Imagine: How Creativity Works (18 page)

At the time, Handler’s husband was an executive at the Mattel toy company. When Ruth suggested that the company create a doll that looked like an adult, he immediately rejected the idea as unfeasible and silly. Little girls didn’t want to play with grownups! Besides, what did Ruth know about the toy business? She was just a mother. And so the proposal was shelved; Mattel continued to produce its line of paper dolls, all of which looked like infants. It was a vacation that made all the difference. In the summer of 1956, the Handler family traveled to Europe for the first time. Ruth was wandering around a small town in Switzerland when she noticed a strange-looking doll in the window of a cigarette shop. The doll was eleven inches tall and had platinum-blond hair, long legs, and an ample bosom. Her name was Bild Lilli. Although Handler didn’t know it at the time — she didn’t speak German — the doll was actually a sex symbol, sold mainly to middle- aged men. (That’s why the doll was only stocked in bars and tobacco stores.) But Handler didn’t get the joke — she took one look at the blond Bild Lilli and saw a perfect toy for young girls.

When the family returned home, Handler continued to lobby her husband to build an Americanized version of the Bild Lilli. The European prototype was ultimately persuasive. After watching young girls play with the adult toy, the executives at Mattel realized that Ruth’s proposal had tremendous potential. And so, in March of 1959, Mattel released the Barbie doll. Although the toy was initially a flop — Sears refused to carry a children’s product with “feminine curves” — sales steadily increased. Before long, the plastic toy became a cultural icon, beloved by girls, burned by feminists, and immortalized by Warhol. Mattel has since sold more than a billion Barbies — a salacious German figurine is now one of the most popular toys in the world.

Handler only saw the potential of the Bild Lilli doll because she was an outsider. If she’d spoken German or been a local — if she’d grasped the bawdy backstory — then she never would have considered the doll for her daughter. She would have disregarded it as a tasteless product, yet more evidence that an adult doll wasn’t feasible. And if she’d been a toy executive, the idea probably wouldn’t have occurred to her in the first place, since everyone knew that little girls want to play with babies. But Ruth Handler didn’t know any of this; her misunderstanding led to the insight. She was just a mother lost in a foreign country, and that’s why she invented the Barbie.

3.

The outsider problem affects everyone. Although we live in a world that worships insiders, it turns out that gaining such expertise takes a toll on creativity. To struggle at anything is to become too familiar with it, memorizing details and internalizing flaws. It doesn’t matter whether you’re designing a city park or a shoot-’emup video game, whether you’re choreographing a ballet or a business conference: you must constantly try to forget what you already know.

This is one of the central challenges of writing. A writer has to read his sentences again and again. (Such are the inefficiencies of editing.) The problem with this process is that he very quickly loses the ability to see his prose as a reader and not as the writer. He knows exactly what he’s trying to say, but that’s because he’s the one saying it. In order to construct a clear sentence or a coherent narrative, he needs to edit as if he knows nothing, as if he’s never seen these words before.

This is an outsider problem — the writer must become an outsider to his own work. When he escapes from the privileged position of the author, he can suddenly see all those imprecise clauses and unnecessary flourishes; he can feel the weak parts of the story and the slow spots in the prose. That’s why the novelist Zadie Smith, in an essay on the craft of writing, stresses the importance of putting aside one’s prose and allowing the passage of time to work its amnesiac magic. When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second — put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal — but even three months will do . . . You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s read it in twelve different versions. It’s the head of a smart stranger, who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

Why is it so important to get some distance from one’s prose? Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of reading and editing. It turns out that the brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, each of which is activated in a different context. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our literacy. The process is straightforward: You see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic meaning. According to Dehaene, this ventral pathway isturned on by “routinized, familiar passages” of prose and relies on a bit of cortex known as the visual word form area (VWFA). When reading a simple sentence or a paragraph full of clichés, you’re almost certainly relying on this ventral neural highway. As a result, the act of reading seems effortless and easy. You don’t have to think about the words on the page. 

But the ventral route is not the only way to read. The second reading pathway — known as the dorsal stream — is turned on whenever you’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, perhaps because of an obscure word, an awkward subclause, or bad handwriting. (In his experiments, Dehaene activates this pathway by rotating the letters or filling the prose with errant punctuation.) Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once an individual learns how to read, Dehaene’s research demonstrates that even literate adults are still occasionally forced to make sense of texts. Once that happens, they become more conscious of the words on the page.

This suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica are read quickly and effortlessly, while unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more work, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. The same principle might also apply to one’s own writing: when you read something that you’ve just composed, everything is ventral. You’re so familiar with the words that you don’t really notice them — it’s literacy at its most automatic. The end result is that all writerly mistakes become invisible, since the brain isn’t paying close attention; the bad prose has been internalized. In contrast, if you follow Zadie Smith’s advice and give your sentences time to be forgotten — if you start to read as an outsider, and not as the author — then you’ll rely more on the dorsal stream. This allows you to think more critically about the words on the page. You suddenly notice what you previously ignored, all those pointless metaphors and pretentious adjectives, those redundant sentences and boring paragraphs. At long last, you know how it needs to be.

Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new. In fact, the only way to remain creative over time — to not be undone by our expertise — is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don’t fully understand. This is the lesson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the nineteenth-century Romantic poet. One of his favorite pastimes was attending public chemistry lectures in London, watching eminent scientists set elements on fire. When Coleridge was asked why he spent so much time watching these pyrotechnic demonstrations, he had a ready reply. “I attend the lectures,” Coleridge said, “so that I can renew my stock of metaphors.” He knew that we see the most when we are on the outside looking in.

TOGETHER

Ch. 6
 
THE POWER OF Q

Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
— Anton Ego, in Pixar’s Ratatouille

The source of every new idea is the same. There is a network of neurons in the brain, and then the network shifts. All of a sudden, electricity flows in an unfamiliar pattern, a shiver of current across a circuit board of cells. But sometimes a single network isn’t enough. Sometimes a creative problem is so difficult that it requires people to connect their imaginations together; the answer arrives only if we collaborate. That’s because a group is not just a collection of individual talents. Instead, it is a chance for those talents to exceed themselves, to produce something greater than anyone thought possible. When the right mixture of people come together and when they collaborate in the right way, what happens can often feel like magic. But it’s not magic. There is a reason why some groups are more than the sum of their parts.

Furthermore, there’s evidence that group creativity is becoming more necessary. Because we live in a world of very hard problems — all the low-hanging fruit is gone — many of the most important challenges exceed the capabilities of the individual imagination. As a result, we can find solutions only by working with other people.

Ben Jones, a professor of management at the Kellogg Business School, has demonstrated this by analyzing trends in “scientific production.” The most profound trend he’s observed is a sharp shift toward scientific teamwork. By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed papers and 2.1 million patents from the last fifty years, Jones was able to show that more than 99 percent of scientific subfields have experienced increased levels of teamwork, with the size of the average team increasing by about 20 percent per decade. While the most cited studies in a field used to be the product of lone geniuses — think Einstein or Darwin — Jones has demonstrated that the best research now emerges from groups.

It doesn’t matter if the researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics: science papers produced by multiple authors are cited more than twice as often as those authored by individuals. This trend was even more apparent when it came to “home-run papers” — those publications with at least a thousand citations — which were more than six times as likely to come from a team of scientists.

The reason is simple: the biggest problems we need to solve now require the expertise of people from different backgrounds who bridge the gaps between disciplines. Unless we learn to share our ideas with others, we will be stuck with a world of seemingly impossible problems. We can either all work together or fail alone.

But how should we work together? What’s the ideal strategy for group creativity? Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, has spent his career trying to answer these crucial questions, and he’s done it by studying Broadway musicals. Although Uzzi grew up in New York City and attended his fair share of productions as a kid, he doesn’t exactly watch A Chorus Line in his spare time.

“I like musicals just fine, but that’s not why I study them,” he says.

Instead, Uzzi spent five years analyzing thousands of old musicals because he sees the art form as a model of group creativity. “Nobody creates a Broadway musical by themselves,” Uzzi says. “The production requires too many different kinds of talent.” He then rattles off a list of the diverse artists that need to work together: the composer has to write songs with a lyricist and librettist, and the choreographer has to work alongside the director, who is probably getting notes from the producers.

Uzzi wanted to understand how the relationships of these team members affected the end result. Was it better to have a group composed of close friends who had worked together before, or did total strangers make better theater? What is the ideal form of creative collaboration? To answer these questions, Uzzi undertook an epic study of nearly every musical produced on Broadway between 1877 and 1990, analyzing the teams behind 2,258 different productions. (To get a full list of collaborators, he often had to track down dusty old Playbills in theater basements.) He charted the topsy-turvy relationships of thousands of different artists, from Cole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The first thing Uzzi discovered was that the people who worked on Broadway were part of an extremely interconnected social network: it didn’t take many links to get from the librettist of Guys and Dolls to the choreographer of Cats. Uzzi then came up with a way to measure the density of these connections for each musical, a designation he called Q. In essence, the amount of Q reflects the “social intimacy” of people working on the play, with higher levels of Q signaling a greater degree of closeness. For instance, if a musical was being developed by a team of artists who had worked together several times before — this is common practice on Broadway, since producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky — that musical would have an extremely high Q. In contrast, a musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q.

This metric allowed Uzzi to explore the correlation between levels of Q and the success of the musical. “Frankly, I was surprised by how big the effect was,” Uzzi says. “I expected Q to matter, but I had no idea it would matter this much.” According to the data, the relationships between collaborators was one of the most important variables on Broadway. The numbers tell the story: When the Q was low, or less than 1.7, the musicals were much more likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “After all, you can’t just put a group of people who have never met before in a room and expect them to make something great. It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” However, when the Q was too high (above 3.2) the work also suffered. The artists were so close that they all thought in similar ways, which crushed theatrical innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the 1920s. Although the decade produced many talented artists — Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Oscar Hammerstein II — it was also full of theatrical failures. (Uzzi’s data revealed that 87 percent of musicals produced during the decade were utter flops, which is far above the historical norm.) The problem, he says, is that all of these high-profile artists fell into the habit of collaborating with only their friends. “Broadway [during the 1920s] had some of the biggest names ever,” says Uzzi. “But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity. All the great talent ended up producing a bunch of mediocre musicals.” What kind of team, then, led to the most successful musicals?