{"id":130330,"date":"2015-03-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-21T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qmarkets.net\/need-an-ah-ha-moment-why-crowd-sourcing-can-mimic-that-individual-flash-of-brilliance\/"},"modified":"2024-10-04T11:56:44","modified_gmt":"2024-10-04T09:56:44","slug":"need-an-ah-ha-moment-why-crowd-sourcing-can-mimic-that-individual-flash-of-brilliance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/resources\/article\/need-an-ah-ha-moment-why-crowd-sourcing-can-mimic-that-individual-flash-of-brilliance\/","title":{"rendered":"Need an Ah-Ha Moment? Why Crowd-Sourcing Can Mimic That Individual Flash of Brilliance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eureka!<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 When we have a problem, this is the \u2018Ah Ha\u2019 moment that we all hope for. A flash of brilliance that saves the day, the project, or even our job!
\nGoing back to Archimedes, innovation is replete with examples of this somewhat mysterious, but extremely useful event. For example, one of Einstein\u2019s key insights in developing special relativity came to him during a discussion with a friend over coffee, and Kekule\u2019s insight into the structure of benzene came to him in a dream.
\nAt first glance, these may seem to be examples of insight coming from nowhere. But in reality, even Einstein probably couldn\u2019t have come up with special relativity without some background reading in physics! All ideas have to come from somewhere!<\/a><\/p>\n

Our Smart Unconscious:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0That Einstein wasn\u2019t consciously aware of how he made the connection on that day simply reflects that a lot of the work our brain does goes on below our threshold of consciousness. This \u2018behind the scenes\u2019 thinking is actually common.\u00a0 It is why we can drive home from work daydreaming and lost in thought, sometimes barely remembering the trip. The complicated, but relatively routine business of driving is mostly handled by our personal autopilot, which only bothers the \u2018pilot\u2019 if something unusual happens. We may not be able to double task as much as we think, and it is still a horrible idea to text and drive, but while we are thinking consciously about one thing, there are a lot of other relatively routine things our brain can manage in the background. And when a Eureka insight hits us out of the blue, the connections that made it happen almost certainly occurred below our awareness.<\/p>\n

Making the Implicit Explicit:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 This is really important for innovation<\/a>, because most of us don\u2019t have \u2018Ah-Ha\u2019 moments as often as we would like.\u00a0 However, if we can understand the unconscious processes that lead to these moments, it is possible to create conditions where they occur more often.\u00a0 We may never get to \u2018Ah-Ha\u2019 on demand, but we may increase the number of genuine breakthrough ideas we have when facing difficult problems.<\/p>\n

Great Artists Steal:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0One way to understand more about how these insights happen is to examine examples where the process does bleed into our consciousness. Artists and musicians\u00a0are a good place to start, as they routinely\u00a0steal ideas from each other, and then adapt or blend these inspirations to create something new. Sometimes this happens\u00a0unconsciously, as with Sam Smiths Grammy winning adaption of Tom Petty's\u00a0I Won't Back Down<\/em>, but often it is more deliberate: For example, Picasso's declared \u201cGreat Artists Steal\u201d, and adapted and blended influences from everything from Impressionism to African sculpture to become one of the most innovative people of the 20th<\/sup> Century.
\nIn science and technology this process is often more opaque.\u00a0 The culture of intellectual property rightly discourages the direct stealing of ideas.\u00a0 However, in reality, nearly all technical breakthroughs stand on the shoulders of past achievements. This does not mean copying or\u00a0plagiarism, simply that one insight leads to another.\u00a0 Einstein would have struggled with relativity without Newton\u2019s calculus, while the discovery of DNA was enabled by a plethora of diverse science that went before it.\u00a0 The \u2018Ah-Ha\u2019 involves taking existing knowledge, and adapting, blending and building productively on it to create new and better. \u00a0Of course, we do this all of the time when we use our training and experience to solve problems, but the magic Ah-Ha comes when we make a big jump, and connect things that other smart people working in our area haven\u2019t.\u00a0 So how can we catalyze this?<\/p>\n

Standing on the Shoulders of the Same Giants<\/em><\/strong>:\u00a0 Unless we have an Einstein\u2019s or Francis Crick on our team, then connecting the dots based on information commonly available within our expert domain typically leads to incremental innovation, and\/or to competitors all coming up with the same idea at about the same time.\u00a0 This latter effect is called multiple discovery, and is experienced by even the greatest innovators. Newton and Leibnitz with calculus, and Darwin and Wallace with natural selection are famous examples, but it also happens to us mere mortals!\u00a0 If we are all standing on the shoulders of the same giants, we tend to see the same opportunities, and at roughly the same time.<\/p>\n

Standing on the Shoulders of Different Giants<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 Of course, incremental innovation is important, and we don\u2019t want to miss out on multiple discovery. If we do, competition will leave us in their dust.\u00a0 But if we want to jump ahead of the pack, and come up with Ah-Ha\u2019s that nobody else has, then one way to do it is to stand on the shoulders of different giants to everybody else.\u00a0 One of the best ways to do this is to look for inspiration in unexpected places, and to make connections with domains that may initially be surprising, or unobvious, but that provide insight that we wouldn\u2019t get if we stuck with the \u2018usual suspects\u2019.
\nFor example, James Dyson stole the air purification system from a sawmill, and turned it into the highly lucrative Dyson Vacuum.\u00a0 While everyone else was trying to improve filtration, he recognized that that standard technology in a sawmill separated dust from air.\u00a0 This could then be adapted to deliver a disruptive innovation that reinvented an entire vacuum cleaner industry.\u00a0 Another example is George de Mestral\u2019s invention of Velcro, a game changer that he \u2018stole\u2019 from the micro-structure of the common burr.\u00a0 Both of these examples were somewhat serendipitous, Dyson wandered into a sawmill, and had an Ah Ha moment, and de Mestral had his moment of insight when he observed burs attached to his dogs fur. \u00a0\u00a0However, they show the value of reaching across domains for disruptive innovation.
\nBut how do we tap into a broad enough range of knowledge to make these surprising connections relatively routine?\u00a0 Part of the challenge lies in looking in the right places, which can be largely solved by searching for inspiration where there is a huge amount of pre-existing innovation, such as the military, medicine, or as in de Mestrals\u2019 case, nature.<\/p>\n

Another way to do this is to build teams full of people like expert generalists, T-shaped Innovators, or polymaths.\u00a0 These are people who know a lot of different things, and are good at diffuse thinking and at breaking mental fixation.\u00a0 This allows them to naturally frame problems at a sufficiently abstract level, and then use analogy to make surprising, but useful connections between different domains. For example, Dyson saw that separation, and not filtration was the answer to his problem, which allowed him to connect the sawmill and the vacuum.\u00a0 De Mistral, that the strong but reversibly attached functionality of the bur was an answer to attaching and at the appropriate time, removing clothing.<\/p>\n

Democratizing Genius?<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 However, polymaths are in relatively short supply, and even the most diverse thinking individuals have a limit on what they know.\u00a0 So how can we democratize this process, and make everyone more like a Dyson or a de Mestral?
\nThere are several ways to approach this.\u00a0 We can use analogy and knowledge representation to make more abstract problem definition to make connections easier.\u00a0 And we can look in very targeted ways for rich sources of pre-existing innovation, like medicine, the military, or nature.<\/p>\n

Go Big! <\/em><\/strong>\u00a0We can also go big, and instead of having a relatively small number of people who know an awful lot, use crowd sourcing to tap into the enormous aggregate knowledge of large numbers of people.\u00a0 This makes the \u2018pot\u2019 of knowledge we draw from huge, as well as increasing the chances of finding natural analogous thinkers.<\/p>\n

New Challenges:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 However, this does create a different set of problems.\u00a0 Lots of ideas means finding really big Ah-Ha\u2019s can be like looking for a golden needle in the proverbial haystack.
\nVoting is one approach to solving this.\u00a0 It can be effective, especially for \u2018why didn\u2019t I think of that?\u2019 ideas – concepts that while not obvious before somebody says them, make great sense in hindsight.\u00a0 People will rally around these ideas.<\/p>\n

Finding Diamonds in the Rough<\/em><\/strong>:\u00a0 But what happens if the big idea is not quite so obvious?\u00a0 Or it is so revolutionary that it requires nurturing?\u00a0 Or if the person who had it is not a good communicator?
\nThere is no silver bullet to solve this, but this is a really good reason to very actively manage a crowd-sourcing event.\u00a0 Don\u2019t just rely on voting, but also actively look for hidden gems, and build on or reframe them if they are poorly articulated.\u00a0 Those running a session often have more time than participants, and can use it to hunt down and elevate diamonds in the rough.<\/p>\n

The Tyranny of Satisfycing:<\/em><\/strong> Humans are also biased towards running with the first good enough idea they have.\u00a0 It is called satisfycing in Behavioral Economics, and in most situations it works very well for us.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve solved the problem, why keep looking?\u00a0 However, a spark of brilliance could have been just around the corner.\u00a0 I suspect that Steve Jobs did not tolerate a lot of satisfycing, but how can we build this into crowd sourcing?\u00a0 There are a number of ways to do this, including creating waves of ideation that take out satisfycing solutions early, and challenge teams to stretch in subsequent waves.\u00a0 Or one of my favorites lies in very thoughtful problem definition.\u00a0 Framing a problem at a slightly more abstract level, as discussed above, encourages people to automatically connect more diverse domains, and make more surprising connections. So if we had been Dyson crowd sourcing vacuum cleaning, we would have been more likely to find the saw-mill if we\u2019d framed the question as \u201chow to separate dirt from air without losing suction\u201d, rather than how to stop filters clogging, or asking for a better filtration system.\u00a0 This sounds obvious, but we have a real tendency to define problems in terms of our own knowledge and experience, whereas one of the great potential benefits of crowd sourcing is that it enables us to tap into a much wider range of expertise.<\/p>\n

About the Author:<\/h4>\n

\"Pete<\/a><\/p>\n

Founder of Pete Foley Innovations, Pete is P&G veteran for over 25 years, spending\u00a0the past 9 years applying psychology and behavioral science insights to innovation, design, shopper psychology and holistic marketing.\u00a0 He is an experienced speaker and workshop leader as well as a serial innovator with well over 100 granted or published patents.\u00a0 He can be contacted at @foley_pete<\/a>, pete.mindmatters@gmail.com<\/a>, or www.mindmatters.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eureka!\u00a0 When we have a problem, this is the \u2018Ah Ha\u2019 moment that we all hope for. A flash of brilliance that saves the day, the project, or even our job! Going back to Archimedes, innovation is replete with examples of this somewhat mysterious, but extremely useful event. For example, one of Einstein\u2019s key insights in developing special relativity came to him during a discussion with a friend over coffee, and Kekule\u2019s insight into the structure of benzene came to him in a dream. At first glance, these may seem to be examples of insight coming from nowhere. But in reality, even Einstein probably couldn\u2019t have come up with special relativity without some background reading in physics! All ideas have to come from somewhere! Our Smart Unconscious:\u00a0That Einstein wasn\u2019t consciously aware of how he made the connection on that day […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1059134,"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130330\/revisions\/1059134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}