Innovative solutions often come from finding ways to look at old problems in new ways. Entering the creative zone can best be done by thinking more like an artist or scientist than like a bureaucrat. Some ways to do this include the following:
• Paying attention to irrelevant thoughts
• Using analogies and metaphors to make new connections
• Combining and relating divergent disciplines.
Edward de Bono is a management consultant who specializes in thinking concepts. He noted that when it comes to the brain, both information and the surface are active. It is an open system. All information changes the surface, which then receives future information differently. A similar analogy would be rain falling onto a landscape. It eventually gets organized into streams and rivers. These mind patterns are asymmetric, which means our organized thoughts tend to go along main streams or tracks. We do this without ever noticing the side stream (1). The trick is to make the connections so we can get over to this side stream.
Thinking differently, whether it is in reverse or opposite ways or by using metaphors or analogies, does not come naturally. We tend to be like rivers and follow similar paths. We can, however, change course and enter new thought streams. It begins by creating a different consciousness, by creating new connections. Land did this by showing his people how to change their reference point. Darwin did this through exposure to new information including reading material outside his discipline. 3M’s Fry gained a new perspective by showing his product to secretaries rather than to engineers or marketing personnel.
There are numerous other ways to gain this different perspective. One of those is used by Francois Castaing, was executive vice president of vehicle engineering and general manager of powertrain operations at Chrysler. Castaing reorganized the engineering team, which was grouped into functions such as body, chassis, powertrain, and so on, into vehicle platforms where a design group worked on the total car and not just its components. The first proof that this was a better arrangement was their “Viper,’’ when a team of 75 engineers created the new car in just three years. This was impressive since in the late ‘80s it normally took about 5 1/2 years to bring a new car to market.
The fear at the time was that the engineers would be so empowered that there might be too much diversity, duplication, or even a lack of sharing. Some worried that there might even be competition among platform teams. So Castaing quickly developed technical clubs in which engineers informally agreed to spend an hour over coffee once a week with their counterparts on other platform teams so sharing could be promoted.
Castaing said these tech clubs seemed to help keep complexity and duplication under control. Chrysler suppliers, reduced from over 2,000 to some 300, also helped to enhance communication by relating successes and failures while working with different platform teams. Cross-fertilization among platforms was encouraged to the point that after five years all designers had changed platforms at least once (2). Doing this allowed people the opportunity to experience new perspectives and make connections that normally would not have been made.
TRANSFER KNOWLEDGE FROM OTHER DISCIPLINES
Creativity does not always come from gaining new perspectives. Developing new connections and insights also requires getting rid of some old prejudices. Business people somehow think that they are different from other professionals. It is okay for the artist or poet to be confused but not a professional. The academic or scientist may walk around in a daze but business people, we are told, are made of sterner stuff. We should just be able to look at a problem logically and deduce the correct solution. Such an approach might work some of the time, and it might get an answer. But will it be a truly creative, inventive, original answer?
To find a truly innovative approach requires thinking in different ways, much like a scientist or even an artist might think. These and other creative types are able to improvise new connections that lead to innovative solutions because they are able to muddle around. The muddling is natural because they are dealing with new information. They are able to think outside the box, to reformulate the problem so they can find new connections. Entering the creative zone means accepting some disorder, confusion, and some messy uncertainty. This healthy state of confusion begins by often paying attention to some irrelevant line of thought.
Edward Steer was the CEO of Pfizer, an American drug company with a reputation for producing innovative and profitable new medicines. He stressed to his researchers that they not fall into the common trap of concentrating on areas in which they are familiar and comfortable. Rather he urges them to stretch into promising new approaches like genetics (3). Exploring new areas is a tough process; it is especially difficult if you have too many Xerox copies of each other.
A central principle involved in finding new solutions to production, quality, or service problems is that diversity of knowledge is essential to creativity. Some companies have even found it necessary to draw from outsiders to insure this new or different perspective. The Doblin Group is a group of innovation consultants based in Chicago. They send cultural anthropologists to camp out with a client’s customers. They watch what their customers do, what they hate or like, and try to come up with new products or services that no one knew they needed. Larry Keelev, Doblin’s president, says the marketing department of large companies is often the least receptive to innovation. He says their corporate marketing department often studies data and asks customers what they do not like about their products (3). However, because they still carry a narrow viewpoint, they often don’t get powerful insights that way.
Some believe that creative ideas emerge deep within the interworking of your mind engine. But just as likely is the possibility that this subconscious or internal working is able to draw in other information sources and make serendipitous connections. An example can illustrate this point. A hospital vice president at a seminar told about a breakthrough she thought she had when she was trying to get the community interested in a new substance abuse program. She said she had tried everything but still was not getting much of a response. It was sometime later, when she was tinkering with her carburetor’s gas and air mix, that she suddenly understood what was wrong. She said she had to change the carburetor mix for a different attitude. She then began to advertise the program on TV. The new “mix” or new strategy was a huge success (4).
Some would say that her unconscious helped to reach this creative insight, but maybe it was something closer to the surface. If she had not had knowledge of this alien discipline (repair of the carburetor), it is doubtful that the connection would have been made about the problem she was facing. The brain continues to look for solutions—when it faces difficult problems, it seeks input; it seeks new connections. The truth is that we never know when a bit of old, unrelated information will become useful in a new way. It is these different perspectives that give different outcomes.
Analogies can provide an effective link that helps people make connections they might otherwise miss. When Canon was working on a new type of small copier, the feasibility team conducted several camp sessions. These were gatherings of project teams outside the workplace to brainstorm new solutions. The feasibility of these small copiers depended on them being essentially maintenance-free. A new concept that emerged to help do this was discarding the entire drum after it had made a certain number of copies. A conventional copier drum was a component with an open-ended life but would certainly need repairing. The team conceptualized an entirely new way of thinking about the drum, one with a limited but known life span.
This meant developing disposable photo receptors, development apparatus, and an instant toner-fuser—all within target cost. When the team members said it was impossible to produce the drum inexpensively, the team leader Hiroshi Tanaka drew on an analogy. He purchased some disposable cans of beer and told the team members to drink the beer (and you thought your work was hard). Then he got the members into an argument (wonder how hard that was to do after a few beers) about how much beer cost and what made it so inexpensive. The disposable beer can resembled the copier drum because it would be disposable. Making the connection between the drum and the beer can provided the team members with many insights into methods of manufacturing the drum at a lower cost (5).
The story is so odd that it has to be true. Beer cans and copiers, who would even have believed that it would lead to any insight— at least a sober one? But that is the power of analogies and metaphors. They allow us to free up our thinking and make connections that lead to insights that might have been otherwise impossible.
Sony is not the only one to use analogies to create novel insights. At one time, an Apple Computer’s project team conceived of the MAC as a bicycle of personal computers, the telephone of the ‘80s, the crankless Volkswagen for the quality conscious, and the Cuisinart (5). The idea was to use analogies to help the team create a product become pervasive and impact everyone’s life. The goal may never be totally achieved, but it did help create a unique and distinctive product.
Creativity does not derive from a single cohesive thought, but rather from combinations of unrelated thoughts. Combining and relating are essential parts of the creativity process in all disciplines (6). Great insights often occur when these streams of thought mix and mingle. This interplay is at the heart of most stories of creativity and innovation.
FIND DIRECT ANALOGIES TO YOUR PROBLEMS
Creativity is built on bridging disconnected fields and knowledge. Ioannis Miaoulis, Dean of Tufts University’s College of Engineering, is somewhat of an expert at bridging disconnected fields and knowledge. He is helping to solve a problem that had challenged material scientists for years—how to heat microelectronics chips evenly enough during production to avoid melting parts of their very thin film surfaces? His solution came out of combining two quite diverse disciplines— engineering and biology. He believed the tools of engineering can help us to better understand biology, and biological insights, in turn, can lead to better technological designs. His point is that some very difficult technological problems have already been solved by evolution.
Most people would see little connection between bugs and chips, but Miaoulis is well equipped to make such serendipitous connections. His fluency in areas like economics, optics, and material science is diverse. This diversity of knowledge has often led him to novel solutions. He recalls how he kept hearing of materials- processing researchers complaining about problems caused by heat. It was obvious to him that material processors were not studying the work done by heat-transfer researchers and heat-transfer people were not applying their work to materials processing. The semiconductor business would prove his point.
Computer chips are made in mass from wafers of silicon several inches in diameter and a thin film of silicon oxide, a few hundred-thousandths of an inch thick. The film is then etched to make the detailed circuitry of chips. The final step involves cutting the wafer into smaller so chips. Before this occurs, chips are heated to extremely high temperatures during some stage of their production. For some reason, never quite understood by materials-processing engineers, the wafers exposed to high temperatures refused to heat evenly. Hot spots develop that get much hotter than the rest of the wafer. They then crack or warp, thereby reducing the number of chips the wafer yields (7).
Miaoulis was baffled about the problem as well. The appearance of the hot spots seemed related to the thickness of the film, but in a most bizarre way. Thicker film should, in theory, insulate against hot spots, but in the lab the spots would often get much worse when the film thickness was increased. Miaoulis believed that these hot spots could not be explained by conventional heat transfer. He could not understand what was happening until a couple of years later when he met a student, Paul Zavracky, who was a specialist in optics. Optical physicists study the way light rays are reflected, bent, or absorbed. Light is a wave with alternating peaks and valleys. When light is bounced off a thin film that is half as thick as the light’s wavelength, the light ray bounces both off the bottom and the top and is then joined up again, thereby creating a bright light. If the film is three-quarters as thick as a wavelength, its peaks will end up aligning with a top-reflecting wave’s valleys and vice versa. The result is that the two waves largely cancel each other out and create weak light.
As Miaoulis listened to Zavracky talk, he thought, “Could the hot spots on chips be an optical effect?’’ Heat, after all, can radiate light even if it is invisible. Could it be that heat radiating during chip production is reflecting off the top and bottom of the chip’s thin-film coating and be creating some spots? Miaoulis later found out that it was indeed the case. He said, “No one had thought about applying optical interference effect to heat,’’ but experiments confirmed the theory. His solution was simple—avoid making thin films the thickness of the wavelength of infrared light. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t always practical to avoid making that thickness of film.
Miaoulis began to suspect that there might be a way to produce thin films that were less vulnerable to melting, but he didn’t have any idea how to do it. He did, however, have a willingness to look for answers by applying knowledge from diverse areas. While snorkeling, he started staring at a sea anemone. With little locomotive ability, they just sit on the floor and let underwater currents carry plankton to them. He saw this as an interesting engineering problem. An anemone would want to be as wide as possible to catch as much food as possible, but not so large that it is swept away by the current. He reasoned that apparently evolution had engineered the anemone to meet both needs. Miaoulis reasoned that nature had solved a thorny challenge that engineers face every day. It was a straightforward optimization problem of solving two equations simultaneously—one describing stability against the current and the other its volume of food.
Connecting two diverse fields, engineering and evolution, led Miaoulis down a path he still pursues. He later used anemones to test different shapes and found that evolution had indeed found the ideal shape and size for a creature that had to have as much water as possible pass through without being carried away. Reinforced by his success, he started looking at the dynamics of other creatures. He looked at fish, crabs, starfish, mussels, and sea urchins. So what does all of this have to do with mechanical engineering? Miaoulis, in the back of his mind, was hoping that somehow nature’s evolution would help to solve problems faced by mechanical engineers. He says, “If you do interesting research, you will find interesting applications.” Sometimes it is just a matter of posing the right question. Posing questions is often harder than finding answers (7).
CONNECTING CHIPS AND BUTTERFLIES
It was a couple of years before one of those right questions came to Miaoulis. While sitting in Tufts’ cafeteria, he thought, “Did any animal take advantage of the eccentric heat absorption properties of thin films?” He wondered if a creature had evolved with a skin of some sort whose thickness was tuned to reflect the warmth of the sun, while perhaps a close cousin, in a cooler climate with an almost identical skin a mere millionth of an inch thick, was tuned instead to absorb warmth.
Miaoulis thought surely nature must have already hit upon it, but what could this thin-skinned creature be? Thinking about the question, he walked out of the cafeteria and noticed that it was butterfly season. The campus was swarming with them. One alighted on a large rock next to the path where he was standing. It only took a moment to adjust its wings—it’s brightly hued and really, really thin wings.
Today, Miaoulis and his students had an aquarium full of butterflies. They used their lab to roast butterfly wings. Deceased butterflies got the heat treatment on a thin pole that has six electrodes glued to their wings. Butterfly wings, you see, are multilayered thin-film construction with scales on the order of a millionth of an inch thick. So what has come out of roasting a few hundred butterfly wings? It is an observation no biologist would have noticed. Their wings, even under intense heat, always cook evenly. There were no hot spots! (Remember the problem about heating microelectronic chips evenly?)
There are no hot spots despite the fact that butterfly wings are not uniformly thick. In fact, they are rough compared to man-made, thin films. This insight led Miaoulis to challenge traditional thinking. He said we have always assumed that films should be smooth. When we are young we learn flat things work best. A sanded table holds a glass better than one made of rough wood, and you don’t get splinters. As a result, engineers have developed a bias for flatness. It is aesthetically pleasing.
Darwin’s nature, on the other hand, does not rely on assumptions; it simply tries everything by trial and error, over eons, until it ends up with what works. Miaoulis believes that his butterflies are telling him that rough films may work better than smooth films for manufacturing semiconductor chips. He says he trusts time, and time has rejected flat films for rough ones. It was unclear why roughness equates to resisting hot spots. Perhaps it has something to do with the effects of random variation serving to break up the potential hot spots. In theory, it should be easier to build rough chips rather than smooth ones, but it may be easier to carve neat designs in smooth ones.
If Miaoulis does build these chips, it would have enormous consequences, including the ability to apply higher temperatures without damaging the chips. His success or failure on this thinking though is not as significant as his ability to apply diverse knowledge to his field. It helped him shed old assumptions, frame new questions, and think in opposite and creative ways.
A long history of psychological literature demonstrates that the creative act is the result of multiple viewpoints and broad problem definitions that pull people away from existing solutions (8). Edward de Bono (9) has called this type of approach lateral thinking.
Thinking differently requires putting yourself in a different frame of reference. One way to do this is to look for connections in metaphorical worlds. For example, in 1959 Allistair Pilkington invented a method for eliminating wavy glass as a result of musing about grease floating on dish water, which, in an open-minded way, led to today’s process of manufacturing uniform glass by floating it on molten tin (10). Analogies compare two things that are essentially dissimilar and serve to encourage creativity because they help you to make connections that otherwise would seem obvious. Analogies and metaphors are also often used to stir up the imagination.
The best advice for using analogies to help you arrive at creative solutions is to do the following:
• Choose a field or area you are familiar with outside of work and apply it to your work situation.
• Create an analogy that allows you the opportunity to use ample facts, knowledge, or technology from this other field to your work problem. Be sure to write out your analogy.
• Write out any insights or potential solutions that the analogy yields.
This section of the book is designed to help you to think differently by making use of analogies and metaphorical worlds. The following is a brief description of analogies and metaphors. Read this, and then use different knowledge domains like those described and see if you can come up with a direct analogy. Try it out, you might find that it opens up a whole world of new possibilities.
ANALOGY: Comparison of things that are essentially dissimilar but are shown through analogy to have some similarity.
Think of a problem you are having and something else and then ask yourself what insights or potential solutions the analogy suggests.
METAPHOR: Figure of speech in which two different thoughts that are linked by some point of similarity (all metaphors) are simple analogies, but not all analogies are metaphors (frozen wages, idea drought).
SIMILES: Specific types of metaphors that use the word like, or as (the wind cuts like a knife).
DIRECT ANALOGIES: Facts, knowledge, or technology from one field are applied to another field (such as biology to robots or examine spiders and other bugs to lok for way improve agility of robots).
Choose a field of science or area of endeavor that could provide an analogy to your problem.
Create an analogy that allows you to apply facts, knowledge, or technology from the other field to your problem. Write out the analogy.
Determine any insights or potential solutions that the analogy yields.
PERSONAL ANALOGY: See yourself as personally involved in the problem you are trying to solve—perhaps role play. Can you put yourself into your problem? Then ask yourself what insights or potential solutions the personal involvement yields. (For example, Gillette managers once pretended to be human hair—and viewed life. I dread being washed every day, I hate blow-dryers, I feel limp and lifeless- some wanted shampoo to protect damaged ends, others wanted more aggressive ones—everyone had different sentiments. The result was a shampoo that adapted itself to different needs and became one of the top 10 shampoos.)
VISUAL ANALOGIES # 1: Imagine you are trying to connect all nine dots. On a piece of paper place three dots on the top, then three in the middle and three on the bottom of a section of paper. Now try to try draw the smallest possible number of straight lines without taking the pencil off the paper. Many assume you have to keep the lines within the nine dot square formed by the outer dots, although the constraint is not part of the problem as stated. A crucial step in solving the puzzle would be to find out whether there is any reason to confine the lines inside the square. So the key question is, how can you use this analogy to help you determine the boundary of a problem you are facing? Use it to help you reassess the latitude you’re giving yourself in solving the problem.
USING VISUAL ANALOGIES #2: Take a fish and put a pane of glass halfway through the fishbowl. Several days later remove the glass. The fish will stay on its side. It assumes that’s all it can do even if no barrier remains. It is an important point to remember. Think of a current problem you are having. Describe what you think are the current barriers, then go back to each and challenge why you believe these exist. Now here is an apology form way out in left field.
SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS ANALOGY
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy applies in all isolated and closed systems. Entropy, a process of continual disintegration to a state of randomness, is a predictable outcome of any system in the absence of new inputs. Open systems overcome entropy by interacting with the environment-taking in needed resources.
Self-organizing system theory posits that open systems use disorder to create possibilities for growth. Through both resilience and self-reference, self-organizing systems are capable of maintaining an identity while changing form. They have both autonomy and control. Each form that is created works for the moment. If new information supports the form, it persists. If new information threatens the form, the system looks for ways to accommodate the information by making incremental changes that are consistent with much of its past but do not unnecessarily deny the new information or a new future. This rolling equilibrium or adjustment is more than a reaction to an action in the Newtonian sense because the reaction is not predictable.
What happens if the autonomy within such systems is removed (that is, if they are externally controlled by the organization)? Self-organizing system theory’ suggests that in such situations the system will fail to adjust to the environment in a timely manner as it must obtain approval from parts of the organization that have not experienced the environment in the same way. Autonomy is central to the system’s evolution. This raises the question, “How does an organization control a self-organizing system?” The answer may be that it does not. The self-organizing system operates within a relatively stable, more global structure. Changes within the local structure tend to have only a minor effect on the global structure. The stability of the global structure stems from its creation over time as a result of the culture, vision, and values shared by the majority of organizational members and key stakeholders.
The leadership development implications of self-organizing system theory are found in the providing of direction and control. First, disequilibrium and disorder are not viewed as negative attributes of such systems. Some degree of each is necessary to provide the system with opportunities to adjust to new information. As adjustments are made, the self-organizing system learns how to accommodate to its environment. Leadership efforts that try to eliminate disorder and control behavior will destroy the system’s ability to self-organize. Novelty of response is often necessary. Without new stimuli, which often arises out of discontentedness, people lapse into dull habits. In so doing, the likelihood of maladaptive behavior increases owing to differences in each actor’s perceived reality of the situation (11).
QUESTION: How can this be used to create an organization that is dynamic but stable? (See chapter 9 for some suggestions.).This is also the inspiration for chapter 2 and chapter 9 and much of the reasoning about creativity. If these analogies are too difficult to apply, choose something you are familiar with and write down:
(1) similarities between your analogy and
(2) solutions that usually come from that area and how they might be applied to the problem you are trying to resolve.
Thinking in opposite and different directions is an essential component of creativity and innovation. It begins by making yourself open to new perspectives. Many recognize the need to gain new perspectives. Students at Yale University of Medicine under the tutelage of Professor of Dermatology Irwin M. Braverman were introduced to a method of learning that takes them out of the classroom and into the museum. In a program called the British Museum Project, Dr. Braverman instructed students to observe preselected paintings at the Yale Center for British Art, and make judgments about how thoughts and feelings are communicated visually. His goal is to train students to be more careful observers by extracting more information through observation.
Dr Braverman believed heightened observation skills help to improve correct diagnosis. He says doctors have to be taught to pick up details that are often overlooked. In metaphorical thinking, he says students are assigned a painting and given time to observe and study it “like a rash that has been framed.” Each student described the work based solely on what he or she sees and learns from group discussions, reactions, and observations. Medical students who participated said it had been a significant step in their medical training (12).
Professor Braverman recognized that the same old knowledge and viewpoint can only produce old solutions. There is ample evidence that the unreflective adoption of premises and old patterns of solving problems is not only detrimental to observation but also to creativity. When we find a solution that works, we tend to use it, even when it no longer is the best one. The power of metaphors and all different thinking tools is that it gets us to think outside the box (13).
One of the best ways to do creative thinking is to find new ways of making new connections. All such approaches mentioned here require you to expose yourself to new knowledge. Along with diversity of knowledge comes the need to generate as many ideas as possible. A Darwinian approach, which is the subject of chapter 5, insures survival-of-the-fittest ideas. Combining divergent fields, disciplines, and perspectives also encourages lateral thinking. One helpful approach is to identify analogies that have common threads with your current problem.
Finding new solutions requires us to accept nontraditional modes of thinking and new ways of gaining new perspectives. As we have seen in this chapter, many good analogies and different perspectives come from nature and, in particular, evolutionary biology. In chapter 5, we will examine this rich field in greater detail. In the process of understanding should come some new insights on how to develop greater creativity and innovative problem solving.
1. de Bono, Edward 1995. Serious creativity. Journal for Quality and Participation 18, no. 5 (September): 12.
2.Stevens, Tim. 1996. Converting ideas into profits: Strategic management of the innovation process pays big dividends at the bottom line. Industry Week 245, no. 11 (3 June): 48.
3.O’Reilly, Brian. 1997. The secrets of America’s most admired corporations. Fortune 135, no. 4 (3 March): 60-64.
4. Harris, Hollis L. 1988. Recapturing a singleness of purpose. Air Transport World Conference. Washington, D.C., 4 October, 13.
5. Nonoka, Ikujiro, and Martin Kenney. 1995. Towards a new theory of innovation management. IEEE Engineering Management Review 23, no. 2: 5.
6. Fiol, C. Marlene. 1995. Thought worlds colliding: The role of contradiction in corporate innovation processes. Entrepreneurship: Theory and practice 19, no. 3 (spring): 71.
7. Smale, Brian. 1997. The butterfly solution. Discover 18, no. 4 (April): 50-52.
8. Koestler, A. 1964. The act of creation. New York: Macmillan.
9. de Bono, Edward. 1968. New think: The use of lateral thinking in the generation of new ideas. New York: Basic Books.
10. Gilliam, Terry K. 1993. Managing the Power of Creativity. Bank Marketing 25, no. 12 (December): 15.
11. Stumpf, Stephen A. 1995. Applying new science theories in leadership development activities. Journal of Management Development 14, no. 5: 39-49
12. Peart, Karen. 1998. Yale medical students use artwork to sharpen diagnostic skills. WWW Eurekalert Org., 23 February, 1.
13. Nemeth, Charlan Jeanne. 1997. Managing innovation: When less is more (creativity in management). California Management Review 40, no. 1 (fall): 64.