The future is Interdisciplinary

Some of the innovations I'm most impressed with have not really been innovations at all - they have been deconstructions of prior innovations, reassembled and stacked in new ways to solve newer and bigger problems.

Think ipods, Tivo, Uber, etc.

Of course, not all innovations fit this model but many do. If I'm honest, most of my patents follow this pattern. Look at an existing problem and re-think a solution based on new technical capabilities and different use cases. Document, re-work in legal language that makes it harder to understand the idea, sprinkle the word embodiment around, file, wait, buy a plaque.

Seeking context

When I finished high school at 16 with low Socioeconomic status (SES), I was deeply aware of my insufficient life context. In my senior year of high school, I had an Economics teacher who gave me a brief introduction to the concept of markets(I wish I could thank him - he wrote my recommendation to the honors program that helped me a lot in college. I forgot his name, 16 year olds are not fully formed humans).

I saw an Economics major as a path to help me make sense of how the world worked and I was all in. In my junior year, I learned the Entrepreneurship program was open to a small group of undergraduate students and again I felt the pull to see the application of context to problem. Without a economic safety net, I was clear that I would not start a business right away, but I wanted to understand how, I wanted to know the component parts and the success criteria and I knew I learned best by doing. My business plan was fashion for breastfeeding women. We came in second to a golf shoe business. Even at the time, I did not fully appreciate how much I learned about startups, markets and funding.

As I finished my degree in 1992, I heard of a summer study abroad that would focus on studying the risks and plans for adopting the EURO. This was compelling to me on multiple fronts. No one in my family had ever left the country, I wanted to be the first. I also wanted to understand the mechanics both logistical and psychological for such a monumental context change. To make this happen, I begged my grandparents for a "scholarship", signed up for three additional credit cards and found a job that would let me start in September vs. June (this did not go according to plan but that is a story for another day). I did not realize that the majority of my fellow students just wanted their parents to pay for them to travel for the summer, my extreme enthusiasm for the studies was NOT appreciated.

Looking back, these experiences built the foundation of strengths I lean on today. Seeing and studying patterns, breaking them down into component parts and re-assembling them into ideas, hypothesis and plans. My entrepreneurship training helped me value finding and filling new market needs vs. just trying to optimize existing solutions.

It took me awhile to realize that my ability to recognize non-linear patterns was a gift.

My outsider status and beginners mindset gave me the opportunity to apply curiosity to things that most people don't question, and my experiences accidentally annoying people, forced me to build better [self and] stakeholder awareness and cross-context communication skills.

I have also stumbled onto a useful insight, people lean on the familiar due to fear not laziness. Here I am on team Jensen, with the strong belief that some suffering in life is necessary for outsized success, because this suffering teaches you how to move past the fear.

Enter the vertical integrators

We are entering a moment where everything is difficult to completely understand, but that is not without historical parallels. Big thinkers have always been with us, and massive breakthroughs have inspired (and scared) us throughout the ages.

I loved the example Packy McCormick explores in his vertical integrators series a good read in its own right but I was captivated by the description of the characteristics of people who mastered vertical integrations [and also struck by the gendered language choice of "that guy"].

Most haven’t studied one particular technology in school that they’ll apply to the new problem. They’re definitely technical – at least one person on the founding team has to be able to hold the whole system in their heads – but they’re more generally technical, in a “that guy can figure anything out” kind of way.?

... Vertical Integrators need to figure out an entirely new way to do something that’s been done a certain way for years, and they need to do it with whichever technologies and processes work best as part of the entire system. Being wedded, or even biased, to one way of doing things or one technology dulls the advantage of starting fresh.?

...If I had to sum it up, it’s something like:?they make world-class people want to do their best work for them.?That’s a hard thing to capture in words or lists.?

So I ask myself, how do we cultivate more of these kind of characteristics? How do we assemble the human raw materials to build a future that we want to see.

Here I see a lot of places where we can get started now to live in the future and be out in the ocean. This will help us recognize where things will move more rapidly, but it will not help us connect the dots to new innovation unless we have interdisciplinary and diverse thinking.

Over the last decade, I've been codifying critical soft skills required to navigate the future. Things like empathy, curiosity, perspective taking and unlearning are all top of mind. I strongly believe these are all important for thriving in this evolving future. What I am beginning to appreciate is that these are not sufficient to invent the future.

If we are going to create the future we need to be able to "hold the whole system in our heads" and "make world class people want to work with us". We need to adapt how we recognize and understand potential. We need to expand our global education systems to create more learning pathways. We need to stop holding back our change agents and and seek to better understand different types of intelligence. We have to stop leaning on outdated pattern recognition and deeply value what we don't know.

We need to move away from a scarcity mindset and recognize the expansive opportunity that is in front of us. We need outsiders to see things we can't, and we need our lived experiences and crystallized intelligence to help us leverage the 3% rule to make this future more accessible to others.

This is our moment - we need to recognize it, value it and capture it.

It's on us.