Product development and creating something new

In companies, it is very common that people advocate for productivity above all things. If you developing a given piece of software, your peers, your manager, and your teachers before them, will tell you that you should focus on getting things done. This involves identifying works that exist on the wild, such as libraries, and glueing them in the best way possible to create something that will be as profitable as possible in the shortest time possible. Of course, in companies, you still have creative work. But this work is always purely pragmatic, the creativity is a medium to get things running faster, and finish them quickly. Companies, are not (and perhaps could not be) interested in slowly maturing bodies of work. Things happen so fast that there is no time for the object of study to be organically cultivated. It is common culture in these places, that you should almost never venture yourself in reinventing the wheel, which could lead you to waste the company’s money and end up creating something which is not as well tested or as robust as an existing solution, commercial or open-source. Truly new and creative work get constrained to individuals that make them in their free time, as their hobbies, and communities that embrace these ideas and foster them in the open source realm. Companies, on the other hand, use these new ideas as dependencies in their projects, as a fast track to innovation. They sometimes put money on these hobby projects and they become part of their investment portfolio, giving some time for their creator to work until they become reliable to be used.

In academia, if you are not inserted in a productive machine-like laboratory, creating new things will probably be a long and excruciating process. Time will often pass slowly and the climb will feel infinite. Complex concepts will make you feel stupid and like you never belonged to this place. But makes me think that this is like a crowd where everybody feels that they are the only one enduring this pain, and nobody is as stupid as them. Eventually, I observe, people manage to build their production line group and let this feeling go, or perhaps accept that their work is a lonely individual endevour, where they artisanally create their pieces of knowledge.

What bothers me is the transposition of commercial productivity as a guiding principle in the university environment. Not that I feel that people should stop working or just do the bare minimum, but importing this logic appears to me that will hinder any true new thinking and sediment the “normal science”, in the worst sense. I am also not naive to think that every work should lead to a paradigm shift, but seems to me that academic work should at least have some room to let inspiration and insight to permeate the manuscripts that leave those institutions. The work created there should be an opportunity for the writer and the beholder to experience some sort of atomic awe and wander.

What I conjecture is that productivity is a chain that drags you in the opposite direction. In some sense, the dream of the productive is to be a chatbot, that generates generic output, as long as it is accepted by its peers and the editors and in the free time it can do whatever they want apart from actual research. Instead of productivity, we should call the quality of creating new work something else, for example “prolific”, since it seems to better reflect what a good researcher should aim for. It reminds of things like a “prolific writer”; furthermore, you would not call an extremely efficient accountant “prolific”, probably “productive”.

Research, when in this place of wander, cannot be produced hastely. It needs to be cultivated as a slow growing tree, that branches and roots itself on the ground day by day. In the first years, this tree does not cast any shadows, and is thin and fragile. After years, this tree will be tall and create a fresh place to sit and enjoy your stay. As Brian Bucklew wrote in an inspired tweet: “do a little every day, life is lonnnng no matter how it feels, and a little bit builds up like dissolved lime building hundred foot pillars.”