(2022-08-20) Johnson The Blind Spot

Steven Johnson: The Blind Spot. In the very first installment of this series on creative workflows, I talked about the early obsession I had during my college years with HyperCard

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who knew some of that backstory gave me this as a gift: (Danny Goodman's Hypercard book)

Holding that long-out-of-print book in my hand immediately transported me back to my cluttered subterranean dorm room

(Ironically I was designing an application to help me manage the notes for those courses.) (note-taking)

it begins with an introduction from then-Apple-CEO John Sculley, offering a rare glimpse of him writing in “software visionary” mode, extolling the paradigm shift that Hypercard represents

Sculley begins his introduction by defining a new word—hypermedia—that has subsequently gone out of favor, but whose meaning will be instantly recognizable to people who have lived their whole lives with the Web

what’s more surprising about Sculley’s forecast is another omission: at no point in the essay does he mention online networks.

The explosion of information that Hypercard was built to manage was not going to come from connecting millions of computers to each other; it was going to come from high-capacity hard disks.

Coincidentally, just as I first started thinking about this post earlier this week, I tuned in for the excellent Betaworks conference on Tools For Thought, which I highly recommend watching in its entirety. ((2022-08-16) BetaWorks Render Tools for Thinking)

What I think is really significant here is the blind spot itself: the fact that Apple (and Sculley) were so close to the formula that seems so obvious to us now—hypermedia running on top of online networks—and yet still couldn’t see it.

The thing about innovation blind spots is that all of us are probably walking around with at least one of them in our field of vision right now.

So how do you see your way around those blind spots?

Part of the answer, I suspect, is a strategy that we’ve talked about here at Adjacent Possible many times: diversify your influences and your sources of information

But also I think it’s helpful—for individuals and organizations—to do a proper inventory of past blind spots every five years or so. What’s the biggest thing that you missed?