#ThinkfullyHabit: Go to the intersection
Have you heard of The Medici Effect? It’s a term inspired by the powerful Italian bankers, the Medici family, who were at the heart of breaking down traditional barriers to ignite the burst of Renaissance creativity. The Medici family funded a huge array of artists, scientists, and scholars, including Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Michelangelo. They sponsored schools and attracted creative innovators from all over the world who were trained in a variety of disciplines across the arts, science, architecture and philosophy. Innovations happen where different disciplines and ideas intersect.
“When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary ideas. ”
WHY?
Taking ideas that interconnect from across different disciplines isn’t always the obvious thing to do but it can be game-changing. Take the example of the randomised clinical trial, used in Covid vaccination testing. We may think these trials have always been central to medicine and vaccine development, but they are far more recent compared to other medical advances such as antibiotics, anaesthetic or antiseptic. They came about at the intersection between medicine and statistics. The first randomised controlled clinical trial took place in 1948 and was devised by Austin Bradford Hill who had no formal training in either medicine or statistics. He didn’t think of himself as a statistician; his academic studies were in economics, yet he set out to apply statistics to medicine with an emphasis on comparing like-with-like, avoiding potential bias and understanding how chance works. Perhaps it was precisely because he wasn’t traditionally immersed in either discipline that he could see the intersection points between them more clearly.
Spotting where different disciplines intersect is a key way to get to novel ideas - and the more distant and remote the discipline, the more novel the solution. It's a specific way to reach out beyond the familiar go-to references that are more within our comfort zone or expertise, which can often become our default. Unlike Austin Bradford Hill, we don’t have to spot the intersections on our own. Working out with others, where the intersection points between disciplines could lie, is a good place to start. It's about sharing ideas with people who aren’t in your world and talking to those in different disciplines, not just to share your thoughts, but to work out what ideas from their world relate to your own. Innovations and new solutions are increasingly likely to be discovered by connecting insights from across industries and disciplines. The “intersection” is the point where established ideas and concepts meet, connect, clash, and combine. It's a good point to start!