Creativity and innovation–two characteristics conventionally thought to be in short supply in law firms–are assumed to be of ineffable origins. Oddly satisfying, that, isn’t it? If no one has a clue how to encourage or foster it, we are blameless for its relative absence from our culture.
That self-satisfied grunt of affirmation of the status quo may be about to get more difficult.
The problem, or the challenge, or the opportunity, is that we’re actually beginning to figure out more about how creativity and innovation work. It turns out that they have a lot to do with:
- Propinquity;
- Diversity; and
- Serendipity
which are all summed up in the new coinage “scenius,” stealing from “genius,” and presumably pronounced the same way–seen-yus, not seen-ee-us.
What is this “scenius” and why should you care?
I first found the coinage in a discussion of the gifted Steven Berlin Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From. This one’s from the FT: You can read reviews of the book from the FT (again, different columnist), and the Economist, and you can watch a video designed to encapsulate the book’s ideas here.
Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn, on the south side of Park Slope to be specific, an area known as “Brownstone Brooklyn,” which enormously overindexes on its population of striving professional and amateur writers. As he was working on “Good Ideas,” he would often distract himself by following blogs which followed his immediate neighborhood and even micro-neighborhood. This gave him the idea to do a mashup with Google Maps, to show where all the neighborhood bloggers were based, and to begin to geographically dimensionalize their coverage. Before you know it, he had a startup on his hands, which became www.outside.in and four years later more than 100 news organizations including CNN rely on the site for local news coverage.
As Johnson became increasingly interested in the New York City startup and VC community, he learned that his
“experience was hardly unusual. It turned out that all around me in New York City, new web start-ups were flourishing. Just a month ago, a study by market research firm CB Insights declared that New York has overtaken the original East Coast technology hub, Boston, in the amount of venture capital and early-stage investment flowing into internet companies, leaving it second only to Silicon Valley in the US rankings.”
This is where “scenius” comes in:
The musician and artist Brian Eno coined the odd but apt word “scenius” to describe the unusual pockets of group creativity and invention that emerge in certain intellectual or artistic scenes: philosophers in 18th-century Scotland; Parisian artists and intellectuals in the 1920s. In Eno’s words, scenius is “the communal form of the concept of the genius.” New York hasn’t yet reached those heights in terms of internet innovation, but clearly something powerful has happened. There is genuine digital-age scenius on its streets. This is good news for my city, of course, but it’s also an important case study for any city that wishes to encourage innovative business. How did New York pull it off?
There are no easy answers. Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants (2010), writes in the book: “The serendipitous ingredients for scenius are hard to control. They depend on the presence of the right early pioneers. A place that is open, but not too open. A buffer that is tolerant of outlaws. And some flash of excitement to kick off the virtuous circle. You just can’t order this.”
Now, you’re really asking yourself what this has to do with encouraging creativity and innovation at your firm, right? Well, it turns out you might be able to organize, or reorganize, your office to encourage such serendipitous encounters:
The physical density of the city also encourages innovation. Many start-ups, both now and during the first, late-1990s internet boom, share offices. This creates informal networks of influence, where ideas can pass from one company to the other over casual conversation at the espresso machine or water cooler. When we started outside.in, we shared a Brooklyn office with a documentary film company for its first year of existence. Today, our much larger office in Manhattan also houses three other smaller start-ups working on unrelated projects. By crowding together, we increase the likelihood of interesting ideas or talents crossing the companies’ borders. […]
Economists have a telling phrase for the kind of sharing that happens in these densely populated environments: “information spillover.” When you share a civic culture with millions of people, good ideas have a tendency to flow from mind to mind, even when their creators try to keep them secret.
All of these spaces – the graduate schools, the co-working offices, the media environments – exhibit the final trait that has been key to New York’s technological success: its diversity. A number of studies have established an essential connection between diversity and innovation. [Citations omitted.]
And don’t think that these are “tech for tech’s sake” ventures gazing at their geek navels. Far from it. Rather, they tend to be projects using software and internet technologies to enrich real-world pursuits: Everything from parenting to food to crafts to health and so on. Don’t forget, as Johnson reminds us, that the slogan of Meetup, the uber-NY-startup, is “using the Internet to get off the Internet.”
Swell, so you don’t want to create another “Meetup” in your firm?
Don’t blame you.
But consider what you might learn from the studies and experiences gathered together in Where Good Ideas Come From: Suppose you did reorganize your office to put some corporate/transactional types next to some litigation/dispute resolution types. (I know, I don’t want to push the radical envelope too far here.)
Suppose you encouraged thinking that is “open” but of course “not too open.” “A buffer that is tolerant of outlaws?” Outlaws in a law firm? Yes, indeed, within the parameters of our own culture: Do you really believe that Marty Lipton, Joe Flom, David Boies, and Fred Bartlit weren’t viewed as quasi-outlaws when they were starting their firms?
And as for diversity, even if we as an industry continue year after year after ignominious year to fall down on the job of attacking that mountain successfully, we could at least intermix some folks from different offices–“seconding,” if you will, lawyers from Asia to London and New York and vice versa.
At the very least, you can no longer say that creativity and innovation stem entirely from a mysterious black box. We’re beginning to figure out some of where this stuff comes from. If you doubt me, visit the Lower East Side, Park Slope, Tribeca, and yes, even the Upper West Side, the home of Adam Smith, Esq.
