Innovation? Think combination
by Yasushi Kusume
'For mind-wondering to lead to an ‘Aha’ moment, you need to have enough on the shelves of your memory to make up the pieces of your new idea.'
Think Bigger, Sheena Iyengar
What does innovation require? Sheena Iyengar thinks it takes ‘the new combination of old ideas and the power to solve complex problems’. It’s how she defines the process in her book, Think Bigger. And it’s a sentiment echoed by other authorities in the field. Steve Jobs said, ‘creativity is just connecting things’. Tom Freston, co-founder of MTV, believed that, ‘innovation is taking two things that exist and putting them together in a new way’. And James E. Young, in his book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, observed that a ‘new’ idea often emerges as a blend of pre-existing components.
What this means is that while innovation can’t happen without creativity, it also won’t happen without a knack for synthesizing existing ideas. That, as Christian Busch emphasises in Serendipity, is just as important. You need to know how to connect seemingly disparate dots. And that calls for two modes of thinking: divergent and convergent.
Converge/Diverge
Simply put, divergence generates creativity by exploring several possible solutions; convergence focuses on finding a single solution. So first you gather copious information on a subject (divergence), then scrutinize it all to pinpoint issues (convergence) that will help you generate potential solutions (divergence), which you can then discuss and categorize (convergence) in a bid to foster further innovation.
For many people, divergence is the key to creativity: the more solutions you consider, the greater your chances of success. I disagree. I believe convergence, the art of connecting existing ideas, is what truly fosters serendipity – positive unexpected discovery - and propels a project to success. And a convergent thinker is a person constantly cultivating pieces of information in their brain and holding onto them so they can be retrieved at any time. Because, as Sheena Iyengar points out, the quality of our ideas is only as good as the pieces we have to put together.
Shelves of the brain
‘If you're stuck on a problem,’ she writes, ‘you're probably missing a piece of the puzzle. It's not on the shelves of your brain.’ For her it’s vitally important to keep learning, to keep assimilating and retaining information – no matter how small or unimportant it might seem – because you never know when it might be useful. When it might become that missing piece of the puzzle. Such an attitude is the hallmark of a truly convergent thinker.
But finding individuals adept at convergent thinking poses a tough challenge to innovation projects. They have to possess a wide-ranging knowledge of many subjects and cross-cultural insights. They have to be ever-adaptable to changing situations. And they have to be clever and creative enough to spot connections between seemingly unrelated elements. It’s a rare combination of talents.
4 Stages
So we’ve got the types of thinking involved, and the knowledge needed to fuel it. Can we then define a process to follow? Graham Wallas, a social psychologist and educationalist, thought we could. He believed creativity had four stages: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification.
In Preparation, you compile all available information on a particular subject. That done, you ‘disconnect’ for the Incubation stage, to allow all that information to percolate, so ideas arise spontaneously. After this comes Illumination, when ideas begin to take shape. (I think you could also call it ‘Inspiration’.) Finally, with Verification, you look at what you’ve come up with and decide whether to proceed, refine, or start all over again.
Wallas explained the purpose of the Incubation stage as follows. ‘We can often get more results in the same time by beginning serval problems in succession, and voluntarily leaving them unfinished while we turn to others, than by finishing our work on each problem at one sitting.’
Convergence in action.
Just connecting
In closing, let's reconsider Steve Jobs observation that, ‘Creativity is just connecting things.’ This sentiment resonates deeply with all those who champion innovation and recognize the profound impact of linking disparate elements. This is his full quote:
‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.’