12

The first wall: conventions and rules

Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the father of modern quantum physics, once discussed a student who made a particular impression on him – by repeatedly giving the wrong answer in an examination.

The examination question was quite simple for someone who knew basic physics. It read: Describe how with the help of a barometer you can determine the height of a building. The answer was to read the barometer at ground level, and then go up to the roof of the building and read it again. By comparing the readings one can determine how much air there is between the ground and the roof of the building. The air exerts pressure on the ground as a column and increases the air pressure proportionately. The length of the column of air is the same as the height of the building. But the student gave the ‘wrong’ answer:

The teacher who corrected the paper marked the answer as wrong. When the student got her paper back, she protested immediately about her marks, for her solution was quite correct. By using the barometer in the way she suggested the height of the building could be determined! This was hard to deny, says Gell-Mann. But as it was not an answer that demonstrated any knowledge of basic physics, the student was given another chance to answer the question, on the condition that the laws of physics should be used in the answer. The student went to work, and the answer was as follows:

This answer put the examiner in an awkward position. The answer, just as the previous one, was quite correct. And it also made use of the laws of physics, the length of the string must be the same as the height of the building because a given distance is always the same wherever it is measured. But the solution was trivial and showed no deeper knowledge of physics. So the teacher decided that the student should have another chance to answer the question, on condition that she used more advanced physics in reaching her solution. This time the result was a little explosion of answers:

Faced with these answers, capitulation was the only possibility. The student had shown good knowledge of basic physics without even being close to the ‘right’ answer. And she had also shown her teacher that he was a victim of his own rules and conventions – rules and conventions that limited the teacher's ability to consider alternative solutions without him even being aware of them. One obvious rule is that physics must always be expressed in numbers and formulas. But physics is in fact the study of nature, and embraces such simple phenomena as the length of a piece of string without having to use – and sometimes be limited by – formulas. The teacher was also inhibited by the fact that the barometer is conventionally used to measure air pressure. But the student, who was not inhibited by any such convention, arrived at a number of solutions where the barometer was used in other ways than for the measurement of air pressure.

Murray Gell-Mann concluded that the student had great creative capacity, which meant that she could use her knowledge of physics in considerably more and better ways than the students who gave the ‘right’ answers in their physics examinations. She did not give the ‘wrong’ answer in her physics exam because she lacked sufficient knowledge; it was rather a matter of not being prevented by conventions and rules from using more of the knowledge she possessed.

Murray Gell-Mann's story is a simple illustration of the danger of calling an answer or a solution ‘right’. For the very word ‘right’ is an obvious indication that you allow yourself to be guided by rules and conventions that decide when one thing is ‘right’ (for example, using the barometer to measure air pressure) and something else is ‘wrong’ (for example, using the barometer as a rule or throwing it off the roof). Almost as bad is the fact that the division into ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ leads you at a much too early stage to reject ideas and solutions that might work perfectly well, simply because they do not work as they ‘ought to’ or as they ‘usually do’. Hopefully at this point you can see that they are worth a second chance. In the worst case, rules and conventions can lead to you think of no alternative solutions at all, in which case you cannot even give them a second chance.

Like Gell-Mann's physics student, you can certainly think up more ways of determining the height of a building with the aid of a barometer now that you have been made aware of the possibility of breaking the convention that a barometer must be used exclusively to measure air pressure.

History is full of product categories that have exploded after being freed from conventions and rules. Milk is such a category. For decades, producers and consumers alike lived by the rule that milk is sold in tetrapaks. As a result, milk was bought by families with children to be put in the fridge and drink at home. Someone suggested the idea that milk could be sold in decorated bottles, and the market exploded when new target groups such as young people and adults started buying milk and drinking it in new situations and places, far from the kitchen table. (It is amusing to note that the market had experienced a similar explosion some time ago when the tetrapak replaced the bulky glass bottle.)

In the same way, the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica managed to avoid the threat of bankruptcy and instead find new business models and reach a broader customer base when, after many years, they freed themselves from the rule that knowledge must come in the form of thick books. Encyclopaedias today – thanks to digital solutions – are more extensive than ever, cheaper than ever, and used by more people; an equation that could never have been solved using the old rule. This example may seem trivial, but that is a common reaction when something is freed from a rule or convention. Who, today, would think of buying music in the form of plate-sized plastic discs?

How to recognize a rule or convention

We have so far been using the terms ‘rule’ or ‘convention’ alternately to illustrate how people become mentally blocked about what is right and what is wrong. This is because these kinds of mental blocks can look slightly different. All mental blocks are in fact only in our heads, but they may be more or less structured and affected to differing extents by their environment. Let us look more closely at some examples.

The simplest and most obvious example of a rule is a definition. If you look through a dictionary you will find definitions that are a form of summary of how most people think the object or phenomenon behind a word or phrase should be described. In most cases, a definition describes an object's shape (a brick is rectangular and flat) or what it is used for (building materials). Instruction books and manuals that describe how to behave work in the same way (‘Become a successful marketer in 30 simple steps’). If you had been following the instructions in a 50-year-old book about athletics, you would probably never be able to jump higher than 2 metres. In those days, the high jump was defined as diving or scissoring over the bar.

Whether they are in a dictionary or not, we are constantly defining things for ourselves on the basis of our own experiences. Through contact with different objects and phenomena, we have learned what they look like and how they work. The effect of this is to impede development by fixing our perceptions on what objects and phenomena have been in the past, when we should really regard them objectively, to see what they could become. Just think about the way in which reference books and milk were defined a few years ago. By completing the sentence ‘XXX is …’, you can draw attention to your own rules, and pin them down. For example, for many years people said ‘a café is a place where you serve coffee and pastries’. This led to the café culture starting to die out as it became possible to buy better coffee and pastries for consumption at home, and the availability of entertainment in cities increased.

An easy way to free yourself from a rule is by creating ‘not’ definitions. This involves introducing a creative process routine that consists of constantly adding the word ‘not’ to your definitions. With the help of the new definition of a café – a café is not a place where you serve coffee and pastries – it was possible to fill the café with new content, from Internet access stations to health products, reading, exotic drinks, etc., and lay the foundations for the renaissance that cafés have enjoyed in recent years. The little magic word ‘not’ liberates us from a rule and allows us space to imagine what something could be instead.

Conventions are as powerful as rules. Conventions are our perceptions of how other people see our behaviour. They are harder to spot and pin down than rules. In the first place, unlike definitions, they are rarely written down; and, in the second place, they are more firmly rooted in us because they have to do with our own behaviour. Everything we do is a reflection of ourselves (we experience this irrespective of whether we want to, or whether it is true) and we therefore tend to identify more strongly with behaviour than with objects or phenomena. The easiest way to expose your own conventions is to complete the sentence ‘people would be upset if I …’ or ‘it would be wrong to…’ in the context of some piece of behaviour.

Further on in this chapter, in the exercise involving the ping-pong ball in the steel pipe, there will be obvious examples of how you can arrive at new solutions by completing the two sentences above. It's about highly unconventional behaviour from a general social point of view. The psychologist Edward de Bono tells the story of a boy who was asked by some of his friends ‘Here is a crumpled pound note and a shiny 50 pence coin: which do you want?’ and he chose the coin. After having made the same choice several times, to the delight of his friends, he was asked by one concerned friend, ‘Why do you always take the coin? Can't you see that they're laughing at you?’ The boy's answer was: ‘Yes, but if I had chosen the pound note they wouldn't have offered me all those coins.’

But in a business sense, it's about completing these sentences in an appropriate context, for example, in the form of a particular product category. Karl Lagerfeld, the German designer of luxury clothing, could complete the sentence ‘people (in the field) would be upset if I …’ with the words ‘sold clothes via a low-price chain store’ when he launched a collection in collaboration with Sweden's clothing chain, H&M. By breaking the convention, he reached new target groups and gained more attention and renewed interest from all directions for his usual business as well. Since then, a number of fashion designers, led by Stella McCartney and, after her, Viktor and Rolf, have been jostling to follow his lead.

Linus Torvalds could complete the sentence ‘it would feel wrong to …’ with the words ‘give away my operating system free’ when he released Linux free on the Internet. But by breaking the convention, Linux has become a thorn in the side of established agents such as Oracle and others, who have been forced to incorporate it into their own solutions, on account of the wide distribution of Linux (with revenue to Linus Torvalds, of course). Sweden's brewery industry might have expressed a similar sentiment about how wrong it would feel to sell bottled water in the country with the cleanest tap water in the world, when, a few years ago, it launched table water on a broad front. Today table water is the driving force behind the growth of the brewery industry in Sweden.

Conventions tie you down because, consciously or unconsciously, you worry about how others will react. To liberate yourself from your inhibitions and push out the walls of the box, you must therefore not only be aware of the convention but also have sufficient self-confidence to dare to break it. Some exercises follow below to make you aware of rules and conventions and train you to break them. By observing the powerful results that you achieve in the exercises and, with the help of the arguments you read about in the opening parts of the book, you should acquire enough self-confidence to challenge the conventions you come across in your business innovation processes.

Selling bricks

You have obtained an unlimited supply of bricks. Spend five minutes thinking out how you could empty your stock and sell them to as many people as possible.

You will probably get stuck first of all at the rule which states that you should build houses from bricks and therefore think about how to sell bricks to people who build houses. In the first place, there are generally speaking not many people who build houses – particularly not brick houses. This is usually left to professional builders. In the second place, there is the risk that these professional builders already have working relationships with competing suppliers, which could be difficult to challenge.

Break the rule and make a list of all the ways of selling bricks in order to appeal to as many people as possible.

In the first place, the solutions illustrate the power of breaking away from the rule that bricks are for building houses. Among the alternatives listed there is something for everyone, irrespective of whether we intend to build or even live in, or want to live in, a house (for example, home exercise equipment). Secondly, the solutions show the power of liberating oneself from the convention that bricks must be rectangular and flat. By changing the shape of the bricks, we increase the number of possible uses drastically (for example, chalk, gravel or hair dye). Thirdly, they provide examples of how bricks can act as concepts rather than concrete objects (for example, the brickogram or charity). Fourthly, the examples demonstrate how it's possible to work on increasing demand for bricks by creating campaigns to increase the basic demand (for example, by boosting the development of ‘gated’ living and thus people's need to build walls around their homes, and by giving free courses in bricklaying to private individuals).

The exercise is an excellent metaphor for the work of increasing sales of an existing product, and also for the work of finding new target groups and areas of use. It is a reminder that it is always possible to make more and different things out of the available material. It is also a good way of warming up before work in order to concentrate one's mental activity on thinking in new and different ways.

Table 12.1

Table 12.1 shows a selection of common ideas. Perhaps you can add a few.

The brick exercise can also be used to measure your creative capacity with the help of Guilford's Alternative Uses Test (named after its inventor). This test involves counting the number of different uses of an ordinary object (or product) you can think of, and is one of the two commonest ways of measuring creativity (we will come to the other, RAT, soon), which are reminiscent of IQ tests. The Alternative Uses Test assesses your creative capacity by giving your uses a score for:

• Originality – If less than 5% of the group have come up with a certain use, it is extraordinary. If less than 1% have spotted it, it is unique.
• Fluency – How many different uses have you spotted? Are you numbered among the top 5%, or even the top 1%?
• Flexibility – How big is the range between the different alternatives, and are they variations of the same idea or do they differ greatly? The more they differ, the better. Scored on a scale of 1–10 usually.
• Elaboration – More detailed solutions are more creative; for example, ‘brickogram’ is a cut above ‘throw it through someone's window’. Usually also scored on a scale of 1–10.

Just as with IQ tests, this test is about comparing with others in the same group. One can either compare the group members with each other, or make comparisons with others who have done the test on different websites, for example, where the test can be found.

Coat hanger: (im)possible tasks

A coat hanger is for hanging clothes on. This means that it is not for anything else and that it cannot be used to do anything else. Or can it? After completing the brick exercise, you can surely come up with a lot of other uses. When you have tired of the bricks and want further inspiration for thinking up new areas of work and target groups, then try thinking about coat hangers instead. But the task now is deliberately to think about what you can not do with a coat hanger. Make a list like the one below.

Now take each of the examples on your list and think about which convention or rule prevents you from doing these things. In fact, they can all be done with a coat hanger, can't they? Let us take the 10 ten spontaneous examples shown in Table 12.2.

The first two examples challenge the convention that the coat hanger must be used in its original shape. A wire coat hanger can be bent (an alternative and popular convention among car thieves, not for locking but for unlocking cars) and a wooden coat hanger can be broken apart (with a little freshening up of your scouting skills, you can then start a fire). The third example breaks the convention of only hanging up clothes on a coat hanger by hanging up pyjamas with you in them when you need to sleep (to be marketed for people with back trouble or sore limbs, who are at risk of bed sores or other medicinal complaints, or for people who want to be taller: ‘Let gravity do the job while you sleep!’).

Table 12.2

The examples that follow break the rule that a coat hanger must be made of a particular material, usually wire or wood. Printing a text on a hanger is nothing new – they often have brand names printed on them. But this can be developed. Take, for example, hangers from the dry-cleaners, which are often wrapped in paper. There is much more space for text. The text could be used for advertisements, or why not for crosswords or reading matter for travel (‘Read a short story on the way and then hang up your jacket when you arrive’)? With the help of new material, the hanger can be developed into completely new products and marketing concepts, for example, ‘wash and store in one’ (hanger with detergent) or ‘take care of your appearance’ (hanger with comb). These examples related to changing the material of the hanger, but just imagine all the further possibilities that open up if you change the shape as well!

This exercise is a good metaphor to adopt for becoming aware and reminding yourself that nothing is impossible. We easily get caught up in our perception of what a product is and what can be done with it, but this is only a matter of conventions and rules putting obstacles in the path of development. The exercise also uses the classic trick of starting with what you can not do, which is often easier to think of and use to develop many ideas than focusing on the more rigid perception of what you can do.

Improving on scissors

Everyone uses scissors; they have been used forever and have served many different purposes, and yet during all that time they have remained virtually unchanged as regards their shape and material (two metal blades). Spend a few minutes thinking about what you can do to improve on scissors and list your solutions below.

Probably it was easy for you to come up with a number of simple improvements. It is not too difficult, as long as you allow yourself to entertain the thought that scissors can be changed and improved. Table 12.3 shows some simple examples of changes:

The first three examples make the scissors more efficient for normal use, which often involves cutting soft materials such as cloth and paper. A ruler on the blade can provide more precision when you are cutting patterns or given lengths, a set square on the blade (possibly even folding in to make it more convenient) can make it easier to cut in a straight line or at right-angles, and a pencil tip on the blade enables you to mark material with the scissors and cut more precisely. The next three improvements make the scissors more user-friendly in general terms. A grindstone means that you never have to worry about the blades becoming dull and needing to be ground; being able to lock the scissors reduces the worry of leaving them within reach of children; and making them battery-driven means avoiding cramping in the hands when cutting for extended periods of time. The following two improvements break the convention that scissors should be used for cutting soft material such as cloth and paper. With the help of extendable handles, it becomes easier to cut, so that you can also cut harder materials such as glass, and the extendable blades enable you to cut thicker materials such as bread. The next improvement challenges the convention that scissors should have straight blades of metal. By employing flexible blades (perhaps graphite), you can easily cut out other patterns and difficult angles. The final improvement breaks the convention that you use your hands to cut with scissors. Putting the scissors under your foot reduces the strain on the back when cutting weeds and such.

Table 12.3

There are of course many more examples of improvements, which is just the point. An everyday product such as scissors can be improved in a number of different and simple ways. If we also break the convention that scissors must be used for cutting, we can further increase the number of improvements: for example, scissors could become an accessory in different colours and materials or be used as cutlery (knife and fork in one). The exercise is a metaphor for the fact that all products can be improved. Just as in the example of milk at the beginning of the chapter, we tend to be tied down to how something looks and adjust its use accordingly. By thinking in the opposite direction, we can not only strengthen existing uses (and probably sell more scissors that are specialized for these uses) but also develop new ones.

The ping-pong ball in the steel pipe

Your ping-pong ball has become stuck in the bottom of a steel pipe, which is cemented to the ground. As the diameter of the pipe is only slightly greater than that of the ball, you cannot reach it with your hand, and the ball is too far down to be reached with a finger (which would not have helped anyway because there is only a very small gap between the inner wall of the pipe and the ball).

Take a couple of minutes and make a list below of different ways of getting the ball up and out of the pipe without destroying the pipe or removing it from the ground. To help you, you have a hammer, an axe and a piece of string.

Table 12.4 shows 15 possible solutions. Only a few of the solutions use all three tools. This is a first rule that it is easy to get caught by, that all the tools must be used merely because they are available (so they must be meant to be used). In the examples in the top row, the hammer and the axe are used conventionally (to hammer and to chop), but not in contact with the ball, which is what most people aim at in accordance with convention (‘to get the ball up you have to get at it’). In the examples on the second row, the tools break the rules of both function and form (in order to make fire or become splinters and sawdust). In the examples on the third row, the tools only fill an indirect function. In the last two examples, we are definitely approaching breaks of convention that fit the sentences ‘people would be upset if I …’ and ‘it would feel wrong to …’. In the fourth row, the use of tools ceases entirely and in the last row we have arrived at examples that really break conventions in every sense of the word. The last solutions are usually the most difficult for people to consider as they break deeply rooted social conventions, so deeply rooted that they do not even pop into our heads to be rejected.

Table 12.4

The exercise is a strong metaphor for daring to break patterns and challenge existing rules and conventions. For example, thinking ‘pee in the pipe’ opens up completely new lines of thought and offers solutions that are so foreign to you that they would never enter your head (but are maybe for this very reason particularly powerful and radical).