Look for Solutions in
Search of Problems
Problems need solutions. That’s elementary. But sometimes smart solutions need a few more problems. In their lively and engaging book, Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small, Yale professors Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres suggest we examine existing solutions and ask two questions:
1. Where else would it work? Sometimes we can export fixes from one realm to another. For instance, the authors ask, if the movie industry can create a PG version of its films to show on airplanes, why not offer the same recut and sanitized version on DVD for parents concerned about what their kids are watching? If U.S. taxpayers can make deductible IRA contributions past the tax year and until April 15, why not permit the same for charitable deductions and “allow people to make more informed choices about their generosity?”
2. Would flipping it work? Changing the default option is a simple step that can achieve excellent results. Consider organ donation. In the U.S., Nalebuff and Ayres write, potential donors must affirmatively indicate their desire to donate their organs. Although polls show most Americans are willing to do so, inertia and circumstance often stand in the way. But if organ donation were opt-out instead of opt-in—that is, when people applied for their driver’s licenses, they were automatically signed up unless they explicitly said they didn’t want to become an organ donor, as is the practice in several other countries—the U.S. could chip away at lengthy transplant waiting lists and save thousands of lives.
Asking “Why?” can lead to understanding. Asking “Why not?” can lead to breakthroughs.
(More information: www.whynot.net)
Create an Inspiration Board.
When you’re working on a project, empty your bulletin board and turn it into an inspiration board. Each time you see something that you find compelling—a photo, a piece of fabric, the page of a magazine—tack it to the board. Before long, you’ll start seeing connections between the images that will enliven and expand your work. Fashion designers have long used these boards, forming wild collages that serve as mind expanders and conceptual guides. You can do the same.
Read These Books.
Here are six books to help you hone your powers of Symphony:
Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture by William Benzon— An excellent exploration of how the mind processes music, in particular how music draws on all parts of the brain in a whole-minded, symphonic fashion.
Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames— Created by the well-known husband-wife team, this flip book contains seventy-six pages, each with one image, each of which is seen ten times closer than its predecessor. Start at the beginning of the book with an image of the earth viewed from ten million light-years away. Then flip through the pages with your thumb, and zero in on a man at a picnic on Chicago’s lakefront—and descend into the man’s skin, one of the skin’s cells, the cell’s DNA, all the way to a single proton.
Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together by William Isaacs — Collaborating with colleagues to cross boundaries, identify patterns, and connect ideas may require new ways of talking with each other. This book explores principles and practices that can help individuals move beyond simply reporting their own thoughts to truly thinking together and building collective wisdom.
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson— This short, accessible work is the best book available about metaphor as a thought process.
No Waste (A project by Laboratorio De Creacion Maldeojo)— A TV aerial made out of discarded metal cafeteria trays. Toy cars fashioned from spent plastic shampoo, ink, and glue containers. Those are just two of the images in this remarkable collection of photographs of ingeniously repurposed items from the streets of Cuba. A stunning display of combinatorial thinking.
How to See: A Guide to Reading Our Man-made Environment by George Nelson— First published in the mid-seventies, and reissued in 2003, this book is an amazing tutorial in looking critically at the world around us, making connections between what we see, and conceiving of human creations in a broader context.
Do Some Real Brainstorming.
You’ve been in this meeting. The boss asks everyone to “brainstorm”—and after fifteen frustrating minutes the effort produces few inspired ideas and many dispirited employees. Why does this happen? Because you weren’t following the rules. Effective brainstorming sessions aren’t random and haphazard. They follow a particular structure that’s proven to elicit good ideas.
To brainstorm properly, abide by these rules (which are drawn from Tom Kelley’s excellent book, The Ten Faces of Innovation):
1. Go for Quantity. Good ideas emerge from lots of ideas. Set a numerical goal—say, a total of one hundred ideas.
2. Encourage Wild Ideas. Extremism is a virtue. The right idea often flows from what initially seems outlandish.
3. Be Visual. Pictures unlock creativity.
4. Defer Judgment. There’s no such thing as a bad idea, so banish the naysayers. Think creatively first and critically later.
5. One Conversation at a Time. Listen, be polite, and build on others’ suggestions.
As people shout out their ideas, or expand others’ thoughts, capture everything in writing. (It helps to have one person serve as scribe and another as facilitator.) At the end of a half-hour, you’ll have a long list of ideas. Take a break. Then begin evaluating what’s on the list. Most of the ideas won’t be very good. Some will be downright ridiculous. But it’s almost certain that you’ll come up with a handful of ideas you’d never have arrived at otherwise.
If you want to brainstorm from your own private Idaho of a computer, check out the Web site Halfbakery, to which people around the world have contributed all manner of ideas for products, services, and businesses. Some of the ideas are raw. But others are surprisingly well done. (More info: www.halfbakery.com)
Celebrate Your Amateurness.
I am best at what I can’t do.
It has become my ability to feel strong and confident in these situations. I feel free to move, to listen to my heart, to learn, to act even if that means I will make mistakes.
If you want a creative life, do what you can’t and experience the beauty of the mistakes you make.
The above from Marcel Wanders, designer and self-described “professional amateur.” (More info: www.marcelwanders.com)
Look for Negative Spaces.
Negative space is the part of the big picture we often overlook. So train your eyes to see it. When you take a walk or browse a store or page through a magazine, peer past what’s prominent and examine what’s between, beyond, and around it. Being aware of negative space will change how you look at your surroundings—and it will make the positive space snap into focus. It’s also a way to be surprised. For instance, on a package of Hershey’s Kisses, of all things, I found an unexpected and whimsical negative space. Do you see it?
Seven
EMPATHY
Yesterday was rough. I worked nonstop from the time I awoke, straining to meet a couple of deadlines, trying to squirm out of an unexpected new assignment, and contending with a seven-year-old with a runny nose, a five-year-old with a loose tooth, and an eighteen-month-old who was teaching himself cause-and-effect by pushing ceramics off a counter. In the afternoon I ran five miles. After a rushed dinner, I returned to my office and worked a few more hours, until I was too tired to concentrate. At about 10:00—bone tired—I went to bed. Except I couldn’t sleep. I read a little, then tried again. No go. So around 1 A.M., I went downstairs, poured myself a glass of wine, and read the previous day’s newspaper. Then another glass of wine. Then another newspaper. At 2:15 I went back upstairs and tried again. Finally, I did fall asleep, sometime after 3:06, the last numbers I remember seeing on the clock radio beside my bed.
About three hours later, the eighteen-month-old stood up in his crib and began bellowing his traditional morning milk chant. By 7 A.M., the house had erupted into full morning mania. And by 8
A.M., I was back in my office, where I now sit, facing another day of deadlines. I’m tired, really tired. In fact, I just yawned. And as I think about the day before me, I’m yawning again. Despite the three cups of coffee I’ve just guzzled, I could fall asleep in about thirty seconds. But sleep will have to wait. Too much to do. So I soldier on—and I yawn.
Stop for a moment. In the past minute, have you yawned? When you read my account of sleepiness, and then pictured me yawning, did you feel an inkling of a yawn creep toward your jaw? If so, you probably have a natural inclination for the next essential aptitude—Empathy. (If not, in order to trigger this innate capacity, you may need a story more emotionally compelling than my boo-hoo tale of overworking and undersleeping.)
Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others’ shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts. It is something we do pretty much spontaneously, an act of instinct rather than the product of deliberation. But Empathy isn’t sympathy—that is, feeling bad for someone else. It is feeling with someone else, sensing what it would be like to be that person. Empathy is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality—climbing into another’s mind to experience the world from that person’s perspective.
And because it requires attuning oneself to another, Empathy often involves an element of mimicry, which is why some of you yawned a moment ago. Contagious yawning, says Drexel University cognitive neuroscientist Steven Platek, is likely a “primitive empathic mechanism.”1 His research has found that contagious yawners score high on various tests that measure levels of Empathy. Such people—some of you, no doubt—are so in tune with what others are going through that they can’t help but mimic that behavior.
Empathy is mighty important. It helped our species climb out of the evolutionary muck. And now that we’re upright and bipedal—the big animals on campus—it still helps us get through the day.
Empathy allows us to see the other side of an argument, comfort someone in distress, and bite our lip instead of muttering something snide. Empathy builds self-awareness, bonds parent to child, allows us to work together, and provides the scaffolding for our morality.
But Empathy—like many of the other high-concept, high-touch aptitudes—wasn’t always given its proper due in the Information Age. It was often considered a softhearted nicety in a world that demanded hardheaded detachment. To undermine an argument or dismiss an idea, you just had to call it “touchy-feely.” Or look at the drubbing former U.S. president Bill Clinton took when he uttered these four words: “I feel your pain.” Some critics thought Clinton was dissembling when he said that. But the roughest criticism came from those who considered the comment laughably unpresidential and even a tad unmanly. Americans pay presidents to think, not to feel—to strategize, not to empathize. Or so it has long been. The era of sharp-minded knowledge workers and briskly efficient high-tech companies prized emotional distance and cool reason—the ability to step back, assess the situation, and make a decision unimpeded by emotion. But as with so many other attributes of L-Directed Thinking, we are beginning to see the limits of such a single-minded approach. Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, published about the same time that Clinton uttered his empathic words, signaled the beginning of this shift. Goleman argued that emotional abilities are even more important than conventional intellectual abilities—and the world took to his message.
“Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.”
—OPRAH WINFREY
But ten years later, the Conceptual Age is increasing the stakes. When Goleman wrote his book, the Internet was in its infancy and those highly skilled Indian programmers of Chapter 2 were in elementary school. Today, cheap and widespread online access, combined with all those overseas knowledge workers, are making the attributes measurable by IQ much easier to replace—which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, has meant that aptitudes more difficult to replicate are becoming more valuable. And the one aptitude that’s proven impossible for computers to reproduce, and very difficult for faraway workers connected by electrons to match, is Empathy.
Facing the Future
In 1872, thirteen years after he published On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published another book that scandalized Victorian society. The book was called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals— and it made some controversial claims. Most notably, Darwin said that all mammals have emotions and that one way they convey these emotions is through their facial expressions. A dog with a lugubrious look on its face probably is sad, just as a person who’s frowning probably is unhappy.
Darwin’s book caused a stir when it came out. But for the next century it languished in obscurity. The assumption in the world of psychology and science was that our faces did express emotion—but that those expressions were products of culture rather than nature. But in 1965, Paul Ekman—then a young psychologist and now a legendary one—came along. Ekman, an American, traveled to Japan, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. He showed people there photos of faces fixed in various expressions, and he found that Asians and South Americans interpreted the expressions the same way Americans did. He was intrigued. Perhaps these common interpretations were due to television or Western influence, he thought. So Ekman journeyed to the highlands of New Guinea and showed the same set of facial expression photos to tribespeople who’d never seen television, or even a Westerner, before. They read the faces the same way all of Ekman’s previous subjects did. And that led him to a groundbreaking conclusion: Darwin was right after all. Facial expressions were universal. Raising eyebrows indicated surprise in midtown Manhattan, just as it did in suburban Buenos Aires, just as it did in the highlands of New Guinea.
Ekman has devoted much of his career to studying facial expressions. He created the set of photographs that I looked at back in Chapter 1 when I was getting my brain scanned. His work is enormously important for our purposes. Empathy is largely about emotion—feeling what another is feeling. But emotions generally don’t reveal themselves in L-Directed ways. “People’s emotions are rarely put into words; far more often they are expressed through other cues,” writes Goleman. “Just as the mode of the rational mind is words, the mode of the emotions is nonverbal.”2 And the main canvas for displaying those emotions is the face. With forty-three tiny muscles that tug and stretch and lift our mouth, eyes, cheeks, eyebrows, and forehead, our faces can convey the full range of human feeling. Since Empathy depends on emotion and since emotion is conveyed nonverbally, to enter another’s heart, you must begin the journey by looking into his face.
As we learned in Chapter 1, reading facial expressions is a specialty of our brain’s right hemisphere. When I looked at extreme expressions, unlike when I looked at scary scenes, the fMRI showed that the right side of my brain responded more robustly than my left. “We both express our own emotions and read the emotions of others primarily through the right hemisphere,” says George Washington University neurologist Richard Restak. That’s why, according to research at the University of Sussex, the vast majority of women—regardless of whether they are right-handed or left-handed—cradle babies on their left side. Since babies can’t talk, the only way we can understand their needs is by reading their expressions and intuiting their emotions. So we depend on our right hemisphere, which we enlist by turning to the left. (Recall from Chapter 1 that our brains are contralateral.)3 People with damage to their right hemisphere have great difficulty recognizing the emotions on others’ faces. (The same is often true for those with autism, which in some cases entails a malfunction of the right hemisphere.) By contrast, people with damage to the left side of the brain—the side that, in most people, processes language—are actually better at reading expressions than the rest of us. For instance, both Ekman and Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Massachusetts Gen
eral Hospital in Boston, have shown that most of us are astonishingly bad at detecting when someone is lying. When we try to determine from another’s facial expressions or tone of voice if that person is fibbing, we don’t do much better than if we had offered random guesses. But aphasics—people with damage to their brain’s left hemisphere that compromises their ability to speak and understand language—are exceptionally good lie detectors. By reading facial cues, Etcoff found, they can spot liars more than 70 percent of the time.4 The reason: since they can’t receive one channel of communication, they’re better at interpreting the other, more expressive channel.
The Conceptual Age puts a premium on this more elusive, but more expressive, channel. Endowing computers with emotional intelligence has been a dream for decades, but even the best scientists in the field of “affective computing” haven’t made much progress. Computers still do a shabby job of even distinguishing one face from another—let alone detecting the subtle expressions etched onto them. Computers have “tremendous mathematical abilities,” says Rosalind Picard of MIT, “but when it comes to interacting with people, they are autistic.”5 Voice recognition software can now decipher our words—whether we tell our laptop to “Save” or “Delete” or whether we request “Aisle” or “Window” to an automated airline attendant. But the most sophisticated software on the planet running on the world’s most powerful computers can’t divine our emotions. Some newer applications are getting better at spotting the existence of emotion. For instance, some kinds of voice recognition software used in call centers can detect big changes in pitch, timing, and volume, all of which signal heightened emotion. But what happens when the software recognizes these signals? It transfers the call to an actual human being.