Szymon's Zettelkasten
Powered by 🌱Roam GardenPN: Standardization is key to creativity
Keywords:: PermanentNote
Reference: R: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
Standardization is key to creativity. It helps you navigate between ideas and makes it easier to compare them. It's counterintuitive therefore, I will show you two examples where structure leads to more creativity which in turn leads to growth.
The first example is about shipping containers that revolutsonarized international trade. Thiago Forte describes this brilliantly here:
Container shipping is a simple idea: ship products in standardized containers instead of loading them onto ships haphazardly as had always been done. But it took multiple failed attempts before it was successful because it wasn’t actually about the container, which after all is just a box.
The potential of the shipping container was only unleashed when every other part of the shipping supply chain was changed to accommodate it. From manufacturing to packaging to final delivery, the design of ships, cranes, trucks, and harbors all had to align around moving containers as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once they did, international shipping exploded, setting the stage for Asia to become an economic power among many other historic changes.
The second example are LEGOs which consist of several standardized shapes and sizes. Thanks to that, they can be shuffled around and assembled into endless configurations resulting in structures such as this:
So, standardization leads to greater creativity because it brings order to the otherwise chaotic and messy process of innovation. Without a standard format, the larger the collection of ideas grows, the more time and energy you have to spend navigating the ever-growing inconsistencies between them. A common format removes unnecessary complexity and takes the second-guessing out of the process. It enables you to compare, combine, mix, and shuffle ideas like LEGOs to build something impressive.
Relevant notes:
PN: Recipe for creativity: although messiness is helping creativity because it facilitates unexpected combinations, it can be combined with standardization to ease the process of idea navigation and comparison. The zettelkasten embodies that.