Talent Is Overrated (22 page)

 
If we're looking for evidence that too much knowledge of the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance in creative achievement, we have not found it in the research. Instead, all evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.

And what about evidence for the related notion that excessive schooling is correlated with lower creative achievement? The contradiction may amount to much less than it seems. Most obviously, years of school may not be a very good measure of domain knowledge, especially in certain realms. Someone with a Ph.D. in literature, for example, has acquired considerable knowledge about the history and interpretation of literature, usually of a specific type; but that's quite a different domain, requiring different knowledge and skills, from actually creating literature. Indeed, in many creative fields the person who pursues an advanced degree has consciously chosen a path that leads to a professorship, not to a life of innovating in that domain; it makes perfect sense that in these fields, those with the most years of formal schooling would be less eminent as innovators.

In science and technology the situation is different. Advanced education is absolutely required for creative problem solving in today's world; no one is going to cure cancer as a college sophomore. That's the reality of today, but remember that the study correlating higher education with lower creative eminence covered the period from 1450 to 1850. For the first half of that period, science as we know it scarcely existed; getting a high-level degree would not necessarily confer much scientific knowledge in an era when the fundamental principles of the scientific method were still unknown. For a research period that was in large part prescientific, it shouldn't be surprising that formal schooling and creative eminence in science didn't correlate. In short, in a wide range of fields, knowledge of the domain may bear little relation to years of schooling.

The bigger picture is that the great innovators aren't burdened by knowledge; they're nourished by it. And they acquire it through a process we've seen before, involving many years of demanding deliberate practice activities.

From here it's a short step to rethinking the popular view that great creative achievements are without precedent, that they spring “into sudden existence, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter,” as an admiring nineteenth-century author said of James Watt's steam engine. A closer look at notable innovations in business, the arts, and science (including Watt's steam engine) shows that they do not arise from nothingness; they are not even remotely unprecedented. Innovation doesn't reject the past; on the contrary, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who've mastered the domain as it exists.

Examples are everywhere, though none is more dramatic than Picasso's
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
deemed by art historians the most important painting of the twentieth century. Both Weisberg and Gardner, in their studies of creativity, consider it at length. It would be hard to name a creative work that seems more disconnected from anything that came before, with its grotesque inhuman faces on human bodies and aggressive nudity; in 1907, this was scandalous. Yet even this shocking creation was built up from many existing influences in art to which Picasso had been exposed—ancient Iberian sculpture, primitive art of Africa and the South Pacific, specific figures and compositions in paintings of Cézanne and Matisse. None of that diminishes the painting's power; but extensive research has shown that even this landmark work was not created out of nothing, as it may well seem, but was rather a brilliant new combination and elaboration of elements that had been developed over time and absorbed by an artist who had worked many years at mastering his field.

As in art, we also find this in science and technology, despite what we may occasionally have been taught in school. James Watt did not invent the steam engine, and what he did invent most certainly didn't spring into existence like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. Many steam engines had been invented before Watt went to work in 1763, and several engines of the type invented by Thomas Newcomen were in commercial use in Britain, pumping water out of coal mines. Not that Newcomen invented the steam engine either; his device was an improvement on earlier machines, stretching back in a chain of developments such that no individual can be said to have invented the steam engine. The Newcomen engine wasn't very efficient, and Watt's design was much more efficient. It was also, of course, a giant innovation that through its role in the industrial revolution changed the course of history. But it was not some previously unimagined conception that burst forth like a miracle. Just the opposite: It came about because Watt was trying to improve on what already existed, the Newcomen engine, and his long training as a maker of scientific instruments gave him the skills and knowledge with which to do it.

Similarly, Eli Whitney didn't invent the cotton gin. Many machines had been developed to remove the seeds from cotton bolls, and they worked, but only with long-staple cotton, which wasn't economical to grow on a large scale. Whitney's device, using many of the same principles as existing machines, worked with short-staple cotton, and that made all the difference. Again, none of this diminishes the importance of the achievement; Whitney's machine revolutionized the economy of the American South and changed history. But it didn't appear out of nowhere; it was a brilliant improvement on existing designs that was possible only because Whitney understood what came before.

The steam engine and cotton gin were two of the most significant business innovations ever, and the stories of how such innovations come about remain the same up until the present. From the telegraph to the airplane to the Internet, they're all adaptations and extensions of what existed, made possible by great insights but entirely impossible without a deep knowledge of, and reliance on, past achievements. Less exalted innovations are no different. Inventor Jim Marggraff, who created the popular LeapPad electronic reading system for kids and the FLY computer pen, which digitizes and stores what you write, told the
New York Times
that “each creation built on the work that went into making the previous one.” In his experience, as in the experiences of other creators, innovations don't get easier to develop if you distance yourself from the problem. Instead, “the aha moments grow out of hours of thought and study,” he said. Douglas K. van Duyne, an Internet entrepreneur who cofounded the Naviscent consulting firm, expressed the same view to the
Times:
“The idea of epiphany is a dreamer's paradise where people want to believe that things are easier than they are.”

It's important to realize that innovation on the scale of the FLY computer pen, which may seem far removed from Beethoven's symphonies or Einstein's theories, is not fundamentally different in type. Until recently, researchers have often thought of creativity in two categories: Big-C creativity, which yields famous, influential products like the integrated circuit or
Huckleberry Finn;
and little-c creativity, which produces everyday creations like a TV commercial or a florist's arrangement of flowers. But Ronald A. Beghetto of the University of Oregon and James C. Kaufman of California State University at San Bernardino have suggested that both types of innovation exist “on the same developmental continuum,” and that the continuum extends even further back than little-c creativity, to what they call mini-c creativity. In this framework, “all levels of creative performance follow a trajectory that starts with novel and personally meaningful interpretations (mini-c), which can then progress to interpersonally judged novel and meaningful contributions (little-c) and even develop into superior creative performance (Big-C).”

This perspective is highly significant because it ties together the evidence showing that creative achievement is attained in the same way as other kinds of achievement. As Beghetto and Kaufman state, “Big-C performance is more likely influenced by intense deliberate practice within a particular domain than by some special, genetic endowment of a few individuals.” As creativity scholars, they see the work of Ericsson and his colleagues as providing “compelling empirical evidence in support of this developmental perspective, demonstrating the important role that deliberate practice plays in superior creative performance.”

That is, innovators become great in the same way that everybody else does.

 
Yet we still face those research studies showing how people get stuck in ruts when they deal repeatedly with the same kinds of problems. How can these be squared with the experiences of real-world innovators that we've seen? An answer emerges when we look more closely at the research. In the famous water-jar experiments, subjects in a laboratory setting were given jars and a series of five problems, each of which could be solved by the same routine of filling and transferring in a certain way. They were then given a group of different problems, one of which could be solved only by a simpler procedure, which the subjects were unable to see. That result seemed to show that too much familiarity with a problem blinds a person to innovative solutions.

But if we step back and consider this situation, we see how different it is from the cases of actual creative problem solvers. These research subjects had not devoted themselves to the study of this domain or spent thousands of hours understanding problems of this type; as far as we can tell, everything they knew about this field was what they learned from the five same-solution problems contrived by the researchers and presented to them. If it then turns out that the subjects weren't very good at devising solutions to other, different problems, we should not be surprised; we certainly shouldn't suppose that this result tells us much about the factors that help or hinder eminent innovators. These experiments have been interpreted as showing what happens when people become too immersed in solving problems of a particular type, but they could be interpreted perhaps more plausibly, even compellingly, as showing what happens when people have not immersed themselves in their field of problem solving nearly enough. The experiments showed that subjects with no previous exposure to the problems were able to find a simple solution that the experienced subjects couldn't see, but the experiments didn't involve subjects who would be of most interest to us—those who had devoted major time and study to the problems. The research studies are interesting and justly famous, but they don't contradict what we've seen in the experiences of great creators and innovators.

And what about those legends of great creative products appearing suddenly and fully formed before their creators? The answer is simple: They aren't true. Coleridge may have been as good a public relations man as he was a poet, or so believes one critic who says Coleridge made up the dream story to help sell the poem. In any case, an earlier version of the poem has been found, showing that Coleridge revised it considerably before publication. Even in Coleridge's own version of the events, he says he faded into opium-induced slumber while reading a seventeenth-century book called
Pilgrimage,
then woke to see his famous poem that begins “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .” As the critic John Lowes discovered,
Pilgrimage
describes Khan's city in a passage that begins, “In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace . . .” Coleridge, like all great creators, built on an existing foundation.

Abraham Lincoln's pen did not trace out the immortal words of the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope while he was riding to the battlefield; a number of drafts of the speech, on White House writing paper, have been found. As for the original eureka moment, nothing in Archimedes' extensive writings, or in the writings of any of his contemporaries, supports or even hints at the bathtub story. Scholars have concluded that it's a myth.

Just as the principles that produce exceptional creativity and innovation in individuals are the same as the principles that produce great performance in general, the lessons are the same for organizations. All the steps described in the last chapter for helping organizations improve their performance will help them become more innovative as well. In addition, organizations can observe a few other principles that will specifically improve their chances of producing valuable innovations. The vast innovation industry has produced countless books on organizational creativity; but with the principles of deliberate practice and great performance in mind, a few ideas stand out.

The impression that emerges most strongly from the research on great creators is that of their enthusiastic immersion in their domain and their resulting deep knowledge of it. Since organizations are not innovative—only people are innovative—it follows that the most effective steps an organization can take to build innovation will include helping people expand and deepen their knowledge of their field. In the previous chapter we saw some of the ways an organization can do this. An additional approach, identified by McKinsey, is creating innovation networks within the organization—finding ways to connect people so that they can talk with one another about the problems they're working on, the approaches they're trying, and what they're learning. The rationale, as explained by McKinsey's Joanna Barsh, Marla M. Capozzi, and Jonathan Davidson, is that “Since new ideas seem to spur more new ideas, networks generate a cycle of innovation.” We've seen that exceptional creators often build these networks on their own, a pattern observed by Howard Gardner, which he indicates when he notes that his Exemplary Creator moves to the big city in order to be among the leading figures of her domain.