What is the Slow Hunch? (Steven Johnson Idea)

The book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary | Amazon) brought Steven Johnson’s “slow hunch” to my attention.

Ahrens says:

“Steven Johnson, who wrote an insightful book about how people in science and in general come up with genuine new ideas, calls it the ‘slow hunch.’ As a precondition to make use of this intuition, he emphasises the importance of experimental spaces where ideas can freely mingle. A laboratory with open-minded colleagues can be such a space, much as intellectuals and artists freely discussed ideas in the cafés of old Paris. I would add the slip-box as such a space in which ideas can mingle freely, so they can give birth to new ones.”

This piqued my interest, so I did some deeper digging into the slow hunch.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The “Slow Hunch” with Steven Johnson (Short Read)

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

What is the Slow Hunch?

Steven Johnson explains it the following ways:

“If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the ‘slow hunch’ … A lot of great ideas linger on sometimes for decades in the back of people’s minds.”

“Change can be fast. The most important ideas that trigger change are often very slow in their development—what I call the ‘slow hunch’ … If you go back and look at all sorts of innovations throughout history, the lightbulb moment almost never really exists. It’s almost always this long process where somebody has a fragment of an idea and it sits in their head for a year, or two years, or ten years before it turns into something really useful.”

“I’m really interested in innovation and technology, and at the same time I spend a lot of my recent career talking about things like the slow hunch—ideas that need time to develop and incubate (sometimes for a decade). In a sense, those two things seem to be in conflict with each other because you have this pace of change that’s accelerating … but you also inevitably need that longer development to come up with truly important ideas … The secret to slow hunches is keeping them alive.”