"The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance - almost is the revelation of ignorance."
Wendell Berry

Today's Thursday Complexity Post by the Plexus Institute featured a 20-year old paper by Marvin Minsky titled Why People Think Computers Can't.  I thought the following excerpt was particularly relevant to the topic of entrepreneurship.

Do outstanding minds differ from ordinary minds in any special way?  I don't believe that there is anything basically different in genius, except for having an unusual combination of abilities, none very special by itself.  There must be some intense concern with some subject, but that's common enough.  There also must be great proficiency in that subject; this, too, is not so rare; we call it craftsmanship.  There has to be enough self-confidence to stand against the scorn of peers; alone, we call that stubbornness.  And certainly, there must be common sense.  As I see it, any ordinary person who can understand an ordinary conversation has already in his head most of what our heroes have.  So, why can't "ordinary, common sense" - when better balanced and more fiercely motivated - make anyone a genius.

So still we have to ask, why doesn't everyone acquire such a combination?  First, of course, it sometimes is just the accident of finding a novel way to look at things.  But, then, there may be certain kinds of difference-in-degree.  One is in how such people learn to manage what they learn; beneath the surface of their mastery, creative people must have unconscious administrative skills that knit the many things they know together.  The other difference is in why some people learn so many more and better skills.  A good composer masters many skills of phrase and theme - but so does anyone who talks coherently.

Why do some people learn so much so well?  The simplest hypothesis is that they've come across some better ways to learn!  Perhaps such "gifts" are little more than tricks of "higher-order" expertise.  Just as one child learns to re-arrange its building-blocks in clever ways, another child might learn to play, inside its head - at re-arranging how it learns!

Our cultures don't encourage us to think much about learning.  Instead we regard it as something that just happens to us.  But learning must itself consist of sets of skills we grow ourselves; we start with only some of them and slowly grow the rest.  Why don't more people keep on learning more and better learning skills?  Because it's not rewarded right away, its payoff has a long delay.  When children play with pails and sand, they're usually concerned with goals like filling pails with sand.  But once a child concerns itself instead with how to better learn, they that might lead to exponential learning growth!  Each better way to learn would lead to better ways to learn - and this could magnify itself into an awesome, qualitative change.  Thus, first-rank "creativity" could be just the consequence of little childhood accidents.

The history of entrepreneurship research and journalism is replete with celebrations of entrepreneurial genius; analysis of the distinctive characteristics of successful entrepreneurs; and assertions that entrepreneurs are born, not made.  Those messages are, in a perverse way, comforting to those of us who are less accomplished, because they relieve us of responsibility.  But, the real world - and Minsky's analysis - suggests that entrepreneurial genius is much like genius in any other field of human endeavor.  Entrepreneurship is an iterative learning process that relies upon the effective integration of a complementary set of skills and resources [1].

We seek the extraordinary - the "most important" factor - because it promises a simple solution to our economic problems: If we can just identify the "X" factor, we can go get some of it.  In spite of ourselves, we constantly seek the silver bullet, knowing all the while that our quest is vain.  Time is precious; so, we are tempted by the possibility of a shortcut.  That's because the identification of subtle differences in learning capabilities and the dynamic balancing of seemingly ordinary resources among management teams, within companies, and among organizations can seem wickedly difficult.  And, it's difficult because context matters.  There is no magic wand.  Even so, there is hope.  If, as aspiring entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial support organizations, we pay attention to the foundational roles of learning and complementarity, we improve our chances for success.

As Dietrich Dörner concludes in The Logic of Failure:

There is no universally applicable rule, no magic wand, that we can apply to every situation and to all the structures we find in the real world...And it seems to me that the ability to deal with problems in the most appropriate way is the hallmark of wisdom rather than of genius...If that is so, then it must be possible both to teach and to learn to think in a complex situation...There is probably no cut-and-dried method for teaching people how to manage complex uncertain, and dynamic realities, because such realities, by their nature, do not present themselves in cut-and-dried form.

Benjamin Franklin asserted, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."  If we continue to invest in programs based on the belief in entrepreneur as solitary genius or businessperson as mechanical clerk, we're not likely to see sustained changes in our economic fortunes.  If, on the other hand, we invest in improving the learning skills of people who are willing to risk the exposure of their ignorance and who embrace the power of complementary skills and resources, there's a good chance that we'll see the flowering of entrepreneurial genius in our communities.

[1] These observations underly the practice of Jeff Shuman and Jan Twombly at The Rhythm of Business.  Consider their whitepaper on the link between entrepreneurial thinking and corporate alliance management (PDF).