Creative People Must Be Stopped (4 page)

Firms intent on creating an air of professionalism can inadvertently constrain perception by controlling your working habits as well as your environment. In many organizations, even ones with avowed objectives of supporting innovation, being “professional” means only doing work while seated at your neatly arranged desk. Being outside the office, even if you are working hard on a project, may not be considered a legitimate use of time. Informing a supervisor or colleague that you are going to a library to look for relevant information or to a busy café so you can do your best creative thinking generates the immediate query, “OK, but when are you getting back to work?”

Overcoming Perception Constraints

You may or may not be able to influence the ways your organization limits your ability to gather and assimilate enough relevant data. But you can do a great deal to loosen the most binding constraints on perception, the ones that come from within. If we want to improve the quality and quantity of the input that goes into our efforts to think creatively, we need to become sensitive to the biases that are built into our perceptions and work hard to overcome them.

Broaden Your Sources of Data

One easy way to reduce the constraints on perception is to develop a list of the sources of data you know could apply to your problem before you actually begin gathering information. You aren't gathering the data at this point, only noting potential sources of data. For example, a team in an arts organization seeking to increase the number of season subscribers might start with the following: current subscriber list (with addresses), government census maps of the area showing family income, data on events attended by subscribers, list of competitive organizations, list of upcoming events, historical subscriber numbers, and a few other relevant sources or types of information that the team thinks could have value. The information doesn't even have to exist yet; it just needs to be potentially relevant to the problem at hand.

Creating the data source list will help in several ways. First, you are less likely to overlook obvious sources of data; with a list in hand, you can go over it carefully or with others. Someone looking at it might suggest, “What about lapsed subscribers? What do you know about them?” If you missed it, then add it to the list. Another advantage is that you can come back to the list during later phases in the project. Circle back at strategic points to see if the team is overlooking some important data you already know about that would help move the project forward. For instance, while the team is trying to generate insights about how to price new subscriptions, a review of the data source list might remind them about the possibility of using census data to map where lapsed subscribers lived. Of course you won't do that if it doesn't make sense, but at least you raised the question and can discuss it with the team. Finally, you can use the list to serve as input to future projects. It is appalling when organizations, especially ones with scarce resources, don't know what they know. You may spend weeks compiling a big list of addresses, only to have someone say, “Why are you doing that? Janis made a list like that six months ago.”

Use Practiced Empathy

Being open to fresh perceptions requires practice. Our powers of stereotyping are extremely strong, and without effort we are unlikely to overcome them. One technique that can help is what I call “practiced empathy.” The idea is to give yourself permission to open up and work at vividly imagining how people unlike you experience the world.

A young playwright once told me how she worked on developing this kind of openness to other ways of perceiving. She would go to newsstands and look through copies of what she considered to be “weird” magazines, imagining what it was like to be a member of that core readership. For her, the exercise served as practice for seeing the world through their eyes, especially looking at the photos and ads the way
they
might see them. As a person gifted with words, she was adept at hearing what her plays' characters would say, but she used this practice to see what they would see.

I found this method useful in work with designers at a company looking to redesign a product to appeal to younger audiences. We spent time browsing copies of
MAD
magazine,
Skateboarding, Game Pro, American Cheerleader, PC Gamer
, and
BMXer
, among others. Thinking and talking about how the readers of these magazines saw the world forced us to challenge our stereotypes, enabling us to be more specific and insightful about what might actually matter to them. In turn, these enriched perceptions became the input that allowed fresh ideas for the product's packaging, for new use scenarios, and for its positioning against products already in the market.

Change Your Perspective

In meetings and classes, I notice how rarely people change where they sit. They seem to find their way to exactly the same seat, class after class and meeting after meeting. To prove the point during classes I teach on innovation, I require students to move to a different quadrant of the classroom every few weeks. As much as they protest, you'd think I'd asked them to show up to class at 5:00 A.M. However, it doesn't take long for them to realize that this simple change in perspective allows them to notice things about the classroom, the instructor, and their colleagues that they had never noticed before. Not everything they notice is profound; some have observed, for example, that the glare on the whiteboard is worse over here than over there, or that they can hear much better from this part of the room. But sometimes people report seeing the classroom in a wholly new light—for example, realizing that sitting in the front or middle of the room causes people to participate a lot, whereas sitting in the back or on the sides has the opposite effect.

You can take this kind of perspective change to an even higher level by
literally
changing your perspective. If you are accustomed to using quantitative sales data to manage the products in your company's lineup, go see those products actually displayed in a store. If you are used to looking for only the latest technology to incorporate in your product, take some steps back by visiting a museum or junkyard. Certainly there is no guarantee that this approach will yield immediate, tangible results. But looking at a problem in the same way that you always have does come with a guarantee: that you'll end up exactly where you started.

Enrich the Input

Organizations sometimes put strict limits on changes employees can make to their working environment. In a former Hughes Aircraft Company building where I once worked in San Bruno, California, employees in the 1950s—all of them men—were allowed only one decoration in their office: a single desk photograph of their wife. Although this example may seem a little extreme, there are plenty of work settings today with rules only slightly less restrictive.

Contrast the practice at Hughes with what I found when I worked at IDEO, a product design consulting firm about twenty minutes away in Palo Alto. At IDEO the buildings are open plan, and employees build their own workspace, even down to the walls, tables, desks, shelves, and computer stands. All manner of personal effects are proudly displayed, primarily collections of parts, models, and prototypes from past projects, but also those eclectic things designers find interesting or “cool.” A walk through one of the buildings is more likely to leave you with the impression of a high-tech Goodwill store than of a world-class design and engineering firm.

The result isn't just something more informal and, dare I say, human, but a richer flow of sensation—that is, data. The environment gives the visual thinkers at IDEO, who work in the world of product development and 3-D problem solving, immediate access to new perceptions about problems they may be working on—for example, inventing a new way to gear a motor, gaining insight on how to paint on rubber, or understanding the process used to mold a bowling ball. Not only is the imagery at hand, but so are the colleagues who actually worked on the projects and who are enthusiastic about sharing the trials and tribulations of their own innovation efforts. Although your innovation work may not take form as gadgets and widgets as at IDEO, encouraging and legitimizing even simple items, such as mounted photos of implemented solutions, team photos, company innovation certificates, or other mementos of projects, allows people to proudly display their accomplishments, while providing clues to others about what they know and giving others an excuse to engage them about it.

Intellection Constraints: Old Thought Patterns for New Problems

Once we have data in sufficient quantity and quality, the next step is to work through the data in ways that can reveal new connections and relationships, which in turn may lead us to innovative solutions. This cognitive process,
intellection
, is what we normally call thinking. As is true of perception, several significant constraints can bias our thought processes, including the way we frame the problem, the approach we take to solving it, and the persistence with which we pursue an optimal solution.

Becoming Captive to the Way You Frame the Problem

When we face a problem to be solved, the first step of defining or
framing
the problem is critical. The way we frame a problem reflects explicit or implicit notions about the goals we are trying to achieve, and it directly affects the choice of strategies for gathering data, analyzing the data, and determining the validity and pertinence of our insights. Not examining the assumptions that are built into our framing can make the problem more difficult to solve or, worse, lead us to solve the wrong problem.

A common error in problem framing is defining the problem at the wrong level of analysis. Much of this book is about exactly this mistake in the case of innovation—for example, framing our innovation problem as “our miserable lack of creative thinkers” instead of “how to overcome the institutional constraints (group, cultural, and so on) that prevent even our best people from thinking in more creative ways.”

We may be tempted to operate at the wrong level of analysis partly because of the information we happen to have at hand. For example, we might lack information about the larger context of the problem or, in the other direction, about the minute details of it, and so attend only to the aspect of the problem that our data address.

Besides forgetting that shifting our perspective to other levels of analysis is an option, we may also lack enthusiasm for changing our framing. To a big-picture thinker, looking at a situation from a vantage point deep down in the details may make ideas for innovation efforts seem disappointingly puny. For a master of detail, viewing the same situation from a high vista that takes in cultural and market forces may lead to the conclusion that the problem is too complex to solve.

Being Seduced by Your Problem-Solving Strategies

After deciding on a way of framing the problem, the next step is to choose a strategy or set of strategies for analyzing and solving the problem. Although it might seem obvious that we should choose the solution strategies that best suit our particular problem, intellection constraints often keep us from doing so.

One basic constraint is that instead of consciously considering what strategy to adopt, we tend to revert to approaches that have worked for us in the past. As a financial analyst, you may start by opening a spreadsheet; as a marketing manager, you begin by constructing a survey; as a designer, you reach for your sketchpad. Up to a point, this tendency is perfectly rational—after all, the strategies have worked for us before. The problem with falling back on them too quickly is twofold. First, our “proven” strategies may not be optimal for the new problem we are facing. Second, settling too easily on a strategy, even a good one, may cause us to overlook the insights we would gain if we tried alternative approaches.

To illustrate the first difficulty, imagine a very large sheet of paper about the thickness of a standard sheet of copy paper or a page in this book. Now imagine folding that piece of paper in half, leaving you with two layers. Now fold it in half again, and you will have a stack that is four layers thick. Keep imagining folding that paper on itself in the same way fifty times. Now estimate how thick the stack of paper will be. Before reading any further, note your answer.

If you are like most people, your tendency will be to answer this kind of question using a visual problem-solving approach. Not only is our visual imagination easily available, but I've formulated the question in a manner that suggests that you can solve it that way (“imagine a very large sheet of paper ...). Common answers I get to this question range from three inches to fifty feet, though occasionally someone will suggest one or two miles. However, a significantly better estimate is arrived at by using mathematical reasoning and a calculator as your problem-solving tools. The better answer is found by multiplying the thickness of a single piece of paper, about 0.1 millimeters, times the number of layers you will end up with (2 raised to the power of 50)—in equation form: thickness = 0.1 mm × 2
50
.

Many people don't believe the answer: 113,000,000 kilometers, or 70,000,000 miles—about three-quarters of the way to the sun! At this point you may feel that there must be some mistake in the way the problem was presented or in the way I calculated the solution. But there isn't. The mistake lies in our not consciously choosing a problem-solving strategy that fits the type of problem we are facing.

Even when we are deliberate about choosing a strategy that fits the problem, we may constrain our ability to generate solutions by failing to consider alternative approaches. Unlike the paper-folding problem, many problems have multiple possible answers, some of which are more powerful or cost-effective than others. Unless we try alternative problem-solving strategies, we may never discover or invent the optimal solutions we are seeking.