New ways for new things
It took me a shockingly long time to get to read Steven Johnson’s Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer. In my top 10 authors list for about 15 years now, his is one of the voices I most trust on innovation - I perhaps misread the title, and conflated it with the ‘longevity bro’ titles out there, which promise immortality in return for some NAD or rapamycin… It isn’t about that, but a wonderful (short) history of why we stopped dying and why we started, as a population, living longer. It is a book that, like Thomas Hager’s Ten Drugs, should be essential reading for those of us in pharma.
But this isn’t a book review. The thing that struck me, on the subject of the less lauded things that made huge contributions, was the Conclusion:
We should also not ignore the less tangible innovations: Farr’s mortality reports, Hill’s randomized controlled trials. I think of these as belonging to six primary categories: I think of these as belonging to six primary categories:
WAYS OF SEEING.
WAYS OF COUNTING.
WAYS OF TESTING.
WAYS OF CONNECTING.
WAYS OF DISCOVERING.
WAYS OF AMPLIFYING.
If one were to write a summary of learning as a discipline, and therefore Asymmetric Learning, these would be essential categories. (In the book, each is elaborated upon, building on examples given earlier.)
Our industry thrives on each of these categories, but perhaps recognises that too little, while we focus on the inventors and on the ‘genius scientists’. These innovations, the adjacent possibles, are critical. The industry we know today was built on ways of testing, and ways of counting (RCTs and biostatistics, for example), but taken together this discipline probably presents the next opportunity - as we build new ways, not just new things.
I’ll elaborate on each in subsequent posts…