This is not to say that sessions like these are always pleasant. Stretching the imagination can be draining work, and tempers can flare. Therefore the main rule in hardball is to focus not on who is best but what is best. When everyone is working toward a shared goal, lightly bruised egos are quickly salved by group success.
In both kinds of brainstorming, hardball and softball, there’s a necessary tension between contrariness and cooperation. Cooperation is essential for achieving an outcome, but without a certain amount of contrary input, the outcome is likely to be mushy. Studies by organizational psychologists have shown that individuals, not groups, tend to be better at divergent thinking, while groups are better at convergent thinking. When faced by complexity that tests the biological limits the brain, groups often default to a herd mentality instead of fighting for divergent ideas.
To guard against herd thinking, shared goals should be as bold as possible. They shouldn’t be ordinary or safe. As Howard Schultz said about the challenge of engaging stakeholders at Starbucks, “Who wants a dream that’s near-fetched?” The simplest way to develop bold goals is to start by wishing. When you get the members of a group to start wishing, their dreams can quickly become roadmaps. There’s a reason people tell you to be careful what you wish for. It works.
For large design projects, especially those which benefit from multidisciplinary teams, there’s an ongoing search for “T-shaped” people. A T-shaped person is one who has a strong descender (the vertical stroke of the T) and a well-developed crossbar (the horizontal stroke). The descender represents deep experience in a certain discipline, and the crossbar represents the ability to work with people across disciplines. Like rock bands, creative groups need specialists who can contribute something unique to the collaboration. The last thing they need is I-shaped people—specialists who have useful skills but can’t work with others.
Finally, both rock bands and creative groups need one more member: an X-shaped person. This is the one whose main role—though not the only role—is to bring the group together and facilitate progress toward a goal. X-shaped people are rare, because they usually have to prove their worth by first mastering a discipline. The leadership gene is an extra gene, a skill on top of a skill. John Lasseter has been a great creative leader for Pixar, but he developed his credibility and his deep-domain expertise by working first as an animator.
When X-shaped people attract the right T-shaped people to the mission, magic can happen. A surprising number of players will volunteer to dream together and work together if the goal is bold enough and the leader respected. This is especially true in an age of virtual collaboration. Anyone who has watched the exponential growth of Wikipedia can sense the power of collaboration. And while contributions to Wikipedia are voluntary, nothing would have happened without the passionate facilitation of its founder, Jimmy Wales.
Today there’s a new variation of collaboration that takes advantage of widespread connectivity. Swarming, as it was originally termed by the military, is a method for attacking a problem or a project from a number of angles at once. Rather than structure a project as a linear exercise, the swarming method unleashes the full power of simultaneous collaboration. It lets you jumpstart the project by bringing a variety of minds together at the start, then tap the talents of a wide range of disciplines throughout the process.
Let’s say you manage a design firm or an internal marketing department. As soon as you get an assignment, you might embark on the usual process of gathering executive interviews, doing customer research, brainstorming concepts, putting some initial thoughts on paper, making prototypes, testing them, refining them, and finally producing them. Because the steps are linear, each one depends on the one before, and the whole process takes ten weeks. Swarming, by contrast, lets you interview, research, brainstorm, sketch, and prototype in parallel, with each activity informing the others, while the team quickly builds up a rich understanding of the project’s possibilities. Not only is it faster, but it skirts the danger of playing “telephone”—the children’s game in which one kid whispers something quickly to a neighbor, who whispers it to the next neighbor down the line, who whispers it to the next neighbor, and so on, until “dancing on the lawn” becomes “Mrs. Johnson’s dog.” With swarming, the project has a better chance to come through in its purest, most focused form.
But let’s be clear about collaboration. A team is only as good as the skills of the individuals in it. While you can learn a lot from working with great people, your value to the team comes from the quality of your own effort. Whether a T or an X, you still have to develop your own metaskills, create your own thought processes, and do battle by yourself in the dragon zone. A master’s degree won’t help you. Only mastery itself.
The bolt upright moment
The metaskill of dreaming brings with it a built-in reward: the glorious split second when the world suddenly reels, a thousand gears snap into place, and the long-hidden answer appears, shimmering, before your disbelieving eyes.
While not every epiphany packs this kind of punch, many do. It all depends on how difficult the problem was, how important the outcome is, and how long the solution has eluded you. And it also depends on the beauty—the sheer aesthetic elegance—of the final answer. Imagine the breathtaking moment when Einstein realized that the secret of relativity could be expressed in three letters and a number. He once likened the surprise of scientific discovery to a hen laying a golden egg. “Kieks! auf einmal ist es da!” Cheep! suddenly it’s there!
I can honestly say that I’d rather have an epiphany than win the lottery. Okay, the lottery brings money, but it leaves you with the problem of how to turn your money into the kind of transcendent experience that makes life worth living. It’s much easier to turn epiphanies into money than the other way around. Winning the lottery is like finding a golden egg; learning to dream is like raising a golden goose.
There’s a good reason why people have reported sitting bolt upright in bed, suddenly awakened from slumber after weeks or months of wrestling with a problem. Their subconscious mind has been busy working behind the scenes to sort through the rational complexities that kept the solution hidden. This “dark time” is known as the incubation period, a stage when the problem, as it was originally framed, does not seem to yield to a solution. The solution can only come when the rational mind lets go so the dreaming mind can take over. It can happen during actual dreaming, but it can also show up anytime the rational mind lets down its guard—while taking a shower, driving a car, lying on the beach, or having sex (presumably with one’s muse). Once, when Johann Sebastian Bach was asked where he found his melodies, he answered that the problem wasn’t finding them—it was not tripping over them when he got up in the morning.
The bolt upright moment is the point at which a new idea clicks into the right criteria, even when the criteria are poorly understood. Sometimes what you think are the right criteria are not, and you find that your subconscious brain has reframed the problem. Other times, the criteria are so complex that your rational brain can’t make sense of them, leaving the job to your dreaming mind.
Imagine criteria as a pile of pick-up sticks that happened to fall in a certain pattern. Each stick is a line item on your problem-solver’s wish list. All you have to do is find a pattern where most of the pick-up sticks overlap. But there’s a catch: Some of the sticks are hard to see, some are more important than others, and some won’t stop moving. The shifting, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t landscape of criteria can overwhelm the focusing mechanism of your mind.
Have you ever pointed an autofocus camera into a moving crowd? The camera will have so much trouble deciding on the focal point that you’ll miss your shot entirely. You’ll hear the lens zooming in and out, but the shutter won’t click. An autofocus camera is a little like your rational mind. It doesn’t like ambiguity, so it will either take the first picture that comes into focus, or else become confused and freeze. This is the problem that the new multifocus came
ras solve. They capture all the information in the scene, but the leave the final decision on where to focus until later. In human terms, it’s like allowing time for incubation.
When a fresh solution to a problem finally does come into focus, the emotional brain sends a signal to the rest of your body—sometimes described as a tingle, a flash, or a jolt—that tells you something remarkable has happened. Developing a sensitivity to these signals is an integral part of being creative.
Six tests of originality
The goal of dreaming is to produce an original idea. The idea can be new to you, new to your group, or new to the world. But how do you know which it is? And how do you know if it’s any good in the first place?
In my experience, creative judgment comes with practice, maturity, and familiarity with the world of ideas. There’s no shortcut. But there is a shorthand for recognizing the potential of an idea at the point of epiphany. I’ve distilled it down to a list of six questions:
1. Is it disorienting? A great idea should be unsettling—not just to you, but to others in your group. Some people may reject it on the spot. This is not always a bad sign, since the potential of a new idea is often inversely proportional to its comfort factor.
Other people may simply find the idea baffling if it doesn’t jibe with their existing beliefs. For example, when talking pictures became possible, H.M. Warner was firmly against it: “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” he roared. Some people believed airplanes would have no military value; that broadcast radio could not become popular; that no one would want a computer at home; and that educated people would never contribute to an encyclopedia without being paid. When you hear these kinds of comments, your antennae should tingle.
2. Does it kill ten birds? A good idea kills two birds with one stone. A great idea kills ten or twenty. This is the place where the pick-up sticks overlap, the pattern that tells you when a solution is elegant. The opposite of an elegant solution is one with too many trade-offs. In politics, trade-offs are often placed on a pedestal, held up as examples of “the art of compromise.” But great ideas don’t come from compromise. They come from common ground.
Let’s say you’re trying to imagine a new product for your company. A great product idea would combine a dozen desirable traits in a single move. It might cost less to produce, use the existing supply chain, reposition the company’s chief competitor, reenergize the workforce, attract more talent, inspire free publicity, deepen customer loyalty, increase annual revenues, produce higher profit margins, drive up the stock price, benefit the community, and create a platform for a whole new class of products. Twelve birds right there.
3. Does it need to be proved? Original ideas are unproven by definition—and therefore inherently risky. If an idea doesn’t need to be tested, it’s probably because it’s not very original or not very bold. The skepticism that calls for a proof of concept is one of the signals of originality.
When my design firm was tapped by Apple in 1988 to rethink the packaging for the company’s range of software products, one of the ideas we presented was a retail package with nothing on the front but a simple hand-drawn icon, a product name, a trademark, and a splash of color. At the time, no self-respecting software package would go out dressed in less than five colors, one or more photos of people using computers, at least three screen shots, and six or seven bullet points explaining its features—and this was just the front panel.
Bill Campbell, then president of the software business, was curious enough about the “white look” to test it with customers. As it turned out, this became the company’s most successful format, increasing revenues by 40 percent across the product line in the first year, and inspiring the clean white packaging now associated with Apple. When your idea is bold enough to trigger the testing instinct, you might be onto something.
4. Is it likely to force change? Great ideas are not polite. They never say they’re sorry. They don’t try to fit in. On the contrary, they force the world around them to make changes in self-defense.
In the 1950s, a small advertising agency named Doyle Dane Bernbach had a big idea: humor. In the hard-drinking, hard-selling days of Madison Avenue, humor was universally frowned on. The prevailing mantra was “the more you tell, the more you sell.” The current voice of reason, David Ogilvy, maintained that “people do not buy from clowns.” DDB’S creative teams not only believed they did, but delivered their witty headlines and graphics with stark simplicity. Over the next decade any agency that couldn’t create clean, humorous ads began to see its status sink like a stale olive in a cheap martini.
5. Does it create affordances? Affordances are the opportunities inherent in a new idea. Good ideas “come woven in a web of auxiliary ideas, consequential notions, supporting concepts, foundational assumptions, side effects, logical consequences, and a cascade of subsequent possibilities.” An affordance of Twitter, for example, is to enable instant communication in places where communication is controlled, such as the Middle East during the Arab Spring rebellions. An affordance of democracy is that citizens can voice their opinions without the threat of reprisals. An affordance of baking soda is that it can soak up fridge odors in addition to making cakes rise.
The measure of a great idea is the number and quality of the affordances it throws off. If innovation is evolution by design, then the best idea is the one that affords the most choices.
6. Can it be summarized? Every innovation—whether a government, gadget, service, iPhone app, movie plot, or business model—can be reduced to a one-sentence description. The US government is a democracy of the people, for the people, and by the people. A Nano MP3 player puts four thousand songs at your fingertips. The Heathrow Express whisks you to London in 15 minutes flat. The Pages tablet application lets you be a writer one second and a designer the next. In Talk to Her, two men form an odd friendship while their girlfriends are in comas. Charles Schwab makes investing personal.
The reason a great idea can be described in a sentence is not because it’s simple but because it has a strong internal order, one that answers to a clear and compelling purpose. The full idea may be quite complex. Complexity without order is an indescribable mess, while complexity with order appears simpler than it is. If you find it hard to describe your idea, don’t fix your description. Fix your idea.
The metaskill of dreaming, the ability to cut ideas out of whole cloth, is not a subject currently taught in business schools—or any other schools. This seems odd in an age when innovation is the dividing line between success and failure. But the gap could grow even wider as aesthetics are asked to play a greater role the way ideas are realized.
The 20th century has made us believe that everything of value can be bought in a store; that the answer to the question lies at the back of the chapter; that design is something only designers do.
But now, in the 21st century, we’re being nudged nervously forward—by our customers, by our employers, by our economy, and by the robots nipping at our heels—to be original. To innovate. To make things. Yes, make things.
MAKING
IL discorso mentale
Leonardo was famous, or perhaps infamous, for taking months to complete a painting—if indeed he did complete it. Some say this is the reason there are so few Leonardo paintings extant. Whether that’s true or not, he did leave quite a bit of time between layers of paint. He felt that il discorso mentale, the mental conversation, was more important than the actual painting. The extra time gave him the mental space to reflect on the details—what to include, what to exclude, and how the elements might fit together to make a unified whole. To Leonardo, an artist didn’t learn to paint. He painted to learn.
This intimacy with craft would have been foreign to the ancient Greeks, who looked down on hand skills as dirty and degrading, a kind of manual labor fit only for the lower classes. Plato’s elaborate taxonomy of human knowledge made no reference whatsoever to craft. To our present-day misfortune, Plato’s way of thinking has had a much g
reater influence on our education models than Leonardo’s. Today we hold academic schools in high regard, while placing trade schools on a much lower tier. What Leonardo understood is that imagination without experience is weak. Originality without craft, to a Renaissance artisan, would have seemed like marriage without sex—lofty but Platonic.
Creativity is more than imagination. It’s imagination coupled with craft. It’s the metaskill of making. It envisions, embodies, elaborates. It develops, shapes, solves. It advances, iterates, proves. Note the lack of passive verbs in this list. Making is action. Unless you’re willing to get your hands dirty, your imagination will remain unrealized and uninformed.
Learning theorist Donald Schön took the idea of discorso mentale to a new level of understanding in his 1983 book, The Reflective Practitioner. He called craft knowledge “reflection-in-action,” the result of thinking while doing. As the maker shapes an object or a situation according to an initial vision, the situation “talks back,” and the maker responds to the backtalk. Our spontaneous reactions don’t always work out, so we keep trying until we succeed. Schön believed that the starting point for reflection-in-action was “knowing-in-action,” a dynamic way of knowing that stands in stark contrast to the kind of static knowledge we’re taught in school.
Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd, who conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, posed a simple question: Can we know all about the world without changing it? No, he finally said. Knowledge must come from action if it’s to be deep enough and rich enough to drive lasting change. We can’t reshape the world without a little trial and error.
Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age Page 17
