Where Good Ideas Come From

// For anyone running a law firm of the future, competition is not only going to be tougher, it will also morph and change constantly. A law firm with a good chance of success will have seeking ideas in its DNA.

A book, which I suspect I found many years ago browsing in a book store, caught my fancy in this vein. It is called “Where Good Ideas Come From” and was written by Steven Johnson.

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I took a chance and read it and was quite impressed.

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Going back to Peter Drucker’s epiphanal statement that all businesses must do two things to succeed — namely, Innovate and Market — it seemed like the generation of good ideas, wherever they might come from, would be useful for any law firm of the future. So here is what Steven Johnson came up with:

• Liquid Networks: This is my favorite one. It is where random unrelated contacts in divergent fields yield incredible breakthroughs. For example, this is the concept of where the printing press supposedly came from, (i.e., an idea in one field of endeavor that was extraordinarily useful outside that field).
• The Adjacent Possible: This is where learning gets to a point where the next level of thought can be figured out. This is difficult to describe, and perhaps the least useful concept, but it makes a lot of sense — why people simultaneously and independently make the same discovery in different places.
• The Slow Hunch:  Johnson postulates that this is where you think of something vaguely, and it sits in your mind for a while — possibly even for many years — and then something hits a tripwire and it becomes incredibly useful. I have found this to be the case for me. This is why, when I have an idea that seems interesting, I write it down and put it in a pile of things to look at someday. When someday comes, sometimes that (old) idea literally leaps off the page to tell me some incredible breakthrough thought.
• Serendipity:  This is where you go for a walk, you browse, you wander around, and you let your passive brain think on it. I find this less useful for new ideas but more useful for solving problems that I cannot easily sort out. It is somewhat like sleeping on a problem and waking up with a greater idea than I had the day before.
• Error: Yes, Edison is famous for saying that he never failed when he kept trying to create a lightbulb. Instead, when asked, he said that he had succeeded in learning several thousand ways not to make a lightbulb.
• Exaptation:  Maybe this is my real favorite: to take ideas from one branch of knowledge and apply them in another area. I do this all the time, and it has resulted in many breakthrough ideas for me. For example, my idea of putting lawyers as more important than clients within my law firm came from Starbucks’ business model to put the customers second and the employees first. That was a breakthrough idea in the legal world at the time.
• Platforms: This is very interesting. His example is a coral reef, where each party on the reef is doing its own thing without really thinking about the reef, but somehow it all cooperates together. An analogy for humans might be a city.  He proposes that cities stimulate a ton more innovation and creativity due to the use of the above possible places for good idea creation. Applying this to law firms, it makes even more important the logic of the lawyers coming into the office a good amount to emulate that choral reef.
• Just Slamming Away: This is my personal idea and not in Johnson’s book. I like to just sit there with a pad and a pen — and no iPhone — and just think, damn it!!! And all sorts of ideas burble forth.

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So great law firms that will survive and thrive will have creating new ideas in their DNA and maybe even come up with formal processes to push these kinds of things to happen.

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Bruce Stachenfeld is the chairman of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, an approximately 50-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With almost 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at [email protected]. Bruce also writes The Real Estate Philosopher™, which contains applications of Bruce’s eclectic, insightful, and outside-the-box thinking to the real estate world. If you would like to read previous articles or subscribe, please click here.

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