Compass

Chapter 1 - Worldview

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Welcome to the Compass page

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Using the COMPASS is natural and includes many things we do anyway. Cultural evolution has found many ways to improve our ability to innovate and has transmitted these throughout our populations. The difference is that once you explicitly label these secrets and codify these strategies, you can intentionally use them to become more creative and innovative.

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Deep dive

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Innovation

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	Factors	Desciption
C	Collective brain thinking	The first step is to recognize that where we are today results from trillions of small decisions made by the billions of people before us about where we should go and how to get there. We must recognize that only some steps have been the best and that there are many inefficiencies in where we are today that can be overcome by walking off the well-beaten path.
O	Off the beaten path	The power, vision, and influence of a new leader and the creation of new societies or companies all offer opportunities to try something new, off the beaten path. Path dependence refers to the role of the past and history in constraining the future when early decisions lock us in due to the difficulty of changing to something different.
M	Magpie strategy	The magpie strategy requires two things: a 'prepared mind' knowing the problem in sufficient depth so that one's inner magpie can distinguish the shiny and useful from the dull and irrelevant, and 'intellectual arbitrage' that actively seeks potential solutions outside one's knowledge domain.
P	Paradox of diversity	The paradox of diversity occurs because diversity offers combinatorial fuel for innovation but is also, by definition, divisive. With a common understanding, goals, and language, the flow of ideas in social networks is smooth, thus preventing recombination and reducing innovation. However, diversity is the most potent method of becoming more innovative.
A	Adjacent possibilities	The adjacent possible, a term coined by Stuart Kauffman, refers to the range of possibilities that can be reached with only small changes.
S	Social beats smart	Innovation in the collective brain is empowered when we talk to each other.
S	Sharing is critical	The final secret to human innovation is finding ways to share information smoothly. Culturally evolved improvements to sharing knowledge include connecting knowledge through metaphors and analogies to help people remember the world -such as the collective brain analogy for innovation - and learning better ways to teach one another.

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Content source
A Theory of Everyone - Michael Muthukrishna - MIT Press - 2023

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