Creative People Must Be Stopped (5 page)

The recent turmoil in the music industry illustrates the point. In response to widespread music sharing that was enabled by Napster starting in 1999, record companies came to rely on law enforcement as their one solution to the problem of a free-for-all of music copying. Their approach was to threaten and then sue those they felt they could prove to be illegally sharing. By mid-2006 they had sued more than twenty thousand music fans, many who were their most loyal customers and who were otherwise law-abiding citizens (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2006). Their failure to consider other approaches to the problem gave Steve Jobs the opening he needed to step in with his own solution and to found (and own) the iTunes Store.

Prematurely Narrowing the Range of Possible Solutions

As I've just noted, we often have powerful incentives (cognitive and otherwise) to settle prematurely on a problem-solving strategy. A similar constraint can constrict the depth and range of possible solutions that make it to the assessment phase of our project.

During workshops, I ask people how many ideas a team in their organization might expect to generate in response to an important problem. The usual response is on the order of “five or ten good ones.” You can imagine the silence that ensues when I insist they should work with a
minimum
of seventy-five relevant ideas and ideally one hundred—
per person
.

At that point someone is likely to say something like “Look, we don't need such a huge number of ideas—we just need one really good one. After all, we can really only implement one idea, anyway.” True enough, but limiting the solution space in order to get to that one good idea is self-defeating. If you restrict your effort to coming up with only ten possible ideas, the chances are good that number eleven (or number twenty, or number ninety-nine) is the one you're looking for. Sometimes we think it is too costly to invest time generating and critiquing so many ideas early in the process. What we forget is how much more expensive it is to try to implement ideas that aren't the best we could possibly have generated.

Overcoming Intellection Constraints

Innovation problems, almost by definition, require fresh ways of thinking. To solve these kinds of problems, we need conscious strategies for keeping our cognitive habits from becoming a crippling constraint.

Reformulate the Problem

Problems are rarely given to us in a way that makes them easy to solve; that's why we call them problems. There can be hard work in reworking the problem into a form that does make it easier to solve. One strategy is to seek other perspectives on our problem, ones that might not view it as a problem at all or that might even consider it an asset. Another is to consider the problem as simply a clue that points the way to a better solution.

Consider the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which was founded on an eclectic group of artifacts, at first collected more because the objects were interesting than because of their academic curatorial value. In making the transition from being a gallery to becoming known as a world-class museum, the curatorial staff arrived at the point where the most beautiful and important artifacts they might have liked to acquire were simply too expensive.

In most organizations, this problem would be defined as “how to increase the budget so that the museum could compete with other world-class museums for those rare, ‘crowd-drawing' items.” However, the board and staff of the Walters ended up on a different course that began with looking at the problem differently. With a mission that has them striving “to create a place where people of every background can be touched by art” (
http://thewalters.org/museum_art_baltimore/themuseum_mission.aspx
), they reformulated the problem to one of seeking relevance for their clientele consisting of “people of every background,” rather than one of increasing the budget to acquire the rarest items. Seeing the problem in this way, they decline to take part in bidding wars for rare, expensive, and “most important” treasures. Instead, they focus on those “unimportant” artifacts overlooked by big museums with large budgets. So, rather than blow the total annual acquisitions budget on a single jewel-encrusted goblet from the Middle Ages, they might buy a decidedly average goblet, then an average knife and fork, an average plate, and an average table and chair. The result, something that other museums can't match: one of the few
complete
place settings from the Middle Ages. From it we can learn a lot more about the experience of day-to-day life of ordinary people far in the past than we can from one king's fabulous cup.

Think of Spence Silver's behavior in this light. Rather than seeing his adhesive as a failure, he turned the problem on its head: the task wasn't how to avoid making a bad adhesive, but rather how to make a “bad” adhesive insanely useful.

Use Multiple Problem-Solving Approaches

The technique of varying your problem-solving methods is well known. In fact, there are a number of tools available online and in bookstores that can help you change your approach to a problem. As one example, Roger von Oech's
Creative Whack Pack
, is a deck of sixty-four cards that will “whack you out of habitual thought patterns” by suggesting different ways of looking at your problem and ultimately solving it. When you find yourself in a place where you are not sure how to proceed, you simply pull a card from the deck, read it, and try to do what it tells you: “Magnify,” for instance, or “Turn it upside down.” (The Whack Pack is available at
www.creativethink.com/products.html
.)

More recently, the design firm IDEO released a set of fifty-one “method cards” organized in four categories of problem-solving methods: Ask, Watch, Learn, and Try. A Try card might say “Scenarios” and offer a few sentences about how to implement the scenario process and why it works. The cards can serve as a handy master list to which you can refer to ensure that you have explored a wide range of possible methods.

This is not to say that the product is the solution. The goal is to help us overcome the brain's tendency to do things in the easiest, most habitual, and least resource-intensive way possible. One senior design manager at Newell Rubbermaid even made his own deck of cards from printed images that he found interesting or even jarring. Anything that helps you try different problem-solving strategies will serve the need just fine.

Set an Ideation Goal

One easily avoidable constraint is limiting our idea generation to the first five or ten ideas we come up with. Although your best idea is probably not going to be the 101st one you generate, it is not usually going to be the first or second one either. (Besides, unless you generate lots more, how would you know?) Setting an aggressive ideation goal ensures that you explore the search space sufficiently and increases the chances that you will arrive at an idea or combination of ideas that can work.

Keep your idea production up by remembering that ideas are (relatively) cheap and easy to generate. A few hours spent in the early stages of a project finding a truly workable idea can save hundreds of hours near the end. Try doing a brain dump (or cleansing) by writing down every idea you think of in a thirty-minute period of time or for as long as it takes you to come up with 101 ideas. Don't assess the ideas as you do this—save that for a later phase.

When you reach your time limit or the target number of ideas, look through the ideas and see if any themes or categories emerge. (A spreadsheet can make this part of the task easier.) For example, your ideas on increasing the profit of one of your company's products might fall into rough categories of
reducing its cost
,
increasing its price
, and
increasing its value
, among others. There may be other themes that cross the categories, such as
physical changes to the product, changes of perception of the product, changes in distribution channels
, and more. Then, looking at the groupings of categories and themes, determine which have lots of ideas and which are light on ideas. Make an effort to explore those areas with few ideas and create new categories as they occur to you. If you have the benefit of working with colleagues, compare your lists to see whether the ideas indicate that you all understand the problem the same way. Likewise, look for similarities or differences in your schemes for chunking. This kind of meta-level thinking will always lead to a productive conversation yielding insights to guide the evolving innovation strategy.

Apart from increasing the odds of generating a killer idea, there is another critically important value in generating and recording as many possibilities as you can. Your master list of ideas is your documentation of the thoroughness of your search of the solution space. Besides serving as a basis for determining whether potentially critical areas were missed, the list provides valuable ammunition during the approval process. As you are presenting the proposal, some obstructionist will invariably ask, “But did you consider
x
?” Your ready answer: “Yes we did. We thought of it (and the related
y
and
z
) during our idea generation process, and here's why those ideas did not make it through our subsequent assessment process.” Case closed.

Explore, Don't Search

The goal in early stages of the process should not be to “find the best idea.” Taking that approach suggests that there is some right answer out there, and all you have to do is locate it. Thinking this way will set you up for stopping the search once you run across an idea that you think might solve the problem—which it may, but only if you're lucky, and even then it's unlikely to be the optimal solution. Your goal should be to develop a reliable process for generating innovative solutions that doesn't depend on luck to work.

Instead of doing a “search” for the right answer,
explore
the solution space thoroughly, taking in even unlikely ideas. In this way, you will gain a much better sense of multiple solutions that may bear on your problem. By comparing them, combining them, and looking for missed areas of exploration, you'll be better able to develop the best approach during your assessment phase.

I experienced this firsthand in work I did with a pottery collective. The group's artists, administrators, patrons, and audience all felt that as an arts organization, the collective should reduce its carbon footprint in order to work in the most environmentally sustainable way possible. Our brainstorm uncovered many possible steps that could be taken, such as to install solar panels, turn down the heat, or even buy a windmill generator (remember, even wild ideas are welcome at this stage). After playing with these notions and a few hundred others, the team came to realize that some of their ideas for carbon reduction centered on the administration of the collective, while others centered on the art itself. This insight spawned a second look at the solutions they had gathered, and ultimately gave rise to a two-step approach to the problem. They decided that they could work to reduce the collective's administrative power needs, with the ultimate goal of getting those functions fully off the grid. At that point any queries about footprint could be met with the statement, “All the nonsustainable energy resources we use go directly into the art.” Then, with the clear understanding that this would be a long-term project, they could focus more of their efforts on sponsoring, supporting, and promoting those pottery practices that reduce environmental impact, such as using low-temperature electric kilns and low-impact glazes and colorings.

Expression Constraints: Difficulty Articulating Your Ideas

The third critical constraint on individual creativity is the need for accurate, articulate expression of our ideas and insights. Being able to express our ideas clearly and persuasively is key to winning support for them—and without support, all the work we've done at earlier stages may come to naught. Although the ideas may feel resolved in our own heads, the process of getting them out in the open where they can be tested and shared is not as easy as it may seem.

Clear and accurate expression is also central to the creative process itself. Without the tools or willingness to express our ideas in the most definitive way possible, we let ourselves be captivated by gauzy notions we haven't really pinned down—as we invariably find out when we try to work with them later. Once an idea is expressed in an articulate way, you can store it, refer back to it, analyze it, and get feedback on it from others. You can generate additional ideas without worry that you will forget the one you just had. And after you compare it to other ideas that you have generated and expressed, you can give it a full and fair assessment before deciding with confidence whether you intend it to live or to die.

Having Only One Language for Exploring and Expressing Ideas

It's only natural to want to communicate in the modes we feel most comfortable with. But limiting ourselves to our current ways of expressing ideas impairs our ability to articulate new ideas in ways that will make them clear, precise, and persuasive.

Verbally inclined people tend to assume that expressing an idea means putting it into words. But can all our ideas and insights be articulately expressed in this way? Most of us recognize the truth in the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words,” yet we may rarely try to express ourselves in visual terms. I sometimes find astounding examples of this resistance, such as the team in one organization that wanted to reconfigure the lobby but didn't want to draw a picture of it. How else could they know whether their ideas could possibly work? (The same constraint, by the way, can operate in the other direction. One book designer had a habit of frustrating the editors she worked with by demanding that they draw pictures to express what they wanted. “I'm a designer, not a word person,” she would say.)

Similarly, many people are intimidated by numbers and won't try to work with them. But having others “do the math” for us is risky emotionally, because the analysis might show that our idea was a dumb one after all. More important, without being able to play with the numbers ourselves, we will find it very difficult to understand how to turn a dumb idea into a brilliant one.