Creative People Must Be Stopped by David A Owens Read Free Book Online Page A

that instead of consciously considering what strategy to adopt, we tend to revert to approaches that have worked for us in the past. As a financial analyst, you may start by opening a spreadsheet; as a marketing manager, you begin by constructing a survey; as a designer, you reach for your sketchpad. Up to a point, this tendency is perfectly rational—after all, the strategies have worked for us before. The problem with falling back on them too quickly is twofold. First, our “proven” strategies may not be optimal for the new problem we are facing. Second, settling too easily on a strategy, even a good one, may cause us to overlook the insights we would gain if we tried alternative approaches.
    To illustrate the first difficulty, imagine a very large sheet of paper about the thickness of a standard sheet of copy paper or a page in this book. Now imagine folding that piece of paper in half, leaving you with two layers. Now fold it in half again, and you will have a stack that is four layers thick. Keep imagining folding that paper on itself in the same way fifty times. Now estimate how thick the stack of paper will be. Before reading any further, note your answer.
    If you are like most people, your tendency will be to answer this kind of question using a visual problem-solving approach. Not only is our visual imagination easily available, but I’ve formulated the question in a manner that suggests that you can solve it that way (“imagine a very large sheet of paper ...). Common answers I get to this question range from three inches to fifty feet, though occasionally someone will suggest one or two miles. However, a significantly better estimate is arrived at by using mathematical reasoning and a calculator as your problem-solving tools. The better answer is found by multiplying the thickness of a single piece of paper, about 0.1 millimeters, times the number of layers you will end up with (2 raised to the power of 50)—in equation form: thickness = 0.1 mm × 2 50 .
    Many people don’t believe the answer: 113,000,000 kilometers, or 70,000,000 miles—about three-quarters of the way to the sun! At this point you may feel that there must be some mistake in the way the problem was presented or in the way I calculated the solution. But there isn’t. The mistake lies in our not consciously choosing a problem-solving strategy that fits the type of problem we are facing.
    Even when we are deliberate about choosing a strategy that fits the problem, we may constrain our ability to generate solutions by failing to consider alternative approaches. Unlike the paper-folding problem, many problems have multiple possible answers, some of which are more powerful or cost-effective than others. Unless we try alternative problem-solving strategies, we may never discover or invent the optimal solutions we are seeking.
    The recent turmoil in the music industry illustrates the point. In response to widespread music sharing that was enabled by Napster starting in 1999, record companies came to rely on law enforcement as their one solution to the problem of a free-for-all of music copying. Their approach was to threaten and then sue those they felt they could prove to be illegally sharing. By mid-2006 they had sued more than twenty thousand music fans, many who were their most loyal customers and who were otherwise law-abiding citizens (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2006). Their failure to consider other approaches to the problem gave Steve Jobs the opening he needed to step in with his own solution and to found (and own) the iTunes Store.
    Prematurely Narrowing the Range of Possible Solutions
    As I’ve just noted, we often have powerful incentives (cognitive and otherwise) to settle prematurely on a problem-solving strategy. A similar constraint can constrict the depth and range of possible solutions that make it to the assessment phase of our project.
    During workshops, I ask people how many ideas a team