Creativity

In the article Neo-Amish Drop Outs, Kevin Kelly shares a quote from Donald Knuth explaining why he (Knuth) seldom reads email.

Rather than trying to stay on top of things, I am trying to get to the bottom of things.

Getting to the bottom of things — questioning assumptions, investigating causes, making connections — requires a different state of mind than staying on top of things. Deep thought is difficult when you’re frequently interrupted. It’s just as difficult when you anticipate being interrupted even if the interruption never comes.

We don’t task switch nearly as well as we think we do. We think we can switch instantly between tasks, when in reality it takes at least 15 minutes to recover our thoughts, and that’s if we were doing something relatively simple. With more complex tasks, it takes longer.

When I began to understand this a few years ago, I asked a colleague how long it takes her to recover from an interruption. She said three days. I thought she was exaggerating, but now I appreciate that it really can take a few days to get into a hard problem.

I ran across this quote from John Tukey a couple days ago:

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

Too often approximate problems take on a life of their own and we forget that they were approximations. We worry about numerical results to many significant figures when the original model might be doing well to get within 20% of reality. Better to produce a crude solution to a more realistic problem. As G. K. Chesterton said, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

On the other hand, you’ll probably face less criticism if you produce exact solutions to unrealistic problems than if you produce approximate solutions to realistic problems. At least that’s what I’ve seen. I suppose this is because it takes less understanding to find fault with your solution than to evaluate your choice of problem to solve.

Wendell Berry on the publish-or-perish ethos of modern universities:

If a tree falls in the absence of a refereed journal or a foundation, does it make a sound? The answer, in the opinion of the imitation corporate executives who now run our universities, is no.

From Life is a miracle: an essay against modern superstition.

Here’s a quote from a recent blog post from Tom Peters:

You will be remembered in the long haul for the quality of your work, not the quantity of your work—the quantity part is just your defective ego talking—no one evaluates Picasso based on the number of paintings he churned out.

From Robert A. Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

About a month ago I wrote a series of four blog posts on innovation. The most important theme from these posts is the statement by Seth Godin just posted an article on his blog entitled The fibula and the safety pin that fits in with a series of innovation post I did about a month ago (Innovation I, II, III, IV). From Godin’s post:

Just about everything has a strike against it. It’s either already been done or it’s never been done. Ignore both conditions. Pushing an idea through the dip of acceptance is far more valuable than inventing something that’s never existed… and then walking away from it.

His phrase “pushing an idea through the dip of acceptance” is a good definition of innovation. (It also contains a passing reference to his excellent little book The Dip.) It goes right along with Michael Schrage’s statement that “innovation is not what innovators do but what customers adopt.” Too often we romanticize the inventor and fail to appreciate the toil of the innovator.

Sometimes making a task just a little simpler can make a huge difference. Making something 5% easier might make you 20% more productive. Or 100% more productive.

To see how valuable a little simplification can be, turn it around and think about making things more complicated. A small increase in complexity might go unnoticed. But as complexity increases, your subjective perception of complexity increases even more. As you start to become stressed out, small increases in objective complexity produce big increases in perceived complexity. Eventually any further increase in complexity is fatal to creativity because it pushes you over your complexity limit.

Going back to simplification, a small decrease in complexity can be a big relief if you’re stressed out. Maybe that small simplification can pull you out of F-state back to C-state. If you’re up against your maximum complexity, a small simplification could make the difference between a problem being solvable rather than unsolvable.

Small simplifications are often dismissed as unimportant when they’re evaluated in the small. Maybe a new term makes it possible to refer to an idea in three syllables rather than six. No big deal if it’s a term you don’t use much. But if it’s a term you use all the time, it makes a difference. That’s why every group has its own jargon.

Suppose one programming language takes five lines of code to do what another language can do in four lines. So what? How long does it take to type one line of code? But multiply that by 10. Maybe you see 40 lines of code on your laptop at once but you can’t see 50. Or multiply by 10 again. Maybe you can hold 400 lines of code in your head but you can’t hold 500. Language features dismissed as “syntactic sugar” can make a real difference.

It’s easy to decide what you’re going to do.  The hard thing is deciding what you’re not going to do.
Michael Dell

Clutter kills WOW.
Tom Peters

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

Some say “The devil is in the details,” meaning solutions break down when you examine them closely enough. Some say “God is in the details,” meaning opportunities for discovery and creativity come from digging into the details. Both are true, but the latter is more interesting.

I posted something along these lines a few weeks ago, Six quotes on digging deep. In that post I quote Richard Feynman

… nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough …

I thought about this again last night when I ran across a post by Andrew Gelman entitled God is in every leaf of every tree. He has a similar quote from Feynman.

No problem is too small or too trivial if we really do something about it.

From there he links to a post where he describes what he calls the paradox of importance. Sometimes we can do our most creative work on the least important problems. The important problems often demand quick solutions, so we fall back on familiar methods.

Everything in this post applies equally well to creativity in field: graphic design, music composition, literature, etc.  However, Gelman is talking about creativity specifically in the context of statistics. The field of statistics itself is a prime example of something that appears dull from the outside but becomes fascinating in the details. A course in statistics can be mind-numbingly dull when the emphasis is on rote application of black-box procedures. Looking inside the boxes is more interesting, and designing the boxes is most interesting.

From Alan Perlis:

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

 See this site for a list of other epigrams from Perlis.

In his book Diffusion of Innovations Everett Rogers lists five factors in determining rate of adoption of an innovation.

First is the relative advantage of the innovation. This is not limited to objective improvements but also includes factors such as social prestige.

The second is compatibility with existing systems and values.

Third is complexity, especially perceived complexity.

The fourth is trialability, how easily someone can try out the innovation without making a commitment.

The fifth is observability, whether the advantages of the innovation are visible.

Innovators are often criticized for compatibility, for not making a larger break from the past. After Bjarne Stroustrup invented the C++ programming language, many people said he should have sacrificed compatibility with C in order to make C++ a better language. However, had he done so, C++ would not have become popular enough to gain the critics’ attention. As Stroustrup said in an interview, ”There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.”

In 1601, an English sea captain did a controlled experiment to test whether lemon juice could prevent scurvy.  He had four ships, three control and one experimental.  The experimental group got three teaspoons of lemon juice a day while the control group received none. No one in the experimental group developed scurvy while 110 out of 278 in the control group died of scurvy. Nevertheless, citrus juice was not fully adopted to prevent scurvy until 1865.

Overwhelming evidence of superiority is not sufficient to drive innovation.

Source: Diffusion of Innovations

Innovation is not the same as invention. According to Peter Denning,

An innovation is a transformation of practice in a community. It is not the same as the invention of a new idea or object. The real work of innovation is in the transformation of practice. … Many innovations were preceded or enabled by inventions; but many innovations occurred without a significant invention. 

Michael Schrage makes a similar point. 

I want to see the biographies and the sociologies of the great customers and clients of innovation. Forget for awhile about the Samuel Morses, Thomas Edisons, the Robert Fultons and James Watts of industrial revolution fame. Don’t look to them to figure out what innovation is, because innovation is not what innovators do but what customers adopt.

Innovation in the sense of Denning and Schrage is harder than invention. Most inventions don’t lead to innovations.

The simplest view of the history of invention is that Morse invented the telegraph, Fulton the steamboat, etc. A sophomoric view is that men like Morse and Fulton don’t deserve so much credit because they only improved on and popularized the inventions of others. A more mature view is that Morse and Fulton do indeed deserve the credit they receive. All inventors build on the work of predecessors, and popularizing an invention (i.e. encouraging innovation) requires persistent hard work and creativity.

Ward Cunningham’s design advice is to try the simplest thing that might work. If that doesn’t work, try the next simplest thing that might work. Note the word “might.”

We all like simplicity in theory, and we may think we’re following Cunningham’s advice when we’re not. Instead, we try the simplest thing that we’re pretty sure will work. Solutions usually get more complex as they’re fleshed out, so we miss out on simple solutions by starting from an idea that is too complex to begin with.

Once you have a simple idea that might work, you have to protect it. Simple solutions are magnets for complexity. People immediately suggest “improvements.” As design guru Donald Norman says “The hardest part of design … is keeping features out.”