BIF-3 Storyteller Steven Johnson on Consilient Thinking
With five eclectic books under his belt—three published within the past three years—BIF-3 storyteller Steven Johnson is a consilient thinker. In other words, he has a knack for combining insights from a variety of disciplines and cultures and experiences to create connections not previously conceived. I had the opportunity to talk to Steven a couple of weeks ago about his latest book The Ghost Map and his latest business endeavor Outside.in.
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World, is Johnson's first foray into historical narrative. “The genre of the book was really the seed of the book,” he told me. “I wanted to write a sustaining story that I could wrap an idea book around.”
Much of the book is grim. In 1854, a cholera epidemic ravaged London, claiming the lives of 30,000 people in one year alone. Prevailing wisdom blamed "bad air" from the raw sewage that was blanketing the city. Ultimately, the source of the contaminant was tracked to a water pump. It also signaled the transformation of a great city from squalor to splendor–all in the time span of a dozen years.
When Johnson first imagined the book, he saw it as a story with three protagonists: the city, the bacterium, and scientist Dr. John Snow. Through his research, a new character emerged: Reverend Henry Whitehead. Quickly, Whitehead went from being “really interesting” to the fourth protagonist of the book.
“The more I researched, the more I realized that he was absolutely central to the actual cracking of the case,” explained Johnson. Whitehead ministered to residents of Golden Square, one of the poorest neighborhoods of London and home to the source of the contaminated pump. “The scholarship had done Whitehead a disservice and underestimated his role, In fact, Whitehead was a social networker who knew everyone in the neighborhood intimately and whose social intelligence was crucial to the problem-solving.”
Whitehead had a knack for making less than obvious connections. This is also one of the latent themes in much of Johnson’s writing. He calls it the sociology of error. “It’s great to study breakthrough ideas but it’s just as important to study the history of how people were wrong,” he told me.
At the time that Johnson was writing about the London epidemic, he was living in Brooklyn with his young family and going online to read neighborhood bloggers tuned into the happenings of his community. “These place bloggers were feeding me really interesting information about my environment that I couldn’t get anywhere else. They became my Whitehead.” Was it possible, he thought, to help organize and amplify those voices in a geographic way? “Whitehead really got me thinking about the power of local experts, those on-the-ground change agents who mobilize action from the bottom up.” A few months later, outside.in was born.
Johnson readily admits that if the idea occurred to him even five years ago, the site could not have been developed. What then would have cost upwards of $30 million in technology investment, today was made with roughly $100,000 seed money and a few dedicated individuals.
Don't miss Steven Johnson share his story at our upcoming Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 10th and 11th.
RELATED LINKS
- Learn more about BIF-3 and how you can participate
- Watch his YouTube video where he talks about The Ghost Map
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