14. Question Killers: Thunder and Other Non-Answers
The Need for More Than "One Order of Understandings"
This is the first part of a longer newsletter that will be published in around six or seven installments and will cover a variety of topics, all connected to writing, teaching, and each other.
(It’s like thunder and lightning/The way you love me is frightening— ”Knock on Wood”)
As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things . . .
(From Walden)
What’s That Funny Noise?
A gentle rain falls outside an open window while a two-year-old boy rolls toy cars across the living room floor. His father sits nearby on the sofa, absorbed in his newspaper. Watching the boy from the edge of a braided rug sits a calico cat whose eyelids grow heavy. “Hrrrumm-hrrrumm” the toddler murmurs as he pushes various cars and trucks over the wooden surface.
A faint rumbling sound builds in the distance. The boy looks toward the window. All living room traffic halts. The cat’s radar ears pivot.
“What’s that funny noise?” the boy asks.
“Oh, that? That's just thunder,” the man responds without looking up from his newspaper.
The boy glances again toward the window, then back at his dad. No response. He looks out the window once more and then at his cat who yawns and stretches before curling up on the rug. Slowly, the boy turns back to his cars. Before long, the engines restart, and traffic resumes.
What Does Open Mean?
A group of designers sits around a conference table. Their purpose is to develop a different design for a can opener to help the company jump ahead of its rivals. The conversation focuses on which enhancements might set the opener apart from the rest.
A: What will give us an advantage over the competition?
B: Sharpness is key. And speed.
C: More powerful, but quieter.
D: Self-cleaning, too.
E: Compact, taking up less counter space, plus a wide choice of colors.
A: It should handle cans of all sizes and shapes.
The group continues discussing improvements, and as 5:00 approaches, they approve a short list of recommendations. Feeling they’ve made progress, the designers pack up their briefcases.
At another company, a different group of designers toss ideas around. Much like the first group, they at first talk about possible can opener enhancements. After a while, they decide the discussion is not so productive:
A: I think you’re right. Let’s back way off from the problem. What does “open” mean?
B: To me, “open” means that something was closed . . . now it’s open.
C: What about a crater? It’s always open, isn’t it?
D: Sure, but that’s not what “open” means to me.
E: Both of you are using “open” to describe a state. I think of it as describing an action . . . I “open” the book. The book was closed now I open it.
(from Synectics by W.J.J. Gordon)
The designers keep talking about things that open. Someone mentions a clam. Someone else mentions pea pods. Eventually, this leads them to a new understanding of their task.
The focus shifts again: What about the can? Meanwhile, the clock ticks unnoticed.
Present Can Opener Art
When a child who hears thunder asks, “What’s that funny noise?” how do you respond? You can name the noise, says Synectics author W. J. J. Gordon, but this “kills the question” rather than answering it. Naming the noise only “dispels the strange.” Speculation ends, inquiry stops, and associations get nipped in the bud. Language then becomes static. For instance, you might ask “What’s that bird?” and someone might answer, “A goldfinch.” “Oh,” you say. “Pretty.” Next, you talk about the weather. But Richard Feynman says his father knew this kind of answer was inadequate, so instead of just naming the bird, he said to his son, “Let’s look at the bird and what it’s doing.”
This is what the second group of designers did. They looked at the can opener and what it was doing (or not doing). Gordon says that their ability to “universalize” the word allowed them to reconceptualize the problem and get beyond ordinary enhancements. Like with Flower and Hayes’s “good writers,” this group was “simply solving a different problem.”
The first group, no matter how well-intentioned, was limited by the members’ limited view of the task and perhaps their inflated view of themselves. They were the experts. Nobody needed to tell them anything about can openers, which may have been an obstacle. This group was too invested in their expertise and held views, in Gordon’s words, “too close to present can opener art.”
James L. Adams in Conceptual Blockbusting says there is so much stacked against innovative thinking because “The structured information in your memory is so important to you that you may dismiss information that is inconsistent with that which is already there”; thus, new or contradictory information is often “devalued.” Those designers knew their stuff, but it didn’t occur to this group to ask what “open” means or to think about the nature of cans.
Expertise, which is advantageous in most instances, can sometimes become a trap. Isaac Asimov claims that to come up with new ideas you need to have expertise or what he calls a “good background” in the subject area, but he adds you also must be “unconventional” in your “habits.” The first group had the former but not the latter. This boxes you in, placing imaginary boundaries around the task. It is only when you can break free of preconceived notions that it’s possible to come up with something truly innovative, where you are not just putting “gadgets on existing engines” as the first group did.
Though I agree with Asimov about the “good background” or expertise issue, I wonder what he might say about our Dinner Party Math student. She didn’t have the background but had unconventional habits, a different frame of reference, which is key. For instance, some important insights in evolutionary biology came from physicists who at first didn’t have a good background in biology. This makes me think that while a good background in the field is usually an advantage, it isn’t always. Unconventional habits may be the primary driver.
The second group, also experts, was more innovative because they questioned the meaning of “open.” This unconventional approach opened (ha!) speculative paths that weren’t available before—the same as the arrow solution in the 9-dot problem did. Because one member chose to “back way off from the problem” the group was able to step back from their role as experts as well and see things differently. (We saw this in action in the first newsletter with the choreographer.)
Once the second group of designers focused on the word “open,” they started making, in Asimov’s words, “connections between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected.” Thinking of a can that might open in the manner of a clam or a pea pod, for instance, leads the designers to come up with scenarios where they imagine how an opener could function in such a way. The focus now is not on the can’s lid but on its seam.
The Wrong Right Answer
The father tells the son that the funny noise is thunder. It turns out, this answer kills the question. If your answer to the question, “What kind of bird is that?” is “Goldfinch,” the questioner may think that’s all there is to it. If instead you say, “That’s called a goldfinch, but watch how they swoop up and dip down like waves as they fly and listen to how their in-flight call sounds like “potato chip” each time they swoop up.” This response helps teach the kind of observational skills Mr. Feynman cultivated in his son who later became the kind of thinker who asked questions like “What does ‘open’ mean?” This style of response turns the questioner’s attention toward the subject in a new way, encouraging the questioner to “notice things” the way Feynman mentioned, and this leads to more interaction. When that happens, who knows where it might lead? Perhaps it will create a memorable experience that you can still recall decades later when someone interviews you. Maybe it will lead to a whole new kind of can opener.
Yes, goldfinch is the right answer, but sometimes right answers teach the wrong things.
To be continued . . .
Notes
In 14 a, we will discuss answer words, banking concepts, élan vital, phlogiston theory (you heard me), lightning strikes, more habitual patterns, and the scholars of Brobdingnag.
(Don’t worry about where this is leading—I swear, I don’t own a corkboard and have only a few mismatched thumbtacks buried in a drawer somewhere, and I’m not sure if there is any string in the house, so you’re safe.)