CHAPTER 2
Fixation
An unemployed woman who did not have her driver’s license with her failed to stop at a railroad crossing, then ignored a one-way traffic sign and traveled three blocks in the wrong direction down the one-way street. All this was observed by a nearby police officer, who was on duty, yet made no effort to issue the woman a ticket for violating the laws. Why?
A man leaves for a horsepacking trip on Sunday. He returns on Sunday, yet was gone for exactly 10 straight days, without crossing international date lines. How is this possible?
A young boy turned off the lights in his bedroom and managed to get into bed before the room was dark. If the bed is ten feet from the light switch and the light bulb and he used no wires, strings, or other contraptions to turn off the light, how did he do it?
Mr. Hardy was washing windows on a high-rise office building when he slipped and fell off a 60-foot ladder onto the concrete sidewalk below. Incredibly, he did not injure himself in any way. How is this possible?
Can you identify the pattern in the following letters?
A E F H I K L M N T V W X Y Z B C D G J O P Q R S U
Can you think of a word that forms a phrase with each of the following words: shot, plate, and broken?
Move a single stick to correct the incorrect Roman numeral equation: ||| + ||| = |||
There are three switches outside a closed room. There are three lamps inside the room. You can flip the switches as much as you want while the door is closed, but then you must enter just once and determine which switch is connected to which lamp. How can you do it?
A dealer in antique coins got an offer to buy a beautiful bronze coin. The coin had an emperor’s head on one side and the date 544 BC stamped on the other. The dealer examined the coin, but instead of buying it, he called the police. Why?
Juliette and Jennifer were born on the same day of the same month of the same year to the same mother and the same father, yet they are not twins. How is that possible?
Can you rearrange the letters n-e-w-d-o-o-r to make one word?
A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found in his cell a rope which was only half the length needed to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?
A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the point of the pyramid is a $100 bill. How could you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?
In what direction is the bus pictured below facing, left or right?
Show how you can make the triangle below point downward by moving only three of the circles.
These 15 brainteasers are the kind of problems psychologists and neuroscientists love to give their research subjects in the lab, often hooked up to fMRI scanners, in order to test whether they have an Aha! moment, and if they do, how long it takes, and if they don’t, what kinds of hints induce it. Researchers have been using these types of insight problems for nearly 100 years. If you weren’t successful in solving them, don’t be discouraged; the average success rate among those who have never seen these classic problems before hovers around 50 percent, with many failing completely, depending on the problem.8
I’ve put the solutions in the back of the book, if you wish to indulge in the Downgrading flaw (see Introduction) and preemptively surrender. In the meantime, know that if these problems stumped you for the most part like they did me, it’s just our Fixation flaw working in high gear.
THE FIXATION FLAW
Psychologist Karl Duncker in his 1939 book On Problem Solving coined the term “functional fixedness” to explain the difficulty people have in looking at objects and situations in ways different than they commonly do, or have in the past. Ever since, researchers have been using updated versions of the kinds of problems he used to study different ways to trigger the kind of thinking that defeats functional fixedness, often referred to as “sudden creative insight,” what we call the Eureka! or Aha! moment.* Various other labels for functional fixedness include paradigms, blind spots, mindset, bias, brain lock, and mental models. Let’s again keep it simple: Fixation.
Outside the safety of psychological experiments, Fixation can wreak havoc in individuals, organizations, and even entire industries.
Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, MD,* who will help us to understand the neuroscience of the thinking flaws throughout this book, is a neuropyschiatrist who has devoted his life to an extreme form of Fixation: obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). By all accounts, OCD is a devastating, self-destructive disease involving biochemical imbalance in the brain, but Schwartz uses a process he developed at UCLA which uses self-directed neuroplasticity to help patients use the power of their minds to break the stranglehold their brains have on how they function day to day.†
Organizational theorist Ian Mitroff attributes General Motors’ dramatic loss of market share in the 1980s at the hands of import car companies to a decades-old, multilevel version of Fixation that went something like this: styling and status is more important than quality, foreign cars are no threat, and workers don’t make a difference. General Motors only became aware of their faulty thinking when it was far too late.
For nearly a century during the 1800s, the ice industry revolved around a simple function: harvesting. Dozens of strong men used large saws designed to cut large blocks of ice from frozen lakes and rivers and hauled the blocks by horse and wagon to ice houses for storage or to barges and trains for shipping. The ice industry spurred the rapid growth in a range of other U.S. industries, including meat, produce, and fish that previously were restricted to local consumption. Ice harvesting created an American “cooling culture,” and most households had an icebox for storing perishables. The ice harvesting trade continued to grow and spread to become a global market by the end of the 1800s, peaking in 1900. Then it vanished nearly overnight. Harvesting was replaced by a new function, ice manufacturing, which had slowly been developing in the late 1800s. Ice plants with mechanically powered chilling facilities that could produce ice blocks quickly and cheaply all year round put the ice harvesters out of business. Ice factories sprung up in every city, and ice manufacturing enjoyed a profitable existence for nearly a quarter century. Then it nearly vanished overnight. A new function, refrigeration, replaced ice manufacturing. Refrigeration absorbed ice making and made cold storage—in the form of electric powered freezers and refrigerators—a household convenience.
Here’s the thing: none of the ice harvesters became ice manufacturers. And none of the ice manufacturers became refrigeration companies. The reason? They were fixed in their function, locked into the activity they performed, unable to see the bigger picture and the changes happening around them, or choosing to ignore them even if they did.
They were victims of Fixation.
It would be ever so much easier for us all if we could simply switch on the Apple tagline “think different” on demand. But we can’t, and no such switch exists. Each of us has a robust set of unconscious thinking patterns that figure centrally into how we look at any challenge. Fixation is one of the most prevalent: it has never once failed to appear when I’ve given the kinds of thought exercises I’ve introduced you to in the previous two chapters. If Leaping is the foremost offender, Fixation is a close second. Framestorming (the fix for Leaping, as I hope you’ll recall) is necessary but generally insufficient to address Fixation. Allow me to demonstrate by using another version of the thought challenge I used in the first chapter . . . again, not a sterile laboratory-type insight problem, but one based on a real case.
I hope you’ll put the book down, refrain from Leaping, do a bit of Framestorming first, and try your hand at this version for five minutes. You’ll at least double your chances of success in arriving at the elegant solution actually implemented, and I would not be surprised at all if you solved it well inside the five-minute mark if you Framestorm first. I’ll even save you some frustration: don’t bother inventing auto-rewind VCR, DVD, or streaming video—not only will you violate the conditions of the challenge, but they aren’t necessary to solve it.
Now, the top 10 solutions participants give me, in no particular priority, are: a loyalty program that gives you a free rental if your rewind record is clean; a small monetary fine; more rewinders in the store with good signage; splicing reminders into the tape itself; altering either the video case or the cassette itself so that it won’t fit back in the case if it hasn’t been rewound; putting the movie on both sides of the tape; cutting the tape to put the ending at the front; eliminating the after-hours drop box; enlisting volunteers to rewind tapes in exchange for free rentals; and the all-time favorite: a drop box that rewinds the tape when it is inserted.
Unfortunately, each of these solutions violates one or more of the limitations I imposed, and furthermore, none of them solve the problem. If you look at them again, you may recognize a pattern: they are fixated on one primary function, which is returning a rewound tape to the store. But take a look at the problem again. It simply required the tape to be rewound; the issue of when the tape had to be rewound was never even mentioned, much less stipulated as a condition. That is Fixation in action. Your brain made an unconscious assumption that the tape had to be rewound before returning it, based on your experience in renting tapes; or if you’re too young to remember the days of Blockbuster, based on stories of old folks like me who used to rent videotapes.
Perhaps in your framestorming effort you arrived at some helpful frames, such as “Why don’t people rewind?” and “How do we make it impossible not to rewind?” The answer to the first is laziness. Once you understand that, you can see why previous solutions didn’t work: nothing at such a low transaction level is going to change a basically lazy person into an accountable one. But you don’t need to: the real issue revolves around making it impossible not to rewind the tape, and to do so with little or no cost and without placing additional burden on the customer.
The actual solution implemented by Star Video was to flip the policy and let the tapes be rented out un-rewound. They simply put a small sticker on the video case, stating that the tape may have to be rewound before watching. The solution placed no additional burden on the customer—one rewind was all that was ever required—and that didn’t change. What changed is when the rewind occurred. If you got a tape that hadn’t been rewound, you rewound it before watching. The stickers were very inexpensive, and there was no ongoing burden on the store. Problem solved. If you think about it, the solution is the same one most of us employ when doing laundry: we clean the lint screen before our next dryer load, not after the last one.
Let’s take a look at how Fixation works.
WHY WE FIXATE
Mst ppl cn ndrstntd ths sntnc wth lttl prblm. That’s because the brain is a pattern-making, pattern-recognizing machine, and it immediately recognized and used the patterns in the letters to make sense of them, even though they didn’t form words.
All day long, unbeknownst to us—and for the most part uncontrolled by us—our brains record every single experience, sending sensory information in the form of electrical impulses to our cerebral cortex, the “grey matter” that houses the brain’s higher functions. Each new experience is automatically stored as data in our brain. The process is additive and cumulative, and generally goes unedited. Even though the electrical impulses themselves disappear in milliseconds, their passage to the nerve cells triggers a grouping mechanism, filing new information with other like data as it comes in, which in turn creates specific and unique patterns.
Different patterns combine to make memories and perceptions, and those connections are reinforced over time, becoming mental models—mindsets, biases, and paradigms. For the most part, these mental models allow us to function much more efficiently by helping us rapidly sift data and sort information into useful knowledge, according to whether it confirms or contradicts the strong patterns already embedded in our minds. There is no sophisticated term for this phenomenon; it’s basically guesswork by the brain.
Fixation works in a couple of different ways. One way actually provokes the Leaping flaw. Former CIA analyst Morgan Jones uses the example below to demonstrate how it works. Can you guess who the individual might be in this description?
A new chief executive, one of the youngest in his nation’s history, is being sworn into office on a bleak, cold, cloudy day in January. He was raised as a Catholic. He rose to his new position in part because of his vibrant charisma. He is revered by the people and will play a crucial role in a military crisis that will face his nation. His name will become legendary.
The vast majority of people conclude that it is John F. Kennedy, and they arrive at their answer before the third sentence. That’s your Fixation flaw hard at work, because there’s another possibility: Adolph Hitler. When I give this description to a European audience, they answer Adolf Hitler far more often. So what is going on here? In rather non-neuroscientific terms, as soon as our brain recognizes a piece of information as being part of a preexisting pattern, our FAST thinking overrides our SLOW, and we get fixed on our solution, essentially screening out other possibilities.
The other way Fixation works involves your brain making stuff up on its own. My favorite example* enabling you to actually experience Fixation in action is to gaze at the three sets of right-angled lines below for a moment. I should tell you that they depict something so ubiquitous that you’d be hard-pressed to make it through the day without it. Can you identify it?
If you can’t, it’s because a key piece of information is missing. Once I share that hint with you, however, you will never again be able to see the image in quite the same way again.
Ready?
What you are looking at is the uppercase version of the most widely used letter in the English language. The letter, though, exists in the white space. Do you see it now? It is the capital letter E. Look again. The black lines represent the shadow of the capital E. Please know that I did not create the E, your brain did, once it had just enough data to call up a well-worn pattern from memory.* And trust me, you will always see the E from now on.
But here is the Fixation power at work: try to unsee the E. Go back to the way you saw it a few seconds ago, when you were “innocent,” without a bit of knowledge, and desperately trying to make sense of the lines, and looking at the image from a number of different perspectives.
Most people cannot unsee the E no matter how hard they try . . . even if they are successful for a split second, their brains flicker back to the E. What makes the image so indelible is the fact that your brain completed it. No “complete” E, no matter how elaborately or ornately rendered, could produce the same level of Fixation impact. Once you were given a clue, your brain created the image for you, without your having much say in the matter. The incomplete E took on a new form, a life of its own—one with real staying power.
The interesting question is, why are we so susceptible to our patterned thinking? Philosopher Immanuel Kant maintained that the mind is not built to give us raw knowledge of the world; we must always approach it from a special point of view, with a certain bias, to make it meaningful. The implication of this is that because mindsets represent our own unique view of the world, we instinctively rely on them to help us make sense of it. But these mindsets are hidden, hard to identify, and we defend them subconsciously.
Nearly a quarter century ago, the late Chris Argyris of Harvard University dove deep into our thinking patterns, eventually coining the term “mental models” as his preferred label of our own individual way of looking at the world. Argyris went so far as to say that many of our mental models are flawed, because most of what guides our behavior is related to one of four intentions: to remain in control, to maximize winning and minimize losing, to suppress negative feelings, and to be as rational as possible. He believed people act this way in order to avoid threat or embarrassment.
Argyris claimed that one’s mental model plays out in a repetitive pattern he called the “ladder of inference.” It works like this: You experience something, and that becomes the ladder’s first rung. You apply your own theory to the situation, and that’s the second rung. Next come the assumptions you make, the conclusions you draw, and the beliefs you hold. Finally, you act. But as you climb the ladder, you are becoming more and more abstract in your thought, further from the facts of the situation. And so you are vulnerable to less than optimal action, which helps explain why so many of our ideas and solutions don’t meet the mark.
Because the process feeds back on itself, it strengthens the patterns in your mind, so the next time you’re faced with a new situation, you’re handicapped from the start.
THE FIX: INVERSION
The cure for Fixation is what I call Inversion, because it involves flipping your thinking around in order see things through a new, fresh, and unique lens, in turn sparking new neural connections in your brain, effectively rewiring it. If this sounds even remotely like hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo, rest assured that the ability of the mind to alter brain circuitry is about as scientifically proven as it can possibly get. It’s called neuroplasticity, and it can be self-directed through various techniques.
For example, in helping OCD patients unlock their brains, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz uses a four-step tool that involves reinterpreting and redirecting what he calls “deceptive brain messages” in order to overcome self-defeating thoughts and actions. The four steps—Relabel, Reframe, Refocus, Revalue—have proven to be a potent way for OCD patients to change their self-destructive perceptions. They first detach from the locked brain circuits that hold them prisoner, and then evoke and direct more beneficial thoughts toward healthy and helpful new patterns that achieve a complete shifting of mental gears that Schwartz likens to a manual but mindful override of the brain’s automatic transmission. “The brain can exert a powerful grip on one’s life—but only if you let it,” states Schwartz. “The good news is you can overcome the brain’s control and rewire your brain to work for you by learning to debunk the myths it has been so successfully selling you.”
I figure if it can help unlock a brain as seized as that of an OCD patient, it most assuredly will help address our everyday Fixation. Schwartz’s metaphor of shifting gears is indeed appropriate: Inversion is really thinking in reverse.
My favorite Inversion technique is one I learned several years ago while working with a few different industrial design firms, each of which had their own pet version of the method. No matter how it gets applied stylistically, the intent of the technique does not change, the essence of which is to shift us away from our current and probably fixed frame, turn things upside down and rightside round, and cut a few new and different thinking grooves.
Inversion Method: “Opposite World”*
Opposite World is about inverting the normal conditions, defining features, or key characteristics of whatever challenge you’re tackling. That inversion could involve, for example, removal of some sort (e.g., remove the top from a shampoo bottle, or remove the physical keyboard from a cell phone), reversal of an activity (e.g., videotapes leave the store unrewound, or the chef decides what the diner will eat), or even a complete exaggeration or escape from reality that could border on pure fantasy (e.g., the camera only has one button, or people get paid for sleeping).
Once a list of opposites is developed, each item on the list becomes the starting point for a framestorm or brainstorm.
There are three basic steps.
Step 1: List the defining attributes.
Let’s take a common example, that of the traditional circus, first used by Stanford’s Tina Seelig in teaching her entrepreneurship class how to address what she called “problem blindness” in her 2009 book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20.
The traditional circus has a number of classic elements:
Clowns
Barkers
Multiple tents
Carnival music
“Star” attractions
Animals
Cheap tickets
Kid oriented
Step 2. For each element, list the extreme opposite or reverse.
In our circus example:
Clowns . . . . . . . . . . No clowns
Barkers . . . . . . . . . . No barkers
Multiple tents . . . . . One tent
Carnival music . . . . Sophisticated music
“Star” attractions . . . Ensemble cast
Animals . . . . . . . . . . No animals
Cheap tickets . . . . . Expensive tickets
Kid oriented . . . . . . Adult oriented
Now, you probably just experienced a bit of the Fixation flaw, if by chance the thought of Cirque du Soleil popped into your head. That’s your brain doing what it did with the JFK example earlier in the chapter. That’s natural, of course. Part of the point here was indeed to illustrate the power of Inversion, an illustration which necessitates a backwards glance at something we consider nontraditional, even disruptive: Airbnb is the inverse of a traditional hotel or bed-and-breakfast in that it does not own property; Uber is the inverse of a traditional cab or limousine service, in that it does not have a fleet; Tesla cars are the inverse of cars with combustible engines, at least to some degree, in that they do not use gasoline for fuel.
The larger point, though, is that by taking the polar or extreme opposite view of the current or traditional way of thinking about a given concept, you can easily forge new avenues worth exploring creatively, which brings up the final step.
Step 3: Framestorm/brainstorm, using the opposites as your starting point.
Look at your opposites list. While it may not reveal a solution, each opposite provides a starting point to now use your framestorming chops and ask Why (not)? What if? How (might we)? Those questions in turn will spark new trains of creative thought.
When you’re done, you may be surprised at just how off-road you’ve gone with your thinking. A fun twist I’ve used is to think of the world’s worst solution or strategy for the challenge you’re tackling, then reversing each element of that idea. There are a number of different such twists and turns you can use, depending on the challenge and the people involved. The only constraint beyond those is your own imagination.
For example, I used a version of Opposite World with one group that wanted to change their organizational culture, aka “the ways things are done around here.” I had them first list all the various “sacred cows”* of their organization: norms, procedures, rules, nonnegotiable elements of their current culture. They then thought of the extreme opposites of those elements, and a number of cultural shifts started immediately. For example, the sacred cow of “you must be in the office every day” was reversed to “you don’t have to be in the office every day.” That turned into a number of possibilities, the most important and lasting of which became the new normal: a results-only work environment, or ROWE.
In another case, I used a variation of this technique to conduct a visioning exercise with the senior executive team of a real estate development company during a management retreat just before the economic crisis of 2008. Things were going quite well at the time, and the real estate boom was in full swing, with nary a sign of impending doom. I’m certain it was nothing more than pure luck that instead of the typical exercise of envisioning what success would look like three years hence, I had them write a corporate obituary called “Rest In Peace,” a kind of pre-mortem retrospective that detailed the key trials and tribulations, foibles and failures that led to the company’s demise. I then had the team prioritize the list of issues and missteps according to its impact potential. Each of the priority items became the target of strategies to ensure that they did not actually happen in the future.
To this day, the CEO of the company* maintains that this exercise not only enabled the company to weather the downturn, but do so in way that positioned them to flourish once the economy emerged from its slumber.
_______
* The most famous and most cited in articles and books is known as the Duncker candle problem. Subjects are given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches, and asked to “fix the lit candle to the wall so that it will not drip wax onto the table below.” Participants either get it right away, or struggle for over 10 minutes, often failing to solve the problem, the solution to which is to empty the box of thumbtacks, put the candle in the box, use the thumbtacks to nail the box with the candle in it to the wall, and light the candle with a match. “Functional fixedness” prevents participants from seeing the box as anything other than a device to hold the thumbtacks.
* Jeffrey Schwartz has coauthored several bestselling books, including The Mind and the Brain, Brainlock, and, most recently, You Are Not Your Brain. I first met him in 2008 when I was researching In Pursuit of Elegance.
† I will say more about this process when I discuss the fix for Fixation. Neuroplasticity refers to the ability to use mental activity to change physical brain circuitry.
* This problem is based on the true story of Star Video, which solved the issue many years ago. I had read a short discussion of the story in the 2003 book Why Not? (pp. 38, 116) by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres, and turned it into a thought exercise. I first posed this problem in my 2009 book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why The Best Ideas Have Something Missing.
* I first introduced this exercise in my 2009 book In Pursuit of Elegance as a metaphorical example of an elegant solution.
* A very small percentage of people are never able to see the E in the white space. If that’s you, do not worry, you do not suffer from brain damage.
* Opposite World takes its cues from a 1992 episode of Seinfeld called “The Opposite,” in which the character of George Costanza is in despair because every decision he’s ever made in his entire life has been wrong: “My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be,” he laments. Jerry Seinfeld suggests that if every instinct George has is wrong, the opposite would have to be right, whereupon George orders the opposite of his normal lunch, which catches the eye of a beautiful woman who has just ordered the same sandwich. George does the opposite of his natural instinct to lie, and tells her he’s unemployed, broke, and lives at home. She becomes attracted to George and gets him an interview with her uncle who works for the Yankees. During the interview, George berates owner George Steinbrenner, which lands him his dream job and the ability to afford his own apartment. His entire life has turned around simply by doing the opposite of what his natural instinct would lead him to do.
* A “sacred cow” refers to a person or thing immune to criticism or questioning. The term alludes to the honored status of cows in Hinduism, where they are a symbol of God’s generosity to humankind. It has been used figuratively for over 100 years, since about 1900.
* For purposes of confidentiality and competitive advantage, this company and its management team wishes to remain anonymous.