Introduction

The Hyperactive Hive Mind

In late 2010, Nish Acharya arrived in Washington, DC, ready to work. President Barack Obama had appointed Nish to be his director of innovation and entrepreneurship and a senior adviser to the secretary of commerce. Nish was asked to coordinate with twenty-six different federal agencies and over five hundred universities to dispense $100 million in funding, meaning that he was about to become the prototypical DC power player: smartphone always in hand, messages flying back and forth at all hours. But then the network broke.

On a Tuesday morning, just a couple of months into his new role, Nish received an email from his CTO explaining that they had to temporarily shut down their office’s network due to a computer virus. “We all expected that this would be fixed in a couple of days,” Nish told me when I later interviewed him about the incident. But this prediction proved wildly optimistic. The following week, an undersecretary of commerce convened a meeting. She explained that they suspected the virus infecting their network came from a foreign power, and that Homeland Security was recommending that the network stay down while they traced the attack. Just to be safe, they were also going to destroy all the computers, laptops, printers—anything with a chip—in the office.

One of the biggest impacts of this network shutdown was that the office lost the ability to send or receive emails. For security purposes, it was illegal for them to use personal email addresses to perform their government work, and bureaucratic hurdles kept them from setting up temporary accounts using other agencies’ networks. Nish and his team were effectively cut off from the frenetic ping-pong of digital chatter that defines most high-level work within the federal government. The blackout lasted six weeks. With a touch of gallows humor, they took to calling the fateful day when it all began “Dark Tuesday.”

Not surprisingly, the sudden and unexpected loss of email made certain parts of Nish’s work “quite hellish.” Because the rest of the government continued to rely heavily on this tool, he often worried about missing important meetings or requests. “There was an existing information pipeline,” he explained, “and I was out of the loop.” Another hardship was logistics. Nish’s job required him to set up many meetings, and this task was made substantially more annoying without the ability to coordinate over email.

Perhaps less expected, however, was that Nish’s work didn’t grind to a halt during these six weeks. He instead began to notice that he was actually getting better at his job. Lacking the ability to simply send a quick email when he had a question, he took to leaving his office to meet with people in person. Because these appointments were a pain to arrange, he scheduled longer blocks of time, allowing him to really get to know the people he was meeting and understand the nuances of their issues. As Nish explained, these extended sessions proved “very valuable” for a new political appointee trying to learn the subtle dynamics of the federal government.

The lack of an inbox to check between these meetings opened up cognitive downtime—what Nish took to calling “whitespace”—to dive more deeply into the research literature and legislation relevant to the topics handled by his office. This slower and more thoughtful approach to thinking yielded a pair of breakthrough ideas that ended up setting the agenda for Nish’s agency for the entire year that...