You Can't Squeeze Creativity From a Pie Chart

The stumbling block for leaders who'd like to think more creatively -- more like Wesley and less like Vizzini -- has partly been a misleading conception of reality. The value of analytical reasoning is based on the assumption that it reliably reveals -- and predicts -- the objective structure of a rationally organized world that we all equally share.

But the teenagers who flocked to MySpace and YouTube were responding to novel, emergent idea-spaces -- user-generated content, social networking and digitally-driven popularity enhancement -- whose convergence was largely confined to their world.

Recognition of the patterns of social intelligence -- collective ways of knowing and behaving -- embedded in these spaces demanded of entrepreneurs and early adopters alike not logical extensions of the familiar, but imaginative, insightful embracing of the radically new.

We live in a smart world, or rather a series of such worlds, each embedded with its own unique patterns of social intelligence. Whether we're entrepreneurs bent on creating a breakthrough or leaders anxious to avoid getting blindsided by an unanticipated development, the key to success lies in thinking based on the 4i's rather than on rational analysis and quantitative prediction.

The reason is simple: Apprehending and insightfully exploiting patterns of social intelligence requires holistic rather than analytical modes of thinking, and that's exactly what the 4i's do.

Fortunately, a new science is coming to our aid. Patterns of social intelligence linked to the invention, development and consumer uptake of breakthrough products and services can be interpreted as interconnected webs whose dynamics follow well-established laws and principles of network science.

The creation -- and success -- of the iPod, YouTube and Nintendo's Wii game console, to name just a few recent examples of breakthrough creativity, can all be understood in terms of various interactions of the laws of fitness, hot spots and tipping points.

In all, I identify nine principles of networking in Smart World that govern creative breakthroughs.

In today's creative economy, relying solely on conventional analytical reasoning could be the equivalent of drinking from a poisoned chalice.