Finding Innovation in Isolation: Reflections from the Tibetan Plateau
The Curious Path #1
On the sixth day of trekking through the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, I found myself stood in a hotel room in the small town of Lintan staring at my own socks being reflected back at me from the TV cabinet in front of me.
After a week spent trekking at an altitude above 4,500m, I was sleep deprived and physically exhausted, my mind, still adjusting to the new altitude, took an extra moment to register what I was seeing. Staring at the reflection of my socks, I noticed the blinking red light and then, the black box like shape. It was a TV box, mounted snugly inside the cabinet. It had been vertically mounted with its front panel facing up towards the ceiling and so unable to receive a signal from the remote. The fix? A mirror, angled at 45 degrees, bouncing the infrared beam back down into the receiver. It was clever. It worked. And it had been installed in all of the rooms on my floor – I checked.
It was a clever fix to a likely sourcing oversight; the differing dimensions of the cabinet and TV box not being accounted for. It was a small moment. But one that has stayed with me.
I had just come off a five-day trek through Gannan (Southern Gansu), a region on the southern edge of Gansu province. It’s the kind of place that lives on the periphery of most maps, perched atop the Tibetan plateau, a world unto itself. A landscape that simultaneously both humbles and ignites the senses. Where the air is thin, water never boils and life moves a little bit slower. It is a region that has developed in relative seclusion from the rest of the world, often finding itself situated on the periphery of global knowledge-making.
But if you spend enough time in places like this, you begin to notice something else， not just what’s missing, but what’s possible. The absence of infrastructure, the lack of connection, it doesn’t just strip things away. It opens space.
Throughout history, people have retreated to the mountains to find that space. For centuries, these high-elevation, rugged regions have made the land too remote, too unruly for governments to fully control. They have offered a kind of sanctuary, not just from power, but from assumption. They have given people the freedom to rethink what a life could look like.
In that space, new ways of living emerge. Ways shaped not by speed, efficiency or abundance but by separation and necessity. When the usual tools and answers aren’t available, people create new ones, and sometimes, those become the seeds of innovation, not because they are more advanced, but because they emerge from an entirely different starting point, shaped by necessity rather than choice.
There’s a growing understanding in cognitive science known as the “collective brain.” It suggests that innovation doesn’t stem from lone genius, but from shared knowledge; passed down, iterated on, built up across generations and geographies. It’s the learning we absorb through culture and through one another, it creates a growing pool of shared understanding, a kind of rising tide of collective knowledge. This 'collective brain,' made up of individual learning and cultural exchange, expands over time and as it grows, so do the chances for unexpected connections and sparks that fuel creative leaps.
In modern economies, this collective brain is everywhere; stored in our cloud drives, sprinkled through our Slack channels, saved in our YouTube tutorials, GitHub repositories and encoded in design systems and innovation playbooks. We tap into it constantly. It tells us what works, what’s been tried, what to avoid.
But what happens when that collective brain is out of reach?
Today, when many of us set out to innovate new products, services, business models, or technologies, we draw heavily from the collective brain; best practices from our industries, institutional knowledge within our organizations, the experience of our colleagues. But this knowledge, while powerful, can also narrow our thinking.
In the high altitudes of Gannan, mobile coverage vanishes. So do cities, villages and any trace of the human world we now struggle to imagine ourselves apart from. In a country renowned for its near-blanket 5G coverage, even in remote outposts, this kind of disconnection was surreal. From the second day of the trek onward, we encountered no other people, no infrastructure, no signal. We carried everything we needed; food, fuel, camp gear and passed the days with the slow rhythm of walking.
The mirror in the hotel cabinet was not the product of best practices or proprietary knowledge. It wasn’t user-tested or brainstormed on a whiteboard. It was the product of a mistake, that created the space for something new to emerge. When the installer realized the cabinet didn’t accommodate the box, he didn’t have guidelines or best practices to refer to. He worked with what he had. It solved a problem. It worked.
We live in a world that rewards certainty. So, we have collectively developed our understanding of how the practice of innovation should work; treating it as something to be orchestrated, ritualized through facilitation and guided by frameworks. These tools can be incredibly valuable and powerful. But so is the kind of innovation born out of necessity, the kind that disconnects you from what’s been tried, what tends to work and what to avoid.
It can be too easy to slip into thinking of the future as a net-zero-sum game, a slightly better or slightly worse version of now. But step far enough away from the guide rails of collective knowledge and the future stops looking incremental. It starts looking infinite again. There is value in starting from nothing. In seeking out disconnect. In finding places where the collective brain is out of reach and in doing so, being offered the chance to build knowledge differently.
This is one of the many paradoxes of innovation: it depends on connection, but it also depends on separation. We build the best ideas by learning from one another. But we also need the space for mistakes. To break with best practices and inherited assumptions. To not know. To be forced to improvise and in doing so, maybe imagine a completely new way.
If you enjoyed this piece, share it with someone who’s ever crafted a clever fix to an unexpected problem, or someone who could use a reminder that a little space and separation can offer the necessity to reimagine a challenge in a whole new light.
- Kriss
Kriss is the Founder of Responsible innovation Lab, the author of The Little Book About Innovation’s Big Responsibility. Want more? Sign up to the The Curious Path and follow Ri Lab on Instagram.
