Посты с тэгом: fixedness

Structural Fixedness: A Barrier to Creativity

Published date: October 19, 2015 в 3:00 am

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Imagine you’re driving down the highway, and you notice a flag waving in the distance. But something’s not right. The flag is upside down. You’d notice it right away because it’s not in its usual position that you have seen hundreds of times before.
We all have this tendency to notice things that are out of order. We have an innate sense of how things are structured, and it helps us make sense of the world around us. But this sense of structure is also a barrier to creativity. Here’s an example:
Take a look at this and tell me, which is the odd one out? Do you see it?
1) 17
2) 19
3) 13
If you’re like most people, you selected one of the three numbers you see here: 17, 19, or 13.
But I want you to step back from the problem and see it in a different light. Now, I want you to consider all the numbers on the page, including the ones on the left side – 1, 2 and 3.
Now, out of these six numbers, which one is the odd one out? You should have no difficulty seeing that the number 2 is the only even number on the page. It’s truly the odd one out.
But why do people have such a difficult time seeing the number 2 as part of the set of numbers? It’s because we all have another type of fixedness called structural fixedness. Like functional fixedness, it’s a cognitive bias. It blocks us from considering other structures than what we’re used to.
Look back at our list of numbers. We’re so used to seeing a list with numbers and parenthesis that we treat the numbers behind the parenthesis differently. We have this structure so fixed in our mind, we don’t consider other configurations.
Structural fixedness makes it hard to imagine different configurations of a product or service that could deliver new benefits to the marketplace. This type of fixedness is a big concern with services and processes, because they tend to happen in a fixed sequence, one step after another. Without a way to break fixedness, we’re prevented from seeing new creative options.
The good news is that you can break structural fixedness just like you do functional fixedness. You do it with one of the five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking.
One in particular, the Division Technique, is your tool of choice.
 
 
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What’s in a Name

Published date: July 16, 2012 в 3:00 am

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“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

                                Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

 Look at this word, then see what mental picture you get:  HAMMER.  Like most people, you probably see a person’s hand wrapped around a metal or wood stick with an object fixed on top. You may see this object being used to strike other objects.  You may imagine the heaviness of the object.  The word “hammer” is a mental shortcut that instantly conjures up all the memories and associations you have with that thing.  Naming objects is useful.

But the names we give items also creates a barrier to innovative thinking.  We have a difficult time seeing that object doing anything else than the task assigned to it.  It is also difficult for us to imagine using other objects to do the job of a hammer.  It is a condition called Functional Fixedness.

Psychologist Karl Duncker discovered  Functional Fixedness when he posed his famous “candle problem.” In this classic 1945 experiment.  Duncker sat participants down at a table positioned against a wall. He gave each one a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches, and asked them to attach the candle to the wall. Duncker realized that participants were so “fixated” on the thumbtack box’s traditional function that they couldn’t conceive of it as a possible solution to the problem. Interestingly, in later experiments, participants presented with an empty thumbtack box were twice as likely to solve Dunker’s challenge than those given a full one. Somehow, seeing the box out of context—that is, not performing its usual function of holding thumbtacks—helped them visualize it as a possible solution.

Fixedness

Published date: December 21, 2009 в 10:07 am

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“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan

The most challenging aspect about innovating is rooted in a concept called fixedness.  Fixedness is the inability to realize that something known to have a particular use may also be used to perform other functions.  When one is faced with a new problem, fixedness blocks one’s ability to use old tools in novel ways.  Psychologist Karl Duncker coined the term functional fixedness for describing the difficulties in visual perception and problem solving that arise when one element of a whole situation has a (fixed) function which has to be changed for making the correct perception or for finding solutions.  In his famous “candle problem” the situation was defined by the objects: a box of candles, a box of thumb-tacks and a book of matches. The task was to fix the candles on the wall without any additional elements. The difficulty of this problem arises from the functional fixedness of the candle box. It is a container in the problem situation but must be used as a shelf in the solution situation.

Roni Horiwitz of S.I.T. puts it this way:  “It’s almost impossible for the human brain to produce a really fresh and unique thought. Every thought, opinion or idea is somehow connected to previous concepts stored in the brain.”   Because of this, we are often unable to see the solution to a problem although it stares us in the face.  We are too connected to what we knew previously. We not only can’t let it go, but we try very hard to anchor around it to explain what is going on.
Fixedness is insidious.  It affects how we think about and see virtually every part of our lives.  At work, we have fixedness about our products and services, out customers and competitors,  and our future opportunities.  The most damaging form of fixedness is when we are stuck on our current business model.  We cannot see past what is working today.  We stop challenging our assumptions.  We continue to believe what was once true is still true.  In the end, it is this perpetual blind spot that is most dangerous to our innovation potential.
Customers have fixedness, too.  Customers have a limited view of the future, they have well-entrenched notions of how the world works, and they suffer from the same blind spot we do.  Yet we continue to seek the “Voice of the Customer” as though a divine intervention will break through this fixedness so they can offer new ideas.
Fortunately, there is a way to address it.  The way to break fixedness is to use structured innovation tools and principles that make you see problems and opportunities in new ways.  Remember the classic Will Rogers quote:

“It’s not what you don’t know that will get you.  It’s what you know that ain’t so.”

Or was it Mark Twain?

 

Innovation Allocation

Published date: August 19, 2008 в 10:09 am

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Who leads innovation in your company: marketing or R&D?  It’s a trick question, of course.  But it’s a useful question for Fortune 100 companies to consider.  Has your company made a conscious choice of how it “allocates” this leadership role?
Allocating innovation to one group over the other will yield a different business result.  The approaches to innovation by marketing are dramatically different than approaches to innovation by R&D, so the outputs will be dramatically different.  The question becomes: which group will outperform the other?   Technical-driven innovation or marketing-driven innovation?
But there is another layer of complexity.  Allocating innovation resources to one group over the other will also yield a different kind of innovation.  Market-driven innovation speaks to what is salable.  Technology-driven innovation speaks to what is technically possible.  Which group delivers the type of innovation that is best suited to the company’s growth strategy?  Now the decision of who leads innovation becomes even stickier.
This question is a bit like deciding how to allocate your money in an investment portfolio. Which allocation of funds will give you the total return and the type of return (tax advantaged, etc) that you need?  The tempting answer here is to assert innovation leadership should be shared between the two.  Diversify your innovation allocation just as you would diversify your personal investment allocation.  I’m not so sure.  Here’s why.
For a company that knows exactly what its customers need, then it’s just a matter of developing it. A technically-led innovation approach makes the most sense. L’Oreal, for example, does virtually no market research with its customers.  It gathers no “Voice of the Customer.”  Yet it knows exactly what customers need because…..L’Oreal tells them!  In that case, innovation is led by the technical team to deliver the beauty compounds and formulas that will thrill their customers. The innovation approach here is described as “Problem-to-Solution.  Engineers lead this because they excel at solution matching.
A company in the refrigerator space such as GE or Whirlpool needs a different approach.  Breakthrough innovation is more likely to be found in the “Solution-to-Problem” mode, best driven by the commercial marketers who excel at problem matching. The marketer needs to use an approach that relieves them of their preconceived notions about what customers want. They seek to avoid “fixedness” around their current product so they can solution spot more freely.  Only then will they be able to envision new concepts of home refrigeration that never would have emerged with a technical approach.
The best companies maximize their innovation investment return by consciously allocating leadership to either marketing or to R&D.  In the end, innovation is best driven with a team approach but with clear role accountability and direction depending on market conditions and corporate strategy.

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