Is Your Idea Crazy Enough? Book Giveaway!

We are giving away a copy of Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work by Michael Michalko. Check out this excerpt and then leave a comment for your chance to win the book!

The playful openness of creative geniuses is what allows them to explore unthinkable ideas. Once Wolfgang Pauli, the discoverer of electron spin, was presenting a new theory of elementary particles before a professional audience. An extended discussion followed. Niels Bohr summarized it for Pauli’s benefit by saying that everyone had agreed his theory was crazy. The question that divided them, he claimed, was whether it was crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. Bohr said his own feeling was that it wasn’t crazy enough.

Logic hides in Bohr’s illogic. In genius, there is a tolerance for unpredictable avenues of thought. The result of unpredictable thinking may be just what is needed to shift the context and lead to a new perspective.

Here is what one marketing agency did. As reported on PSFK.com, it persuaded the “Unilever corporation to place GPS devices in selected boxes of its Omo brand detergent in Brazil. This enabled the agency to track the purchasers right to their doorsteps and surprise them with gifts. As soon as any one of the fifty Omo boxes bearing GPS devices was removed from the store shelf, one of its teams swooped into action and reached the shopper’s home within hours.”

The playful freedom that accompanies a “bizarre” idea permitted the agency to juxtapose possibilities that would not otherwise have been available, and to construct a sequence of events that would otherwise not have been constructed.

In another example, Spencer Silver, a 3M chemist who liked to play around with chemicals, tried mixing together different ones just to see what would happen. One of the things that happened was his invention of the special adhesive that made Post-it notes possible, a product that had accounted for over $300 million in business by 2002.

Spencer Silver is quoted as saying, “If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” If he had studied the literature, he would have stopped his work. The key was not knowing what the experts believed, and experimenting to see what he could do. Silver, in a “Eureka” moment, realized he had developed an adhesive that created an impermanent bond.

But the problem was how to use his discovery. The company climate permitted Silver to continue with his efforts, but no one could develop it into a useful product. Silver had found a solution, but he hadn’t found a problem to solve it with. The breakthrough came when another 3M employee, Arthur Fry, got his inspiration. Art was a member of a church choir and used paper slips as bookmarks in the songbooks to identify the songs to be sung. Sometimes the paper would fly off and create problems. The idea of using Silver’s adhesive to make a better bookmark came to him while singing in the choir.

The bookmark inspired him to think of other paper-to-paper applications in which only one of the sheets of paper was coated with the glue. The problem was that 3M did not have the equipment to do this, so management was not enthusiastic about Fry’s application. Consequently Fry designed and built his own machine in his basement to manufacture the forerunner of the Post-it note. The machine was too large to get through his basement door, so he blasted a hole in the wall to get the machine to 3M. He then demonstrated the machine to management, engineers, salespeople, and production managers. His demonstration generated the enthusiasm to get management behind the project.

Thinking Outside Your Cone of Expectations

Thought is a process of fitting new situations into existing slots and pigeonholes in the mind. Just as you cannot put a physical thing into more than one physical pigeonhole at once, the processes of thought prevent you from putting a mental construct into more than one mental category at once. This is because the mind has a basic intolerance for ambiguity, and its first function is to reduce the complexity of its experiences.

When you come up with crazy or fantastical ideas, you step outside your cone of expectations and intentions — which is what happened to a manufacturer of dinner plates who had a problem with packaging. The plates were wrapped in old newspapers and packed in boxes. Every packer would eventually slow down to read the papers and look at the pictures. Most employees would drop to about 30 percent efficiency after a few weeks on the job.

The manufacturer tried using other material for packing, but that proved too expensive; the newspapers had been free. They tried using newspapers in different languages, but these were hard to obtain. They even offered incentives to workers to increase the number of plates wrapped, but without great success. Finally, one day in a meeting an exasperated supervisor said they should tape the workers’ eyes shut so they couldn’t read. This absurd comment created a lot of laughter as the others joked about his comment. But the supervisor had an “Aha!” moment: he got the idea to hire blind people to do the packing. The company not only greatly increased its packing efficiency but also received tax benefits for hiring the disabled.

***

Michael Michalko is the author of Creative Thinkering, Thinkertoys, Cracking Creativity, and ThinkPak. While an army officer, he organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics to find the best inventive thinking method. He has expanded and taught these techniques to numerous Fortune 500 companies and organizations. He lives in Rochester, New York. Visit him online at CreativeThinking.net.

WIN THE BOOK! Enter a comment below and you will automatically be entered to win a copy of Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work by Michael Michalko. Winner will be announced on January 31 (winner will be notified via Care2 profile). Good luck!

CONGRATULATIONS TO:

Pat C.

Please email Samantha at samanthas@care2team.com to claim your new book. Thanks to everyone who entered!

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Brian M.

10:38AM PST on Feb 7, 2012

My best ideas always seem to come in the middle of the night. Sometimes I even write them down. Now if I could just win this book.

send a green star

Pamela C.

2:53PM PST on Jan 30, 2012

My viewpoint changes when I change what is important to me. What is important to me may be trivial to the next. I just have to make sure that my spirit doesn't get dragged down by the person that can't see past the mundane.

Heather G.

4:47PM PST on Jan 28, 2012

I myself have never been one to conform to what society deems to be acceptable,some might say even by a professional business standard I am still to eccentric to ever fit into a venue of fortune 500 companies.I very much think outside the box. Your'e story on a companies employees who lost productivity from the news paper they were wrapping the dishs in. So they fire old employees and hire new blind employees? That has to be one of the most absurd asacine expensive merges I have Ever heard of....FOR REAL that guy should so be fired. Solution? And it will only cost petty cash of no more than $50.00 and I am being very cheap(hint the sarcasam) so buy a stereo genius! Really? Who the hell can read when the music is redirecting your'e basic thought processes? And that is a absolute fact jack.More so music is a natural positve motivation force of it's own so productivity goes up more work is being done so supply becomes more in demand,those employees that are always wanting to work overtime so they can make there rent will finally get that opportunity because for the first time your'e work is back ordered not because of yor'e end but your'e wholesale factory's inablity to provide such a quick turnover....Sigh,it's almost should be a total crime it is so damn simple me how do ya like those apples? You can always tell a real entrapaeneur from a salesman, a entrapauner will be able to to hear what isn't being said,finding,following,and drawing upon this is a priceless comodity that

Betty K.

2:49PM PST on Jan 26, 2012

Good article! It reinforces my "'cuz I'm not a monkey" attitude. If there's a generally accepted practice or behavior that I find questionable for good reason and my research as to the reason(s) behind the behavior/practice comes up nil, I'll do it my way, as long as it's not illegal (and possibly even if it is). I may have a low tolerance for things that don't quite do the job they're supposed to do, or practices that ignore good common sense. Either way, if I'm bothered by it, I immediately launch into a "think of a better way" mode. The first memory I have of trying to improve upon an already manufactured item, to make it fit MY NEEDS, was when I was 12 or 13. I was a teenage girl in need of a blow dryer. But it was 1964 or 5 and they weren't invented yet. So I disconnected the hose on my brand new hooded hair dryer Christmas gift and blew my hair dry with the end of it, and went out for the night. Too bad I was more interested in my new found freedom and later curfew, boys and hanging out with girl friends to pay attention to creating a solution to every girls major hair issue. I fixed our record player when I was 8 or 9. I could have been Conair!

12:41PM PST on Jan 26, 2012

Good article. It reinforces my "'cuz I'm not a monkey" attitude of not just going along with accepted practices or behaviors when I question them. If I can't rationalize why something is done a particular way and I have doubts about it making sense, and my research as to the reason(s) for the accepted practice comes up blank, I ask myself, "What if everyone did it my way?". If the answer is positive with no for seen negatives, if I have good reason(s) for doing it differently and it's not illegal (and possibly if it is) I do it my way. Things would never change or improve if we never questioned anything.

Adrian Y.

7:21PM PST on Jan 25, 2012

More than a good read......a catalyst for creative juice?!

cally h.

11:10AM PST on Jan 25, 2012

singing might be good for you but it might well send other people crazy

Berny P.

10:07AM PST on Jan 25, 2012

THANKS

Arunprasath S.

6:38PM PST on Jan 24, 2012

Amazing article!

Terrance B.

5:52PM PST on Jan 23, 2012

I have this idea of scientific methods, reality and a study related to strawberry jam. First I'll talk about the strawberry jam. There is this study done by Timothy Wilson and Johnathan Schooler involving Consumer Reports ratings of strawberry jam. Consumer Reports rated 45 different types of jams and ranked them. The researchers then brought in two groups of people, one group came in, tasted several of the jams, then ranked in them in order of how good they were. Then there was a second group who came in, tasted the jams, ranked the jams, and also had to justify their rankings. The first group ranked the jams pretty much right in line with what Consumer Reports had. The second group's rankings were all over the place. So what basically happened is the people in the second group began to focus on the most salient feature of the jams, features which in reality really didn't actually impact how good they thought the jam was. If the second group was not asked "why" they would have never paid attention to the features that they thought justified their ranking of a jam. So when it comes to scientific methods and reality I see an issue. If we imagine reality as strawberry jam, something we're trying to figure out and decide how it works, we pay attention to the most salient features. Gravity, smell, temperature, mass, etc. How do we decide what is important to pay attention to in formulating a theory of the universe and what are we missing? Think about Newton for a second. Humans