Stephen Shapiro explains how deliberately exploring adjacent fields generates innovation. Cardiologists solved blood-clot problems by borrowing solutions from gas-pipeline engineers. He argues that tangents in neuroscience, sports, or magic help you see your own problems differently than staying in your lane.
Chapters
Here's a group that I like. It's a group that gets together in Houston called Pumps and Pipes. They are cardiologists and gas pipeline experts who get together on a regular basis and share what has worked in each of their respective disciplines. So they look at the cardiovascular system and try to understand how can we apply things from the cardiovascular system to gas pipelines and vice versa. One thing, for example, is gas pipelines break crack and leak a lot. And it's very difficult to find where the cracks are and then go seal them. Well, guess what? Capillaries in our finger, coagulant ingredients now go in gas pipelines to help seal them. Breakthroughs can come from a number of different places. And to me, this is what I will call a purposeful tangent. There's a lot of things you could do. You could take a cooking class, maybe you'll find that valuable. But I would have you ask what are the things in your area of expertise? What are the things that you're doing that is something nearby that is a purposeful tangent that's adjacent to what you're working on. I'll give you, for example, with me. So I been spending 20 years focused on innovation and I sort of love innovation. But unless I'm speaking at an innovation conference, I don't go to innovation conferences because I hear the same things that I've heard a thousand times. And I'll read the executive book summaries and get at least the nuggets I need. But I don't hang out with innovation people. But I do attend conferences in neuroscience. I don't understand what the heck they're talking about half the time, but I love neuroscience and I love psychology and I love sports performance. And in fact, I just got back from taking a four day class with four master magicians in Las Vegas because I think magic is a great purposeful tangent for innovation for two reasons. One is magic is all built around the concept of visual misdirection. Innovation is all around cognitive misdirection. But it's the same thing. We need to fool the brain to see or believe something that it's not naturally wired to believe. The other reason why I love magic as a purposeful tangent is because it if we're good innovators, we're going to be working on something and somebody's going to say this is not possible. But magicians don't look at it that way. They want to take what is considered to be impossible and make it possible. And they have a very specific thought process that they go through to do this. So for you, what is your purposeful tangent? I'm not saying don't become an expert. Look, knowing your area of expertise, becoming an expert in technology is awesome. But, look, if you want to understand things differently, look in different places.
