Shakespeare: We're told that creation begins with a thunderclap—a 'Eureka!' moment. But what if the secret to world-changing innovation isn't a brilliant flash, but a quiet, simple gesture? What if the real story isn't about Archimedes in his bath, but about a 12-year-old slave on a remote island who, with a tiny sliver of bamboo, single-handedly transformed a global industry? That's the provocative idea at the heart of Kevin Ashton's How to Fly a Horse.

DW: It's a powerful reframing. It takes innovation out of the realm of myth and puts it into the world of process.

Shakespeare: Exactly. And today, we're going to deconstruct this idea from two powerful angles. First, we'll dismantle the myth of the 'lone genius' by uncovering that surprising story behind vanilla. Then, we'll explore how the Wright brothers' methodical process for inventing the airplane is actually a masterclass in product development that every innovator, especially in tech, needs to understand. And who better to help us connect these historical dots to the modern world of creation than DW, a product manager who lives and breathes this process every day. DW, welcome.

DW: Thanks for having me, Shakespeare. I'm excited. This book really speaks the language of anyone who's ever tried to build something new, whether it's a piece of software or, well, a flying machine.

Shakespeare: So, DW, let's start with that myth. We all love the story of the genius, the lone inventor. But Ashton argues this is a dangerous fantasy. He takes us instead to the 1840s, to Réunion Island, a French colony in the Indian Ocean. The French had a problem. They had successfully transplanted vanilla orchids from Mexico, but the vines were barren. They flowered, but they never produced the precious vanilla beans.

DW: So they had the hardware, but not the software to run it, so to speak. The ecosystem was incomplete.

Shakespeare: A perfect analogy. The plant's natural pollinator, a specific species of bee, didn't make the trip from Mexico. For twenty years, the colonists were stumped. The entire vanilla industry was confined to Mexico. Then, one morning in 1841, a plantation owner named Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont finds two vanilla pods growing on his vine, a vine that had been fruitless for two decades. He's astonished. And he asks his 12-year-old slave, a boy named Edmond Albius, if he knows how it happened.

DW: And the boy did it.

Shakespeare: The boy did it. Edmond, who had been taught botany by Ferréol, had been observing the flowers. He took a small sliver of bamboo, no thicker than a blade of grass, and performed a simple, delicate operation. He lifted the small flap, the rostellum, that separates the male and female parts of the flower, and with a gentle pinch, he pressed them together. He pollinated the flower. It was a simple, repeatable gesture. It became known as ‘le geste d’Edmond’—the gesture of Edmond.

DW: That's incredible. It wasn't a new machine or a complex chemical formula. It was a single, precise, manual action. In product, we hunt for things like that. We call it 'unblocking a core loop.' The vanilla plant's loop was 'flower, get pollinated, produce fruit.' That middle step was broken. Edmond didn't reinvent the plant; he just found the one tiny, manual intervention that fixed the broken step.

Shakespeare: And the results were world-changing. Ferréol had Edmond teach the technique to other slaves. Réunion's vanilla production exploded. By the end of the century, the tiny island was producing 200 tons of vanilla a year, far surpassing Mexico. A global luxury became a common ingredient, all because of one boy's quiet observation and his simple gesture. Ashton contrasts this with the 'Eureka!' myth of Archimedes.

DW: Right, the dramatic, sudden insight. But Edmond's story feels much more real, more tangible. And more importantly, it was scalable. He taught others. That's the key to any good process. It's not a one-off miracle; it's a technique. In the tech world, we'd document that 'geste,' we'd write a script for it, and then we'd build it into our standard operating procedure. That's how you scale an innovation. You turn a discovery into a process.

Shakespeare: So the genius wasn't in some grand, complex invention, but in the observation and the simplicity of the solution?

DW: Exactly. The value wasn't in the gesture itself, which was simple, but in the understanding of the problem that led to it. He saw the flower's anatomy for what it was and identified the missing piece. That's pure product management: deeply understand the problem, and the simplest solution is often the most powerful.

Shakespeare: And that idea of a repeatable process, of scaling an insight, brings us perfectly to our second point: the power of iteration. If Edmond's story is about the power of a single, ordinary act, the Wright brothers' story is about the power of thousands of them. Ashton argues they didn't 'invent' the plane in a great leap; they, in the book's title, learned 'how to fly a horse.' They tamed it.

DW: I love that framing. It implies control and mastery through process, not a single moment of creation.

Shakespeare: Precisely. Before the Wrights, there were other pioneers. Most famously, Otto Lilienthal in Germany. He built beautiful gliders and made over two thousand successful flights. He had the idea of flight. But he had a fatal flaw. He controlled his gliders by shifting his body weight, like a hang-glider today. In 1896, a gust of wind stalled his craft, he couldn't shift his weight fast enough, and he fell to his death. His last words were, 'Sacrifices must be made.'

DW: He identified the wrong problem to solve. He focused on getting into the air—on lift—but not on what to do once you're there. The core problem was control.

Shakespeare: And that is exactly where the Wright brothers began. As bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, they understood one thing better than anyone: balance. They knew that a bicycle is an inherently unstable machine that is made stable through the constant, tiny adjustments of its rider. They believed a flying machine would be the same. So they ignored the engine, they ignored almost everything else, and they obsessed over one problem: control.

DW: They de-risked their biggest assumption first. That's a core principle of building anything new.

Shakespeare: They did. They started by building a kite in 1899, not to fly it, but to test an idea Wilbur had for controlling the wings—'wing warping,' twisting the wings to control roll. It worked. So the next year, they built a bigger version, a glider they could fly themselves at Kitty Hawk. But it didn't produce enough lift. They thought the existing scientific data they were using, the Smeaton coefficient for air pressure, must be wrong.

DW: So what do you do when the foundational data is wrong? You don't guess. You get your own data.

Shakespeare: You build your own analytics platform. And that's what they did. Back in their bicycle shop in Dayton, they built a six-foot-long wooden box—a rudimentary wind tunnel. They tested over two hundred different wing shapes, meticulously recording the data. They discovered the old data was, in fact, wrong. Armed with their own data, they built their 1902 glider. It was a masterpiece. They made hundreds of flights, mastering control, turning, and soaring. That glider was the first true airplane. The 1903 Flyer, the one that made the famous first flight, was really just the 1902 glider with an engine bolted on.

DW: This is a perfect historical parallel to building a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. The 1902 glider was their MVP. It didn't do everything—it had no power—but it did the one thing that mattered most: it solved for control. They proved their core hypothesis before adding more features, like an engine. Lilienthal, in contrast, tried to build the whole thing at once and failed.

Shakespeare: So Lilienthal was the dreamer, but the Wrights were the engineers? The product managers?

DW: Precisely. Lilienthal had a vision, but the Wrights had a roadmap. They broke a massive, impossible problem—'flying'—down into smaller, solvable, testable problems: first control, then lift, then power. Any good PM knows you have to isolate and solve your biggest unknown first. For them, it was control. For a new app, it might be user engagement or a technical bottleneck. The principle is identical. You don't fly the horse until you've tamed it.

Shakespeare: So, from a 12-year-old slave on a tropical island to two bicycle mechanics in a dusty workshop, the lesson from How to Fly a Horse seems to be the same. Creation is not a divine spark. It is work. It is observation, small steps, and relentless iteration.

DW: It's about demystifying innovation. It's not something that happens to you in a dream; it's a process you execute. The book makes it clear that it's less about being a 'genius' and more about being a detective and an engineer, solving one small puzzle at a time, day after day. It's about showing up to do the work.

Shakespeare: It removes the magic and replaces it with something far more powerful: a method. A process that anyone can learn and apply.

DW: Yes. And that's incredibly empowering. It means the ability to create something new isn't a lottery ticket. It's a skill you can cultivate through discipline and curiosity.

Shakespeare: A powerful thought to end on. So for everyone listening, especially those of you out there building the future in tech or any other field, perhaps the question isn't 'What's my big idea?'. As DW suggested, maybe it's 'What is the smallest, most ordinary step I can take today that unlocks the next one?' What's your 'geste d'Edmond'?

DW: Find that one simple gesture. That's where the real work, and the real magic, begins.