Catalysts
A chemical catalyst speeds a reaction by providing a pathway with lower activation energy. Used as a social analogy, a catalyst reduces barriers to a process, whether its consequences are beneficial or harmful.
THE IDEA
The first internet
Catalysts are not required for a reaction to occur, but they make things easier. Having them means that there are more possible starting conditions for reactions. Like all models from the physical world, they are value neutral. Catalysts can just as easily speed up the occurrence of negative reactions as of positive ones.
Once you start looking for catalysts, you see them everywhere; like the printing press, which significantly sped up the learning process. If attaining knowledge is thought of as a reaction, then prior to the printing press this reaction required comparatively huge activation energy to get started.
Handwritten books were rare and the purview of a very small section of society. Getting access to them was complicated—you needed the time and the means to seek them out. In order to learn, scholars would have to wander from scriptorium to scriptorium, hunting down one of Aristotle’s or Euclid’s works. In addition, they couldn’t rely on the integrity of what they were reading—hand copying lent itself to errors and embellishment, and books were sometimes erased so the parchment could be reused. For medieval scholars, the older a manuscript was, the more likely it was to be accurate.2
The printing press acted as a catalyst to accelerate the process of obtaining knowledge. There was now a repeatable process for copying knowledge: books. These books were cheaper and faster to make than the old manuscripts, and thus were more widely available.
In this analogy, the lower time and cost of obtaining books correspond to a lower activation energy for learning.
When to use it
Analyzing historical innovations to see how they catalyzed societal change
Designing educational tools that lower the barrier to learning (like the printing press)
Identifying leverage points in business processes to accelerate growth
Understanding how social media platforms catalyzed the spread of both good information and misinformation
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
The Printing Press
The printing press catalyzed the spread of knowledge by making books cheaper and faster to produce, reducing the effort and resources required to access information, analogous to lowering activation energy.
Steam Engine as Industrial Catalyst
The steam engine catalyzed the Industrial Revolution by enabling factories and mechanized transport, reducing the barriers to mass production and economic growth.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
What catalysts have you observed in your work or daily life that made a process significantly easier or faster?
Can you think of a situation where a catalyst inadvertently sped up a negative outcome?
How might you intentionally introduce a catalyst to lower activation energy for a goal you're working toward?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- The Great Mental Models Volume 2 Physics, Chemistry and Biology