by Kevin Ashton
But the results were the same for every group. People who worked continuously performed as well as people given a period for incubation. People given a period for incubation performed as well as one another, regardless of what they did during incubation. Olton sliced the data many ways, looking for evidence that incubation worked, but was forced to conclude, “The major finding of this study is that no evidence of incubation was apparent under any condition, even under those where its appearance would seem most likely.” He called this “an inexorably negative finding.” He was also unable to replicate any of the positive results others had reported. “To our knowledge,” he wrote, “no study reporting evidence of incubation in problem solving has survived replication by an independent investigator.”
Olton suggested that one explanation for the lack of evidence supporting incubation was flawed experiments. But he added, “A second, more radical, explanation of our results is to accept them at face value and to question the existence of incubation as an objectively demonstrable phenomenon. That is, incubation may be something of an illusion, perhaps rendered impressive by selective recall of the few but vivid occasions on which great progress followed separation from a problem and forgetting of the many occasions when it did not.”
To his credit, Robert Olton did not give up. He designed a different study, this time using experts trying to solve a problem in their area of expertise—chess players and a chess problem—in the hope that this would give better results than undergraduates with an insight problem. Half his subjects worked continuously and half were given a break, during which they were asked not to think about the problem. Again, the break made no difference. Both groups performed equally well. Olton, initially a believer in incubation, was forced to doubt its existence. His despair was evident in the subtitle of the paper he wrote about the study: “Searching for the Elusive.” The paper concluded, “We simply didn’t find incubation.”
Most researchers now regard incubation as folk psychology—a popular belief but wrong. Almost all of the evidence suggests the same thing: Caterpillars do not cocoon in the unconscious mind. The butterflies of creation come from conscious thinking.
5 | THE SECRET OF STEVE
Karl Duncker wrote that the act of creation starts with one of two questions: “ ‘Why doesn’t it work?’ or, ‘What should I change to make it work?’ ”
These sound simple, but answering them can lead to extraordinary results. One of the best examples comes from Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple Inc. When Jobs announced Apple’s first cell phone, the iPhone, in 2007, he said:
The most advanced phones are called smartphones. They are definitely a little smarter, but they actually are harder to use. They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not. How do you solve this? We solved it in computers 20 years ago. We solved it with a screen that could display anything. What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. We don’t want to carry around a mouse. We’re going to use a stylus. No. You have to get them and put them away, and you lose them. We’re going to use our fingers.
It is no coincidence that Jobs sounds like one of Duncker’s subjects thinking aloud while trying to attach a candle to a door. The step-by-step process is the same. Problem: Smarter phones are harder to use because they have permanent keyboards. Solution: A big screen and a pointer. Problem: What kind of pointer? Solution: A mouse. Problem: We don’t want to carry a mouse around. Solution: A stylus. Problem: A stylus might get lost. Solution: Use our fingers.
Apple sold 4 million phones in 2007, 14 million in 2008, 29 million in 2009, 40 million in 2010, and 82 million in 2011, for a total of 169 million sold in its first five years in the phone business, despite charging a higher price than its competitors did. How?
For several years, starting around 2002, I was a member of the research advisory board of a company that made cell phones. Every year it gave me its latest phone. I found each one harder to use than the last, as did other board members. It was no secret that Apple might enter the cell phone market, but the risk was always dismissed, since Apple had never made a phone. A few months after Apple’s phone became available, the board met and I asked what the company thought of it. The chief engineer said, “It has a really bad microphone.”
This was true, irrelevant, and revealing. This company thought smartphones were phones, only smarter. They had made some of the first cell phones, which, of course, had buttons on them. These had been successful. So, as they added smarts, they added buttons. They thought a good phone provided a good phone call and the smart stuff was a bonus.
Apple made computers. For Apple, as Jobs’s announcement made clear, a smartphone was not a phone. It was a computer for your pocket that, among other things, made calls. Making computers was a problem that Apple, as Jobs described it, had “solved” twenty years ago. It did not matter that Apple had never made a phone. It did matter that phone makers had never made a computer. The company I was advising, once a leading phone manufacturer, lost a large amount of money in 2007, saw its market share collapse, and was eventually sold.
“Why doesn’t it work?” deceives us with its simplicity. The first challenge is to ask it. The chief engineer did not ask this question about his phones. He saw rising sales and happy customers and so assumed that nothing was broken and there was nothing to fix.
But Sales + Customers = Nothing Broken is a formula for corporate cyanide. Most big companies that die kill themselves drinking it. Complacency is an enemy. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is an impossible idiom. No matter the sales and customer satisfaction, there is always something to fix. Asking, “Why doesn’t it work?” is creation inhaling. Answering is creation breathing out. Innovation suffocates without it.
“Why doesn’t it work?” has the pull of a polestar. It sets creation’s direction. For Jobs and the iPhone, the critical point of departure was not finding a solution but seeing a problem: the problem of keyboards making smarter phones harder to use. Everything else followed.
Apple was not unique. Korean electronics giant LG launched a product much like the iPhone before the iPhone was announced. The LG Prada had a full-sized touch screen, won design awards, and sold a million units. When Apple’s very similar direction—a big touch screen—was revealed, competitors built near replicas within months. These other companies could make an iPhone, but they could not conceive one. They could not look at their existing products and ask, “Why doesn’t it work?”
The secret of Steve was evident in 1983, during the sunrise of the personal computer, when he spoke at a design conference in Aspen, Colorado. There was no stage, and there were no visual aids. Jobs stood behind a lectern with yearbook hair, a thin white shirt, its sleeves folded as far as his forearms, and—“they paid me sixty dollars, so I wore a tie”—a pink-and-green bow tie. The audience was small. He gestured widely as he envisioned “portable computers with radio links,” “electronic mailboxes,” and “electronic maps.” Apple Computer, of which Jobs was then cofounder and a director, was a six-year-old start-up playing David to IBM’s Goliath. Apple’s sling was sales; it had sold more personal computers than any other company in 1981 and 1982. But despite his optimism, Jobs was dissatisfied:
If you look at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or buildings but hardly any of them are designing computers. We’re going to sell ten million computers in 1986. Whether they look like a piece a shit or they look great. There are going to be these new objects in everyone’s working environment, in everyone’s educational environment, in everyone’s home environment. And we have a shot at putting a great object there. Or if we don’t, we’re going to put one more piece of junk there. By 1986 or 1987 people are going to be spending more time interacting with these machines than they spend in a car. And so industrial design, software design, and how people interact with these things must be given the consideration that we give automobiles today, if
not a lot more.
Twenty-eight years later, Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, described a similar discussion that happened near the end of Jobs’s life: “One minute he’d be talking about sweeping ideas for the digital revolution. The next about why Apple’s current products were awful, and how a color, or angle, or curve, or icon was embarrassing.”
A good salesman sells everybody. A great salesman sells everybody but himself. What made Steve Jobs think differently was not genius, passion, or vision. It was his refusal to believe that sales and customers meant nothing was broken. He enshrined this in the name of the street encircling Apple’s campus: Infinite Loop. The secret of Steve was that he was never satisfied. He devoted his life to asking, “Why doesn’t it work?” and “What should I change to make it work?”
6 | RAINING LIGHTBULBS
But hang on. Surely there is an alternative to starting by asking, “Why doesn’t it work?” What if you simply start with a good idea?
Ideas are a staple of myths about creating; they even have their own symbol, the lightbulb. That comes from 1919, the age of silent movies, a decade before Mickey Mouse, when the world’s favorite animated animal was Felix the Cat. Felix was black, white, and mischievous. Symbols and numbers would appear above his head, and sometimes he would grab them to use as props. Question marks became ladders, musical notes became vehicles, exclamation points became baseball bats, and the number 3 became horns he used to turn the tables on a bull. One symbol lived long after the cat: when Felix had an idea, a lightbulb appeared above his head. Lightbulbs have represented ideas ever since. Psychologists adopted the image: after 1926, they often called having an idea illumination.
The creativity myth confuses having ideas with the actual work of creating. Books with titles like Making Ideas Happen, How to Get Ideas, The Idea Hunter, and IdeaSpotting emphasize idea generation, and idea-generation techniques abound. The most famous is brainstorming, invented by advertising executive Alex Osborn in 1939 and first published in 1942 in his book How to Think Up. This is a typical description, from James Manktelow, founder and CEO of MindTools, a company that promotes brainstorming as a way to “develop creative solutions to business problems”:
Brainstorming is often used in a business setting to encourage teams to come up with original ideas. It’s a freewheeling meeting format, in which the leader sets out the problem that needs to be solved. Participants then suggest ideas for solving the problem, and build on ideas suggested by others. A firm rule is that ideas must not be criticized—they can be completely wacky and way out. This frees people up to explore ideas creatively and break out of established thinking patterns. As well as generating some great solutions to specific problems, brainstorming can be a lot of fun.
Osborn claimed significant success for his technique. As one example of brainstorming’s effectiveness, he cited a group of United States Treasury employees who came up with 103 ideas for selling savings bonds in forty minutes. Corporations and institutions including DuPont, IBM, and the United States government soon adopted brainstorming. By the end of the twentieth century, its origins forgotten, brainstorming had become a reflex approach to creating in many organizations and had entered the jargon of business as both a noun and a verb. It is now so common that few people question it. Everybody brainstorms; therefore, brainstorming is good.
But does it work?
Claims about the success of brainstorming rest on easily tested assumptions. One assumption is that groups produce more ideas than individuals. Researchers in Minnesota tested this with scientists and advertising executives from the 3M Company. Half the subjects worked in groups of four. The other half worked alone, and then their results were randomly combined as if they had worked in a group, with duplicate ideas counted only once. In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher quality, too: independent judges assessed the work and found that the individuals produced better ideas than the groups.
Follow-up research tested whether larger groups performed any better. In one study, 168 people were either divided into teams of five, seven, or nine or asked to work individually. The research confirmed that working individually is more productive than working in groups. It also showed that productivity decreases as group size increases. The conclusion: “Group brainstorming, over a wide range of group sizes, inhibits rather than facilitates creative thinking.” The groups produced fewer and worse results because they were more likely to get fixated on one idea and because, despite all exhortations to the contrary, some members felt inhibited and refrained from full participation.
Another assumption of brainstorming is that suspending judgment is better than assessing ideas as they appear. Researchers in Indiana tested this by asking groups of students to think of brand names for three different products. Half of the groups were told to refrain from criticism and half were told to criticize as they went along. Once again, independent judges assessed the quality of each idea. The groups that did not stop to criticize produced more ideas, but both groups produced the same number of good ideas. Deferring criticism added only bad ideas. Subsequent studies have reinforced this.
Research into brainstorming has a clear conclusion. The best way to create is to work alone and evaluate solutions as they occur. The worst way to create is to work in large groups and defer criticism. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs’s cofounder at Apple and the inventor of its first computer, offers the same advice: “Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
Brainstorming fails because it is an explicit rejection of ordinary thinking—all leaps and no steps—and because of its unstated assumption that having ideas is the same as creating. Partly as a result, almost everybody has the idea that ideas are important. According to novelist Stephen King, the question authors signing books get asked most often—and are least able to answer—is “Where do you get your ideas from?”
Ideas are like seeds: they are abundant, and most of them never grow into anything. Also, ideas are seldom original. Ask several independent groups to brainstorm on the same topic at the same time, and you will likely get many of the same ideas. This is not a limitation of brainstorming; it is true of all creation. Because everything arises from steps, not leaps, most things are invented in several places simultaneously when different people walk the same path, each unaware of the others. For example, four different people discovered sunspots independently in 1611; five people invented the steamboat between 1802 and 1807; six people conceived of the electric railroad between 1835 and 1850; and two people invented the silicon chip in 1957. When political scientists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas studied this phenomenon, they found 148 cases of big ideas coming to many people at the same time and concluded that their list would grow longer with more research.
Having ideas is not the same thing as being creative. Creation is execution, not inspiration. Many people have ideas; few take the steps to make the thing they imagine. One of the best examples is the airplane. The brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright were not the first people to have the idea of building a flying machine, nor were they the first people to begin building one, but they were the first people to fly.
7 | HOW TO FLY A HORSE
The Wright brothers’ story begins in Germany’s Rhinow Hills on Sunday, August 9, 1896. The sky stretched clean as a sheet, the moon chewed the sun in a partial solar eclipse, and a white shape soared between the peaks. It had the spoked wings of a bat and a crescent tail. A bearded man hung beneath: Otto Lilienthal, piloting a new glider, maneuvering by shifting his weight, aiming to create a powered flying machine. A gust of wind caught the glider and tilted it up. He swung his body but was unable to right it. His great white bat fell fifty feet, and Lilienthal thrashed in its jaws. His back was broken, and he died the next day. His last words were “Sacri
fices must be made.”
Orville and Wilbur Wright read the news at their Wright Cycle Company store in Dayton, Ohio. Lilienthal’s sacrifice seemed senseless to them. No one should drive a vehicle he cannot steer, especially not in the sky.
Cycling was a new fashion in the 1890s. Bicycles are miracles of equilibrium. They are not easy to build or ride. When we cycle, we make constant adjustments to stay balanced. When we turn, we abandon this balance by steering and leaning, then recover it once our turn is complete. The problem of the bicycle is not motion; it is balance. Lilienthal’s death showed the Wrights that the same was true of aircraft. In their book The Early History of the Airplane, the brothers wrote:
The balancing of a flyer may seem, at first thought, to be a very simple matter, yet almost every experimenter had found in this one point which he could not satisfactorily master. Some experimenters placed the center of gravity far below the wings. Like the pendulum, it tended to seek the lowest point; but also, like the pendulum, it tended to oscillate in a manner destructive of all stability. A more satisfactory system was that of arranging the wings in the shape of a broad V, but in practice it had two serious defects: first, it tended to keep the machine oscillating; and second, its usefulness was restricted to calm air. Notwithstanding the known limitations of this principle, it had been embodied in almost every prominent flying machine that had been built. We reached the conclusion that a flyer founded upon it might be of interest from a scientific point of view, but could be of no value in a practical way.
In the same book, Wilbur added: “When this one feature has been worked out the age of flying machines will have arrived, for all other difficulties are of minor importance.”