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You can’t think outside the box unless you’re thinking strategically. In other words, thinking about thinking, because the box is, what are the limits of conversation that presently inform the community of thinkers that you are engaged with? That’s what the box is. I don’t think that these kind of paradigmatic shifts occur because of a moment of extraordinary brilliance. I don’t think it’s genius. It’s more about think different than it is think brilliant.
Recognize paradigm shifts
For the entirety of my professional career, my field of political science has been concerned with governments as principal actors. That is because for the entirety of my political science career, we have thought of the physical world as the world in which international relations play out. I grew up in a bipolar world with the Americans versus the Soviets. The Soviets collapsed. It became a unipolar world for a brief period of time with the Americans in charge. And then it becomes kind of a non-polar world with the Americans not wanting to be the global policeman but no one playing that role and what I call a G-Zero World, and might it become bipolar again with the Chinese, or could it become multipolar? Is it really going to stay non-polar?
Thinking outside the box for me was a recognition that the digital space was becoming dramatically more important in every aspect that mattered for international politics. The digital world isn’t non-polar. It’s not multipolar. It’s technopolar. Technology companies actually exist as sovereign actors. They have control over their walled digital gardens. The economy is increasingly about the digital world. And it’s about how one buys, and how one sells, and how one transmits, and how one provides services online in a virtual world, and the civic engagement that you have, the personal engagement.
When I was younger, it was all about nature versus nurture. Now it’s nature, nurture, and algorithm, and the algorithmic intermediation that human beings have that determine how they function, how their neuroplasticity actually evolves. From there, from that little bit of thinking, which is a breakthrough moment, you suddenly say, “Wow.” So governments are either open or closed. They’re authoritarian or democratic. Well, what are technology companies? They’re not democratic or authoritarian. They’re all just trying to make money.
Okay, well, then how do I think about models? One way of thinking about is, what is their orientation towards governments, the other principal actor in the physical space? Are they just coexisting but think that digital will be separate? Do they think that governments will become dominant in digital, or do they think that governments will go away and technology companies will become supreme? Turns out that those are three different models.
The paradigm of international affairs in my entire world did not allow for a principal actor to be a company, because it did not allow for the digital space to be the fundamental space for international relations. As I explain it, it all, to me, feels completely obvious, and yet there wasn’t space for that thought inside the box, inside the paradigm of how international relations was considered.
Take the first step
That box can be surprisingly resilient to change. It’s so much fun to be in a conversation where you finally found these people that get you. You can finish each other’s sentences. You know what you’re talking about. You don’t have to explain it from the beginning. I love people, but I don’t necessarily love people that I don’t have anything in common with, because it’s hard. So the end of the day, what do you want to do? Oh, you want to find the people that think just like you, because then you can just have a beer and you can just be you.
No, you have to resist that. That’s like the single thing. If you want to think outside the box, you have to force yourself to have some downtime with people that don’t think just like you. The hardest thing ever is the first step ever, ever, ever. And people have a really difficult time getting in motion. They overthink. It’s not uncomfortable once you do it a lot. It’s actually the most natural thing. But it’s super uncomfortable for people that don’t do it.