More Black Swannage:

Sir Francis Bacon commented that the most important advances are the least predictable ones, those “lying out of the path of the imagination”. Bacon was not the last intellectual to point this out. The idea keeps popping up, yet then rapidly dying out. Almost half a century ago the best selling novelist Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book about it, aptly called The Sleepwalkers. It describes discoverers as sleepwalkers stumbling upon results and not realising what they have in their hands.

I don’t like the idea of being a sleepwalker. I don’t really like the idea of sleeping full stop. But this accidental discoverer concept is very interesting right about now (and always has been – even when out of vogue).

I’ve been doing a lot of talking with Toby Moores of late which has lead to us working together on a number of ideas. Tomorrow we’re meeting at the Creative Coffee Club with more like-minded folk to talk about creating a Network of Networks. Come along if you’re free and in London – the details are here.

What interests me about Toby and relates indirectly to what Taleb is saying about inadvertent discoveries is the space we work in. Toby likes to think of traditional media as self contained silos – I prefer to call them islands. We have a slightly different vocabulary but we both end up at the same conclusion. Being secluded is not healthy.

This buildings of walls, these self imposed sanctions are ridiculously short sighted, but they do provide a fun space between these islands and silos for some of us to work in. Toby’s company for example, found a way for the music industry silo and the gaming industry fortress to overlap slightly. And everyone benefits. I’m doing my damnedest to bring the film industry kicking and screaming into the social media space. We both operate in the limbo between companies that is often seen as just that. A no mans land.

Here be monsters/flat earth etc… you can see why I prefer the islands analogy. There are even pirates and sharks out here, but the most interesting place to be is on the speedy little boats that operate out in the blue. And like Black Swans every now and again a couple of Black Ships drop anchor offshore and things change forever.

The important thing is to remember what Taleb warns about. There’s a lot of cool stuff out here. It’s difficult to instantly see the benefits of some of this stuff especially when great new apps, platforms and indeed people are added to the mix every day. The trick is not to get sleepy eyed.

Staying awake is a skill.

Slowly building to something that spans numerous projects and oddly enough the colour black is offering a nice meat hook.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Ships that signaled an end to Japanese isolation in 1853 and now (thanks to a nod on Twitter by Ben) Black Sheep:

We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here…

Great article that. Go read it.

Thinking a lot about Black Ships and Black Swans.

More to follow…