Creative People Must Be Stopped (22 page)

Use Knowledge in the World

In his book
The Design of Everyday Things
, Donald Norman (2002) coined the term “knowledge in the world” to signify the kind of intellectual insights, skills, and information that people in a society already have and that they will bring as they use some new thing they have not dealt with before. If you have ever pushed on a door that needed to be pulled or, worse, have stood in front of a door completely perplexed at how to open it, you will know what he means. Even though I, for one, might lament the wide adoption of the inefficient QWERTY keyboard layout, it would be foolish to try to switch the world to a new layout. However, there are alternative approaches that venture somewhere in between.

Palm Computer's Graffiti proprietary handwriting system (
Figure 6.2
) made it relatively easy for handheld computers to recognize handwriting by getting users to focus on the major gestures that go into writing a letter. Once the lettering was simplified, the recognition problem became easier, allowing these handheld devices to use less complex and expensive processors, bringing the cost of the device to a level that consumers could afford. This new way to write took a little effort to learn, but not nearly as much as it takes to learn one of the many written shorthand systems or as long as it takes to learn to touch-type on a keyboard. Graffiti could be learned in as little as fifteen minutes and mastered in a few hours, because the gestures that stood for the letters corresponded closely to the way they are conventionally drawn.

Figure 6.2

Although knowledge already in the world can constrain innovation if it requires an innovation to conform to the ways that people currently believe things should be, innovators can also gain advantage in the situation. Allowing people to use skills that they already have can help them be more confident and more competent as they assess (and, you hope, adopt) your proposals for positive change.

Use Open Standards Unless You Can't

Many of the things we use to get along in life are part of some kind of system and therefore conform to some kind of standard. Your electronic gadgets are powered from a standard outlet with standard levels of voltage, or they use batteries that come in standard sizes. The water that arrives in your house that's connected to the water distribution system comes through a pipe of standard size. The paper you use in a copier or printer also comes in standard sizes that allow you to use it relatively easily in writing and printing devices. Soft drinks are a standard twelve ounces, and the list goes on. In this world of standards, why would anyone want to go against the standard?

At times standards may serve the rest of the world well, but for some reason you find them lacking. The JPEG standard for storing digital photographs, for example, is an imperfect one. If you have ever tried to zoom in on a picture on your computer and watched it become blurry, blocky, and jagged, you know what I mean. That happens because of the way the picture is compressed in a JPEG file; the JPEG standard favors a small file size over retaining the original resolution. Audiophiles make similar complaints about loss of detail in MP3 music files, another space-saving standard that serves most users well by making it possible to store thousands of songs on portable devices. Sometimes innovators will become annoyed or even disgusted or insulted by this kind of “pretty good” solution. But because the standard is a fact of history, this attitude may open them up to a lot of work toward the end of being rejected.

Using the standard has an advantage: you can view that same picture on your camera, on your phone, in your computer, or on your Facebook page, and you can send it instantly to someone else or print out a copy for yourself. For most people, this is the value of the standard. Of course another standard, one that focused on high quality instead of small size, might allow you to zoom in 30× to inspect the nose hairs in a picture of Uncle Ralph; but the cost of lost flexibility in using the picture across the many parts of a person's life systems might simply be too high.

This suggests that for our purposes, you should make a considered choice each time you adopt a standard or reject one in the design of your innovation. Blindly adopting standards means you may be giving up critical features that are essential to your function. Higher resolution than JPEG can provide may be needed for making enlargements of photos for formal portraits or images of a planet's surface. Blindly ignoring standards, or not using them on the grounds that you are offended by their inelegance or illogic, means you may be giving up important leverage over adoption. I'm much more likely to adopt your innovation with open arms if your use of the standard reassures me that your innovation will fit into and even extend the value of the systems around which I've built my life.

Putting the Framework to Work: Societal Constraints

To aid you in assessing the constraints at this level, use the following diagnostic survey. It is intended to help you assess the extent to which the constraints described in this chapter may be unintentional hindrances to innovation in your organization.

Using the Results

Note the total number of statements that you rated as “Highly Descriptive.” If you have rated more than six of them this way, then working on societal constraints will be a productive effort. Now that you have identified the specific constraints, you can take action. You may wish to turn back and reread the description of the problem and of the specific strategies for addressing this constraint. You may also find that strategies are obvious given the symptom you have identified. For detailed instructions on working with your assessment results, use the steps outlined in Appendix A, Using the Assessment Results, to determine if these constraints are a significant impediment for you in your organization and to develop strategies for overcoming them.

Later, after completing assessment for the other chapters, you will be able to compare constraints and see if one of the other levels poses a greater challenge for you overall than do these societal constraints. Of course you need to recognize that societal constraints evolve over long periods of time through a history of interactions of all members of society and may therefore be difficult to change. Still, this framework can help you understand and anticipate the ways others are likely to view your innovation efforts.

Summary

Any innovation that pushes against societal constraints will be perceived as a social innovation, and necessarily a stand against history and against the social structures used to keep us safe and productive. You can, however, envision and create changes to help society move in a direction that makes it better and helps it see itself as better. This starts with understanding how your ideas and actions will be interpreted and then creating strategies for getting those ideas a fair hearing. The chart on page 184 offers a recap of the constraints discussed in this chapter, along with some strategies for overcoming or living with them.

Chapter Reflection: Societal Constraints

It can be helpful to reflect on your insights about societal constraints and the process of diagnosing them in the social group of your most important stakeholders. You may wish to consider these questions:

• What evidence is there for the existence of the constraints you named?
  
• How important are these societal factors compared to the individual, group, organizational, industry, and technological constraints you have identified?
  
• What constraints were overlooked because of your own social identity?
  
• Would others agree with the need to change society to fix these constraints?
  

CHAPTER 7

How to Take a Really Hard Problem and Make It Completely Impossible

Technological Innovation Constraints

Figure 7.1

In 1960, while conducting a spying mission for the CIA in a U2 aircraft, pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. This incident demonstrated the immediate need for a new spy plane that could fly higher and faster and that would be less visible to radar. The CIA's specifications for Lockheed were daunting. The new aircraft would be required to fly at more than 2,000 mph, four times faster than the U2; it would need to fly at over 90,000 feet, 20,000 feet higher; and despite being one hundred feet long and weighing over sixty-two tons, it would have to have a far smaller radar cross section to minimize the possibility of detection.

For the designers and engineers in Lockheed's famed skunk works, there were very few of the kinds of constraints I have already discussed in previous chapters. They had ready access to the most knowledgeable experts, an immense amount of funding (over $130 million), and by operating as a skunk works far away from HQ, they faced few organizational barriers. Yet although the initial delivery had been planned for May 1961, the schedule was slipping and the costs were rising.

Among the most significant problems the designers faced was heat. The heat generated by air friction on the skin of an aircraft traveling at speeds up to Mach 3.2 would exceed 500° and in places reach temperatures as high as 1000°. There was no metal used in aircraft design that could withstand those temperatures. Obvious candidates like stainless steel, which could withstand the temperatures, were far too heavy. Eventually titanium was chosen. It could withstand the heat and was half the weight. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible to work: difficult to form, hard to drill, and excruciating to rivet and weld. What's more, the one company that could supply the needed quantity of titanium could not deliver the quality. As a result, the metal had to be bought secretly from the Soviet Union.

For the plane to meet the performance goals, the J58 turbojet would have to be the most powerful aircraft engine ever made. The plane's two engines would need to supply in excess of 320,000 horsepower—each would have more power than the QE2—creating an unprecedented problem of materials, fabrication, and testing. The turbines would have to withstand temperatures of over 2000° but without increasing the weight. These high temperatures also exceeded the capabilities of available lubricating oils, hydraulic fluids, and the eleven thousand gallons of fuel the plane needed. Engine testing was done at night, because the local electricity grid couldn't supply enough power during the day.

Amazingly, solving all these problems—along with innumerable other significant technological difficulties, including accommodation for the pilot in an uninsulated 400° cockpit—would not be enough. The engineers and designers still faced the problem of taking pictures, the whole purpose of the project. The cameras would have to exceed the performance abilities of any camera made to that point in terms of their resolution, coverage, size, weight, and imperviousness to heat. Given temperature differences between the inside and outside of the aircraft reaching up to 400°, the camera's window to the exterior had to be invented to accommodate the thermal distortion such temperature differences would cause. When the quartz window was finally perfected, there was no known way of securing it in the titanium frame.

Once the prototype was built, getting it to the test site was problematic. Too secret to fly and too big to put into another aircraft, it was dismantled and taken by truck. Some parts of the aircraft were so big, however, that during the two-day ride to the test site, parts of the highway had to be shut down, with road signs removed, trees cut back, and bends and curves releveled to accommodate the giant cargo.

After reassembly at the site, flight-testing had to be stopped on account of unpredictable handling caused by errors in reconnecting the navigation controls after transportation, in addition to the general instability inherent in the unconventional design of the aircraft itself. At one point during one of the more successful early test flights, upon reaching three hundred feet in altitude, the plane began shedding numerous titanium skin panels. It took technicians four days to find the pieces and reinstall them.

Finally, on April 26, 1962, a year later than scheduled and tens of millions of dollars over what was planned, the A-12 finally took to the skies. During its first, hourlong flight, the plane reached thirty thousand feet and attained speeds of up to 400 mph. Although it had not flown at the limits of the specifications, the Lockheed lead designer and project manager remarked that the test flight was one of the smoothest he had ever been a part of.

As the story of the A-12 suggests, even without the constraints of adverse group dynamics, a stultifying organizational structure, or a lack of resources, creating an aircraft to fly at three times the speed of sound, sixteen miles above the surface of the earth, evading radar, while taking pictures of the ground to a resolution of eight inches is, to put it simply, really, really hard. Ultimately the designers, engineers, scientists, technicians, pilots, and all the others involved in the project were able to develop the understanding that was required to get matter to behave in exactly the manner they needed it to. If this wasn't easy, then we're left with the question of why it wasn't easy or, more generally, why some things are harder to do than others.

What's Hard About Manipulating Matter, Time, and Space

Although so far I've focused on the constraining effects of the human element of innovation initiatives, technological constraints can be a key factor in innovations that involve the manipulation of matter in time and space. Your own technical challenges may be far more modest than those involved with the A-12 project, but few, if any, innovations can be accomplished with a total disregard for what is physically possible to do given the current state of our understanding of nature and our ability to manipulate it. Of course, it isn't possible to deal comprehensively with such technological constraints even in a small library, let alone a single chapter. Entire sectors of our society, such as those representing schools of science and engineering and R&D labs, are devoted to investigating ways of understanding and manipulating the physical, temporal, and biological world. Consistent with the framework as a whole, my aim here is to offer a way of thinking about innovation efforts that can help you correctly diagnose whether your key constraints would be best overcome by throwing more technological resources at them or by giving greater attention to some other aspect of the problem. I will consider three broad categories of technological constraints:

• Physical constraints:
  the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, and our ability to understand how they work and how we might manipulate them in desired ways
  
• Time constraints:
  the amount of time available to accomplish important tasks, and the time lags caused by a need for feedback and learning
  
• Natural environment constraints:
  the distribution of natural resources and the requirements of maintaining a habitat suitable for human life
  

Physical Constraints: Knowing What You Know (and What You Don't)

It seems that more and more of the constraints of the natural world are being removed through human efforts to understand physical reality and buffer us against nature's potentially adverse effects. At one end of the spectrum, we've been able to see and manipulate things on a nanometer scale; at the other, we have been able to peer farther and farther into the cosmos far beyond our own galaxy. Yet the more we discover, the more we come to know how much we don't know. Each advance seems to bring even more difficult problems and unintended consequences into view.

In 1966, Abraham Maslow offered a way of characterizing learning skills that seems to fit this description. We begin the task of learning in a state of
unconscious incompetence;
that is, we don't know how to do something, and we don't know that we don't know. Suppose you are watching a teenager do some tricks on a skateboard. After a short time observing her, you come to believe that what she is doing cannot be that hard. It looks easy, and you've just watched her do it. After stepping with both feet onto the skateboard yourself and then landing hard on the ground, you realize that you were unconscious of your incompetence at that task. But all learning is painful, so this act did have some value. It made you realize that balance matters, as does momentum. At this point, in a state of
conscious incompetence
, you begin to know what needs to be done, but you just don't know how to do it. After buying your own skateboard, you begin to practice and get to where you can stay standing on the thing. You've reached
conscious competence
. If you keep riding, you eventually get to the point where you aren't thinking about balance, momentum, foot position, or anything like that. Your mind is somewhere else, and you've reached
unconscious competence
. This skateboard example can serve as a simple model for describing the constraints that create different kinds of technological difficulty.

Unconscious Incompetence: Not Knowing What You Don't Know

Like stepping with both feet on a skateboard, assuming that your understanding is complete—simply because you've been successful in the past, because you have watched it being done, or even because you are an expert in a related field—can be dangerous. History provides numerous examples of innovations being introduced seemingly without a concern on the part of the change agents that they didn't understand how the innovation worked or how it might affect the environment into which it was introduced.

One of the more tragic medical innovation episodes occurred in the late 1950s in Europe. The “wonder drug” thalidomide was first synthesized and then prescribed and sold as a painkiller and tranquilizer and as a remedy for colds, coughs, insomnia, and headaches. It was also found to reduce morning sickness. At the time, medical science held that this kind of drug would not cross the placental barrier between mother and fetus. Unfortunately, medical science was wrong. After several years and the births of more than ten thousand deformed children, doctors realized that it was thalidomide that had caused the horrific birth defects. The adverse impact of the drug in the United States was lessened significantly due to societal constraints in the form of regulation. In a controversial decision, the drug was denied approval by the FDA on the grounds of insufficient study.

Examples like this one demonstrate the first kind of difficulty that makes some things harder than others: things look easy because we don't know
what
we don't know or
that
we don't know, and when the world kicks back, we find we've made the problem worse and not better.

Conscious Incompetence: Knowing What You Don't Know

This next type of difficulty arises when you understand the problem you face, but do not understand how you can address it. In the development of the A-12, for example, the aircraft's designers understood that because of air friction, the fuel temperatures would reach over 350° in the tanks and over 700° on the way into the engine. These temperatures would cause traditional fuels to vaporize or explode. The designers knew they would need a formulation that would burn, but not at normal temperatures. In the end, the A-12 chemists finally concocted a special formulation that burned at 3400°, a temperature so high that the fuel could not be lit by a match. This also meant that the engines could not be fired up in a traditional way and so required liquid explosives to get the engines started.

Innovation of this kind tends to be incremental: through trial-and-error experimentation, we build on what we currently know in order to move just far enough in our understanding to solve the problem. This process is straightforward when the understanding we seek is close to what we already know; the constraint is that it may take immense amounts of time, money, and people to get us there, as it did in the cases of the A-12. But there is also a possibility that the knowledge we need is so far away from what we already know that we will not be able to acquire it using traditional methods or our current understanding.