I’ve long admired how Thomas Edison wielded naps in his “Thinking Chair” in order to induce creative insights. He’d nap with ball bearings in each hand and place pie pans below the armrest so that, just as he was dozing off, the bearings would clatter him awake. Salvadore Dali did the same thing, but with with different hardware: as he describes in his 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, he’d slip a key between his fingers to accomplish the same purpose. Bill Pfann did the same thing at Bell Labs, and didn’t need anything other than his clanging chair to capture insights.

The fine folks over at The Art of Manliness have catalogued examples ranging from Aristotle to Einstein to Beethoven to Edgar Allen Poe, to name a few. Yet while I’ve long appreciated these historical examples, I’ve never had a “nap-to-eureka!” story of my own… until recently.

Background: For the last 23 months, we’ve been hard at work on a new process visualization at the d.school. As much as we love the famous hexagons, they hardly capture the spirit of what we teach, so we’ve been working on alternative ways of providing provisioning for beginners. Yet it’s turned into a bit of a search for the unifying theory, as each advance we make has been accompanied by glaring deficiencies that plague me even as I describe our work in new ways.

We’ve done focus groups with students, round-ups among faculty, workshops with graphic designers… and yet something just hasn’t felt quite right. Thus the creative challenge has become a bit of an obsession, and left me banging my head against the wall. (As long-readers of the blog know, this is a critical step in the process.)

Breakthrough: Just the other day, right smack dab in the middle of a massive program I was co-leading, I spied a 15-minute window to step away from the session before I was supposed to introduce a guest speaker and prompt an exercise around inquiry-driven design. I had the material down pat, and set a timer for 7 minutes to get a wink of refreshing rest before getting back to the session.

BANG!

Approximately one minute into my nap, a critical insight regarding the visualization challenge rushed into my mind. I spent the next 6 minutes frantically jotting down notes and firing them off to the broader team that’s working on the visualization challenge with me, and rushed back into the zoom to launch the next lecture.

I’d say that single minute of unexpected insight — triggered by my subconscious, and harvested thanks to a willingness to capture the moment inspiration struck — has provided ~85% of the direction we’ve needed to make a major advance. Don’t call it a breakthrough… but I’m pretty delighted that such a leap in progress can be attributed to the tactic I’ve admired from afar. Perhaps someday it will be added to the annals of The Art of Manliness… :-)

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