Leverage Interruptions

"Creativity is excited by sensory input that is random or at least unusual... Research has shown that subjects arrive at the most innovative solutions when the objects they had to work with were randomly selected from a larger pool of possibilities. The best creativity tends to be serendipitous rather than deliberate... By beginning with the totally unexpected, participants in these experiments were forced to stretch their creativity to the highest degree."

- Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius

That's all well and good, Sir Simonton. But how does it work, practically? You know, outside the lab? One tactic I've noticed spectacular innovators employ is to turn interruptions into serendipitous opportunities for random input. “If I’m going to be interrupted, might as well put it to use,” they think.

Ana Leyva is an alum of LaunchPad11 doing fantastic things at Lelu. She was one of the only women in her business school class to have children, and despite the hypothetical concerns about "founder distraction," I've seen firsthand how she's bent ordinary household interruptions to her purpose as an entrepreneur. When Mar Hershenson and I interviewed her, one of the stories that really resonated was how she's learned that the interruptions her children bring can be a blessing in disguise.

"One practice that I've leaned in to a lot is, when my son asks questions — for example, when he overhears conversations that I have with my employees and asks, 'what was that about?' — instead of just dismissing him, I engage it. I try to explain whatever problem it is I'm dealing with, in terms that he can understand. Boiling things down like that has actually been really helpful, actually... Every time it happens, the temptation is to feel like I don't have time to have to explain things, but every time I do — when I take the time to try to boil it down for him — it's always helpful. This clarity happens, and I realize, 'Oh that's that's what's really at the core of this. Instead of this other thing that was are masquerading as the true issue."

There’s enough evidence that suggests that randomness is a meaningful input in the creative process that we instruct our students at Stanford to deliberately go seek out random inputs; but when the world offers up interruptions, an innovator doesn’t even need to leave home to get fresh input. She just needs to be willing to embrace it, and bend it to her purposes.

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