Black Box Thinking

by Matthew Syed

  Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the creative power of error comes from a different experiment by Nemeth and a colleague.4 In a typical free association study, we are given a word and have to respond with the first word that pops into our heads.

  The problem is that when many of us free-associate, we come up with rather boring associations. If someone says “blue,” most people reply “sky.” If someone says “green,” we say “grass.” This is hardly the stuff of inspiration. In her free-association experiment, Nemeth showed slides to volunteers. As expected, they came up with conventional, banal associations.

  But then she had a lab assistant call out the wrong color as part of the experiment. When a blue slide was shown, the assistant called out “green.” And this is when something odd happened. When Nemeth then asked these volunteers to free-associate on the colors that had been wrongly identified, they suddenly became far more creative. They came up with associations that reached way beyond tired convention. Blue became “jeans” or “lonely” or “Miles Davis.”5

  What was going on? We should now be able to glimpse an answer. Contradictory information jars, in much the same way that error jars. It encourages us to engage in a new way. We start to reach beyond our usual thought processes (why would you think differently when things are going just as expected?). When someone shouts out the wrong color, our conventional mental operations are disrupted. That is when we find associations, connections, that might never have occurred to us.

  And this takes us to the second crucial aspect of the Dyson story. You’ll remember that in his moment of insight he essentially brought two disparate ideas together: a vacuum cleaner and a sawmill. These were two different things. They existed in two different places of vastly different scale: in the home and in the sawmill. You could almost say that they inhabited separate conceptual categories.

  Dyson’s innovation, stripped down to its essentials, was to merge them. He was a connecting agent. The act of creativity was an act, above all, of synthesis. “I think the fact that I had so many years of frustration probably made me the perfect person to glimpse a possible solution,” he says. “But the solution was really about combining two existing technologies.”

  And it turns out that this act of connectivity is another central feature of innovation. Johannes Gutenberg invented mass printing by applying the pressing of wine (the technology of which had existed for many centuries) to the pressing of pages.6

  The Wright brothers applied their understanding of manufacturing bicycles to the problem of powered flight.

  The rank algorithm behind the success of Google was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page from an existing method of ranking academic articles.

  Sellotape, a staggeringly successful commercial innovation, was developed by merging glue and cellophane.

  The collapsible stroller was created by fusing the folding undercarriages for Spitfires in the Second World War with an existing technology for transporting children.

  Little wonder that Steve Jobs, a master in the art of merging concepts, once said: “Creativity is just connecting things.”

  If failure sparks creativity into life, the moment of insight invariably emerges from the attempt to bridge the problem with previously unconnected ideas or technologies. It is about finding a hidden connection in order to solve a problem with meaning. But the crucial point to realize is that these processes are intimately intertwined. It is precisely because we have been hit by jarring information that we are nudged into looking for unusual connections, as we saw in the free association experiment.

  To put it simply, failure and epiphany are inextricably linked. When we come up with a brilliant idea, when it pops into our mind, it has often emerged from a period of gestation. It is a consequence of engaging with a problem, sometimes, as in the case of Dyson, for many years.

  As the neuroscientist David Eagleman says in his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain: “When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, the neural circuitry has been working on the problems for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you merely take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden political machinery behind the scenes.”7

  Much of the literature on creativity focuses on how to trigger these moments of innovative synthesis; how to drive the problem phase toward its resolution. And it turns out that epiphanies often happen when we are in one of two types of environment.

  The first is when we are switching off: having a shower, going for a walk, sipping a cold beer, daydreaming. When we are too focused, when we are thinking too literally, we can’t spot the obscure associations that are so important to creativity. We have to take a step back for the “associative state” to emerge. As the poet Julia Cameron put it: “I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me.”8

  The other type of environment where creative moments often happen, as we have seen, is when we are being sparked by the dissent of others. When Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University, went to look at how scientific breakthroughs actually happen, for example (he took cameras into four molecular biology labs and recorded pretty much everything that took place), he assumed that it would involve scientists beavering away in isolated contemplation.

  In fact, the breakthroughs happened at lab meetings, where groups of researchers would gather around a desk to talk through their work. Why here? Because they were forced to respond to challenges and critiques from their fellow researchers. They were jarred into seeing new associations.

  As the author Steven Johnson puts it: “Questions from colleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level. Group interactions challenged researchers” assumptions about their more surprising findings . . . The ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.”9

  And this helps to explain why cities are so creative, why atriums are important; in fact why any environment that allows disparate people, and therefore ideas, to bump into each other, is so conducive. They facilitate the association of diverse ideas, and bring people face-to-face with dissent and criticism. All help to ignite creativity.

  • • •

  This brief jaunt through the literature on creativity reveals one thing above all else: innovation is highly context-dependent. It is a response to a particular problem at a particular time and place. Take away the context, and you remove both the spur to innovation, and its raw material.

  The best way to see this truth is through the phenomenon of the multiple. Steven Johnson runs through an entire list of breakthroughs that were conceived by different people, working independently, at almost precisely the same time.10

  Sunspots, for example, were discovered by four scientists in four different countries in 1611. The mathematical calculus was developed by both Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the 1670s. The forerunner to the first electric battery was invented by Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1745 and Andreas Cuneus of Leyden in 1746.

  Four people independently proposed the law of the conservation of energy in the 1840s. The theory of evolution through natural selection was proposed independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (an extraordinary, unsung polymath) in the mid-nineteenth century.11 S. Korschinsky in 1889 and Hugo de Vries in 1901 independently established the significance of genetic mutation.

  Even Einstein’s pioneering work has echoes in the work of his contemporaries. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré wrote about the “Principle of Relativity” in 1904, a year before Einstein published his landmark paper on the Special Theory.

  In the 1920s William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, two academics from Columbia University, found as many as 148 examples of independent innovation. Multiples are the norm; not the exception. They entitled their paper “Are Inventions Inevitable?”*

  The reason harks back to the “responsi
ve” nature of creativity. The failures of Newton’s Laws created a specific problem. It invited particular solutions. It wasn’t just Einstein and Poincaré, but also Hendrik Lorentz and David Hilbert who were working on a possible remedy.12 Indeed, the so-called relativity priority dispute is about who invented what, when.13

  And that is why the seductive idea that if Einstein had been born three hundred years earlier, we could have had the benefit of the theory of relativity in the seventeenth century is so flawed. Relativity couldn’t have happened back then, largely because the problems that it responded to were not yet visible.

  Einstein may have seen further and deeper than his contemporaries (there is still a large role for individualism: Einstein really was a creative genius), but he wasn’t pulling insights out of the ether. As Johnson writes: “Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air.”

  Dyson is well aware of this aspect of creativity. “Every time I have gone for a patent in a particular field, someone else has got there first,” he says. “I don’t think there has been a single time in all the thousands of patents we have applied for where we were the first. With the vacuum cyclone, there were already a number of patents lodged.”

  But this raises a rather obvious question. Why didn’t the person who came up with the original idea for a vacuum cyclone go on to make a fortune (the first cyclone vacuum-cleaner patent was lodged as early as 192814)? Why did Dyson, rather than his predecessors, change the world of domestic cleaning?

  We noted earlier that we tend to overlook what happens before the moment of epiphany. But, if anything, we are even more neglectful of what happens afterward. This is a serious oversight because it obscures the reason why some people change the world while others are footnotes in the patent catalog.

  The eureka moment is not the endpoint of innovation, it is the start of perhaps the most fascinating stage of all.

  III

  Dyson strode into his workshop. He had come up with his big idea: a bagless vacuum cleaner where dust is removed from the air by the geometry of the airflow rather than a filter. But he was pretty much alone. The directors at his company didn’t back his idea (the response he received was: “If that is such a good concept, how come Hoover and Electrolux aren’t doing it already?”), so he started his own business along with a silent partner, who had provided half the capital.

  Dyson’s workshop was a tiny former coach house. It had no windows and no heating. At the beginning he had no tools and precious little money. He also had huge debts, having remortgaged his house in order to start the business. But the then thirty-three-year-old (who also had three young children—and a very understanding wife) was nothing if not determined.

  His first prototype, as we have seen, was the cardboard-and-gaffer-tape cyclone that he made after returning from the lumberyard. It seemed to work well. But although no dust was visible to the naked eye coming out of the top of the makeshift cyclone, he had to check whether he was getting rid of all the dust.

  This was one of his first post-epiphany tasks. He bought some black cloth and obtained a quantity of fine white dust. Then he placed the cloth above his makeshift cyclone, vacuumed the dust, and noticed that some of it was, indeed, getting through. He could see white residue on the cloth.

  So he altered the dimensions of the cyclone to see if it would improve the efficiency. He tried new sizes, new shapes. Each time he would note how a small change in one dimension would impact the overall engineering solution. The key challenge was to balance airflow with separation efficiency.

  With each iteration he was learning new things. He was seeing what worked. Most of the time he was failing. “A cyclone has a number of variables: size of entry, exit, angle, diameter, length: and the trying thing is that if you change one dimension, it affects all the others.”

  His discipline was astonishing. “I couldn’t afford a computer, so I would hand-write the results into a book,” he recalls. “In the first year alone, I conducted literally hundreds of experiments. It was a very, very thick book.”

  But as the intensive, iterative process gradually solved the problem of separating ultra-fine dust, Dyson came up against another problem: long pieces of hair and fluff. These were not being separated from the airflow by the cyclone dynamics. “They were just coming out of the top along with the air,” he says. “It was another huge problem and it didn’t seem as if a conventional cyclone could solve it.”

  The sheer scale of the problem set the stage for a second eureka moment: the dual cyclone. “The first cyclone gets rid of the awkward strands of cotton or hair, before the air is pushed into the second cyclone, which gets rid of the finer dust,” he went on. “You need both to make the device work properly.”

  In all, it took an astonishing 5,127 prototypes before Dyson believed the technology was ready to go in the vacuum cleaner. The creative leap may have been a crucial and precious thing, but it was only the start of the creative process. The real hard yards were done patiently evolving the design via bottom-up iteration. To put it another way, with the epiphany he had vaulted onto a taller mountain in a new landscape; now he was systematically working toward this new summit.

  According to Dyson:

  When you file a patent, somebody is almost always there before you. A lot of your argument with the patent examiner is to say: “Look, they may have had the eureka moment when they came back from the timber yard. They may even have created an early prototype.” But none of my forebears had made their prototypes work. Mine is statistically different. That was my decisive advantage.

  Creativity, then, has a dual aspect. Insight often requires taking a step back and seeing the big picture. It is about drawing together disparate ideas. It is the art of connection. But to make a creative insight work requires disciplined focus. As Dyson puts it: “If insight is about the big picture, development is about the small picture. The trick is to sustain both perspectives at the same time.”

  And this turns out to be the very cornerstone of understanding how creative success happens in the world today, as alluded to at the end of the last chapter. It is often said that in a rapidly changing world innovative companies will dominate. But this is, at best, only partly true. In their book Great by Choice, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen show that innovation may indeed be a necessary condition for success, but it is by no means sufficient.15

  Genentech, the U.S.-based biotechnology corporation, for example, outpaced Amgen, a major competitor, by more than two times in patent productivity between 1983 and 2002 (they also outpaced Amgen in terms of the impact of their patents as measured by the number of citations) but Amgen’s financial performance outperformed that of Genentech by more than thirty to one.

  This finding is by no means unusual. In their book Will and Vision, Gerard J. Tellis and Peter N. Golder looked at the relationship between long-term market leadership and pioneering innovation in sixty-six different commercial sectors. They found that only 9 percent of the pioneers ended up as the final winners. They also found that 64 percent of pioneers failed outright.16

  Jim Collins writes: “Gillette didn’t pioneer the safety razor, Star did. Polaroid didn’t pioneer the instant camera, Dubroni did. Microsoft didn’t pioneer the personal computer spreadsheet, VisiCorp did. Amazon didn’t pioneer online bookselling and AOL didn’t pioneer online Internet service.”17

  What was the key ingredient that characterized the winners, the companies that may not have come up with an idea first, but who made it work? The answer can be conveyed in one word: discipline. This is not just the discipline to iterate a creative idea into a rigorous solution; it is also the discipline to get the manufacturing process perfect, the supply lines faultless, and delivery seamless.*

  Dyson was not the first to come up with the idea of a cyclone vacuum cleaner. He was not even the second, or the third. But he was the only one with the stamina to “fail” his concept into a workable solution. And he had the rig
or to create an efficient manufacturing process, so he could sell a consistent product.

  His competitors confronted the same problem and had the same insight. But they didn’t have the same resilience to make their idea work, let alone take it on to a working production line.

  Collins takes the battle between Intel and Advanced Memory Systems as symbolic of this crucial distinction. Intel was months behind its fierce competitor in the race for the 1,000-bit memory chip. In the rush to introduce the 1103 chip, it hit major problems, including one that could actually erase data from the chip. It was so far behind the game that the outcome seemed like a foregone conclusion.

  And yet Intel destroyed Advanced Memory Systems in the marketplace. They worked around the clock, creating new prototypes, iterating the chip into a workable solution. But they also insured that they nailed all the surrounding supply issues crucial for success. As Collins puts it: “Intel obsessed over manufacturing, delivery and scale.”

  By 1973, everyone was using Intel. Its slogan is not “Intel Creates,” it is “Intel Delivers.”

  Dyson says:

  It is no good creating the most beautiful products if you produce them shoddily. It is no good having the most innovative engineering solution if the consumers can’t be certain it will be delivered on time. It is no good if inconsistent production means that a great idea is not translated into a polished product. The original idea is only 2 percent of the journey. You mustn’t neglect the rest.

  Collins writes:

  We concluded that each environment has a level of “threshold innovation” that you need to meet to be a contender in the game . . . Companies that fail even to meet the innovation threshold cannot win. But—and this surprised us—once you’re above the threshold, especially in a highly turbulent environment, being more innovative doesn’t seem to matter very much.18