Beware Conventional Wisdom
Experience is a dangerous thing. It’s a currency most organizations highly value, and the stock in which most professionals trade. To be more experienced in any field is almost de-facto better. That is, until a fresh perspective comes along and the world changes in an unexpected way. The paradoxical importance of “entertaining absurdity” is a theme that cuts across the history of invention and innovation (definitely read the Beethoven reference at the end of that link!), but it’s not something that the keepers of conventional wisdom are often capable of doing.
One of my favorite examples comes from Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works division, which invented everything from America’s first jet fighter to the U-2 to the SR-71 Blackbird, always shrouded in secrecy. In the freezing pre-dawn of the Cold War, the division delivered an incredible breakthrough that revolutionized aviation and warfare forever: stealth technology that could evade radar detection at previously unfathomable levels. But the idea almost never lived to see the light of day.
Thirty-six year old mathematician and radar specialist Denys Overholser discovered a formula buried deep in a decade old technical paper written by a scientist from Russia. He believed it held the key to designing an aircraft with a radar cross section that would give an advantage. The only catch is, the design specified flew in the face of all conventional wisdom regarding aerodynamics. It was so bad, in fact, that the internal code name for the project was “Hopeless Diamond.” As Ben Rich, who directed Skunk Works for nearly twenty years, recalls in his memoir, “Skunk Works,”:
“Most of our veterans used slide rules that were older than Denys Overholser, and they wondered why in the hell this young whippersnapper was suddenly perched on a throne as my guru, seemingly calling the shots on the first major project under my new and untested administration. I tried to explain that stealth technology was in an embryonic state and barely understood until Denys unearthed the theory for us; they remained unconvinced even when I reminded them that until Denys had come along with his revelation, We had known only two possibilities to reduce in airplanes radar detection… Dick Cantrell, head of our aerodynamics group, suggested burning Denys at the stake as a heretic and then going on to conventional projects…”
The design based on Overholser’s formulations ended up registering a radar signature of something like 1/1000th of the next best aircraft ever designed, won the company lucrative defense contracts, and cemented its place in the annals of aerospace history.
The truth is, much of the time, the keepers of the conventional wisdom should be trusted. The trouble is that every once in a while, their finely-tuned instincts are exactly wrong. And so it’s also true that the keepers conventional of conventional wisdom are much more likely to consider a revolutionary idea absurd — just remember how the computer experts of Bob Taylor’s day, mostly mathematicians and physicists, scoffed at his emphasis on the screen — and this is an important bias to beware.
At the risk of being long-winded, I’ll close this piece with a fantastic thought from Boston University’s legendary professor of biochemistry and author Isaac Asimov (full article here):
Regarding the factors that led to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Asimov says, “Undoubtedly in the first half of the 19th century, a great many naturalists had studied the manner in which species were differentiated among themselves. A great many people had read Malthus. Perhaps some both studied species and read Malthus. But what you needed was someone who studied species, read Malthus, and had the ability to make a cross-connection.
That is the crucial point that is the rare characteristic that must be found. Once the cross-connection is made, it becomes obvious. Thomas H. Huxley is supposed to have exclaimed after reading On the Origin of Species, “How stupid of me not to have thought of this.”
But why didn’t he think of it? The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corollary of an old idea.”
It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.
A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us…”
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