The secret of innovation

We always wonder about the creative process. How do people come up with new ideas? How can we get our staff to come up with innovative products? What is the secret of the most innovative companies? What do people like Steve Jobs have to teach us about the nitty gritty of the creative product development?

For a long time, aside from the lone geniuses like Einstein, it was the received wisdom that the best way to come up with innovative ideas was brainstorming. Many a book was written on how to brainstorm. One of the earliest ones was by Osborne who based on his experience in the ad world , touted the success of the brainstorming approach to innovation and creativity.

His book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The most important of these, —the thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity—was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” he wrote. “Forget quality; aim now to get a quantity of answers. When you’re through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you’ll be disgusted. Never mind. You’re loosening up your unfettered imagination—making your mind deliver.” 

Brainstorming enshrined a no-judgments approach to holding a meeting. The underlying assumption of brainstorming was that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity.

But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t always work. 

Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas. And yet Osborn was right about one thing: like it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process. “Many of us can work much better creatively when teamed up,” he wrote, noting that the trend was particularly apparent in science labs.

Today scientific advances have led to a situation where all the remaining problems are incredibly hard. Researchers are forced to become increasingly specialized, because there’s only so much information one mind can handle. And they have to collaborate, because the most interesting mysteries lie at the intersections of disciplines. Advances in knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone.

But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for group creativity?

Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley carried out a number of experiments to test various templates for creativity. In Nemeth’s view, “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” Osborn thought that imagination is inhibited by the merest hint of criticism, but Nemeth’s work and a number of other studies have demonstrated that it can thrive on conflict.

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.” Another of her experiments demonstrated that exposure to unfamiliar perspectives can foster creativity. Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating, because it wakes us right up. Criticism allows people to dig below the surface of the imagination and come up with collective ideas that aren’t predictable. And recognizing the importance of conflicting perspectives in a group raises the issue of what kinds of people will work together best and how to ensure that they do.

A few years ago, Isaac Kohane, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, published a study that looked at scientific research conducted by groups in an attempt to determine what effect physical proximity had on the quality of the research.  He found that if you want people to work together effectively, there is a need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions. Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the Internet, it was still important to create intimate spaces.

One fanatical believer in the power of space to enhance the work of groups was Steve Jobs. When Jobs was planning Pixar’s headquarters, in 1999, he had the building arranged around a central atrium, so that Pixar’s diverse staff of artists, writers, and computer scientists would run into each other more often. Jobs soon realized that it wasn’t enough simply to create an airy atrium; he needed to force people to go there. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria, the coffee bar, and the gift shop. Finally, he decided that the atrium should contain the only set of bathrooms in the entire building. He really believed that the best meetings happened by accident, in the hallway or parking lot. Jobs made it impossible for staff not to run into the rest of the company.

Another example of this grew entirely by accident. Building 20  at MIT became a strange, chaotic domain, full of groups who had been thrown together by chance and who knew little about one another’s work. And yet, by the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world. In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from advances in high-speed photography to the development of the physics behind microwaves. Building 20 was full of knowledge spillovers.

Building 20 served as an incubator for the Bose Corporation.  Take the career of Amar Bose. In the spring of 1956, Bose, a music enthusiast, procrastinating in writing his dissertation, decided to buy a hi-fi. He chose the system with the best technical specs, but found that the speakers sounded terrible. Bose realized that the science of hi-fi needed help and began frequenting the Acoustics Lab, which was just down the hall. Before long, Bose was spending more time playing with tweeters than he was on his dissertation. Nobody minded the interloper in the lab, and, three years later, Bose produced a wedge-shaped contraption outfitted with twenty-two speakers, a synthesis of his time among the engineers and his musical sensibility. The Bose Corporation was founded soon afterward.

 Building 20 ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as “the magical incubator.”

The fatal misconception behind brainstorming has been that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Steve Jobs and Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions will finally add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together and it is the human friction that makes the sparks.