The stickiest thing on earth is a myth.The myths I’m talking about are powerful, insidious, bite-sized fact(oid)s that range from the slightly askew and nearly-correct to the patently absurd and downright damaging. And we love them.
Columbus discovered America. Hardly.
Washington could not tell a lie. Ahem.
The international judges in professional figure skating and gymnastics are faithful and unbiased purveyors of athletic truth. Score: 2.6.
You can stay off email for the entire weekend. Right.
See? Powerful. Very sticky. Charmingly and decisively wrong.
And still, we love them.
It seems at times that there’s a kind of “S-curve” around myths in which we all participate: We learn myths to help us cope with some new, complicated situation or body of knowledge. Then we get a little experience, and we spend the rest of our time unlearning the myths so we can get something useful accomplished.
If we’re lucky, that is. Because, inevitably, the truth is more interesting and richer than the myth, and the key to forward progress.
The myths we create and perpetuate in business are as debilitating as any of our historical or cultural myths. In fact, they may be more debilitating, since they can govern our professional success (unlike, say, the Columbus myth, which simply nets us a long weekend and some parades).
That’s why Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation, published earlier this year by O’Reilly Media, is such a breath of fresh tsunami. Not only is Berkun a smart, clever and humorous writer (despite the typos, O’Reilly—shame, shame), but he’s organized his topic in a way that takes the myths head-on.
Berkun’s aims are articulated upfront: Identify the myths about innovation, explain why they're popular, and explore and teach from the truth. I count ten myths in all, but a single uber-myth weaves its way through most of the detail, and it goes like this: Innovation is about some brilliant person who is struck by a profound insight and then goes on to change the world. The quintessential myth-story, as Berkun illustrates, is that of Newton being hit on the head by an apple.
If we truly believed that, we’d all go home to swing in the hammock with a mint julep in our hand. Or we’d keep walking by the cube of the smartest engineer or marketer in the company, waiting for the disco ball to start turning. That’s why myths can be so debilitating.
The fact is that the truths about innovation are energizing. And, Berkun’s Myths of Innovation is full of good history and thoughtful ideas that supply some great momentum if it just happens to be your turn to come up with something new and good. (And which day of the week isn’t that true?)
In deference to Mr. Berkun’s good work, I’m going to include only 14 take-aways in this article (even though I have about 40). I don’t want to be the spoiler to your buying the book. And, while those of you who have knocked around a bit in the trade will have slayed some of these myths long ago, I would venture that those of you new to innovation will find all of the myths worth exploring.
The single best part of the book for me--and alone worth the price of admission--is Berkun’s discussion about the importance of defining a problem before attempting to solve it.
Wow, did this resonate.
I feel sometimes like I’ve slaved over an issue, whether in innovation or finance or marketing or some other discipline, only to find that I’m not finding the right answer because I haven’t even asked the right question. I’ve defined the problem incorrectly from the start. Berkun writes, "Discovering problems actually requires just as much creativity as discovering solutions." Einstein once said, "If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it."
Now, that’s a course for every MBA program: How to Define a Problem.
Indeed, you could argue (once you peel back the myth) that one of the reasons Edison became so famous is not that he “invented the light bulb,” but that he framed his problem much more broadly: "Make an electricity system cities can use to adopt my lights."
That turned out to be a problem worth solving.
And, to make sure we see Edison with the feet of clay we all possess—and help debunk that great uber-myth--one of his rivals criticized Edison’s methods, which involved immense quantities of deliberate trial-and-error:
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of a bee to examine straw after straw, until he found [it]. I was a sorry witness of such doings. . .a little theory would have saved him ninety percent of his labor."Now, don’t you feel better about yourself just knowing that the single greatest inventor in American history could have done better?
There’s lots more where this came from. Scott Berkun has written a terrific book, and I encourage your picking up a copy.
Here are my (self-limited, hopefully non-spoiler) 14 take-aways:
1. All innovations are a combination of materials and ideas that already exist, used in a different or new way. (That’s why innovation responds to “good process” and determined work, just like most everything else.)One of the great takeaways from the book is Berkun’s contention that, “To some extent, we've lost the ability to innovate because so many of us make other people's stuff, and are willing to use what's there rather than devise something better.” The fact is, if we don’t use our ability to innovate, it deteriorates over time like any other skill. That’s a scary thought when you recognize how much of business growth depends on new products and services.
2. "The best lesson from the myths of Newton and Archimedes is to work passionately but to take breaks. Sitting under trees and relaxing in baths lets the mind wander and frees the subconscious to do work on our behalf. Freeman Dyson, a world-class physicist and author, agrees, "I think it's very important to be idle. . .people who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative. So I'm not ashamed of being idle. . .Some workaholic innovators tweak this by working on multiple projects at the same time, effectively using work on one project as a break from the other."
3. "The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems. Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. . .Nearly every major innovation of the 20th century took place without claims of epiphany."
4. "Study the history of any innovation--from catapults to telegraphs to laser beams and nanotechnology--and you'll find its invention and adoption is based on ordinary, selfish, and mostly short-term motivations. Mistakes and complexities are everywhere, rendering a straight line of progress as a kind of invention itself. . .Every technology arrived in the same chaos that we witness in our innovation today.”
5. "The love of new ideas is a myth: we prefer ideas only after others have tested them. We confuse truly new ideas with good ideas that have already been proven, which just happen to be new to us. The paradox is that the greater potential of an idea, the harder it is to find anyone willing to try it.”
6. There is a huge gap between how an innovator sees the world and how others see the world. Howard Aiken, a famous inventor, said, "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
7. "While there a lot to be said for raising bars and pushing envelopes, breakthroughs happen for societies when innovations diffuse, not when they remain forever "ahead of their time."
8. "Apple, like Edison, earned well-deserved credit for vastly improving existing ideas, refining them into excellent products, and developing them into businesses, but Apple did not invent the graphical user interface, the computer mouse, or the digital music player. Similarly, Google did not invent the search engine, and Nintendo did not invent the video game."
9. “Despite the myths, innovations rarely involve someone working alone, and never in history has an invention been made without reusing ideas from the past. For all of our chronocentric glee, our newest ideas have historic roots: the term network is 500 years old, webs were around before the human race, and the algorithmic DNA is more elegant and powerful than any programming language. Wise innovators--driven by passion more than ego--initiate partnerships, collaborations, and humble studies of the past, raising their odds against the timeless challenges of innovation."
10. "The myth that leads to this idea-destroying behavior is that good ideas will look the part when found. . .The future never enters the present as a finished product, but that doesn't stop people from expecting it to arrive that way."
11. "The dirty little secret--the fact often denied--is that unlike the mythical epiphany, real creation is sloppy. Discovery is messy; exploration is dangerous. No one knows what he's going to get when he's being creative."
12. The myth that the best idea wins is dangerous. The goodness or newness of an idea is only part of the system that determines if it will win or lose.
13. This suggests that the most successful innovations are not the most valuable or the best ideas, but the ones that appear on the sweet spot between what's good from the expert's perspective, and what can be easily adopted, given the uncertainties of all the secondary factors combined."
14. "It's deceptively hard to create good constraints, and there's less glory in problem finding than solving; however, the number of successful innovations based on clever constraints proves it's worth the time."
The solution, according to Linus Pauling (winner of two solo Nobel Prizes) is this: “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”
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