Idea incubation comes in seemingly unproductive times [CREATIVITY], [DETACHMENT], [PATIENCE], [CONFIDENCE]

Break Through by Taking Breaks

Posted: 17 Sep 2009

From Matthew E. May, In Pursuit of Elegance:

Ever wonder why our best ideas come when we're in the shower, driving, daydreaming, or sleeping? Most people know the story of Archimedes' shouting "Eureka!" upon suddenly discovering volume displacement while taking a bath and of Einstein's theory of special relativity coming to him in a daydream. But there are many others:

• Friedrich von Stradonitz's discovered the round shape of the benzene ring after dreaming about a snake biting its tail.

• Philo Farnsworth was plowing a field gazing at the even rows when the idea for projecting moving images line by line came to him, leading him to invent the first electronic television.

• Richard Feynman was watching someone throw a plate in the air in Cornell University's cafeteria when the wobbling plate with its red school medallion spinning sparked the Nobel Prize-winning idea for quantum electrodynamics.

• Kary Mullis, another Nobel winner, was driving along a California highway when the chemistry behind the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) came to him, stopping him in the middle of the road.

• Car designer Irwin Liu sketched the innovative new lines of what became the shape of the first Toyota Prius after helping his child with an elementary school science project involving the manipulation of hard-boiled eggs.

• Author J. K. Rowling was traveling on a train between Manchester and London, thinking about the plot of an adult novel, when the character of child wizard Harry Potter flashed in her mind.

• Shell Oil engineer Jaap Van Ballegooijen's idea for a snake oil drill came as he watched his son turn his bendy straw upside down to better sip around the sides and bottom of his malt glass.

When you look deeper into these ingeniously elegant solutions and brilliant flashes of insight you can see that they came at strange times and in random locations. They didn't occur while actually working on the problem but after an intense, prolonged struggle with it followed by a break. A change of scene and time away seems to have played a part.

Most "creatives"—artists, musicians, writers, etc.—instinctively know that idea incubation involves seemingly unproductive times, but that those downtimes and timeouts are important ingredients of immensely productive and creative periods. But until fairly recently the how, when, and why of being kissed by the muse was something of a myth and mystery, explained only by serendipity.

But now there's some hard science that shows it's not just coincidence.

Neuroscientists examining how the human brain solves problems can confirm that experiencing a creative insight—that sudden aha!—hinges on the ability to synthesize connections between seemingly disparate things. And a key factor in achieving that is time away from the problem. New studies show that creative revelations tend to come when the mind is engaged in an activity unrelated to the issue at hand; pressure is not conducive to recombining knowledge in new and different ways, the defining mark of creativity.

Neuroendocrinologist Ullrich Wagner has demonstrated that the ultimate break—sleep—actually promotes the likelihood of eureka! moments. He gave volunteers a Mensa-style logic problem to solve, one containing a hidden rule enabling the solution. The subjects were allowed to work on it for a while, then told to take a break. Some took naps, some didn't. Upon returning to the experiment to continue working on the problem, those who had taken a nap found the hidden rule quicker and much more often than those who hadn't.

Wagner believes that information is consolidated by a process taking place in the hippocampus during sleep, enabling the brain to clear itself and, in effect, reboot, all the while forming new connections and associations. It is this process that is the foundation for creativity. The result is new insight and the aha! feeling of the eureka! moment.

While no one yet knows the exact process, there's an important implication for all of us: putting pressure on ourselves to try and make our brains work harder, more intensely, or more quickly, may only slow down our ability to arrive at new insights. In other words, if you're looking to engineer a breakthrough, it may only come through a break. Your brain needs the calm before its storm.

Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, and blogs here. You can follow him on Twitter here.

 

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The Ability to Prioritize - Making room for what really matters [DETACHMENT], [EXCELLENCE], [WISDOM]

 

The Stop-Doing Strategy

Posted: 16 Sep 2009

From Matthew E. May, In Pursuit of Elegance:

In this recent interview, Campbell Soup CEO Douglas Conant defined his mission in taking the helm eight years ago as being, "to take a bad company and lift its performance to extraordinary by 2011." His strategy was simple enough: developing or keeping only products that ranked first or second in three major categories. That meant, among other things, selling the Godiva chocolate brand in 2008.

Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great, commented on Conant's sale of Godiva by saying, "That gets my attention, when someone has the discipline to let go of what doesn't fit."

Collins firmly believes in the power of a "stop-doing" discipline, a practice that began taking shape during his early post-Stanford Business School career at Hewlett-Packard. On a return visit to the school early in his career, Jim's favorite former professor, Rochelle Myers, reproached him for his lack of discipline. An expert in creativity and innovation, she told him his unbridled energy was riding herd over his mental clarity, enabling a busy yet unfocused life.

Her words rang true: At the time, Jim's life was crowded with the commotion of a fast-tracking career. Her comment made him pull up short and re-examine what he was doing. To help, she did what great teachers do, constructing a lesson in the form of an assignment she called "20-10": Imagine that you've just inherited $20 million free and clear, but you only have ten years to live. What would you do differently—and specifically, what would you stop doing?

The exercise did precisely what it was intended to do: make Jim stop and think about what mattered most to him. It was a turning point for three reasons.

First, he realized he'd been racing down the wrong track, spending enormous energy on the wrong things. In fact, he woke up to the fact that he hated his job. He promptly quit and headed back to Stanford to launch a new career of research, teaching, and writing.

Second, the assignment became a constant reminder of just how important his time is. He now starts each year by choosing what not to do, and each of his to-do lists always includes "stop-doing" items. Collins preaches his practice, impressing upon his audiences that they must have a "stop-doing" list to accompany their to-do lists. As a practical matter, he advises eliminating the bottom twenty percent of your goals... forever.

Third, the strategy helped him identify what factors led the companies he was studying to become "great" while others remained merely "good." The great companies routinely eliminated activities and pursuits that did not significantly contribute to the following criteria: profit, passion, and perfection. All three criteria had to be met in order for any activity to remain in these great companies' repertoires.

In this editorial piece Collins said, "A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit—to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort—that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life."

In an economic environment where time, money and attention are fixed or decreasing, where we must achieve maximum effect with minimum means, having a good stop-doing strategy may hold the key. At the very least, it will allow us to make more room for what really matters by eliminating what doesn't.

Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and blogs here. You can follow him on Twitter here

 

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