The Wisdom of the Iron Age

Interesting BBC programme In Our Time this morning about The Dawn of the Iron Age. Why and how did people start making ornaments and tools and weapons from copper and tin and lead? Because the ores were shiny, and it was easy to see how they could be melted and purified and worked. Gradually, people discovered that certain combinations of these materials (what we now call alloys) were stronger, or more malleable - hence the development of bronze.

Although iron ore was much more abundant than any of the others, it was much less attractive, and primitive people were unaware of its potential value. Even when melted, it didn't look much. Producing useful iron from this stuff was a more complicated procedure, and those tribes that first discovered the secret wisely kept it to themselves. Egyptian tombs had a few iron items, but these were probably obtained by trade or capture - the evidence suggests that Egyptians themselves did not know how to produce iron.

Could people ever have worked out how to produce iron if they didn't already have the experience of working with other metals. Would people ever have thought it worth the extra hassle of producing iron if they weren't aware of the limitations of using other metals? Is it conceivable that we could ever have had an Iron Age without having a Bronze Age first?

There is an important lesson here for innovation. Nobody should ever be satisfied with the "low hanging fruit". The only purpose of the low-hanging fruit is to get us started, to feed us and motivate us as we build ladders, so we can reach the high-hanging fruit.

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See also

Venkatesh Rao, The Disruption of Bronze

Paula Hay, Cognitive Archeology of the West

The Wisdom of the Tomato

@davidnasser @mingk @leebryant @kaldajani and many others have tweeted the following aphorism.

'Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad."

Please permit me to quibble with this aphorism. Classifying tomatoes as fruit is merely information. This classification is supported by data, such as the observation that the tomato contains its own seeds. Knowing not to put it into a fruit salad is a culinary "best practice", based on a series of social conventions about the proper constitution of fruit salad and its place within a meal. So this is knowledge, or what is sometimes called "received wisdom". However, innovation often involves disobeying social conventions and surprising those who rely excessively upon received wisdom. For example, how did chefs discover that it was okay to put flower petals into salads ("next practice")? So courage is knowing that you are not "supposed" to put tomatoes into fruit salad, but doing it anyway. And real wisdom is not inflicting such gross culinary experiments on the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong way.

To lead people on a journey ...

#PROMSG @PG_Rule tweeted

1. We have to start from where they are (not from where we are).

and I added three corollaries

2. We have to start from where they really are (not from where they think they are).

3. We have to make our way to where they are (not expect to lead them from a distance).

4. We have to head towards where they want to be (not where we want them to be).