I'm not a vendor I'm not trying to sell you something for money but I'm going to put a few ideas in front of you and I view my job here is first to get us to lunch in a reasonable time second to get questions from you some of these will do at lunch but I'm going to go against my the people invited me here and I'm still going to go solicit questions at any time because otherwise I could have just made a video and we could do some sort of conference call for the for the questions that's not what I want and then the the third part is to put a few ideas in front of you that might get the questions to be important for you I was asked to talk about simplicity and there was some interesting paradoxes there but the first I like to deal with a metaphor about ideas and the question is our idea is made out of ponderable matter in which case ideas oppose each other they can't be in the same place at the same time or our idea is made out of light in which case we can have any number of ideas in the same place at the same time we don't have to choose between them and sometimes even the color changes can be very suggestible similarly our ideas things or are they processes so I'm going to take the right-hand side view here and put a bunch of things in front of you some of which may seem somewhat paradoxical in fact the likes curve here this is a curve everybody knows in this room represents quite a bit of the last maybe a hundred years but certainly for most of you the time that you've been in your career there's always some exponential happening and at any given point in time represented by the vertical line there there's a likes factor in corporations it's not just the competitive pressure but all the legacy this is in that's that need to be tended to people think but are costing more and more fact they're costing so much in the realm of software that corporations have actually been unwittingly destroying the very agencies that could help them namely corporations are telling universities that they need people who are experts in programming in this language or that language all of those languages are completely obsolete but they happen to be the ones that your legacy software is written in and because universities have decided to turn themselves into businesses they're feeling the pressure from businesses because they want to get money from the businesses and so the businesses are actually undermining their own future because you're systematically killing off the people who might actually come up with much better software solutions
The likes curve represents the exponential growth and change that has happened over the past 100 years. However, much of this growth is just complications rather than true complexity. Legacy systems, outdated languages and techniques, and an inability to reinvent has led to inefficiencies piling up. Corporations are unwilling to move past legacy systems, and this is preventing real progress.
Ideas should be thought of as light, not matter. This means we can have multiple, even contradictory ideas without having to choose between them. The color and nature of ideas can change fluidly. Thinking of ideas as fixed, ponderable things limits us.
Our instincts push us to solve immediate problems and cope with difficulties. But most of these "problems" arise from the current faulty context. Real progress comes from questioning the context and finding the true underlying problems to solve.
Progress often comes from finding a more sophisticated building block, not simpler ones. Kepler struggled to explain planetary motion until he moved beyond circles to ellipses. The new building block of ellipses allowed simplicity and accuracy.
Most companies have no real 10 year plan. They are focused on immediate results, not long-term vision and progress. But real innovation takes time - often 7+ years. With proper vision and funding over a 10 year horizon, companies could achieve so much more.
Current accounting laws discourage long-term research. All costs must be expensed, hurting quarterly earnings. This motivates damaging short-term thinking. We need to change laws to allow long-term R&D investments.
Paying to prototype the future early allows you to do the experiments needed to find the right building blocks. With Moore's law, you can "buy" your way into the future early by spending more. This is how we created the Alto personal computer in the 70s that inspired the Macintosh.
The key is picking the solution that is just over the threshold of qualitative change. This "sweet spot" sets you up to make real progress, not incremental improvements. It gives you an opening to think differently. This is how to enable meaningful change.