Appreciating Instigators, Young and Old
I just got off of a particularly brutal call with a mentor who is pushing me to shift gears a little bit more radically than my comfort zone enjoys. And that, coupled with the recent post on complimentary collaborators, reminded me of a couple of important functions that others can play in sparking fresh thinking.
One is the the power of naïveté: this one is counterintuitive. One of my favorite lessons about collaboration is something I learned from my friend Dr. Beau Lotto (whose book "Deviate" is essential reading on the neuroscience of perception): there's enormous value in pairing novices with experts. As he says, and I won't even try to direct quote, but the essence I learned from him is that experts know how to spot a great question, but because of their familiarity with convention, have trouble asking them; novices, on the other hand, un-bounded by convention, naturally ask good questions, but they don't know it when they do! So there's power in pairing an expert with a novice in order to source great questions.
This is one reason why an outsider's perspective (which is implicitly effectively naive, even if otherwise experienced, or as Marvel Comics calls it, "inexperienced experience") is such a powerful lever for creating change.
The other is pointing out an unexplored direction. This function often flows the other way around (from expert to naive), but is just as transformative in helping fresh thinking take shape. One thing that experience breeds is the unfortunate combination of 1) knowledge of yet-unsolved problems and 2) capacity limitations that make it impossible to explore all unknowns. But a great life hack for folks just starting out is to listen to what bothers folks who are more experienced (what stinks?); what questions are lingering that they wish someone would answer? A famous example is how Bell Labs' famously experienced Mervin Kelly inspired a fresh line of inquiry for a youngster still in employee orientation:
"One day, Kelly stopped by (Bill) Shockley's West Street office, possibly to visit with his office-mate, and began to talk. Shockley later recalled, 'I was given a lecture by then-research director Dr. Kelly, saying that he looked forward to the time when we would get all of the relays that make contacts in the telephone exchange out of the telephone exchange and replace them with something electronic so they'd have less trouble.'
In a system that required supreme durability and quality, there were two crucial elements that had neither: switching relays and vacuum tubes... Kelly set an intriguing goal that lingered in Shockley's mind as he finished his training program and turned back to studying the physical properties of solid materials on his own and with his study group. Kelly's articulation of a solution--a product, in essence--was fairly straightforward, even if the methods for creating such a product (ed: the semi-conductor transistor!) remained obscure... For the rest of his life Shockley considered Kelly's lecture as the moment when a particular idea freed his ambition, and in many respects all modern technology, from its moorings."
(Excerpt from "The Idea Factory")
Application questions: where you're an expert, do you have enough naive folks around you to HEAR some great questions? Have you created an environment where naive are willing to ask, not knowing which questions are great? And where you're naive, are you willing to speak up? And are you willing to follow an unexplored line of inquiry?
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