Quote of the Day: Somebody Else's Problem.

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what is more can be run for over a hundred years on a single flashlight battery. This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting or can't explain. - Duglas Adams. The Life, Universe and Everything.

tags: quote, reverse brainstorm

Social network vs Wisdom of crowd

So far, since the mass adoption of the Internet (web) we had two major bubbles. One - the dot com bubble of the late 1990s; another - the housing and financials bubble of the late 2000s (the crash of 2008). The paradox is that the more information consumers and analysts have access to, the less they seem to be able to make reasonable conclusions from it. In other words, access to the broader wisdom of the crowds should help, not hurt decisions.

New research by Jan Lorenz, et. al. provides a possible explanation for the reduction in "wisdom" phenomenon,

The wisdom of crowd effect is a statistical phenomenon and not a social psychological effect, because it is based on a mathematical aggregation of individual estimates.

In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks.
Although groups are initially “wise,” knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. 

- The “social influence effect” diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error.
- The “range reduction effect” moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers.
- The “confidence effect” boosts individuals’ confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy.

 The increase in social interaction over the Internet probably leads to similar "wisdom" deterioration effects.

tags: reverse brainstorm, psychology, social, network,

The good, the bad, and the loss aversion bias.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman writes about the bad news bias:

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. No comparably rapid mechanism for recognizing good news has been detected. Threats are privileged above opportunities, as they should be. Loss aversion is one of many manifestations of a broad negativity dominance in people.

John Gottman, an expert in marital relations, observed that the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive. Gottman estimated that a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad ones by at least 5-to-1.

By now, there must be a smartphone app for counting good and bad martial interactions. You can probably hook it up to facial, voice, or some other vital signs detection/recognition software.

His three other articles on Bloomberg (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4.)

In the meantime, here's your good news of the day: Justin Bieber reaches 2B YouTube views.




tags: reverse brainstorm, mobile, psychology, problem, effect

Trade-off of the Day: Creativity vs Self-Control

A few years ago there was a research article showing that simple walks in a park, sleeping, gardening, and meditation restore people's thinking and self-control abilities, while a walk on a busy street does not. The key to restorative brain activities is low requirements for attention.

Today’s world presents numerous challenges to maintaining one’s focus. It offers a plentiful supply of interesting but unimportant stimulation, whereas many important stimuli lack interest.


Thus, people must ignore much of what surrounds them. This act seems to require frontal and parietal brain mechanisms that mediate cognitive control and are susceptible to fatigue.


In order to replenish these resources, a person should engage in activities high in soft fascination that will activate involuntary attention in non-conflicting ways.


...what makes an environment restorative is the combination of attracting involuntary attention softly while at the same time limiting the need for directing attention.

Watching TV or browsing the web are not restorative activities because the media is designed to draw our attention.

Along the same lines, two days ago, NYT published a general interest article: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? Among other things, it talks about how our brain resources are depleted by attention-demanding tasks, with self-control being one of the more important ones.

Since problem-solving and willpower draw on the same resource, it probably makes sense that people come up with creative ideas, i.e. experience an aha moment, in soft fascination environments. How can we break the trade-off and improve our creativity? One way would be to routinize creative efforts, so that they require minimal involvement of will power. Another, would be to intersperse information acquisition (learning) or focused thinking/writing with low-attention activities, e.g. walking in a park, etc. One more, engage in free-form, divergent thinking "what if" exercises, e.g. "if we could solve any problem, which problem would be worth our blood, sweat, and tears?"


tags: creativity, psychology, trade-off, dilemma, separation, reverse brainstorm, brainstorming, control

Foxes vs Hedgehogs

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.

tags: magicians, 3x3, innovation, reverse brainstorm, problem, solutions, quote, information, learning, method, detection

How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming (part 4). Problem selection.

The second half of Reverse Brainstorming is Problem Selection.  By the end of the session, we have to select problems that are worth solving, i.e. the problems that are worth our investment of time, money, and effort. Everything else (like 95%) is noise.

Here's a couple of diagrams illustrating the outcome of the session:

As you can see, numbered problems from the list created during the first part are first assigned Value and Timing, then sorted accordingly. Since the Value dimension invokes many questions from participants, I'll have to explain it in a separate post.

On the other hand, Timing is understood intuitively. Nevertheless, it is still important to make sure everybody has the same frame of reference. For some people, like a startup product organization, short-term means six months; for others, like a nanotech research group, short-term means six years. To avoid confusion, both short-(ST) and long-term (LT) terms have to be defined before problem evaluation, e.g. ST = 1year, LT = 5years.

One important consideration to keep in mind, though. You, as the session moderator, have to have a more sophisticated understanding of timing because when it comes to invention most simple intuitive notions, even the familiar ones like timing, tend to be wrong.

Let me explain. Time measured in calendar years reflects periods of rotation of the Earth around the Sun: 1 year - one rotation, 5 years - five rotations. Unless your group is dealing with agricultural products or services, which depend on Sun patterns, the Earth's rotation has almost no connection with invention and innovation. I say almost, because we do have major purchasing seasons, e.g. Christmas, Chinese New Year, Back to School, etc. Nevertheless, real timing has nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth. Rather, orthogonal to our everyday thinking, innovation timing has to do with technology or business constraints. That is, short-term means we are working inside a set of constraints, while long-term means we've managed to break through at least some of them.

If you have time during the session, it might be a good idea to convey to the group the concept of timing as constraint-related, rather than calendar-related. Often, it gets people thinking outside of the box their intuitive mindset and leads to a better understanding of Value and problems that prevent us from getting to it.

tags: reverse brainstorming,  reverse brainstorm, book, course, stanford, constraints, time, high value.

Previous posts on Reverse Brainstorming Howto:
1. How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming.
2. It may look like this.
3. Concept Diagram: Reverse vs Traditional Brainstorming

Entrepreneurs: finding the problem is the hard part.

Instagram founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, talk about their entrepreneurial experience in a Stanford University eCorner lecture. The fourth part of their talk is about how hard it is to find the right problem to solve.



problem, reverse brainstorm, solution, video,  stanford

How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming (part 3). concept diagram.

This diagram (from the electronic version of my upcoming book) shows the conceptual difference between Reverse Brainstorming (circled in red on the left) and Standard Brainstorming (in blue).

Traditional (standard) brainstorming starts with the assumption that the problem has already been selected. It's explicitly recommended that for a brainstorming session to be effective there should be a single well-defined problem for participants eventually to solve (by generating lots of ideas).

The trouble with this approach is that if a wrong problem is selected all ideas turn out to be ... well, not good at all. This happens not because the participants are not creative enough, but because a wrong approach is used for problem definition, which is a common occurrence in uncertain situations.

Reverse Brainstorming addresses this issue by making people starting earlier in the thought process, making sure the right problem is identified for solving.

tags: reverse brainstorm, brainstorming,  book, method,  course

Previous posts on Reverse Brainstorming Howto:
1. How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming.
2. It may look like this

Reverse Brainstorming (continued). It may look like this.

How did we live before blogging?!

Thanks to the wonders of  internet technologies and people who use them, I've found a participant's account from the Reverse Brainstorming session I did at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2009. The session was a part of my guest lecture about invention and innovation for students in a cross-disciplinary course on  Smart Surfaces. 

Peter Hall, the author of the blog, was a Senior studying industrial design. His post and pictures on Flicker can give you an idea of how a real session looks like.

Links:
Smart Surfaces 2009 course website.
Session report, by Peter Hall.
Peter's pictures from the session on flicker.

Note that the group (pictured hard at work) used whiteboards, not flipcharts, to record problem statements. Overall, they generated 70 problems over 40 minutes.

tags: reverse brainstorm, information, class, howto

The beauty of simplicity

"Investors should remember that their scorecard is not computed
using Olympic-diving methods: Degree-of-difficulty doesn't count.
If you are right about a business whose value is largely dependent
on a single key factor that is both easy to understand and
enduring, the payoff is the same as if you had correctly analyzed
an investment alternative characterized by many constantly shifting
and complex variables." (Warren Buffet, 1994 Letter to shareholders)

With regard to problems, inventions work in a similar fashion: it's not the complexity of the problem that matters, but rather the value of the solution that problem "sufferers" attribute to it.

½ + ½ > 1

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5763/1005.full DOI: 10.1126/science.1121629

Due to mind's relatively slow background information analysis processes, splitting an invention or a problem-solving session into two parts may help you come up with a better solution.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left to unconscious thought. Named the “deliberation-without-attention” hypothesis, it was confirmed in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation.

Dijksterhuis et al., On Making the Right Choice. Science 311 (5763): 1005-1007.

This approach is especially helpful when running a reverse brainstorming session on the first day and a problem-solving session on the next.

tags: creativity, mind, brain, brainstorming, reverse brainstorm, research, psychology, efficiency

Psychology of creativity

In the Authors at Google series, Rick Hanson, author of Buddha's Brain, talks about brain plasticity, i.e. how consistent thought patterns restructure brain's connections. Among other things, he links creativity (a generative state of mind) to core psychological systems, Avoidance, Approach, Attachment (see below).

Maybe that's why having an attitude, either justified or unjustified, that you can solve any problem often helps to develop breakthrough ideas. In addition to that, this attitude allows to overcome fear and generate a lot of problems during reverse brainstorming sessions.

A related dilemma:

On one hand you don't want to be aware of a lot problems because it activates the threat response and inhibits creativity; on the other hand, you want to be aware of as many problems as possible, so that you don't miss the one or two that represent the greatest opportunities.

tags: creativity, method, psychology, control, mind, brain, reverse brainstorm, stress, dilemma

The value of aproblem: finance.

From George Soros' book "The Alchemy of Finance" (2003 paper back edition):

The major insight I gained ... is that all human constructs (concepts, business plans or institutional arrangements) are flawed. The flaws may be revealed only after the construct has come into existence... Recognizing the flaws that are likely to appear when a hypothesis becomes reality puts you ahead of the game. p. 37.

This is a good argument for starting a project with Reverse Brainstorming, a technique I've developed to search for problems rather than solutions. In a Reverse Brainstorming session participants are required to generate a 50+ problems within an hour; 100 is my preferred number. The vast majority of the flaws discovered during the session will never be exposed, or will never become important enough to entail a corrective action. But there will be several that will reveal critical issues. Understanding and inventing ways to address them will put us ahead of the game.

tags: reverse brainstorm, method, problem, solution, high value, money

The good news about bad moods

From a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:

...negative moods can improve the detection of deception (Forgas and East, 2008 J.P. Forgas and R. East, On being happy and gullible: Mood effects on scepticism and the detection of deception, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008), pp. 1362–1367. Article | PDF (178 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (0)Forgas & East, 2008), reduce judgmental errors (Forgas, 1998), improve eyewitness accuracy (Forgas, Vargas, & Laham, 2005), and improve interpersonal communication strategies (Forgas, 2007). The present experiments confirm this pattern by demonstrating that mild negative moods also increase fairness and sensitivity to the needs of others.

New Scientist provides a more detailed description of the experiments.


Reference: doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.01.007
tags: psychology, brainstorm, reverse brainstorm, problem, control, creativity

This inventor story is about Hans Berger, the pioneer of electroencephalography (EEG) - technology widely used today in brain research and medical applications.

It is well known that Berger worked for almost 30 years in nearly complete isolation, recording electrical activity from the brain, before he dared to risk his first publication on the EEG in 1929. His first few publications on the new method were neglected until Nobel Prize winner Douglas Adrian repeated his experiments and demonstrated the new method to the scientific community of physiologists. Then, in the second half of the 1930s, groups specializing in EEG recording mushroomed all over the world, particularly in the United States.

A happy ending? Not really. Berger developed and used EEG to detect signs of human psychic activity. The popular press was enthusiastic about the technology, but scientists met Berger's direction of research with skepticism. Eventually, funds dried up and "without any prospect of pursuing the project further, Berger, depressed, committed suicide on June 1, 1941."
At the same time, clinical psychiatrists who used the same technology to solve a different problem (detection of brain disorders), succeeded beyond all expectations:

Quite early on, the new method demonstrated an enormous diagnostic potential with the recording of disease-specific patterns. Brain tumors could be localized by their halo of electrical silence, and epileptic seizures displayed persistently dramatic changes of the record.

Same technology, drastically different results in its application.

Source: Cornelius Borck. 2005. WRITING BRAINS: Tracing the Psyche With the Graphical Method. History of Psychology. 2005, Vol. 8, No. 1, 79–94. DOI: 10.1037/1093-4510.8.1.79


tags: health, problem, 4q diagram, problem, solution, reverse brainstorm, mousetrap

Dilemma of the day: rejection

via NS:

Rejection can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.

"It's been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive," says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. "But we've found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive."

Thus, a dilemma: a) on one hand, we should reject bad or crazy ideas because they don't provide good solutions; b) we should not reject such ideas because the rejection will make people feel and behave stupid.

Reverse brainstorming solves this dilemma by taking the original idea and, instead of rejecting it, expanding the problem space around it. Eventually, better problems and a better solutions are found, and participants' self-esteem is preserved.

In contrast, regular brainstorming sessions, unless run under strict rules, often deteriorate into criticism of a specific idea, which makes participants more aggressive and less creative.

tags: dilemma, problem, creativity, brainstorm, reverse brainstorm,

Trade-off of the Day: quality vs costs

A good article by Jeffrey S. Flier, Harvard Medical School, in which he discusses several key problems that plague the US health care system. For example, the lack of innovation is #2 on his list:

Second, in health care as in other markets, real progress depends on innovation. Yet health care markets rarely conduct successful experiments with new ways of paying for and organizing health care delivery.

He also notices the tendency of proposed solutions to fall back into the familiar quality vs costs trade-off.

Some have offered novel approaches to “payment reform,” but none of these can realistically claim to both increase quality and reduce costs, while being acceptable to Congress.

:: tradeoff, health, greatest, problem, reverse brainstorm

If you are into it.

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.

What and, more importantly, when something is a problem?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the noun problem as:

1 a: a question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution b: a proposition in mathematics or physics stating something to be done;
2 a: an intricate unsettled question b: a source of perplexity, distress, or vexation c: difficulty in understanding or accepting.

Basically, the first meaning talks about something that needs a solution; the second - about a feeling that something is going wrong.
The Madoff pyramid scheme is an excellent example of how the same thing at different times can be considered, first, as a solution, and, later, as a problem. In 2004, the Securities and Exchange Comission had information about irregularities at Madoff's firm, but at the time the scheme was supposedly making money for its investors, so nobody bothered to investigate. In other words, it was not a problem then. But in 2008, the exactly same financial arrangement became a problem when people decided to treat it as such. The result of this sudden change of heart?

Madoff, 71, was sentenced to a prison term of 150 years on Monday after he pleaded guilty in March to a decades-long fraud that U.S. prosecutors said drew in as much as $65 billion.

Obviously, out ability to detect problems is rather limited, even when it concerns vast amounts of money and involves a government agency dedicated to the task. Moreover, having a powerful agency that thinks that something is not a problem is a big problem in itself. One of the ways to deal with it would be to stimulate the public's perception that huge mistakes by government agencies are inevitable and transparency of information flows is essential in detecting such mistakes.

From an inventor/innovator perspective, developing a bank of problems, e.g. by running periodic reverse brainstorms, and monitoring the change in people's perception would be an effective strategy for determining the timing of a product or service introduction.

A recent research paper describes links between creativity and problem-finding skills:

Problem finding is vital to problem solving. It is how one defines a potential predicament. In one example, Getzels (1975) described a pair of people who get separate flat tires while driving through the countryside. The first person notices that he does not have a jack and attempts to find one. The second frames the problem as how to lift the car, and thereby solves the problem faster. Problem finding includes the questions people ask before they solve the problem. Problem finding is not only utilized in obvious problem solving situations; artists who are good at problem finding have their artwork rated as more original, and many become more successful (Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels, 1988). Problem  construction, a subprocess of problem finding, has also been shown to be positively associated with problem solving originality and quality (Mumford, Reiter-Palmon,& Redmond, 1994).
Problem finding, itself, is not a single process. It can be broken down to four separate, but related, skills: problem identification or detection, problem definition, problem expression, and problem construction (Runco, 1994a; Runco &; Nemiro, 1994). It has even been described as a post-formal operations stage of cognitive development (e.g., Arlin, 1975, 1989).

References:
Paletz, Susannah B. F. and Peng, Kaiping(2009)'Problem Finding and Contradiction: Examining the Relationship Between Naive Dialectical Thinking, Ethnicity, and Creativity',Creativity Research Journal,21:2,139 — 151.