The Ways to New

Chapter 5Structural Disruption

The Imitation Game won four Oscars in February 2015. The movie is a biopic of mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, the Englishman who headed the team that succeeded in breaking the Enigma Code used by the Germans during World War II. At that stage in the war, the Germans were sinking up to fifty Atlantic supply ships every month. Historians suggest that Turing's team saved fourteen million lives by ending the war at least two years early. The devices Turing devised, known as Turing machines, are basically the first computers.

Turing's code-breaking team at Bletchley Park, near London, was inter-disciplinary. The word was not used at the time, but it well describes the way linguists, physicists, mathematicians, German-language experts, chess champions, and crossword champions had to work together, as well as of course cryptographers. Teams, like the Bletchley Park team, that bring together people of different talents stand a good chance of coming up with new ideas. Diversity and the confrontations it generates throw up new avenues of thought. Talking about Bletchley Park, Frans Johansson writes in The Medici Effect, “Diversity is a proven way to increase the randomness of concept combinations.”¹ The book gets its title from the fact that the Italian Renaissance blossomed in the fifteenth century, when the Medici family gathered an incredible diversity of talents at its court, including painters, writers, sculptors, and engineers.

Nissan: ...