Frans Johansson > Quotes

“Leonardo da Vinci, the defining Renaissance man and perhaps the greatest intersectionalist of all times, believed that in order to fully understand something one needed to view it from at least three different perspectives.15”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“It was not even necessary for people to know how to sing to be considered rock musicians. Bob Dylan had no clue, but that did not stop him from becoming one of the greatest artists ever.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Innovations must not only be valuable, they must also be put to use by others in society.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“All of this suggests that it makes sense to spend significant amounts of time reading and drawing, learning and experimenting, without guidance from instructors, peers, and experts.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Why are we so hesitant about working in diverse teams? The reason is at least in part a function of human nature. Humans have a tendency to stick with people who are like themselves and avoid those who are different. Psychologists have a name for this tendency. They call it the similar-attraction effect.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“The holy grail of complex forces is when success feeds on itself in a self-reinforcing loop or cascade. Although we can’t rationally figure out exactly how to trigger such forces, we can be prepared to harness them when they occur—assuming we are able to spot them in the first place.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Sometimes events play out in a straightforward way, exactly according to plan. There is a simple cause-and-effect transaction: we act, and our actions bring the result we expect. Put a piece of bread in the toaster and press down. Two minutes later the toaster pops up and you have a nice warm breakfast. You are sitting in your car, idling at an intersection and waiting for the traffic light to turn green. It does turn green. You put your foot down on the gas and—predictably—the car starts to move forward again. This much is obvious. Unfortunately this predictability has convinced many people that the world behaves, more or less, like a machine; a complicated machine, perhaps, but a machine nonetheless. If we study this machine carefully we should be able to pull back the curtain that covers its mechanics and effect change in a far more thoughtful manner.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“With the benefit of hindsight, everything seems obvious. But the reason these people did not connect the dots has to do with how connections and associations happen. The whole reason for bringing in Sargent’s software was to improve Microsoft’s own debugging program—it had nothing to do with fixing Windows. Our mind tends to keep separate concepts apart. It requires something unusual to spark the connection. The opposite of click moments are planned situations with expected outcomes. On their own, these don’t generate the chaos and randomness needed to discover new, unique ideas. They have a harder time shaking the box of concepts, projects, and ideas to form new combinations.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Interestingly, to be considered creative, it is not enough that an idea is new. To say that 4 + 4 = 35,372 is definitely original, but it hardly qualifies as creative.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Sometimes events play out in a straightforward way, exactly according to plan. There is a simple cause-and-effect transaction: we act, and our actions bring the result we expect. Put a piece of bread in the toaster and press down. Two minutes later the toaster pops up and you have a nice warm breakfast. You are sitting in your car, idling at an intersection and waiting for the traffic light to turn green. It does turn green. You put your foot down on the gas and—predictably—the car starts to move forward again. This much is obvious. Unfortunately this predictability has convinced many people that the world behaves, more or less, like a machine; a complicated machine, perhaps, but a machine nonetheless. If we study this machine carefully we should be able to pull back the curtain that covers its mechanics and effect change in a far more thoughtful manner. But that’s not how most of the world works at all. We can never really be sure that pushing this button or pulling that lever will have the result we are looking for.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“There is a third type of complex force, which I call a self-reinforcing loop, and I think it’s the most interesting of them all. Self-reinforcing loops are situations where past success continually reinforces future success. The initial success can sometimes be very, very small—just enough for other people to notice it—but this small initial win makes it more likely to become increasingly successful. If one is truly fortunate, such a loop will allow a person or an organization to not only reach greatness, but also make it difficult for others to emulate this particular pathway.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“when the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of believing the genuine pattern, natural selection will favor the false pattern.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“in this case that is exactly what it was.” Because it is impossible to fully control the events that occur around us, we must use complex forces to our advantage. The constant reshuffling of actions, desires, and consequences causes windows of opportunity to open and close unexpectedly. These windows provide a pathway to breakthrough success. They may not be open for long, however, so we need to be prepared to make a quick decision before complex forces cause conditions to shift once again.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“In order to harness complex forces you must first to create something for these forces to latch on to. You must actually do something, even if you are not sure where it will lead. This tactic is based on the idea that the most important part of a purposeful bet is the fact that you took action. Once you start executing, whether or not the bet actually works in your favor, you are exposed to complex forces that can pave the way for future success. Even if you do not have a crystal-clear goal in mind, it is still better to do something—and to tell people about it. The complex forces of the world will now have a concept to work with, and you will have exposed yourself to the possibility of positive unanticipated consequences, cascades, and self-reinforcing loops.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Creating diverse teams is one of the best ways to encourage click moments.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“It essentially meant that anyone was allowed to use Linux as long as they did not sell it, and”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person. Such a person is more prone to question traditions, rules, and boundaries—and to search for answers where others may not think to.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“The second type of complex force is what might be called a cascade. A cascade is an action that has consequences that spread far beyond anything predicted or expected, like the rings on the surface of water. The initial action can be very, very small, but its effects seem to take on a life of their own and propagate throughout society. These types of cascades are becoming far more common today with the increasing connectedness of people across countries and across fields. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an infrastructure for viral trends to take off at an instant.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Incentives were important in attracting a candidate to accept a particular job, but once on the job it hardly mattered at all. People who are driven to perform do so based on internal drive, not on external incentives. They want to do a good job.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“This book is about two very simple but highly provocative ideas. The first one is this: success is random, far more random than we have come to believe. The second is that there are a number of specific actions that individuals and organizations can take to capture randomness and focus it in our favor.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“We often consider unintended consequences as something undesirable, but this is just our natural resistance to randomness. Instead they can provide an amazing opportunity for us to avoid our predictable, instinctive reactions.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“If we find something that works, particularly something that seems to be swept up by complex forces, we need to double down. In this context, doubling down means that you invest time, money, reputation, or other resources into the project with the expectation that it will not only continue to be successful but in fact go big. You are, in other words, finally making some sort of prediction.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Many of the lessons of this book are ones I had to discover through my own process of trial and error. Luck not only matters far more than we’d like to believe, but it is also our best chance to stand apart. As such, there is no one single master plan for success; every journey is unique.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“And therein lies the beauty of complex forces. The big opportunity is almost never what you would guess, because your best guess is based on the prevailing logic. Surprises are likely to harbor unexpected opportunities—the type that are a far cry from obvious. So much so that anyone who is not a party to the surprise would be hard-pressed to come up with anything like it.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“In 2011 Alabama passed a controversial law meant to curb illegal immigration and bolster the state’s economy. In 2012, the University of Alabama estimated that the law would eliminate upwards of 140,000 jobs, costing the state nearly $11 billion annually.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“A person with low associative barriers, on the other hand, may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience, or that cannot easily be traced logically. Therefore, such ideas are often met with resistance and sentiments such as, “If this is such a good idea, someone else would have thought of it.” But that is precisely what someone else would not have done, because the connection between the two concepts is not obvious.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“we must employ tactics that allow us to learn as many things as possible without getting stuck in a particular way of thinking about those things.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“The second type of complex force is what might be called a cascade. A cascade is an action that has consequences that spread far beyond anything predicted or expected, like the rings on the surface of water. The initial action can be very, very small, but its effects seem to take on a life of their own and propagate throughout society.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World