Einstein’s theory of relativity. Gandhi’s vision of nonviolent resistance. Jung and the collective unconscious. Those Big Ideas upend our beliefs and expectations and make us see the world in new ways. To create them, a genius is struck with inspiration—Newton gets bonked by an apple, Archimedes shifts in his bathtub—and in an instant, it all becomes clear. Right?
The truth is a lot more complicated. Big Ideas aren’t hatched by a rare breed of intellectuals living in isolation. Instead, they come from regular people who are willing to ask the right questions and stay open to new ways of looking at the world. To assume that creativity is something that other people do—that you aren’t capable of it—is an abdication of responsibility, says Professor David Burkus, author of The Myths of Creativity. It’s incumbent upon us to open our minds and try, rather than shutting down before we even begin to engage.
True thought leaders are driven by asking questions that others have not, and question assumptions others take for granted. Of course ulcers are caused by stress (an accepted medical “truth” until an obscure Australian doctor shunned by the medical establishment proved—by infecting and then curing himself—that they were actually the result of a bacterial infection1). Of course something as high stakes as space flight should be run by the government (until entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Richard Branson began aggressively creating successful private ventures). And of course the only right way to teach college classes is by having a professor lecture in front of a small group of students (until Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun gave up his tenured teaching position to launch Udacity, an online MOOC provider, after seeing that his first pilot course attracted 160,000 students—more than he could reach in dozens of lifetimes teaching in a traditional classroom).
Finding the next Big Idea is about cultivating a questioning mind-set. It’s easy to accept established wisdom—which is usually, though not always, correct. But it’s in those moments where conventional wisdom fails that the biggest breakthroughs occur. Thrun had no idea how many students would register for his first class, but when he saw the overwhelming results, he was willing to jump on board and explore. Barry Marshall, the intrepid Australian doctor, couldn’t be 100 percent sure of his hypothesis until he drank the H. pylori concoction himself, but he was willing to step forward and test his beliefs. In this chapter, you will learn how to challenge the implicit assumptions you’re making, and test whether something is really impossible—or just difficult enough that most people haven’t bothered to look further. We’ll examine the importance of asking what’s next—a critical question in a rapidly changing world. It’s easy to see what’s right in front of you, but if you broaden your perspective and think critically about the next year, or five or ten, you can add real value to the conversation. Finally, we’ll look at how your own personal experience can lead you to Big Ideas.
WHAT ASSUMPTIONS ARE WE MAKING?
Every field has useful guiding assumptions. Received wisdom saves time—you don’t have to reinvent the wheel—and stops you from pursuing fruitless leads, but it can also be a trap, preventing you from exploring new ideas. To find a Big Idea, you have to question the assumptions that are keeping everyone else in check. You don’t succeed by following the rules and thinking exactly like everyone else; you need to ask “what if?” and “why not?” Try to put yourself into the mind-set of an outsider, who doesn’t know all the rules. What would they make of how things are typically done? Are there practices they might find counterintuitive or outmoded? Might there be a new or different way of doing things? Finding that answer could be the seed of your Big Idea.
That was the case for Robert Cialdini, now an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. As a young researcher studying influence and persuasion, he ran his experiments the traditional way: bringing research subjects into the lab and running experiments on them. But as he progressed in his teaching career, something began nagging at him. His students would invariably raise their hands and ask how he knew the laboratory results worked in the real world. “My answer was, you have to trust that the findings we’re getting in the lab are going to reflect what we’d get in [natural environments],” Cialdini recalls. “The principles we’re investigating are the same, and human psychology is the same. Sometimes they’d be convinced, and sometimes they’d shake their heads and say, ‘We’d like to see that evidence.’ And I realized they had an excellent point.”
Cialdini could have stuck to the laboratory, as he’d been trained to do. He could have built a perfectly successful academic career by devising controlled experiments that—hopefully—mirrored real life. But instead, spurred by his students’ questioning, he tried something different.
“I decided to go outside the lab, into the world of influence professionals,” he recalls. He wanted to see the world through the eyes of salespeople, marketers, and fund-raisers—the people who lived and breathed persuasion. But that was easier said than done. Conducting an experiment outside the confines of academia created complicated new challenges. In an early foray, he decided to test whether it would be possible to increase donations to the United Way in a door-to-door solicitation experiment. “It took us about three times longer to do that study than it would to do any study in the laboratory,” he recalls. They needed permission from the police, and to find research assistants willing to knock on strangers’ doors and face the possibility of hostile respondents or guard dogs.
Cialdini persisted, and he carefully set up the controls. “We always randomly assigned people,” he says. “There was the standard way people normally ask for United Way donations, versus a new and different way, and whether someone got the standard or the new request was randomly assigned based on their house number.” For the new version of the request, Cialdini’s team added five simple words: “Even a penny would help.” The result? Contributions doubled. “How can you say no if even a penny is acceptable?” says Cialdini. “What would you have to think of yourself, to be someone who wouldn’t even give a penny? We doubled the number of people who gave, and no one gave a penny, because you don’t give a penny to United Way, you give a donation that’s appropriate. People don’t want to see themselves in a negative light.”
Finally, he had an answer for his students’ question: he had proven what worked in the real world, not just the laboratory. It’s easy to see why others hadn’t tried conducting real-world persuasion experiments before; the logistical hassles were substantial. (Notifying the police? Fending off guard dogs?) But Cialdini’s decision to try it made all the difference. It propelled him to the heights of his profession: these days, he has a roster of blue-chip consulting clients and is a New York Times best-selling author whose work has sold more than two million copies.
The “Big Idea” of bringing influence studies into the field was theoretically available to any psychology researcher. Cialdini surely wasn’t the first professor to be questioned by his students about the lack of real-world data. But he was the one who listened, and who was willing to ask: Is there a better way?
Just as Cialdini reshaped psychology, almost any field can be transformed by challenging basic assumptions. Taxis—and their extensive regulation—have been a fact of life in cities for decades. But the rise of smart phones made it possible to ask, What if you could catch a ride with a regular driver who had spare time on his hands? Today, ride-sharing start-ups like Uber are worth billions of dollars. Spare bedrooms sat empty, until Airbnb created a platform that made short-term rentals easy and appealing, disrupting the hotel industry in the process. And in the past, professionals had to weigh whether their need for administrative help warranted hiring an expensive full-time staffer or locking in a contract with a temporary agency and trusting the luck of the draw. No longer. Online sites like oDesk and Elance allow easy access to short-term administrative help that’s been vetted with transparent reviews and recommendations. We’re no longer subject to the tyranny of “how things have always been done.”
The rewards for challenging the status quo—professional recognition, financial reward, and more—can be substantial, but the path to that happy ending can be winding and dispiriting, so few choose to follow it. Most systems reward those who follow the rules, not those who break them. Professors are praised if they publish frequently in academic journals, and running elaborate experiments that take three times longer than normal is not a good way to get a book out quickly. As we saw with Diane Mulcahy in the introduction, sometimes you get substantial blowback for challenging the underpinnings of an industry; Barry Marshall was treated like a crank because the establishment was convinced, even in the face of medical evidence, that it already knew what caused ulcers. No industry ever welcomes those who challenge its received wisdom, but if you’re willing to risk short-term disapprobation, you can ultimately make a substantial contribution to your field. If he hadn’t questioned assumptions, Cialdini still could have been a successful professor, but he wouldn’t have become a seminal figure who influenced millions. “It seems to me,” he says, “the outcome was worth every ounce of inconvenience.”
ASK YOURSELF:
Just about everyone can see the really big picture. The Internet is becoming more important every day. Mobile computing will decimate desktops. India’s and China’s economies are expanding dramatically. Yes . . . and what does any of it mean for us? We know the wave is coming, but how do we make use of that information? How can we prepare to succeed in the new economy? Too many people pontificate about what’s happening now, and don’t shed any light on the implications moving forward.
If you can find a way to help people prepare for the future—to provide real solutions to upcoming challenges—people will clamor for your practical insights, as Rita Gunther McGrath discovered. A professor at Columbia Business School, she realized the concept of “sustainable competitive advantage” (most famously propounded by the legendary Harvard Business School thinker Michael Porter) had become irrelevant as the pace of change in the corporate world sped up.2 Years ago, the biggest competitive threats were easy to identify: phone companies only had to worry about other phone companies. Now they need to worry about Apple, which began as a computer company, or Google, which began as a search engine. “The phenomenon [of rapid change] is starting to touch companies that people interact with in their daily lives,” such as Nokia and BlackBerry, she says. “It wasn’t supposed to be possible that the number-one brand in the world in phones could become irrelevant in five years.”
As a result, she began to tackle the question of: What’s next? When sustainable competitive advantage no longer exists—when other companies can catch up to your product innovations in a year, rather than in a decade—what’s your move? McGrath began to develop practical answers for companies wrestling with this question. She suggested speeding up budgeting processes (annually is too slow, so make it quarterly) and creating an ongoing innovation pipeline within the company. Citing the example of Apple, whose massively successful iPhone rendered its own iPod obsolete, she recommended that companies might need to proactively put themselves out of business in certain areas in order to strengthen the company overall. By speaking articulately about the end of competitive advantage and creating a road map for how to succeed in the new business environment, McGrath became a recognized thought leader on the subject. Her hard work paid off: in 2013, she was ranked as the sixth most influential business thinker in the world and won the prestigious Thinkers50 Strategy Award.3
It can be tempting—and intellectually easy—to opine about the trends right in front of us. But as McGrath shows, people are hungry for expert guidance as they figure out what these trends mean for their futures. We’ve all heard the warnings about climate change and increasingly erratic weather patterns. But does that mean we should sell our coastal homes and relocate inland? Or should we stay where we are, but invest in retrofits and reinforcements? Or ignore the warnings and hope for the best? Similarly, we’re entering a “flat,” geographically agnostic world. How do we best take advantage of that opportunity? By hiring a foreign virtual assistant and outsourcing our work? Relocating to another country and enjoying the lifestyle benefits of “geoarbitrage”?4 Buying stock in internationally diversified companies? There’s a huge amount of fear and uncertainty about how to respond to our changing circumstances, so if you can provide others with sound, intelligent, actionable advice, your work will be noticed—and appreciated.
So how do you actually know what’s next? One secret is staying close to the ground, where research and innovations take place. You can only learn so much by reading newspapers and getting secondhand information. Instead, it’s your time in the trenches—talking with those on the front lines and seeing things for yourself—that will help you understand. Robert Scoble, a technology opinion leader, also makes a point of getting firsthand information. “Figure out how to get as close to the research labs as possible,” he says. He’s become a recognized authority on subjects as diverse as blogging, Google Glass, and Bluetooth low energy radio not because he invented any of them—he didn’t—but because he knew their creators, avidly followed the technologies’ progress, used them, and wrote and spoke about them. “I’m always looking to meet people who are doing deep research,” he says.
Of course, many industries don’t have research labs per se, but they all have equivalents—places where new insights are most likely to arise. You may want to track certain think tanks or universities. Maybe the end users or frontline staff in your industry can shed light on emerging trends. Track where the most important advances have come from in the past few years, and you’ll understand who you need to be watching to see what’s coming. You’ll have a particular advantage if, like Robert Scoble, you can find out about emerging developments in the early stages, before they become mainstream. Perhaps you could make a point of attending conferences where new innovations are talked about, reading industry journals, or simply keeping in close touch with colleagues who are “in the know.” However you do it, one of the best ways to develop a reputation as an authority in your field is by staying on top of trends, informing others about them, and sharing your take on what they mean and how we should adapt.
ASK YOURSELF:
WHAT CAN YOU DRAW ON FROM YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE?
To find your Big Idea, you don’t need to be a university professor or plugged into the cutting edge of the tech community. It’s also possible to draw on your own life and experiences. Some might assume that you can only become “qualified” to offer Big Ideas through formal study—getting a doctorate or spending years working your way up in an industry. Those are great experiences, but not the only ones that matter. Sometimes it’s the unexpected elements of your background that create a unique mix that enables you to see things just a bit differently from everyone else. When I interviewed Stuart Crainer—Des Dearlove’s partner in the biennial Thinkers50 ranking—for my Forbes blog, he told me that they see particularly fresh insights from thinkers with eclectic backgrounds, such as Wharton professor Adam Grant, who worked as a magician; Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD, who is a psychiatrist by training; and celebrated yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur, who gained fame boating solo around the world and has reinvented herself as a business theorist.5
For Rose Shuman, it was a jarring personal experience that set her on her life course. When she was eighteen, she took a family trip to visit her stepmom’s relatives in Nicaragua. “It was such a jolt to be there, a few years after the Contra War had finished,” she says. “It was not in good condition at the time; they had one street signal in the entire country. Growing up in suburban Maryland, it was more than I was equipped to deal with in terms of making sense of things.” That trip introduced her to international development, and after college, she made it her career.
She was the director of business development for a UK-based social enterprise that specialized in high-tech eyeglasses aimed at the developing world. More than a billion people worldwide don’t have access to an optometrist; Shuman was spending enormous amounts of time in the field, trying to figure out how best to reach them.
One afternoon, she started brainstorming on a related theme: How could you bring the Internet to those same people? We’ve all heard about the promise of laptops for the poor. But Shuman knew from her travels that this still left many who could likely never take advantage of the technology. “First, they have to learn to read,” she says. “Then they need electricity, and to be able to keep their computer in a safe place, and to have an Internet connection. They need to learn to use the computer, and it has to be in a language they know, which there’s probably not much of on the Internet—so they’d have to learn a new language. And then they’d have to browse, and maybe something good will happen. That’s an enormous number of steps. So how do you collapse and get rid of those steps?”
She spent about four hours hashing out an idea in her notebook, inspired by the public call boxes you might see on a university campus or at a transit station. What if people could connect through a call box with someone who spoke their local language and was sitting in front of a computer, ready to look things up and answer questions? “The last connection would be through voice, so people would never even have to grasp the abstract concept of the Internet,” says Shuman. “But you could bring the benefits of it to them right away.”
That was the beginning of the Question Box project, a nonprofit initiative now operating in India and sub-Saharan Africa. “It took four hours to conceptualize, and seven years to implement and execute,” she says. In the process, she’s been named a TED fellow, profiled in The New York Times, and lectures at the USC Marshall School of Business.
Users—ranging from students to farmers to orphaned children—ask any question they like, from “Who is the richest man in the world?” to agricultural commodity prices. Shuman’s favorite question, she says, was “Did the pyramids ever move?” Fundamentally, she says, the Question Box is a “livelihood enhancement device”—a way to bring the promise of the Internet, and the world’s information, to people who would otherwise be shut out.
On one hand, Shuman’s story appears to be the ultimate, Archimedes-like flash of “Big Idea” inspiration. In one electrifying four-hour brainstorming session, she mapped out a vision for her life’s work. But she couldn’t have developed the idea without the inspiration of her teenage family trip to Nicaragua, or the intensive on-the-ground research she’d done in developing countries. And the idea, great though it was, wasn’t sufficient on its own. It’s required nearly a decade of subsequent work to implement it around the world.
Outsiders often wonder at Big Ideas: It must have taken a genius to have come up with something like that! Of course, the thought leaders profiled are all smart people, but developing a Big Idea doesn’t require genius. What’s required are skills that many professionals already have—the ability to ask good questions, to challenge assumptions, and to listen to your gut instinct that alerts you when the rest of the world is overlooking something. Ultimately, it requires hard work and patience, as you work to spread and actualize your Big Idea.
In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson talks about the power of the “slow hunch.” Some of the best ideas take time, even years, to percolate. Charles Darwin, for instance, posited rough versions of the theory of evolution in his journal for months before it finally coalesced in his mind. For many of us, our Big Idea is an iterative process—refining a concept, or answering new questions that arise in the course of our work. Because of your unique experiences, you already see things differently from anyone else. Pay attention to what’s in front of you—whether it’s a call box or the beak of a finch—and let it suggest new ideas and directions for your work. If you really look, and really listen, you can see things in a new way.
ASK YOURSELF: