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

in their organization might expect to generate in response to an important problem. The usual response is on the order of “five or ten good ones.” You can imagine the silence that ensues when I insist they should work with a minimum of seventy-five relevant ideas and ideally one hundred— per person .
    At that point someone is likely to say something like “Look, we don’t need such a huge number of ideas—we just need one really good one. After all, we can really only implement one idea, anyway.” True enough, but limiting the solution space in order to get to that one good idea is self-defeating. If you restrict your effort to coming up with only ten possible ideas, the chances are good that number eleven (or number twenty, or number ninety-nine) is the one you’re looking for. Sometimes we think it is too costly to invest time generating and critiquing so many ideas early in the process. What we forget is how much more expensive it is to try to implement ideas that aren’t the best we could possibly have generated.
    Overcoming Intellection Constraints
    Innovation problems, almost by definition, require fresh ways of thinking. To solve these kinds of problems, we need conscious strategies for keeping our cognitive habits from becoming a crippling constraint.
    Reformulate the Problem
    Problems are rarely given to us in a way that makes them easy to solve; that’s why we call them problems. There can be hard work in reworking the problem into a form that does make it easier to solve. One strategy is to seek other perspectives on our problem, ones that might not view it as a problem at all or that might even consider it an asset. Another is to consider the problem as simply a clue that points the way to a better solution.
    Consider the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which was founded on an eclectic group of artifacts, at first collected more because the objects were interesting than because of their academic curatorial value. In making the transition from being a gallery to becoming known as a world-class museum, the curatorial staff arrived at the point where the most beautiful and important artifacts they might have liked to acquire were simply too expensive.
    In most organizations, this problem would be defined as “how to increase the budget so that the museum could compete with other world-class museums for those rare, ‘crowd-drawing’ items.” However, the board and staff of the Walters ended up on a different course that began with looking at the problem differently. With a mission that has them striving “to create a place where people of every background can be touched by art” ( http://thewalters.org/museum_art_baltimore/themuseum_mission.aspx ), they reformulated the problem to one of seeking relevance for their clientele consisting of “people of every background,” rather than one of increasing the budget to acquire the rarest items. Seeing the problem in this way, they decline to take part in bidding wars for rare, expensive, and “most important” treasures. Instead, they focus on those “unimportant” artifacts overlooked by big museums with large budgets. So, rather than blow the total annual acquisitions budget on a single jewel-encrusted goblet from the Middle Ages, they might buy a decidedly average goblet, then an average knife and fork, an average plate, and an average table and chair. The result, something that other museums can’t match: one of the few complete place settings from the Middle Ages. From it we can learn a lot more about the experience of day-to-day life of ordinary people far in the past than we can from one king’s fabulous cup.
    Think of Spence Silver’s behavior in this light. Rather than seeing his adhesive as a failure, he turned the problem on its head: the task wasn’t how to avoid making a bad adhesive, but rather how to make a “bad” adhesive insanely useful.
    Use