(2021-11-01) Johnson Designing A Workflow For Thinking

Steven Johnson: Designing a Workflow For Thinking. At some point in the fall of 1988, during my sophomore year of college, Apple released a strange but—to me at least—intoxicating new application called Hypercard.

Hypercard, as the name suggests, revolved around the metaphor of a stack of cards; instead of “documents,” in the Hypercard world you created stacks. Crucially, specific information on each card could be linked to information on other cards.

In my case, I immediately dove into creating a Hypercard stack that would allow me to capture notes for all of my classes.

I don’t think I ever got Curriculum to a place where it really lived up to my aspirations—but it did give me a tantalizing hint of something that I’ve been chasing ever since, what Howard Rheingold called in his visionary book written around that same time “tools for thought”.

software that helps you generate ideas, remix them into new combinations. Software that serves as a seedbed for your ideas.

In 2010 I published a whole book ruminating on these themes: Where Good Ideas Come From.

There was, I suppose, a more straightforward how-to book lurking inside Good Ideas, but for whatever reason I have a hard time writing books in a purely prescriptive mode that just lays out the tools and habits that can help you achieve a goal like having more generative ideas. But the truth is I have been collecting strategies for what I suppose we could call “idea hacking” for decades now.

One meta-strategy that I’ve developed over the years is what I’ve come to call taking a “creative inventory.”

I’ve started a routine where every few years, I block out a couple of days to sit down and review all my idea tools—and other rituals of how I structure my creative thinking— to see if there's something that can be improved upon. (see My CollaborationWare History)

from that process I deliberately design a creative workflow that becomes my default standard for the next few years.

So what I’m going to do here at Adjacent Possible is share a series of documents that are all structured around the key questions you should ask yourself in designing that creative workflow. Questions like: how do you capture your own hunches? How do you capture ideas from other people?