Author Joshua Wolf Shenk has been receiving quite a bit of
publicity lately for his new book entitled, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence
of Innovation in Creative Pairs.
Studying pairs like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Shenk argues that
for far too long, we have viewed creative thinking as a solitary pursuit, and
we believe that innovation comes from lone geniuses toiling on their own. The
classic anecdotes of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree and devising the law
of gravity after being struck on the head by an apple or Archimedes discovering
buoyancy while lowering himself into the bathtub may be entertaining, but they
are not the way creative discoveries really happen.
In a recent New York Times article, linked here, entitled,
“The End of ‘Genius’,” Shenk writes about creativity resulting from the dynamic
exchange of ideas between pairs of people. He comments, “The elemental
collective, of course, is the pair. Two people are the root of social
experience — and of creative work. When the sociologist Michael Farrell looked
at movements from French Impressionism to that of the American suffragists, he
found that groups created a sense of community, purpose and audience, but that
the truly important work ended up happening in pairs, as with Monet and Renoir,
and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In my own study of pairs, I
found the same thing — most strikingly with Paul McCartney and John Lennon.” An additional interesting article Shenk wrote
about his study of pairs is published in The Atlantic, linked here, entitled,
“The Power of Two.”
Very often around school, I hear students talking about the
work they are doing, whether it is research for their thesis, writing an essay,
or working on a problem in math or science. They share what they are working
on, and they solicit ideas from their classmates. These conversations help them
refine their thinking and move from one level to the next. In the process, they also learn that concepts
can be more of an amalgamation of different people’s thoughts than someone’s
isolated musings. Hopefully, over the course of this year, students can
discover for themselves the truth in the adage, “Two heads are better than
one.” Or as Shenk says with rather more
sophistication, “At its heart, the creative process itself is about a push and
pull between two entities, two cultures or traditions, or two people, or even a
single person and the voice inside her head.
Indeed, thinking itself is a kind of download of dialogue between
ourselves and others.”
