A More Beautiful Question (18 page)

A growing body of research describes what happens when we allow the unconscious mind to work on a problem. Writing recently on the site Big Think, Sam McNerney pulled together a number
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of recent studies showing that sleeping can help people to perform better at solving difficult problems requiring a creative solution. (McNerney quoted an old John Steinbeck line: “A difficult problem at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”)

Similar research exists on daydreaming and its value in producing original, creative ideas. And everyone knows about the clichéd (but only because it’s true) idea-in-the-shower moment. The same neurological forces seem to be at work in all of these instances. The sleeping or relaxed brain cuts off distractions and turns inward, as the right hemisphere becomes more active, leading to periods of greater connectivity.

Some of the same effects can be seen during walks (remember Edwin Land, pacing the grounds of his resort?), long drives, or other activities that distract the mind a little, but not too much. (Watching a movie is too much of a distraction and shuts down creative thinking.)

The neurologist Kounios reports “striking anecdotal evidence” that tinkering or doodling can also induce an inattention that is conducive to having insights. “And it’s possible you may get different results depending on which hand you doodle with,” Kounios says. “Using the left hand may stimulate the brain’s right hemisphere.”

If you’re looking to take a break and simultaneously stimulate connective inquiry, a visit to the museum might be just the ticket. It engages the imagination, yet leaves room for thinking; it offers up as inspiration the many creative connections and smart recombinations that others have produced in the past; and it exposes the visitor to so many ideas and influences that it provides abundant raw material for making new mental connections. (The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, “Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.”)
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The point about connective inquiry—and the What If stage in general—is that when you take on a challenging question, if you spend time with that question, your mind will keep working on it. This doesn’t mean there aren’t conscious ways to trigger What If ideas, including some of the exercises to follow. But be willing to slow down, go quiet, and let the question incubate. If nothing else, this provides a handy excuse when it’s time to get out of bed in the morning: “Give me another ten minutes, I need to do some more connective inquiry.”

What if your ideas are wrong and your socks don’t match?

If sleeping or daydreaming doesn’t yield enough lightbulb ideas and What If queries, there are ways to encourage more of this kind of thinking. One way is by purposely trying to “think wrong.”

This idea’s roots can be found
⁵⁰
in the work of the creativity guru Edward de Bono; more recently, it has been embraced by innovation firms such as Frog Design and the designers Stefan Sagmeister and John Bielenberg. All are practitioners of divergent thinking—which calls for trying to generate a wide range of ideas, including offbeat ones, in the early stages of creative problem solving.

This is not easy to do because the conscious brain is resistant to wide-open idea generation and far-reaching connective inquiry. The mind is inclined to try to solve problems by doing the same things over and over, following familiar and well-worn neural paths.

The idea, then, is to force your brain off those predictable paths by purposely “thinking wrong”—coming up with ideas that seem to make no sense, mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together. Proponents of this approach say it has a jarring effect on creative thinking; in neurological terms, when you force yourself to confront contrary thoughts or upside-down ideas, you “jiggle the synapses” in the brain,
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in the words of author and adult learning expert Kathleen Taylor. In so doing, you may loosen some of the old, stale neural connections and make it easier to form new ones.

John Bielenberg, a designer best known
⁵²
for running an experimental problem-solving workshop known as Project M, has been teaching people to “think wrong” for about two decades. As Bielenberg explains it, truly gifted innovators and creative geniuses have no difficulty connecting ideas in surprising and unusual ways. “Picasso and Steve Jobs were natural ‘wrong thinkers,’” he says, “but the rest of us have to work at it.”

To that end, Bielenberg uses exercises in his workshop that require participants to make “random connections” between unrelated ideas, or even just words. Here’s a simple word exercise, and all you need is a dictionary: Choose a high number and a low number (say 342 and 5); go to page 342 in the dictionary and find the fifth word. Try to come up with ideas based around that word; take the word apart and rearrange letters to find other words; then repeat the process to come up with a second word, and see if you can form an interesting combination with those two words; you can even advance to a three-word combination if you like.

A number of creative artists use word-combination exercises like this to get their creative juices flowing. It’s become so popular that you don’t even need a dictionary anymore—the Idea Generator app will randomly select and combine three words for you when you shake your smartphone.

In his workshop and with some of his clients, Bielenberg takes this random-combination exercise up a notch—for example, by asking a bank to consider offbeat What If scenarios in which their business is combined with another, completely unrelated one, as in,
What if your bank was run by the makers of
Sesame Street
? Would there be puppets in place of tellers?

There are lots of variations on the exercises Bielenberg does. Some years back I attended a workshop run by the creativity consultant Tom Monahan,
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who teaches an exercise he calls 180-degree thinking—which is “thinking wrong” with a different name. In his exercises, Monahan encourages participants to come up with ideas for things that don’t work—an oven that can’t cook, a car that doesn’t move. It sounds crazy, but when you do the exercise, interesting things can emerge; you come up with offbeat, alternate uses for the oven or the car.

But the goal of such exercises is not necessarily to generate lasting ideas on the spot; if you do come up with an idea worth pursuing, that’s a bonus. The real point is to begin to train the mind to think differently when confronted with a problem or a challenge—to consider a wide range of possibilities, including offbeat ones, and to connect ideas that don’t normally go together. It’s an attempt to develop and strengthen the What If muscle.

As John Seely Brown noted, What If questions tend to free up the imagination because they allow you to “see things as other than they currently are”—they allow you to shift reality, if only briefly.

Luke Williams, a former creative director
⁵⁴
at Frog Design and author of the book
Disrupt
, talks about ways that What If questions can be used to “invert” reality. If the current reality is that restaurants provide people with a menu upon arrival, the inverse hypothesis is
What if a restaurant provided customers with a menu only when they leave?
Williams has worked with clients who have used hypothetical questioning to challenge the most basic assumptions about customer behavior. He cites the example of Jonah Staw, who, over dinner with friends, was exchanging wild, implausible business ideas with others in the group. Someone asked,
What if some company started selling socks that didn’t match?
This classic example of “thinking wrong” could have come straight out of a workshop by Bielenberg or Monahan. Today, the company LittleMissMatched—which sells colorful, mismatched pairs of socks to young girls who consider it a fun fashion statement—is a thriving business.

What if prisons had no walls?
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There are many differing views on how to reform prisons, but on one point there’s a consensus: conventional incarceration is not working, as evidenced by high recidivism rates and soaring costs. In search of an alternative way of dealing with prisoners that might cut crime, reduce costs, and be more humane, one interesting question being asked is:
What if prisons could be turned inside out, with the convicts released instead of incarcerated?
New technology—in particular, GPS tracking devices—offers the possibility that non-violent offenders could be released from prison with enhanced high-tech supervision via wearable devices that broadcast prisoners’ real-time locations and flag any backsliding consistently and immediately (two failures of current parole systems). The system has already been tested successfully in Hawaii; if adopted on a broader scale, as the
Atlantic
notes, it would empty half of our broken, expensive prisons in one fell swoop.

We can use What If questions to erase the past and make a fresh start. One of the favorite questions of Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia is
What if we could start with a blank page?
—a question that works as well in personal relationships or life choices as it does in business. We can also use What If questions to remove the possibility of failure simply by asking,
What if we could not fail?
We can use them to envision doing the impossible.

At some point, however, we must contend with reality. An innovation or creative breakthrough can start with thinking wrong, but along the way impossibilities must be made possible, as we move from speculation to something more tangible—-something that exists in the real world. Divergent, anything-goes thinking must begin to converge around what’s doable. For this to happen, What If questions must give way to How questions.

How . . .

How can we give form to our questions?

Unconscious creativity, wherein all of those mental connections come together to form What If possibilities as you daydream or sleep, is a welcome gift. But there comes a time to awake and go to work. This was a problem for Gauri Nanda.

She was having trouble getting out
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of bed in the morning. She started with Why:
Why am I oversleeping, why isn’t my alarm clock getting me up?
The answer to that was simple: She’d gotten into the habit (like many of us) of hitting the snooze button again and again. Nanda was a design student at MIT with a knack for problem solving, so she analyzed her situation and asked,
What if it was harder to turn off the alarm clock? What if your alarm clock forced you to get out of bed and chase after it?

This led to a question that could be considered a classic in connective inquiry:
What if I put wheels on it?
Nanda had a vision of creating the first alarm clock on wheels. Her What If question set things in motion—but then again, anyone can speculate about putting wheels on something. How do you actually put them on?

Nanda began by doing something that tends to be a starting point of the How stage—she solicited feedback on her speculative idea, asking a few trusted friends what they thought of the notion of an alarm clock on wheels that would roll off a night table and force you to chase it down to turn it off. “They laughed,” Nanda said, “but in a good way.” They also said it was the kind of thing they might buy.

Nanda made her first test versions of a rolling clock using materials she had handy, combined with what she could borrow from the lab at her college. Parts from LEGO toys, including LEGO motors and wheels, formed her early versions of what she called the Clocky. To create a protective covering for the clock, to cushion its regular fall from a night table to the floor, Nanda used shag carpeting. “It almost made it look like a furry animal,” she recalls.

While testing her invention, Nanda realized “this was going to be much harder than I thought.” Getting the clock to roll was easy; enabling it to survive those suicide dives off the night table was another matter. “It’s an unusual thing to expect a clock to go through,” she acknowledged.
How might that shock be absorbed?
Nanda used reinforced electronics inside the clock, along with bigger wheels designed to take the brunt of the fall. These lessons were learned through repeated testing—dropping the clock over and over to see how it held up. Nanda also realized during testing that the runaway clock moved predictably and thus was easy to catch. She had to figure out how to make it more elusive. She put in a microprocessor that enabled the clock to move at different speeds, following various routes.

Nanda’s quirky project drew the attention
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of technology blogs, which generated Internet buzz that led to an invitation for Nanda to show her still-unfinished invention on a television program. Now Nanda faced the challenge of how to make her rough prototype ready for prime time. Visible wires connecting the clock to a circuit board had to go. The shag-carpet covering needed to be replaced, eventually by a tough silicon skin.

The Clocky cleaned up well, and after a few media appearances, customer interest in the product was growing. Thus Nanda now had to figure out
How do we gear up production? How do we handle the orders? How do we launch a full-fledged business?