Boris Johnson, Idea Hunter?

Boris Johnson suffered an extraordinary 20 point fall in the past week in United Kingdom polling as the result of the so-called “Cummings affair”, where a member of his leadership team broke all of the conventions regarding social-distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic for reasons that apparently the majority of British citizens polled found capricious, if not outrageous. The affair has dominated the UK press for much of the time since, drawing attention away from far more important issues such as trying to control the spread of the Covid-19 contagion, thinking about reopening the economy, and trying not to forget the self-inflicted complexities of Brexit in the midst of all of this. Why on earth would any leader not terminate a relationship which has created all of these problems, and move on?

We are told, by British observers from the press, that this is, in fact, all about ideas; that Mr. Johnson, Prime Minister and apparent polymath that he is, simply has too few ideas of his own about the economy, especially about “ordinary people” and needs Mr. Cummings to supply what he lacks. Far-fetched? Maybe not. Many years ago, a well respected clarinetist, Buddy DeFranco, noted that he faithfully attached himself to a slightly eccentric pianist by the name of Dodo Marmarosa, because “Dodo.... had a great ability to hear new things. He had a concept for grasping new ideas — playing new ideas. .... Dodo was always searching, always into new things. .... a lot of new things escaped me. But I was smart enough to hang onto Dodo. Because he knew. He knew. And I knew he knew.” Is it possible that Boris Johnson has found his own Dodo in Mr. Cunningham, and is overwhelmed by the thought of losing him, and his access to new ideas?

Before we disparage Mr. Johnson, completely, let’s acknowledge that being astute enough to recognize one’s own limitations, such as Buddy De Franco was able to do, and savvy enough to recognize who could help you overcome such limitations, is not a bad position to be in if you are in the hunt for new ideas, and who isn’t? We are all idea-hunters, on the prowl for the next new idea, be it about our work, our customers, our organization, our future or even about “ordinarily people,” and having access to someone who is really good at finding and generating new ideas is a gift not to be dispensed with lightly. But is it wise to have only one such source? What happens if he, or she, becomes indisposed, unavailable, or banished from their position of counsel?

Jim Rohn, an American entrepreneur and motivational speaker, famously suggested that “you are the average of the five people who you spend the most time with,” while David Burkus has argued that it’s way bigger than just five, that you must consider all of the people who surround you. Either way, the ideas that you work with originate, in large part, with the people you hang around with, and if you limit yourself to only one person, be they Dodo Mamarosa or Dominic Cummings, or a few people who are ideologically identical, you are unnecessarily limiting your access to good ideas. Just imagine how vapid discussions must be at the White House, with Messrs Pence, Guiliani, Navarro and Pompeo, each trying to trump each other with orthodoxy; not a chance of an original new idea emerging. So, let’s use the “Cummings affair” to make us all a bit better at idea-hunting.

I start with the belief that complex situations require complex responses. This is a play on Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety: “for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.” One way of simplifying this is to say that in complex situations your conversations must be at least as complex and possess at least as much variety as the situation itself. How do we access such ideas? First, and foremost, is to critically appraise those people who are important in the formation of your ideas, who are they and what do they add, and how can you get more and better ideas into the mix? In the arts, this has been characterized as creating collaborative circles, and was instrumental in the development and evolution of the Impressionists. The Bloomsbury Group was another such collaborative circle, and successful to the extent that British poet Stephen Spender called it “the most constructive and creative influence on English taste between the two wars.” In all of these cases, membership was based very much on talent and the variety of belief, required a considered invitation and plunged the new member into a maelstrom of new ideas and challenges to old ones; and out of these collaborative circles came a wealth of new ideas about complex topics. Model T originator, Henry Ford, belonged to a more casual friendship called the Vagabonds, with Thomas Edison, tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone, botanist Luther Burbank and U.S. president (and engineer) Herbert Hoover. At one point, after the First World War, Firestone encouraged both Ford and Edison over fireside camping chats to use their substantial intellect, and research teams, to look for rubber substitutes to overcome a scarcity of that key strategic product.

Not surprisingly, forms of such collaborative circles also appear in politics as well. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created what he called his “Brain Trust,” which was a largely academic, hand-picked, group that FDR himself said would create a “new form of government, a factocracy.” Lacking a strong ideological orientation, he deliberately staffed this brain trust with all sorts of beliefs and political biases, and then invited them to argue it out. It was so successful in creating policy recommendations during the campaign that it was continued into one of its own creations, the New Deal. One of the members, economist Rex Tugwell, was characterized as “being like a cocktail. His conversation picked you up and made your brain race along,” which is exactly what you want when confronting the unknown. Lincoln also preferred challenging ideas amongst what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has called his Team of Rivals cabinet, and this tradition of deliberately assembling contesting schools of thought in order to expose all facets of an issue were upheld as well in the Clinton administration with endless college-style talkathons at Camp David.

All in all, what Boris Johnson needs to see is that more ideas are better than fewer, more brains behind those ideas are better than fewer, and more different brains are better than more of the same. If you need help with more new ideas, and all of us do, go with more than one source, and choose wisely. At a time when seemingly everyone in the White House, or Number 10, are singing exactly the same old songs in the same old way, new ideas, preferably jarring new ideas, would be highly recommended. Dan Pontefract, formerly the Chief Envisioner at Canadian telecom company TELUS, has a chapter title in his book Open to Think,  that reads “Great Minds Don’t Think Alike,” which is not only good advice but which reminds me of Lehigh University’s mantra “Together, we are genius.” That, to me, is the goal of any such idea contributing group. Swiss explorer, pioneer and psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard, won the race to orbit the planet first in a balloon by deliberately choosing two weathermen, from contesting schools of thought, in order to get better ideas about the possible best routes to follow. Bertrand once told me that his two always arguing weathermen were his “secret weapon” for success, referring to their partnership as 1+1=3; or, together, we are genius!