Creative chaos, French culture and Nuclear fusion
Creative Chaos
My favorite part of the creative process is the moment just before an idea is born.
I’ll be researching a problem, or a hunch, and I’ll do what I typically do when I’m learning, which is to overwhelm myself with information in a kind of manic, starving-person-at-a-buffet consumption. I read, I interview people with the methodology of an anthropologist, I look around at what others are working on. I gather information faster than my mind can make sense of it.
The feeling is like being blindsided by a wave, submerged and weightless, literally disoriented, waiting for myself to float to the surface. (The Atlantic coast where I live is wavy, so this happens to me a lot.) I feel totally preoccupied and a bit agitated as my subconscious makes connections, tests hypotheses, and digs up tangential stories. It can be uncomfortable.
Sometimes I can feel those subconscious connections before I can articulate them. I don’t yet know what the idea is, but I have a kind of euphoria that I’m on to something. Everything seems possible as I tap into this intuitive confidence that there is a path out of the darkness. I start to realize, in fits and starts, that there is a solution in that direction, over there, if I follow the path a bit further.
I love that feeling.
From the outside, it must look like, well, nothing. Or perhaps it looks like some kind of chaos. Someone looking at me must think, “that is a very confused and agitated person who has nothing sensical to say”.
* * *
There’s another part of the creative process that I find difficult, that I used to dread, but I’ve come to appreciate, like an acquired taste: the moment after an idea is born, when I have to tease apart which parts of it, if any, are actually good.
I tend to conflate things when I’m creative. I’ll have an idea that is actually three different ideas rolled up together in one sketch of a new product, or company, or story. Because the idea was born with this kind of confidence and euphoria, I am often convinced that the magic, the power, comes from the combination of those components, that every part is essential, like a vision that will reveal its grandeur once it is fully realized.
I have learned that in reality, these ideas are like metals mined from the earth. When they come out they are in the form of ore, a mix of elements that are mostly useless, a kind of dirt. Only by refining the ore and discarding the useless parts can you access the precious metal hidden within. (At Pixar, new movie ideas are famously called “ugly babies”, which is maybe a cuter image than “a kind of dirt”.)
My best ideas are often hidden within a tangle of the first inspiration, and only by slowly separating the threads and letting go of most of them can I grasp the one valuable part. And sometimes, of course, going through this exercise reveals that there is no valuable part at all, it was an illusion to begin with. This happens a lot!
The process is emotionally painful, it requires ego-detachment and a confidence in peers and an ability to accept, truly accept, criticism and invalidation.
From the outside, this part of the process must look like a different kind of chaos. People looking in must think, “that stupid idea will never work for many obvious reasons.”
French Culture
What is the difference between Silicon Valley and France? Why are the internet giants either American (GAFA) or Chinese, but never French? As the resident American guy in France, I get asked this question a lot.
The typical answers are around a fear of failure in French culture, or a too-narrow focus on the French market and French language, or a lack of financing for high-risk projects. There is probably some truth to those answers. The financing part seems to have changed in the past few years.
Another answer is that French culture is deeply uncomfortable with disorder and uncertainty, and frequently, breakthrough innovation requires passing through some chaos. This is a country, after all, where the first question about a new project is often “what statut does that fall into?” – in other words, where does that activity fall in the regulatory framework? Everything has its place in a societal order.
I say all this as a great admirer of French culture, a happy immigrant. The order has its advantages, of course.
A European politician recently claimed that Google could never have been invented in Europe because it required massive financing as a free service, before it had a validated business model. He is probably right: that kind of uncertainty is unacceptable here.
I work with a big French company who asks me, occasionally, to help them evaluate new business ideas. When a new idea comes along, they ask the project leader to prepare a business plan: what kind of revenues and expenses should they expect in years one, two and three? Specific projections are required before they can approve a budget to finance the project.
This process, of course, demands an orderliness and level of definition that squashes the kind of creative process I practice. The phases of idea gestation, nurturing new ideas that are clearly confused, refining the precious metals from the mixed and dirty ore – these things need a budget, of course, but they also need an open horizon of undefined possibilities.
This could happen at a big company in America or any other country, of course. But French business-people tend to be quite good at the analytical part of business-planning. In the culture, overall, that strength becomes a liability in creative contexts.
When we were first starting Imagination Machine, almost four years ago, a prominent French investor agreed to invest 100k€. He was very enthusiastic. He came to visit our office and spent a few hours talking to teams that were in the early phases of our methodology: researching markets, looking for insights, exploring far-fetched ideas. At the end of the day he hurried out of the office with a distressed look on his face. He called me that night and asked, with quite a bit of anger, to withdraw his investment. “Those are not startups”, he said, “what you’re doing is nothing, it’s amateur, it’s nonsense.”
It is too early to say that he was definitely wrong, but for now the numbers are looking good in our favor. Our creative process, which looks like chaos from the outside, seems to be working as planned, and the investors who remained are on track to be rewarded. The investors who remained are also French, and I do not mean to paint a stereotype here; but I can’t help but think that his reaction was revealing of a strong cultural current.
Nuclear Fusion
The big storyline in French business this year has been the mega-financing of French digital startups. There are dozens of new “unicorns” in France, thanks to recent nine-figure financing rounds.
This is good news for the country, and indicates a real strength of French culture: once a phenomenon is understood, massive resources are mobilized to support it. The very same value of orderliness is an asset.
But digital marketplaces and business tools, while valuable and important, are extensions of the last technological revolution that started decades ago, the technological revolution that led to GAFA in America. Technological progress is not a smooth, consistent thing over time. It comes in bursts, as major scientific discoveries get applied to industry.
Nobody knows what the next burst will be, or when, but it seems highly likely that one will come. Is France set up to be the birthplace of the next technological revolution?
There is a possibility that nuclear fusion is the next technological revolution. I am watching closely as progress reports come out of nuclear physics labs in universities and private companies.
Nuclear fusion, if it works, would produce energy at a fraction of the cost of current power plants, with no consequent carbon emissions. Unlike nuclear fission (which is commonly called “nuclear energy”), fusion uses a totally different set of technologies that cannot be weaponized, are theoretically accident-proof, and produce significantly less radioactive waste.
Plentiful, cheap, carbon-free energy would profoundly transform our societies.
France has traditionally been one of the leaders in nuclear science. So it was no surprise that France was selected as the home of ITER, the massive multi-national, government-funded fusion project, nearly two decades ago.
French-led ITER has a budget of tens of billions of euros, has made major progress, and until recently was leading the race to develop commercially-viable fusion. If you have never seen any photos of what they’re building, look it up, it is mind-blowing.
Yet in the past five years, a new crop of startups has applied physics breakthroughs in creative ways to invent fusion reactors far sooner, for less money. All of these startups seem to be Anglo-Saxon: Commonwealth in Boston has raised hundreds of millions from Bill Gates and others; General Fusion in Canada has raised similar amounts from Jeff Bezos; and a dozen others in the US and the UK are pursuing the goal.
I have no idea how ITER functions internally, but I can imagine that new directions and wacky ideas are perhaps treated with skepticism; that a high degree of definition is required before new paths are financed. Maybe scientists are asked for the equivalent of a full business plan before their experiment gets the green-light – and of course, maybe the most innovative proto-ideas are too chaotic, too uncertain, too ugly to pass that hurdle.
The next GAFA will probably not be a digital tool. My guess is that catching the next wave of technological revolution will require investments of time, energy and money in some ill-defined ideas that look like nothing from the outside.
In the meantime, I will continue nurturing chaos and uncertainty in the little island of Imagination Machine within the great sea of France.