Where Do Ideas Come From?

You have hundreds of thoughts today. You will probably have no ideas at all. That is not an insult; it is arithmetic, and it is the starting point of Episode 13 of Vantage Point, in which Eli Amdur takes on a question that sounds like a parlor game and turns out to be the central practical problem of leadership: where do ideas actually come from?

The distinction he draws is simple enough to remember and sharp enough to use.

“The guy who invented pizza had an idea. The guy who orders it has a nice thought. Big difference.”

Thought and Idea Are Not the Same Thing

A thought is a mental process that carries you from a premise to a conclusion. It is useful, necessary, and constant. An idea is something else entirely: an original, novel thought that changes your mental construct of the universe, the planet, the business, or even your cubicle space.

Pizza for the group lunch may sound like a good idea. It is a fleeting thought. Somebody, at some point, rearranged flour, tomato, and cheese into a thing that had never existed. That was an idea. Everything since has been ordering.

Once you accept that definition, the scarcity makes sense. Thoughts are the traffic of an ordinary day. Ideas require the mental furniture to be moved.

What Thomas Kuhn Understood About Transformative Ideas

This episode is the practical follow-on to the previous one on cognitive bias, the nefarious force that keeps us from spawning good ideas, making good decisions, and creating a creative climate. Assume for a moment that we have all that handled. What do leaders actually do to generate ideas?

Eli begins where a lot of serious thinking about this begins: Thomas Kuhn’s highly heralded 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that transformative ideas, and with them scientific progress, do not arise from the day-to-day process of experimentation and data accumulation, and certainly not from ongoing stultified thinking. The breakthroughs come from somewhere else.

And it is no different outside the world of science. The routine of a business, the accumulation of reports, the quarterly cadence: all of it is necessary and none of it produces the thing every executive says the place needs more of.

Why Organizations Starve for Ideas

Here is the paradox at the heart of the episode.

“The most valuable asset any organization has is its employees’ creativity. Creativity generates ideas. Ideas generate value.”

And yet there is not a CEO alive who will not say, “We need more ideas around here.” If ideas are that valuable, why are they that rare?

Eli splits the answer in two: the individual and the organization.

Part One: We Are Trained Out of It

Most employees do not consider themselves creative. Their schooling and their work experience, both highly routinized, reward conformity and compliance. Creativity rewards something closer to the opposite. It rewards defiance, which, properly channeled, is a powerful force.

Notice who does feel creative: children. That is how babies figure out their world. They crawl, they eat dirt, they explore, they stand, they ride a bike, they learn the guitar. Every one of those is a creative act performed by someone who does not yet believe they are capable of it. Somewhere between the bicycle and the annual review, most of us stop believing.

Part Two: The Organization Blocks It

Drawing on fifteen years teaching graduate leadership at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in both the MBA and MAS programs, and on observation of companies across twenty-five industries, Eli names the most common blockers of creativity and ideas plainly. The voice of judgment. Petrified expectations. Sticking with something long after its useful life has ended. Organizational structure. Inflexible teams. Micromanagement. Internal competition for power and recognition. Disagreement instead of dimension.

Add time pressure, because ideas do not happen on schedule. And then the big one, the fatal phrase, the sentence that has quietly killed more value than any competitor ever did:

That’s the way we do things around here.

The episode walks through this inventory with more texture than a list can carry, and it ends where the real work begins: having identified the barriers, what does a leader do about them? How do you generate not just an endless flow of ideas but expand the number of sources they come from? Much easier said than done. The full discussion is in the audio.

Two Asides, Because This Is Vantage Point

The aphorisms in this episode do what aphorisms are supposed to do, which is rearrange a little furniture of their own.

“God Bless America was written by Irving Berlin. Irving Berlin was an immigrant. God Bless America was written by an immigrant. Just saying.”

“In 2021 I had my COVID shot, first dose; my COVID shot, second dose; my pneumonia shot; my shingles shot, first dose; my shingles shot, second dose; my flu shot; and my COVID booster. When I was younger, doing shots was a much different activity.”

And one that belongs on a wall somewhere:

“A day feels like a year when you haven’t accomplished anything. And a year feels like a day when you have.”

Great Minds: Jonas Salk on Intuition

The Great Minds segment returns to Dr. Jonas Salk, the man who invented the polio vaccine and changed the world. Salk was a very disciplined, thorough researcher who also believed in intuition. His words:

“Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.”

It was certainly the case with him, and he moved forward from there. That is the whole argument of the episode compressed into eleven words. Discipline and data tell you what you have. Something else tells you where to go.

What If?

What if Jonas Salk had agreed with the lawyers at the University of Pittsburgh to go after a patent for the vaccine? The whole remainder of the twentieth century would have been different. He refused to let it take that long and pushed straight into distribution, which he could do because the vaccine was under his control, and he never made a dime on it beyond the salary he was already being paid. Many hundreds of thousands of people were spared the disease, or death from it. Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

That is the difference between a thought and an idea, and then the difference between an idea and an idea acted upon. Salk had all three.

Listen

Episode 13, roughly twelve minutes, and worth the walk around the block.

• 🎧 Episode page: https://eliamdur.com/where-ideas-come-from/
• 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vantage-point-with-eli-amdur/id1896926911
• 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033yuddGiSOzbmEk75HLUl
• ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VantagePoint-Podcast
• ✉️ Join the email list: https://eliamdur.com/

Follow or subscribe wherever you listen, and share this one with the colleague who says “that’s the way we do things around here.” They may not thank you. They may have an idea.

Vantage Point – the podcast for critical thinkers. We’re not political, just critical.

This episode is supported by Vantage Point’s Executive Sponsor, Stephen Bozer, SVP of Human Health at Flavine. Also supported by Major Sponsor Bergen Volunteers, neighbors serving neighbors across 70 towns in Bergen County since 1966. Also supported by Major Sponsor Kardam Consulting, strategic counsel for the business of making medicine.