Monoculture is Death
If life is diverse, then monoculture is death, if not just dead boring. Can you say potato famine? Up to 1.5 million people died because of a monoculture! With crops, companies, or cultures, a lack of diversity is never a good idea. My girlfriend is a foodie, and we were watching a Michael Pollan documentary, The Botany of Desire, a few nights ago. I learned that 99.9 % of apple orchards in the west are monocultures. They don’t grow from seeds but from cloning – watch the movie or read the book if you want to know more. We have similar issues with potatoes; most potatoes in the US are the same strain. Why is this bad?
If you grow a crop without sexual reproduction, you’ve cut out evolution from the growing process. Which means you get reliable and predictable results, not bad right? The bad part is that the things that are trying to eat your crops, molds, bacteria, insects, and other pests, are evolving. Since all of the crops in a field, a town, or in some cases, the entire country are the same, one effective pest could kill the entire crop nationwide before anyone had time to react.
We use pesticides to keep these pests away from our crops. There are farms and orchards that are diversifying their crops, but not many, and some people are using GMO crops to introduce evolutionary advantages to mono-crops. Most of these folks are beholding to big agra and have to grow what makes the most profit.
I’m using crops as a metaphor. The same is true for cultures and companies. When a company is run in a command-and-control fashion, a mono-leadership is making most of the decisions. Companies that run this way have built-in limitations that restrict their sustainability. Diversity of leadership and vision lead to transparency and innovation.
After reading Steven Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, I started thinking about connecting the monoculture issue we have in the farming industry with issues we are having with businesses. The book contrasts evolution with innovation and draws many parallels between Mother Nature’s and human innovation - striking similarities.
Innovation is a Virus
Patent holders have told us, primarily large corporations, that intellectual property rights encourage innovation. Copyright laws have been extended from 14 years to up to life plus 70 years. Competition is said to accelerate creativity. Do these ideas serve innovation or corporate greed?
As an artist, I know that creativity is iterative. It’s built upon lots of versions, ever-changing, and constantly informed by the creative works of others. Art begets art. If you try to create art in a vacuum, you may get results, but you’ll get better results if you study art history and exchange ideas, techniques, or critiques with others. The more open we are, the more likely we are to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas and to see the big picture. Compartmentalization does not work very well for spreading ideas.
We have this romanticized idea that innovation is the child of singular genius and that some few of us have an almost magical gift to have aha Moments – it makes for a better story. Steven Johnson, in his new book, Where Good Idea’s Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation, tells us that Innovation is more likely to come from a network of people working intrinsically than from a single person working for profit. We have singular geniuses among us, but they are the exception, not the rule.
People working together for the love of the work innovate at a higher rate because they are more focused on innovation than making money. Copyrights, patents, and corporate security act as barriers to creativity to protect wealth. Johnson doesn’t argue against intellectual property rights, he just recognizes that they can get in the way of propagating new ideas. Putting walls around innovation is like quarantining someone with an infectious disease. It keeps ideas from spreading.
Innovation is like a beneficial virus. The more an idea spreads, the greater chance of its surviving and thriving. If it survives, propagates, and mutates, more exciting things and failures will result. The road to innovation is paved with mistakes. The best ideas, according to Johnson, come from the Adjacent Possible, from the edge of what is now possible, not from giant leaps forward.
More innovation has come from informal talks at coffee houses than brainstorming sessions. As Johnson says, “All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters… do the best in open environments, where ideas flow in unregulated channels.”
