There are many different roads to innovation. James Dyson developed his vacuum cleaner by
noticing an analogy between vacuum cleaners and sawmills. George DeMestral created Velcro after looking
at cockleburs sticking to the fur of his dog.
One strand of insight comes from breaking functional fixedness. The idea behind functional fixedness is best
illustrated with the television show MacGyver. In this show, the main character would
routinely get into a jam. To get himself
out of it, he would fashion a device using all sorts of objects around
him. The fascinating thing, though, was
that he would use these objects in novel ways.
Paper clips became wires; a toolbox was
emptied and used to float something on a lake; a clock was taken apart
to use some of its gears.
Broadly, we tend to think of objects having particular
functions. Paper clips are for holding
together papers. Toolboxes are for
holding tools. We don’t think about all
of the parts of those objects and the materials they are made from, and so we
don’t recognize that we might be able to use those same objects for many
different functions. The fun of MacGyver
was watching him rig up a device by using objects in new ways.
For MacGyver, of course, it was all in the script. What can the rest of us do? An interesting paper by Tony McCaffrey in the March,
2012 issue of Psychological Science suggests that everyone can get better
at breaking out of functional fixedness.
The key to breaking out of habitual ways of looking at
objects is to list all of the features of the objects and then to describe them
by looking at what they are made of rather than by thinking about their function. In the paper, McCaffrey gives the example of
trying to combine together two metal rings using a candle and a block of
metal. People have a lot of difficulty
with this problem. However, if you start
to list the parts of the objects, you recognize that a candle is made of wax
and a wick. That wick is made of
string. If you scrape the wax off the
candle, you can use the string to tie together the rings.
In a study exploring this method, McCaffrey compared one
group that was taught to list out all of the properties of the objects with
another group that did not get this instruction. Then, the groups were given a series of six
insight problems to solve that all required overcoming functional fixedness The control group solved about half the
problems, while the group listing features solved over 80% of the
problems.
This strategy is a nice one to use when you get stuck
solving a problem. Whenever you get
stuck, it is possible that the knowledge and tools you need to solve a problem
are easily available. The key to
effective problem solving is to describe a problem in a way that allows you to
use your knowledge to solve it. Listing
the parts of objects around you in a function-free way is a nice method for
helping you to redescribe a problem in ways that might allow you to find an
innovative solution.
