Keeping the "not Invented Here Syndrome" in engineering thread in
mind, I found this in the NYT this morning. Very interesting.

Bright Ideas

By JANET RAE-DUPREE
Published: December 30, 2007

It's a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase,
our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because
the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along
with our experience.

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he
told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something
is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes
nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the
box you’ve built around yourself.

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in
The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an
expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what
you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with
catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When
it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new
cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way
it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the
well-worn path.

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse
of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She
gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known
songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a
tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in
their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to
name the songs.

Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they
believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On
average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the
time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs
tapped out, or 2.5 percent.

The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how
could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?

That’s a common reaction when experts set out to share their ideas in
the business world, too, says Chip Heath, who with his brother, Dan,
was a co-author of the 2007 book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas
Survive and Others Die.” It’s why engineers design products ultimately
useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble
convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the
advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to
consumers.

“I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of
them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use
that button and believed I would want to use it, too,” Mr. Heath says.
“People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and
they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of
us.”

[NOTE: The above paragraph is something that I've believed for a long
time - hense bloated software programs with twenty zillion ways of
doing the same thing - Tom]

But there are proven ways to exorcise the curse.

In their book, the Heath brothers outline six “hooks” that they say
are guaranteed to communicate a new idea clearly by transforming it
into what they call a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed
Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting acronym, Succes,
refers to a different hook. (“S,” for example, suggests simplifying
the message.) Although the hooks of “Made to Stick” focus on the art
of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering
innovation.

To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a
variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one
another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of
specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American
tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking
English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the
common connections.”

In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We
Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia
Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity
thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.

When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an
outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world
differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old
problems.”

She cites as an example the work of a colleague at Ralston Purina who
moved to Eveready in the mid-1980s when Ralston bought that company.
At the time, Eveready had become a household name because of its sales
since the 1950s of inexpensive red plastic and metal flashlights. But
by the mid-1980s, the flashlight business, which had been aimed solely
at men shopping at hardware stores, was foundering.

While Ms. Rabe’s colleague had no experience with flashlights, she did
have plenty of experience in consumer packaging and marketing from her
years at Ralston Purina. She proceeded to revamp the flashlight
product line to include colors like pink, baby blue and light green —
colors that would appeal to women — and began distributing them
through grocery store chains.

“It was not incredibly popular as a decision amongst the old guard at
Eveready,” Ms. Rabe says. But after the changes, she says, “the
flashlight business took off and was wildly successful for many years
after that.”

MS. RABE herself experienced similar problems while working as a
transient “zero-gravity thinker” at Intel.

“I would ask my very, very basic questions,” she said, noting that it
frustrated some of the people who didn’t know her. Once they got past
that point, however, “it always turned out that we could come up with
some terrific ideas,” she said.

While Ms. Rabe usually worked inside the companies she discussed in
her book, she said outside consultants could also serve the
zero-gravity role, but only if their expertise was not identical to
that of the group already working on the project.

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work
in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says. “Make it
possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come
in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...

Keeping the "not Invented Here Syndrome" in engineering thread in
mind, I found this in the NYT this morning. Very interesting.

Bright Ideas

By JANET RAE-DUPREE
Published: December 30, 2007



Interesting article and one I can directly relate to.

It's one of the reasons the company I founded has been somewhat successful.

I didn't know any better.

Eisboch

On Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:53:56 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

When
it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new
cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way
it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the
well-worn path.

Very true. Of course some of that is a result of pressure on all
concerned to get the task done right the first time, as quickly and
efficiently as possible. Those goals are not closely aligned with
innovation, and it is much safer in the business world to stick with
what is tried and true. It takes a lot of the fun out of it. :-)