I use this blog to gather information and thoughts about invention and innovation, the subjects I've been teaching at Stanford University Continuing Studies Program since 2005.
The current course is Principles of Invention and Innovation (Summer '17).
Our book "Scalable Innovation" is now available on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Scalable-Innovation-Inventors-Entrepreneurs-Professionals/dp/1466590971/
(nhl.com) "Freddie[Shero] was the first coach to use team systems," Clarke said.
"Everybody played the same way on the ice. Every player was taught the
same way, even though different players had different roles. And that
was way ahead of hockey's time. Nobody else ever did that. … He was by
far the most progressive coach ever."
Source:nhl.com
One of the hallmarks of system thinking is to approach a problem at two levels: individual element (player) and the system as a whole (team). Shero treated the entire team as a unit, making sure it executes a certain set of game strategies, while other coaches before him focused on the player.
Another example of system thinking would be historical insights into a "new big thing." For example, historian Fernand Braudel, who covers the emergence of capitalism in the 15-18th centures, writes:
To use one of Kula's metaphors, one must keep looking down into the well, into the deepest water, down into material life, which is related to market prices but is not always affected or changed by them. So, any economic history that is not written on two levels-that of the well's rim and that of the depths-runs the risk of being appallingly incomplete. (Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. p. 42).
In our invention system (Scalable Innovation, chapter 9), we use the Three Magicians method to help people develop system thinking by "leveling up", i.e. looking at what they are creating from a different, higher perspective. As Alan Kay famously said, a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
Yesterday, John Markoff, a Senior Science Writer for the New York Times, gave a guest lecture at our Stanford University CSP course "The Greatest Innovations of Silicon Valley" (BUS/SCI 117). He talked about cultural, scientific, and technological developments in the valley that lead to the creation of the modern Personal Computer (PC). Here's one of the fascinating insights from his talk:
We receive a lot of relevant information from fiction: books, movies, blogs, gossip, etc. Memory research shows that even when people know they read fiction they tend to remember as real the "facts" learned from the fiction. The researchers call this "The Illusion of Knowledge." In other words, misleading fictional stories are an effective way to distort one's memories. The effect is due to the ease of recall. That is, facts mentioned in stories are easier to remember and recall; therefore, when asked, we tend to give fictional facts as answers. Paradoxically, slowing down the narrative or highlighting suspicious paragraphs increases the illusion of knowledge.
(source: Fazio and Marsh, 2008)
Now, I understand why people have major misconceptions about inventors and inventions. They acquire the misconceptions from media stories, and the only way to dispel the illusion of knowledge is to write a better story. For example in the 1990s, books about Nikola Tesla managed to improve his public standing relative to Thomas Edison.
References: 1. Elizabeth J Marsh, Michelle L Meade, Henry L Roediger III. Learning Facts from Fiction. Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 49, Issue 4, November 2003, Pages 519-536. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00092-5 2. Andrea N. Eslick, Lisa K. Fazio, and Elizabeth J. Marsh. Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors. MEMORY, 2011, 19 (2), 184-191. DOI:10.1080/09658211.2010.543908 3. LISA K. FAZIO AND ELIZABETH J. MARSH. Slowing presentation speed increases illusions of knowledge. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2008, 15 (1), 180-185 doi: 10.3758/PBR.15.1.180.
4. MARKUS APPEL and TOBIAS RICHTER. Persuasive Effects of Fictional Narratives Increase Over Time. Media Psychology, 10:113–134, 2007. DOI: 10.108/15213260701301194
[This is a rough draft/outline of a section of the book I'm working on. I'm not sure this piece will make it into the book, though. ]
Let's take as a starting point Kahaneman's formula that "success is talent + luck" and "great success is a little more talent + a lot of luck."
It follows that in every highly successful invention we should be able to discover a lot of luck. What kind of luck? What should we be looking for?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines luck as
a: a force that brings good fortune or adversity;
b: the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual;
c: favoring chance.
Definitions a and c are tautological; they won't survive logic analysis. Definition b is closer to what we need because it talks about circumstances that operate independently from an individual and don't contain fuzzy notions like "force" and "fortune." Thus, we can take Kahneman's formula and re-write it as follows:
great success = a little more talent + strong circumstances that operate for the individual.
Finding strong circumstances that help invention should be relatively easy.
Consider the example of Otto Frederick Rohwedder, the inventor of bread slicing machine. He started working on the idea in 1912. In 1916, he sold his jewelry stores and moved back to Davenport, his home town, to work full time on implementation. In 1917, he suffered a major setback [bad luck] when his blueprints and prototypes were destroyed in a fire.
While making a living as a financial agent, Rohwedder continued working on the idea. In 1927, fifteen years after starting the project, he came up with a machine that not only sliced, but also wrapped up the bread. [wrapping is important and it deserves a separate discussion]. In 1928, he built and sold his first machine - customers loved sliced bread.
In 1929, stock market crashes and, to stay afloat financially, Rohwedder sells rights to his technology [again bad luck]. In the meantime, consumer demand for sliced bread persists. In the beginning of the 1930s, Wonder Bread enters the market and by 1933 sales of sliced bread outpace those of unsliced bread. Sliced bread becomes proverbial. During WWII when authorities forbid its sale, the public complains and the authorities are forced to reconsider their decision.
Back to the formula for success. Definitely, Rohwedder has talent. But the sixty-four billion dollar question is, Where's a lot of luck? What are the strong circumstances that operate for the individual?
The answer seems to be, there's no good luck for Rohwedder. He suffers a fire, loses of assets, and faces strong competition. But there's a lot of luck for sliced bread and the bread slicing machine, i.e. his inventions. What are the circumstances that work for them?
Earlier I noted that in 1910, GE introduced first commercially successful toaster. With this information, the start of Rohwedder's quest for sliced bread in 1912 doesn't look accidental anymore. Successful toasters need sliced bread.
Let's follow the toaster thread further. In 1920, Charles P. Strite invents the pop-up toaster with timer. The new design solves two problems: bread slices don't get burned and the toasting process is sped up because heat is applied to both sides at the same time. By 1926, Strite's toaster is a major commercial success. People love the toaster, but slicing bread is a tedious task. Besides, to produce consistent results, the toaster requires uniform slices - something that can't be done consistently by a human. In short, because of the toaster success, there's a lot of demand for regularly sliced bread. The stage for the bread slicing machine is set. The toaster is it's luck, i.e. strong circumstances that favor an individual. If not for the improved toaster, nobody would care for high-performance bread slicing technology.
Two additional considerations. One: From the beginning of the 1900s, electricity becomes common in houses and businesses. In 1904, long-lasting tungsten filament for light bulbs is patented. In 1906, GE patents a process for mass production of tungsten wire for light bulbs. The same wire is used in toasters. Lucky toasters!
Two: In the early 1900s, Henry Ford begins using electric motors in his car factories. With the adoption of his mass manufacturing methods, the electric motor technology is improved dramatically. It is not a coincidence that by the 1930s Rohwedder's bread slicing machine uses electric motor. Lucky machine!
To summarize: First, when we talk about successful invention/innovation, the luck component operates not for an individual, but for his/her invention. Second, luck operates on at least three levels: 1) the invention works. e.g. the bread slicing machine is operational as designed; 2) the invention scales. e.g. the bread slicing machine with its mechanical and electric components can be mass produced; 3) there's a need to scale. e.g. there's a lot of hungry toasters out there in the wild.
STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig discusses how reframing problems can open new approaches to finding solutions. Narrow definition of problems is a danger, says Seelig, and reframing can be a valuable tool in the process of creative thinking. In this clip, Seelig encourages the audience to come up with a new type of nametag, but by reframing the problem to address the real underlying need.
An excellent article in MTR about the demise of Kodak, despite the company's pioneering efforts in digital photography.
In 1997, the stock market valued the company at over $30 billion.
Today Kodak is worth only $265 million.
Kodak also invested extensively in research and development. In fact,
the first electronic camera using a charge-coupled device was invented
by a Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson in 1975, and Kodak in many ways
led early development in digital photography. The company introduced the
first megapixel sensor in 1986, and the QuickTake camera launched by
Apple in 1994 had to a large extent been developed by Kodak. It looked
like a pair of binoculars, stored 32 photos, and could be connected to a
personal computer.
But the limited performance and the high price tag of such cameras
(the QuickTake cost about $800 and a high-end digital news camera ran
$15,000) meant that the market for digital photography was very small,
almost insignificant for a multibillion-dollar company like Kodak.
It's easy to think that Kodak was disrupted by cheap digital cameras. This is less than a half-truth. If there were no web and Facebook (social networking), we would still be printing pictures using Kodak paper and Kodak chemical processes. And, because we'd be taking a lot more pictures, there would be more money for the company than ever before.
The real company that destroyed Kodak was Facebook, not Nikon, Canon, Olympus, and others.
While discussing greatness, S.B. Kaufman cites an article linking latent inhibition and creativity.
In all of our studies and analyses, high IQ, when combined with low LI (Latent Inhibition, the capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant), was associated with increased creative achievement. These results are particularly stunning in the analysis of eminent achievers and high-functioning controls. High IQ clearly appeared to augment the tendency toward high creative achievement characteristic of low-LI individuals. (Carson SH,
It appears that seeing old things as new due to, e.g. changing circumstances, is an important element of creativity. In Buddhism it is called "Beginner's Mind."
The concept of having a fresh look on an old subject may sound obvious, but in reality it is very difficult not to follow headlines screaming about the latest and greatest. For example, in the world of technology what can be more boring than railroads? But look at how high-tech investor Peter Thiel sees Warren Buffet's purchase of a railroad company:
The Warren Buffet rhetorical point is his US$34 billion investment
in late 2009 in a railway, the single biggest investment by Berkshire
Hathaway outside of finance. It is an all-out bet against clean tech. It
was described as a bet on America, but 40 percent of what gets
transported on railroads is coal. You have to look at Buffett's railroad
investments as an all-out bet that clean tech is going to fail.
It's a bet that we're going to send coal to ships in Long Beach and
send it to China to power Chinese factories to send us stuff. That's not
the clean-tech vision of the 21st century.
What we've got here is two high-IQ individuals re-considering seemingly old, irrelevant developments (low LI condition) to draw creative conclusions: 1) buy railroads; 2) don't invest in clean tech.
From an essay by Dan Garner and Philip Tetlock about the depth of our ignorance in forecasts:
Some even persist in using forecasts that are manifestly unreliable, an attitude encountered by the future Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow when he was a young statistician during the Second World War. When Arrow discovered that month-long weather forecasts used by the army were worthless, he warned his superiors against using them. He was rebuffed. “The Commanding General is well aware the forecasts are no good,” he was told. “However, he needs them for planning purposes.”
One of the goals of the Reverse Brainstorming technique is to expose things we don't know. "We don't know X, Y, Z" should be on every problem list the group is considering.
Another point to take from Tetlock's other work on decision pattern analysis would be the distinction b/w "foxes" and "hedgehogs."
“the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
The experts with modest but real predictive insight were the foxes. The experts whose self-concepts of what they could deliver were out of alignment with reality were the hedgehogs.
The Three Magicians, esp., the second one (Climb on the Roof) should be good for finding alternative scenarios, i.e. simulate the "fox" analysis pattern.
In one famous experiment, the psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby showed that subjects often had difficulty solving a logical puzzle which required them to identify playing cards that failed to conform to a rule of play (this is called the Wason selection task). However, when the very same logical puzzle was reformulated as a problem of identifying people who had failed to conform to a rule of social behavior, the subjects performed very much better on the test. This led Cosmides and Tooby to conclude that our reasoning abilities are sensitive to context in ways that would have been beneficial for our ability to spot cheats during our evolutionary history.
Wilson, Robert. The Company of Strangers. revised edition. p. 75.
It appears, in many cases we fail to solve a problem because we don't understand - no, understand is not the right word here - we don't internalize the rules, i.e. we don't feel comfortable working and playing within the context in which the problem is presented. Transferred into a familiar context, the problem becomes an easy target. Therefore, finding the right context of a problem should be one of the first steps in a problem-solving process. Stripping the problem of professional jargon, explaining it to an 8-year-old would be good first steps.
Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs.
It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too.
This is a yet another reason to ask problem solvers, e.g. engineers, managers, entrepreneurs, to reformulate the problem in jargon-free terms. Very often their ability to find a solution is constrained by their inability to describe the situation in language that does not imply a specific approach dictated by past professional experiences. Switching from verbal to graphical descriptions, e.g. by using the Three Magicians method or Five Elements analysis, helps overcome this issue.
tags: creativity, method, magicians, five element analysis, problem, solution, example, information
Here are some top tips on how to achieve lucid dreaming:
Step 1: The reality test.
Ask yourself whether you are awake or dreaming throughout the day. Later on, in the land of nod, you might find yourself pondering this question. If you succeed, congratulations! You have opened the door to lucid dreams.
Step 2: Focus your thoughts.
People who focus single-mindedly on a task during the day, be it a computer game or playing a musical instrument, are more likely to experience lucid dreams, says Jayne Gackenbach at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.
Step 3: Plan your fantasy.
Almost as fun as the dreaming itself. Before you go to bed, think about what you want to dream lucidly about, in as much detail as possible.
Step 4: Total recall.
When you wake up, try to recall as many of your dreams as you can.
Step 5: Wake up and get motivated! ...And then go back to bed.
To solve a stubborn problem, on step 3 do a complete problem analysis, e.g. using the Three Magicians technique.
Here's a study that may hint at a reason why so many people are bad at thinking "outside of the box":
A team of researchers has conducted a study which argues that liars betray their actions through drawing.
"Another distinguishing factor was the perspective of the drawing. Fifty-three per cent of truth-tellers penned a drawing from their own first-person perspective at the scene; 47 per cent opted for a birds-eye view. By contrast, 81 per cent of liars went for the birds-eye view and just 19 per cent for the first-person perspective."
When we invent and/or work to develop creative ideas we have to lie. That is, we have to use our imagination to come up with a description of events that haven't happen yet. These events are still in a possible future, therefore we can't tell the truth about them. But, since most of the people are trained to tell the truth, they have trouble creating the big picture, e.g. draw the birds-eye view of a problem situation and its potential solutions. Over the last six years that I've been teaching my Principles of Invention class at Stanford, seeing and drawing the big picture has been by far the most difficult exercise for the students. Here's a snippet from a recent e-mail from one of them:
Even in the class discussions one could see people getting trapped in linear thinking and unable to climb above the problem and see the big picture. Practicing “climbing on the roof” to see the big picture is what I will focus on to improve as an inventor.
Drawing by itself is not going to make people more creative. To produce good results, it needs to be combined with systematic tools that teach people how to step out of the first-person perspective.
tags: creativity, magicians, imagination, class, example, dilemma
reference: Vrij, A., Leal, S., Mann, S., Warmelink, L., Granhag, P., & Fisher, R. (2010). Drawings as an innovative and successful lie detection tool. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627
Since past is fact and future is fiction, common sense might suggest that different cognitive mechanisms underlie recollection of past events and construction of future ones. There is a fundamental causal asymmetry, and one simply cannot know the future as one knows the past. However, various lines of evidence suggest that mental time travel into the past shares cognitive resources with mental construction of potential future episodes(Suddendorf & Corballis 1997). Normal adults report a decrease in phenomenological richness of both past and future episodes with increased distance from the present (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004). The temporal distribution of past events people envisage follows the same power function as the temporal distribution of anticipated future events (Spreng & Levine 2006).
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975
It's quite possible that foresight is, at least in part, a skill that allows us to construct imaginary situations, either in the past or in the future. Maybe that is why exercises like The Three Magicians a The Nine-screen View are so useful during invention sessions.
Reference: DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975 Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007. The evolution of foresight. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2007) 30, 299–351.
One of many interesting insights from an "in vivo" experiment with the real-life scientific method:
When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.
It is a very difficult task indeed to recognize your own assumptions. That is why systematic methods-metaphors that force you to look at the situation from various perspectives often help us find novel solutions. My own role as a moderator during an ideation session is to shake people out of their normal ways of thinking.
tags: method, metaphor, creativity, example, book, brainstorming, magicians
Friday, January 08, 2010
With power supply being a major datacenter cost driver, Google steps in to become an electric power marketer:
The Internet search company, which consumes vast amounts of electricity to run the computers in its data centers, created a subsidiary last month called Google Energy. It then applied for approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to be allowed to buy and sell power much like utilities do.
Google said it did not have specific plans to become an energy trader and that its primary goal was to gain flexibility for buying more renewable energy for its power-hungry data centers.
Looking beyond data center applications, future smart grid power meters are going to generate lots of information. Access to and processing of this information would be consistent with the overall Google's mission to "organize the world's information". To speculate further, Google could become a catalyst for the next generation auction-based power market, similar to the one they run for their keyword search adds.
tags: energy, information, market, control, computers, google, efficiency, magicians, five element analysis,
The findings also showed that giving the children the opportunity to draw, significantly increased the amount of accurate information they recalled. This is consistent with previous, forensically motivated research showing that drawing facilitates children's verbal reports of their experiences.
Modern personal computers, are very unfriendly to people, including children, who like to draw. The keyboard-and-mouse interface prevents users from developing their natural ability to describe the world as they see it. When children transition from a piece of paper to a PC/Mac screen they immediately lose a large chunk of their creative power. Fortunately, mobile phones with touch interface provide a much better platform for helping them to recover this magic of natural drawing.
Friday, September 11, 2009
An important principle to keep in mind when using The Three Magicians and The Five Elements analysis:
Любой сложный объект может члениться либо на элементы, либо на единицы. Особенность членения объекта на единицы состоит в том, что продукты членения сохраняют свойства целого. Членение на элементы, наоборот, приводит к таким продуктам, которые свойств целого не имеют.
Any complex object can be divided into either elements or units. Units maintain properties of the whole, while elements do not.
G.P. Schedrovitsky. The processes and structures of thinking. Chapter 3.
ПРОЦЕССЫ И СТРУКТУРЫ В МЫШЛЕНИИ.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Scientists distinguish between "splitters" and "lumpers," between those who favor fine-grained distinctions and those who tend to put entities together into broad categories.
For the most part, we are lumpers. Our minds have evolved to put things into categories and ignore or downplay what makes these things distinct.
Why does the mind work this way?
We lump the world into categories so that we can learn. When we encounter something new, it is not entirely new; we know what to expect of it and how to act toward it.
Someone without the right concepts might well starve to death surrounded by tomatoes, "because he or she has never seen those particular tomatoes before and so doesn't know what to do with them." Decartes' Baby. p.39-41.
Flexible thinking techniques allow us to be both, splitters and lumpers, depending on the problem at hand. They provide guidance on how to split and how to lump. For example, lumping iPhone with phones would cause us lose sight of its ability to run thousands of applications, including voice-based ones. On the other hand, splitting it from phones creates, at least initially, a problem for consumers, who might think that having a powerful mobile computer with thousands of potential applications on it would be an overkill for making simple phone calls.
From Explaining Creativity (2006), by Keith Sawyer:
Many of these [creativity] studies found that the most important characteristic of creative people is an almost aesthetic ability to recognize a good problem in their domain. They know how to ask the right questions. That’s why highly creative people tend to be creative in one specific domain: it takes a lot of experience, knowledge, and training to be able to identify good problems. p. 47.
That's why I strongly emphasize search for high-value problems in all my courses and invention workshops. The Reverse Brainstorm, the Three Magicians, the 9-screen view, the 10X Diagram, the 5-element analysis - all these tools are necessary for accomplishing what creative people have to do: recognize a good problem. Furthermore, these tools allow you to go beyond the basic creative ability and recognize a good problem outside of your domain of expertise.
Of course, only if you are into it.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Laura T. Thomas and Alejandro Lleras, researchers from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, confirmed earlier findings that tracking even an unrelated pattern with your eyes can improve your problem-solving performance. Here's their 2007 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review paper.
I think it might explain that drawing things out during a problem-solving session, e.g. The Three Magicians exercise, helps people come up with better ideas.
Also, a recent book by Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin, describes some really cool methods to "solve problems by drawing".
