Bed, Bath & Beyond: Ideas for Ideation
By: Lux Narayan
Tags: Problem Solving, Ideation, Meetings, Creative Thinking, Productivity

You know the feeling. You’ve been there.

Many times, I’m guessing. You’ve been racking your brains about a problem, likely, a business problem. A question that demands a creative solution that you know exists, elusive as it seems. You can feel it in the force.

Years of workshops and mountains (or gigabytes) of books have told you that creativity is a process: a process that needs some catalysts and some sherpas. But a process, still.

The frustrating head-banging of creative problem-solving

You do the rounds:

Offsite meetings at the pub, resort, or Starbucks — Check.

Nothing is taboo, a.k.a. “No idea left behind meetings” — Check.

Tissue meetings, bounce meetings, lie-down / tied-down meetings — Check

Everyone has ideas, i.e., “Let’s ask the FedEx guy what he thinks” — Check.

Your walls are plastered with enough Post-Its to boost 3M’s share price single-handedly.

Photo by İrfan Simsar on Unsplash

So many ideas. So many thoughts. So many hours.

And yet, so much angst.

Intuitively, you know that your collective minds need to step away from a problem to see it afresh. To find “it,” you need to make a non-linear jump. As Interstellar, Back to the future, and many other movies have taught us, non-linear jumps need space and time — to allow unobvious connections to manifest.

Photo by Jesse Sewell on Unsplash

Linear thinking won’t yield non-linear jumps.

The history of innovation is rich with examples of non-linear jumps that changed humanity’s course in ways that we now take for granted. Let’s look at three examples.

BED

Benzene is a non-linear organic hydrocarbon. Worry not. That’s all the chemistry we will be discussing. Today, Benzene is an invisible part of our lives: it’s in paints, resins, lubricants, phenol, detergents, explosives, many kinds of plastics, and too many other things to name here. It was also used to decaffeinate coffee — something it is, thankfully, no longer used for.

Before we could tame Benzene, we needed to understand it. That took some time. The structure of Benzene confounded scientists for years. It did not behave anything like the other hydrocarbons scientists knew at the time. All the other hydrocarbons were linear. Straight. Benzene was the black sheep.

One of the people banging his head against this problem was the German scientist, August Kekule. He finally deduced that Benzene was structured as a ring.

Kekule attributed his breakthrough discovery to a day-dream where he saw an ouroboros (a snake seizing its own tail in a ring). This inspired thought along a new direction no one had considered before. Thanks to that dream, he was able to connect the dots (err… hydrocarbons).

The rest, as they say, is history.

Ouroborus

Geek alert: The benzene molecule has six carbon atoms joined in a hexagonal ring. Each Carbon atom attaches to one hydrogen atom. It’s beautiful.

Benzene

BATH

Circa 250 BC, King Hiero II of Syracuse, Greece, wanted to know if the local goldsmith had mixed any silver into what was purported to be a pure gold crown. After every local intellectual failed to solve this problem, the king assigned the problem to the neighborhood polymath, a gentleman called Archimedes.

For a long time, Archimedes unsuccessfully ruminated on the problem.

One day, while bathing, he noticed that the tub's water level rose as he got into it. He realized that this could be used to figure the volume of his body. Thus, it could be used to calculate the crown’s volume (by drowning it in the bathtub).

Since he knew the crown’s weight, he could now calculate its density- its weight divided by its volume. Gold is a dense metal; if other metals like silver were mixed, the crown’s density would reduce.

Excited upon solving the king’s riddle, discovering buoyancy, and the principle that now bears his name, Archimedes ran through the streets naked, crying “Eureka,” Greek for “I’ve got it.”

Spoiler alert: the goldsmith had mixed in some silver into the crown. He was probably killed.

Photo by Max Murauer on Unsplash

BEYOND

In the orchard at Woolsthorpe Manor in England is an extraordinary apple tree. It first put down roots around 400 years ago. For many years, we’ve known it as Newton’s apple tree.

Sir Issac Newton relayed the story of the tree to one of his earliest biographers. In the biographer’s own words (sic):

“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees… he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”

Photo by Michael Weidner on Unsplash

Kekule was in bed.

Archimedes was in his bath.

Newton was out, and beyond.

Some problems need a sous vide approach.

Sous Vide is a cooking method in which food is placed in a plastic pouch or a glass jar and cooked in a water bath for longer than usual cooking times. Usually for one to seven hours, and up to seventy-two or more hours in some cases.

Photo by Kadir Celep on Unsplash

Some problems demand this approach. They need us to recognize that we have all the parts (ingredients) in our head (container). Walking away and letting it slow cook is all that’s left in the recipe.

This requires us to recognize what economists call the point of diminishing returns.

In meetings, it is the point characterized by three things:

You’ve moved from square one to square three but seem to keep coming back to square three. People start to regurgitate old ideas. They tell them in the passive voice if discussed in an active voice before. And vice versa. There is a discernible increase in input and output. Brainstormers consume more coffee or alcohol and take more comfort breaks.

Recognizing this point is a skill unto itself. It is what Kenny Rogers, in his song The Gambler, calls “Knowing when to walk away.”

After many turns around corners, it requires us to know that the solution probably isn’t around the next corner.

It requires us to remember that linear thinking will not yield non-linear jumps.

It requires us to think Sous Vide.

It’s easy to recognize people who have this skill. For starters, simply look at their calendars.

They will not be scheduled from minute to minute. They ensure they keep at least fifteen-minutes between meetings to give their minds time to digest, rest, and prepare for the task ahead. There will be broad swathes of time on their calendar blocked out on a regular cadence — for thinking. In this age of publicly accessible calendars and transparency, they label them ‘thinking times.’

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

They have learned that shining a continuous light on a problem doesn’t always help.

When I think about this idea, I think about the scientist Heisenberg of the Uncertainty principle fame. His best-known thought experiment was about photographing an electron.

Taking the electron’s picture would reveal its position, Heisenberg realized, but the light bounced off would impart energy to the electron, causing it to move. In effect, the act of learning about the electron’s position would create uncertainty about its position.

In a similar vein, continually shining a light on a problem often causes the solution to move away.

Photo by Isaac Davis on Unsplash

Sometimes, you’ll see things only when you’re stumbling in the dark.

There’s a difference between intellectual laziness and the mind being at rest.

It’s akin to strength training: strained muscles recoup and grow during periods of rest. They trust that the process of resting and allowing connections to manifest is the best possible approach.

It’s something improvisational comedians know well. They adopt a “Yes, And” stance in a resting but receptive mind: the best possible approach to creating spontaneous comedy gold.

Pic: Lux’s Improv T-Shirt

The gold, the creative solution, is in the connections. Rest elicits connections and associations, as Kekule, Archimedes, and Newton have shown us.

In short, the best problem solvers go to bed, bath, and beyond.

So, the next time someone, or better still, your mind, asks you to go take a hike, do it. You never know the gravity (pun intended) of what you might find.