Find Innovation Where You Least Expect It
by Tony McCaffrey and Jim Pearson
ON THE EVENING of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sunk two hours and 40 minutes later. Of its 2,200 passengers and crew, only 705 survived, plucked out of 16 lifeboats by the Carpathia. Imagine how many more might have lived if crew members had thought of the iceberg as not just the cause of the disaster but a lifesaving solution. The iceberg rose high above the water and stretched some 400 feet in length. The lifeboats might have ferried people there to look for a flat spot. The Titanic itself was navigable for a while and might have been able to pull close enough to the iceberg for people to scramble on. Such a rescue operation was not without precedent: Some 60 years before, 127 of 176 passengers emigrating from Ireland to Canada saved themselves in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by climbing aboard an ice floe.
It’s impossible to know if this rescue attempt would have worked. At the least it’s an intriguing idea—yet surprisingly difficult to envision. If you were to ask a group of executives, even creative product managers and marketers, to come up with innovative scenarios in which all the Titanic’s passengers could have been saved, they would very likely have the same blind spot as the crew. The reason is a common psychological bias—called functional fixedness—that limits a person to seeing an object only in the way in which it is traditionally used. In a nautical context, an iceberg is a hazard to be avoided; it’s very hard to see it any other way.
When it comes to innovation, businesses are constantly hampered by functional fixedness and other cognitive biases that cause people to overlook elegant solutions hidden in plain sight. We have spent years investigating how innovative designs can be built by harnessing the power of the commonly overlooked. We have identified techniques and tools to help overcome cognitive traps and solve problems in innovative ways—whether conceiving new products, finding novel applications for existing products, or anticipating competitive threats. Using the tools doesn’t require special talents or heroic degrees of creativity; taken together, they form a simple, low-cost, systematic way to spur innovation.
To understand how the tools work, let’s first look at the three cognitive barriers they address.
Functional Fixedness
In the 1930s, the German psychologist Karl Duncker demonstrated the phenomenon of functional fixedness with a famous brainteaser. He gave subjects a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches and asked them to find a way to affix the candle to the wall so that when it was lit, wax would not drip onto the floor. Many people had a hard time realizing that the answer was to empty the box of tacks, attach the candle to the inside of the box with melted wax, and then tack the box to the wall. The box acts as a shelf that supports the candle and catches the dripping wax. Because the box had been presented to subjects as a tack holder, they couldn’t see it any other way.
In similar puzzles—known by cognitive psychologists as “insight problems”—people have trouble seeing that in a pinch a plastic lawn chair could be used as a paddle (turn it over, grab two legs, and start rowing); that a basketball could be deflated, formed into the shape of a bowl, and used to safely carry hot coals from one campsite to another; or that a candlewick could be used to tie things together (scrape the wax away to free the string).
What causes functional fixedness? When we see a common object, we automatically screen out awareness of features that are not important for its use. This is an efficient neurological tactic for everyday life, but it’s the enemy of innovation.
One way to overcome the problem is to change how you describe an object. When told that a candlewick is a string, for instance, almost everyone recognizes that it could be used to tie things together. Our “generic parts technique” is a systematic way to change the way an object is described to avoid unintentionally narrowing people’s conception of it, opening them to more ideas for its uses.
We consider each element of an object in turn and ask two questions: “Can it be broken down further?” and “Does our description imply a particular use?” If the answer to either question is yes, we keep breaking down the elements until they’re described in their most general terms, mapping the results on a simple tree. When an iceberg is described generically as a floating surface 200 feet to 400 feet long, its potential as a lifesaving platform soon emerges. (See the exhibit “Overcoming functional fixedness” for a visualization of the parts of a candle.)
Overcoming functional fixedness
Breaking an object down into its component parts can reveal new uses.
Calling something a “wick” implies its use as a conduit of a flame. Describing it as a “string” strips away a layer of preconceived uses and suggests less common ones. Breaking the string down further into its constituent parts of “fibrous strands” might spark even more uses.
To see if generating generic descriptions bolsters creative thinking, our research team presented two groups of students with eight insight problems that required overcoming the functional fixedness bias in order to solve. We told the members of one group simply to try their best. We taught the other group the generic parts technique and then asked them to use it on the problems. The people in the first group were able to solve, on average, 49% of the problems (just shy of four of them). Those who systematically engaged in creating generic descriptions of their resources were able to solve, on average, 83% (or 6.64) of them.
Design Fixation
Simple insight problems given in a psychology lab can be solved by focusing on only four types of features—materials, size, shape, and parts. But solutions to real-world engineering problems often depend on noticing unusual aspects of a broader range of features. This, as we noted, is very difficult to do.
Promising features for a pouch
If you consider an object’s less obvious characteristics, new purposes may arise. Some features to consider in the case of a candy pouch are:
We studied this phenomenon by asking 15 people to list as many features and associations as they could for a candle, a broom, and a dozen other common objects. We then classified their responses by the type of feature, including its color, shape, material, designed use, and aesthetic properties, along with the emotions it evokes, the type of energy it generates, and the objects it’s commonly paired with. On average, participants overlooked almost 21 of the 32 types of features (about 65%) that we had previously identified for each object.
Why? When handed a product and asked to create a new design or variation on it, people tend to fixate on the features of the current design. This obstacle to novelty is called design fixation. To take a real-world example, when people are shown a sturdy, resealable pouch full of candy and asked to think of a new design that could lead to new uses, they tend to manipulate the types of features used to create the current design—that is, they focus on the width of the base of the pouch or the rigidity of the plastic that makes it stand. To be truly innovative, however, you need to manipulate the features that everyone else has overlooked.
But how do you do that? Just as airline pilots have long used checklists to make sure they don’t skip any necessary steps when preparing for flight, we developed a checklist of types of product features that people tend to overlook. Whether your product is a physical object or an intangible process, we recommend that you develop a checklist of features that were important to your previous and current innovation projects and add to the list with each new project. Teams working on innovation projects can then refer to the list to prompt them to consider features they would probably overlook—thus saving time, effort, and frustration. Examining the pouch of candy with our checklist in mind permitted us to easily uncover many features that could lead to new designs and new uses. First, every pouch sold has something in it. This feature is so obvious that its absence is commonly overlooked. Why not sell empty pouches so that customers can decide what to use them for: jewelry, spare change, nuts and bolts, cosmetics, and so on? Imagine empty pouches next to the sandwich bags, freezer bags, and storage bags in your supermarket. Second, most pouches sold are about the size of your hand. Systematically considering changes to the size triggers new ideas for possible contents. What about selling a gallon of paint in a resealable pouch, for instance? Third, current pouches have one inner compartment. But what might you do with more? You could, say, sell two-compartment pouches for things you want to mix together later: cereal in the top compartment and milk in the bottom, salad in the bottom and dressing in the top, and so on. Fourth, consider the pouch as a container of aroma (or as a guard against it). You could sell a large pouch as a garbage can that reseals to keep in the odor. These are just a few of the new designs that emerge from contemplating a checklist of overlooked features.
Goal Fixedness
Suppose we asked you to think of a way to adhere something to a garbage can. Chances are that like most people, you would think of using glue or tape, both forms of adhesives. But what if we asked you instead to fasten something to the can? Just switching a specific verb like “adhere” to a more general one would most likely prompt you to list a wider range of possibilities: binder clip, paper clip, nail, string, Velcro, and so on. That’s because the way a goal is phrased often narrows people’s thinking. We call this barrier “goal fixedness.” Framing a problem in more general terms can help overcome it.
What’s in a name?
How broadly—or narrowly—you phrase a goal affects how you visualize it.
But it can be hard to determine what constitutes a “more general term.” Is “fasten” more general than “adhere”? A good resource for mapping terms is a thesaurus that makes hierarchical structure explicit by identifying hyponyms—more-specific synonyms—for them. For example, the online thesaurus WordNet indicates that there are least 61 ways to fasten things—including sew, clamp, chain, garter, strap, hook, staple, belt, screw, wire, buckle, cement, tack, joggle, button, and rivet. Each describes the concept of fastening one thing to another in a slightly different way and gives rise to diverse solutions. “Adhere,” by contrast, has only four hyponyms.
Action words, the centerpiece of most goals, often have hyponyms. Each hyponym hints at a more specific way to achieve the goal. There are 172 for the verb “remove,” 50 for “guide,” 46 for “transport,” 115 terms for “separate,” and—perhaps surprisingly— only 24 for the seemingly very general term “mix.”
Of course, a goal consists of more than just a verb. The verb expresses what sort of change you’re after, but nouns express what needs changing, and prepositional phrases express important constraints and relationships between things. Put them all together, and almost any goal can be expressed as a verb (fasten), a noun (something), and a prepositional phrase (to a garbage can). Try it: Increase sales in Massachusetts, reduce vibrations in skis, and so on. By putting your goal in this format and playing with the hyponyms of each of its parts, you can explore diverse approaches to your problem in a simple and cost-effective way.
Here’s how the approach worked when one of us (Jim) applied it to the real-world goal to reduce concussions in football. First he dropped the prepositional phrase “in football” from consideration and focused on the verb and noun: “reduce concussions.” To break free of hidden assumptions, he used WordNet to rephrase the goal in as many different ways as possible: lessen trauma, weaken crash, soften jolt, reduce energy, absorb energy, minimize force, exchange forces, substitute energy, oppose energy, repel energy, lessen momentum, and so on. Using Google, he performed searches such as “concussions lessen trauma” to see which ways of phrasing the goal had been heavily explored already and which ones were underexplored.
Jim found that in the context of concussions, the phrase “repel energy” had relatively few search results—a sign that the solution it implied might have been overlooked. One way to repel energy is through magnets, and this suggested a possible approach: Make each helmet magnetic with the same pole so that two helmets would repel each other when in close proximity. Results from initial tests showed that when the helmets were about to collide, they decelerated, and because of their circular shape, they tended to glance off each other, as two magnetic billiard balls would, rather than smashing head-on. Several physicists have verified the plausibility of this approach for significantly reducing the force during helmet collisions.
We began the patenting process for our solution, but our lawyer discovered that someone had submitted the same idea just weeks earlier. We tip our hat to that person.
Visualizing Innovative Thinking
At its most basic level, problem solving consists of two connected activities: framing a goal and combining resources to accomplish it. Each variation of the goal, and every discovery of a “hidden” feature of an available resource, can suggest a different course to take. Our approach involves mapping the relationships among all the possibilities in a simple graph, somewhat analogous to a decision tree.
Starting with the goal at the top, we represent each refinement of the goal as a vector pointing downward. The available resources are placed at the bottom, with their features extending upward. Interactions among the resources and their features extend further toward the top. When the two sets of vectors connect, we have a “solution path.” A solution path can be built by working from the top down, from the bottom up, or by switching back and forth between considering the goal and thinking about the resources.
This approach is an effective alternative to traditional brainstorming sessions for group innovation work, because it allows people to play to their strengths: Strategically oriented people can focus on refining the goal, while those more familiar with technologies and production processes can begin with the resources. We call this approach brainswarming—a nod to the concept of swarm intelligence. As people contribute to the growing graph, their activity resembles a swarm of insects.
To understand how this works, let’s return to the problem facing the passengers on the Titanic. We’ll start with the goal “save passengers.” The most obvious resources are the lifeboats. The simplest application of the resources to achieve the goal is “put people in the lifeboats.” Thus, we begin with a straight line (see the exhibit “Dominant survival strategy on the Titanic”).
Dominant survival strategy on the Titanic
The first step in discovering how resources could be used to reach a goal is to map the most obvious solution.
Next, we find different ways to phrase the goal to bring out different solutions. For instance, slightly different goals would be “keep people warm and breathing” and “keep people out of the water.” Let’s look more closely at one of the options: keep people out of the water. One way is to place them on floating things—not just lifeboats—which might spark a fuller consideration of the resources at hand. You might remember that wood floats, for instance, suggesting that wooden tables might have been of help. Planks, or perhaps doors, from the ship might have been placed between the lifeboats to hold more people out of the water.
Overlooked strategies for saving Titanic passengers
Find new ways to name the goal, and new resources may present themselves.
Moving from floating things to even more-general considerations of buoyancy might bring to mind the many steamer trunks on board. Tying a set of trunks together to produce another sort of makeshift floating platform might have been enough to support several people directly or to provide a foundation upon which to build a more secure platform of wooden planks.
It was estimated that as many as 40 cars were on board. That means 160 tires and inner tubes (not to mention spare tires) were at passengers’ disposal. Tying together rubber tires and inner tubes might conceivably have created a floating raft on which wooden boards could have been placed. And of course, the iceberg itself is a giant floating thing.
On that April night in 1912, none of these ideas might have worked, particularly since it took so long for people to understand the peril they were in. But the point of such an exercise is not to discover the “right solution”; it is to uncover as many connections between the goal and the widest view of the features of available resources as possible so that people look beyond the obvious.
The goal of the brainswarming graph, therefore, is to distill the problem-solving process to its most basic components and show how they are all related to one another. People do not have to remember all the components under consideration, because the graph shows them in a glance. This systematic approach takes some of the mystery out of innovation.
In our research, we are discovering that barriers to innovation are like gravity—pervasive, predictable, and not all that strong. There are many ways to overcome them, but the simplest and easiest path is to help your innovators notice what they’re overlooking. Often it’s right in front of their eyes.
Originally published in December 2015. Reprint R1512F