Future Here Now: Binaries blind us

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Hey there. This month, we’re highlighting how the requirements of innovation are changing , and how all of us, no matter what you do, have to learn to leverage the change we don’t always notice to make anything new - anything that actually solves the problems we care about.

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One of the First Principles of my approach to understanding the world we are moving into is a pretty simple looking statement: Most issues actually exist on a continuum, not a yes-no binary.

Seems self-evident, at least on first glance. Until you start noticing all the things we’ve been taught to treat as a binary, or as clear-cut categories…and how those assumptions fall apart on a little closer scrutiny. Gender is one of these assumed binaries that has fallen apart recently, but there are hundreds more.

Here’s the deeper truth: binaries hide as much or more than they claim to make clear. Map the categorizations we were taught as facts onto pretty much any actual observed phenomena, and you find that the categories often don’t help. Instead, they obscure the full range of what’s actually going on.

Categories and binaries are inventions of our brains, responding to our evolutionary urge to create shortcuts so that our brains can leave some energy for running and throwing things. And in the Industrial Era and before, these kinds of shortcuts gave people a level of confidence. They made the world small and simple enough to feel like they had control.

Now we find that even subatomic particles defy our categorizations, setting our very basis in uncertainty and probabilistics.

That is a quantum level of change from what we have assumed (pun not intended, but kind of unavoidable at this point). And it’s a core challenge to one of our most basic adaptive mechanisms.

But the urge that some people have to try to claw back to certainty, to shout their insistence at the universe, doesn’t change this reality.

So we have to learn to grapple with continuums, live with ambiguity, make sense of the world based on detail and nuance and context, without the crutch of simple categories. And as I’ve written elsewhere, our best opportunities for innovation often fall in the spaces between the categories – the spaces that our predecessors overlooked.

Incubators without Borders

As I analyze in Everybody Innovates Here, organizations that help entrepreneurs and small businesses often work against their objectives by failing to