Welcome to Innovationland
A tour of emerging conceptual order: the messy middle space where half-baked ideas evolve into innovative products and systems.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” - Alan Kay.
Innovationland is the mental space we enter to explore emerging concepts like half-baked theories, wild hypotheses, and innovative tech. In pop culture, players in this space are idealized as rogue geniuses like Steve Jobs or Tony Stark, villainized like Hannibal Lecter, or played for laughs as zany nerds or mad scientists.
Like Cultureland above, we’re entering a messy world of risky notions only visible when zoomed out to a birds-eye view that’s untethered from practical reality.
The middle space of emerging conceptual patterns lacks the drama, art, and raw emotion of the culture wars raging above but can be equally disruptive.
Three Plays in Innovationland
When all’s well, we overlook the tech, economic, intellectual, and legal systems that buttress our daily life. But then we lose Internet access, the market crashes, or we take the wrong prescription, and it suddenly appears.
Systemland’s conceptual order is our world’s invisible OS, and it’s equally prone to bugs and crashes. Like software and hard infrastructure, it must be fixed, upgraded, and overhauled.
Three Plays in Innovationland help us upgrade our conceptual order to be more scalable, robust, and powerful.
Play I: IMAGINE
The sum of human knowledge is an ocean of which we can only grasp a drop. Exploring the depths of a single domain is a rare lifetime achievement. Yet the deeper we dive, the more we uncover:
“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” – Albert Einstein
Grounding our minds closer to the shore of proven knowledge, systems, and logic is infinitely more sensible. Yet humans share this strange inclination to gaze at the horizon instead.
Looking is one thing; venturing into the unknown quite another. It requires a bold, naïve faith that there’s something better to discover in the chaos beyond the foundation of knowledge under our feet. IMAGINE plays from a paradoxical mind space that grows ever more critical and blind to how things are while opening our imagination towards wilder gut-level intuitions.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” — Steve Jobs
Living on the edge of Chaos and Order is a precarious ordeal. One wrong mental leap may be the difference between a revolutionary theory or outlandish conspiracy; an Apple Computer or Theranos; a novel philosophical insight or midwit hubris.
So as much as society claims to value imagination, we tend to be wary of it:
Imagination is suspect by default
Generative imagination is only valuable in hindsight once an idea becomes reliable bits of knowledge, words, code, or law. Few novel thoughts survive the trek from Chaos to Order, but all pose some threat to the Established Way. Naturally, they face a backlash:
After speculating his way to figuring out that if doctors and nurses simply washed their hands, it would drastically reduce deadly infections in new mothers, Ignacio Semmelweis was rewarded with career-ending mockery. He died alone in a mental institution at 47, well before his insight grew into modern antiseptic practices.
The punishment for imaginative speculation is more benign for most of us but begins early within a robust system for grounding growing brains in robust conceptual knowledge: School. In school, the first time we raise our tiny hand and blurt out a too-imaginative question or idea, the not-so-subtle snickers and looks from classmates are all the signals we need to be wary about going there again. No matter how often teachers repeat that “there are no stupid questions,” our peers teach us that going outside the book is a risky move. And then quizzes, tests, and grades reinforce the lesson that measurably correct answers are far better than speculative, imaginary ones.
Now, it’s perfectly reasonable to be critical of half-baked imagineering. Not only is it likely to fail, but it may succeed with catastrophic side effects:
“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” - Albert Einstein.
Innovative theories like Darwinian evolution upended the scientific order and created waves of social upheaval, including novel justifications for mass genocide. The invention of the printing press sparked widespread dissemination of information while kindling a violent splintering of the Church that held together the medieval political order.
But the instinctive — and often mocking — resistance we face from the social and intellectual order when we stray too far into the unknown can quickly flip IMAGINE into DELUSION1: a mindset so fixated on defending an outsider vision that it begins to see suppressive conspiracies in practical, ordinary views.
Notable IMAGINE Plays and Players in the past and present:
Popular science fiction, self-driving cars, space colonies, the Laputans in Gulliver’s Travels, Elon Musk, techno-futurism, Balaji, Einstein’s theory of relativity, The Enlightenment, Technocracy, the heliocentric model, “The Intellectual Dark Web,” Tesla’s wireless energy, DAOs,...
Play II: BET
Making a real BET is the prerequisite for science, technology, and law - it’s what takes IMAGINE to the step beyond merely dreaming.
We play BET when we commit scarce resources, energy, and reputation to something unprovable that few even attempt. There are no templates, playbooks, spreadsheets, or comparative examples. It’s the skin-in-the-game that separates sci-fi fans, early adopters, and armchair experts from the players.
How to make smart bets on invisible, unmeasurable ideas.
The tools of science — precise observation, statistics, and proofs — are useless for developing never-been-seen ideas.
Instead, players here evaluate plausibility using general mental models, first principles, and gut intuition. These moves are uncomfortably risky and unfamiliar in an orderly world of measurable, precise concepts.
Outside the middle space, these tools often appear as platitudes or superfluous mental gymnastics compared with the more practical and precise instruments of mathematics, code, and hard science. But general models, metaphors, and frameworks are essential scaffolds that help us find the shape of incomplete, imagined patterns indirectly. Skilled players in emergent order understand this intuitively and create and use them to generate inventions that are misunderstood as luck, genius, or hubris from the outside.
But no matter how strong our models or intuition, bringing anything new to reality takes a dose of good fortune outside our control. Regardless of past success, the next leap into Innovationland takes us back to the same betting table. Free markets are perhaps the best economic system we’ve come up with for rewarding continual bets that spark innovation but also may lead to a darker play, EXPLOIT, where the winner-takes-all leaving others who were instrumental or impacted out of the equation.2
Notable BET Plays and Players in the past and present:
Silicon Valley, Entrepreneurship, Apollo 11, The Human Genome Project, Tesla, SpaceX, Effective Altruism, String Theory, The Manhattan Project, Galileo, OpenAI, Crypto, Nassim Taleb, millions of failed BETs we’ve accordingly never heard of,…
Play III: FORGE
IMAGINE fuels us to conjure up unlikely ideas, BET commits to them, then FORGE alchemizes them into innovative products, systems, and information. This play takes less creative magic and more tenaciousness:
Thomas Edison famously tested more than 3,000 light bulb designs, effectively proving that the single “light bulb moment” is a myth. And James Dyson created 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum before landing on a revolutionary design that decimated dirt (and the competition).
It may take months or years, but FORGE plays out in two parts: Shaping & Honing.
1) Shaping: First, we shape — and reshape — raw ideas into a sketch of something that just might work. It’s a process of saying “no” to countless instances of “What about this?” We bat them around with mental simulations, rough prototypes, and short experiments.
How to know if you’ve got the right shape.
Poorly-shaped plans make things more complex. As we press to make them plausible, they surface increasingly more questions, complicated workarounds, and side effects. The scope grows bigger and harder to grok. But well-shaped solutions not only resolve the tensions and paradoxes we’re wrestling with, they cascade to solve and simplify complexities that weren’t originally in view. At Pathwright, we know a plan for a new feature or code architecture is on the right track once it simplifies other features or plans we weren’t considering.
On arriving at a well-shaped sketch of a system, technology, or theory, it’s time to Hone:
2) Honing is the rocky downhill slope of making a rough shape an actual product. Unlike shaping, where we explore many possible directions and ideas, this phase works within the contours of the decided direction. It’s mostly the “work” side of “creative work” and requires more rigorous tools, attention, and judicious editing. It bears little resemblance to the popular conception of creativity, genius, or innovation.
“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work” – Peter Drucker.
Our pristine shape must be ruthlessly cut down, altered, and compromised around the edges for our project, theory, or model to smoothly integrate with the established order.
Finding a genuinely workable idea is rare. But ideas are worthless until they’re honed into something that works. The tedious complexity of this last making-it-work phase frequently leads to a darker play, FORCE, where we fail to negotiate with the current order we're aiming to alter.3
Notable FORGE Plays and Players in the past and present:
ChatGPT/AI, Theory of Mind, Kanban, SWOT, strategic plans, first principles, systems thinking, Ray Dalio, Myers & Briggs, Lean Startup, design thinking, Shape Up, Apple, Heterodoxy, Toyota Systems, Ada Lovelace, Bret Victor, Xerox Park, Spiral Dynamics,…
Conclusion
In closing, let’s look at how these plays work in concert by considering the most significant concept to emerge from Innovationland in many generations: Artificial Intelligence.
Over a hundred years ago, Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein," depicting a scientist who creates an intelligent, self-aware creature by reanimating dead body parts. She explored the ethical implications of human-made life and creating beings with intelligence and emotions — themes many people are now discussing with more practical urgency.
Science fiction picked up the theme, sparking IMAGINE plays in thousands of conceptual minds. Fantastic dreams of future artificial intelligence eventually grew into hobbyist theory, science, and engineering in pursuit of making AI fiction real. In the 1950s, Alan Turing and a cohort of novelty-seeking thinkers BET on AI as a serious field of study.
In the subsequent decades, AI research faced waves of skepticism from all sides. The criticism was hot enough at times to create long “AI winters” where funding and interest dissipated for years. But tens of thousands of intelligent people spent millions of hours FORGing their way through countless theoretical schemes, models, and techniques that only showed marginal promise for decades. Then Geoffrey Hinton and a handful of others quietly introduced the concept of deep learning, finding the shape that would eventually lead to the incredible leaps that have only recently bubbled up into public awareness with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
IMAGINE & BET still get plenty of play, but a few highly practical and powerful AI tools are in the final honing phase in sight of Systemland’s shores. And the early adopters watching on the walls are reacting with a wild mix of hype, confusion, and apocalyptic doom.
Take this recent imperative from Eliezer Yudkowsky, a well-known AI theorist and doomer, who’s advocating for bombing data centers that don’t comply with his proposed worldwide ban on AI research:
“Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky in TIME.
The messy, extreme takes of various nerds are emblematic of a significant new concept emerging from Innovationland. There’s no consensus, but various clans of experts believe it’s plausible that AI will:
Rapidly replace myriads of comfortable, well-paid, high-status white-collar jobs (including many creative ones).
Terminate us like Skynet.
Disrupt the order of things more than any human invention — not only the printing press and Internet, but language and fire.
Create universal basic income, immense wealth, and leisure.
But then again, AI might hit another ceiling any day now, and its future may look more like acting as a fantastic personal assistant for writing and drawing an essay like this one.4
DELUSION is the darker side of IMAGINE. We’re prone to playing it when the existing social and conceptual order uses outright mockery or outright ignoring of the compelling possibilities we imagine. Instead of employing BET or FORGE towork them out, we double down on our unprovable vision and increasingly reframe all pushback as a vast conspiracy, the critics as evil, and those who don’t “get it” as sheep.
EXPLOIT is the darker side of BET. It’s played when we take all the rewards from the risk without considering other costs. It’s easy to get away with because the hero who cunningly risks it all to return with treasure from the dragon of chaos is the oldest, most profound story we know. It’s the narrative underlying every version of the scrappy inventor in the garage or lab who becomes a billionaire. We revere people who achieve great creative works so much that we give them a pass for personal failings we don’t give ourselves or anyone else.
All progress requires sacrifice from the inventor and the team that brings it to life. That’s easy enough to see. But there’s a hidden sacrifice as well: adventure and innovation are possible only when supported by robust order built over generations. But then, innovation disrupts the old order of things, leaving many people displaced or discarded. Yes, old ways must make way for the new:
Factories replaced humans with robots, and robotic cars will replace millions of paid drivers soon enough;
Code replaced most clerks in the last couple of decades, and AI will likely replace as many knowledge workers in the next few;
New theories and information will displace our current ones leaving them to appear as pre-scientific as blood-letting and leaching look today.
After we’ve made an arduous but successful journey wrangling chaos into a new order, it’s easy – even expected – to take on Thorin’s view at the end of The Hobbit; We defend our right to the hard-won treasure against all outside claims and externalities. But if the spoils of conquest only flow to the top – merited or not – all-out war comes in the end; A sad truth Thorin learned soon enough.
A good creative leader reaps the rewards of creative work for themselves and others. But great leaders share credit and proactively tend to those who are inevitably disrupted by progress.
FORCE is the darker side of FORGE. We use it when we unyieldingly pursue an idealistic plan instead of making edits and concessions. Getting every detail right is one thing, but unadaptable perfectionists deny a gravity-like law of order: order never embraces the new without compromise. The closer we move to launch, the more we must trim and bend our invention or model to meet reality as it is, not how we wish it were. If we don’t bend a little, we risk meeting stony indifference or hostility from the people and systems who like things the way they are.
AI didn’t draft or draw a single line in this essay but was useful as an assistant. I prompted ChatGPT4 to act as a writing coach and editor who asked Socratic questions and made editorial observations sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph but didn’t draft anything. ChatGPT also acted as a research assistant in finding relevant quotes and examples. Finally, I used Midjourney 5 to generate style ideas for the three play cards.