The Father of Invention

Necessity is the mother of invention. Few of us would deny the truth in this age-old adage. Many of us have even taken what was a descriptive truth and made it into a prescriptive suggestion for our innovation efforts. If you want to innovate, put yourself in necessity’s way so that you will be required to invent your way out.

Think of the heroic efforts at improvisation by the Apollo crew who with duct tape and their wits were able to create a makeshift solution that saved them. Extreme circumstances (i.e., necessity) call on us to be resourceful.  But where does this resourcefulness come from? If necessity is the mother of invention, then who is the father?

We recently heard Stuart Brown, M.D., founder of the National Institute for Play, talk on the subject of “play” at a conference sponsored by Stanford University’s School of Engineering and the design firm IDEO, where the focus was on “the intersection of play and innovation.” Both the conference and my subsequent conversations with Dr. Brown leave me with the suspicion that too many of our corporate innovation efforts are single parent efforts.  They are based upon necessity alone, real or perceived. Has an almost single-minded obsession with corporate performance unwittingly eroded that resourcefulness so essential to meet necessity with inventiveness?

Stuart Brown’s interdisciplinary studies of play suggest that while necessity may be the mother of invention, the father may be play.  Brown, who produced the PBS-series “The Promise of Play,” a National Geographic cover story on play, and consults with companies like Mattel, brings a fresh perspective on what is necessary for innovation. Is playfulness essential to innovation?  Does the notion of play have a PR problem in the world of work?  Is the absence of play what is ailing a lot of companies when it comes to their relative inability to innovate? We offer these questions and the following four-point hypothesis to initiate a dialog with you:

1.   Elongating the life span of a company (e.g., sustaining its ability to produce profits) requires the ability to respond to the unexpected – surprises that will sooner or later arise from its competitive environment.  Arie de Gues (The Living Company) and Peter Schwartz (The Art of the Long View) have written convincingly about this. 

2.   The ability to respond to the unexpected comes from experience gained in what can actually be called “play.”  Using the word play is appropriate because it names activities and efforts that have no direct bearing on immediate performance, as measured in the traditional ways.  Peter Senge, John Seeley Brown and others refer to this as the “learning organization” or “communities of practice.”  An example of successful ‘play’ that prepared a corporation with notable results was Royal Dutch Shell’s scenario planning that prepared them better than all competitors for the unexpected oil crisis in the early 1970s.

3.   As they mature, corporations become increasingly driven by performance, losing their ability to “play.”  This makes the “play” engaged in during its entrepreneurial and pre-entrepreneurial stages increasingly rare, and disables the company, at least in the sense to be entrepreneurial.  As a result, more mature companies slowly lose their ability to attend, act and adapt to the unexpected (whether the unexpected comes from market conditions or changes in technology or both), thus threatening their ability to sustain profitability in the long term.

4.   In order to correct this “play entropy,” some percentage of the corporation’s resources (time, money, experts) should be regularly devoted to what the company would perceive to be “play” (e.g., R&D, Invention and Design, Futures, Exploratory investigations, “free range” activities, etc.).

We would love to hear what you think of this hypothesis and encourage you to read what Stuart Brown, M.D., has to say about the value of play at work.

 

All in a Day’s Play

By Stuart L. Brown, M.D.

Many think of inventiveness as essentially a human capacity granted by our huge brains and special linguistic and imaginative capacities.  But let us also factor authentic play into this scenario.  Imagine feeling really safe, well rested, well fed and free from anti-play cultural restraints like chronic guilt or permanent preoccupation with responsibilities.  (When is the last time you could say you were in such a situation?)  What spontaneously happens when we are free is we seek out play and get ourselves into our own personal play states.

It is in a state of play that unexpected novel connections get established.  Somehow, nature has specially designed us as the premier lifelong and best of players in the whole animal kingdom.  We have a persistent need to play freely.  So playing is part of our strategy to survive in challenging and changing ecological circumstances.

Some futurists have said that we will need to be more inventive, creative and flexible to handle the tasks, flow and rhythm of life in this century and beyond.  A sure (and fun) way to develop those abilities is to play.  Play by yourself, play with children, play with your officemates and friends.  Encourage your children to go out and play.  If they play, their problem solving and adaptive abilities will be in better shape to handle their world and they will be more likely to choose healthy answers to situations they encounter.

Play teaches us how to manage and transform our negative emotions and experiences; it supercharges learning, and is the foundation for good mental and physical health.  The components of play – curiosity, discovery, novelty, risk-taking, trial and error, pretense, games, social bantering – are also the essential components of learning.

Yet somewhere between childhood and adulthood, most of us exchange play for work and forget to play with the abandon and joy of childhood.  Work is where we spend much of our time so that is why it is especially important for us to play during work.  Without some light moments our work suffers.  Play arouses curiosity, which leads to discovery and creativity.  It develops adaptability and flexibility, which are fundamental to positive, proactive behavior.  The ability to take on responsibility, find meaning in life, and perhaps discover our personal bliss requires a full measure of play.  Play makes work pleasurable instead of drudgery, and there is simply the sheer fun of it.

For a good and inventive life, prioritize getting yourself some safe haven times for play.  Better yet, learn to include it in all of your life tasks.  If beyond the byproduct of inventiveness, you would like to experience more openness to change, a renewed spirit of optimism, non-dogged perseverance, the capacity to enjoy and sustain intimacy, keeping your workplace fun, I urge you to find your own personal play partners and niches – and honor them.

Editor’s Note: Stuart Brown’s commitment to the subject of play stems from his background in psychiatry, long-term research into human and animal play, as well as his clinical research into the causes and prevention of violence. Brown believes play is hardwired into our genetic code and is a state of being which can be accessed and used by everyone.  Humans want to play because it is instinctive and fundamental to human existence.  It is one of the evolutionary mechanisms that has developed us to our current state; play is part of how we adapt and survive anywhere on earth. His book Play: How it shapes the brain, Opens the imagination and Invigorates the soul was published in 2009. 


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in March 2005. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Dr. Stuart Brown’s book Play: How it shapes the brain, Opens the imagination and Invigorates the soul was published in 2009.

http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/1583333789/ref=lp_B000AQ74GC_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335885923&sr=1-1

You can contact the National Institute for Play at http://www.nifplay.org.

Innovation Playgrounds: Keep them close

While necessity may be the mother of invention, play is quite likely its father.  — Editor’s Note

By Stuart Brown, M.D.

Necessity and play are rarely allowed to be seen together, particularly in or corporate innovation efforts.  Operating realities tend to foster a necessity-born urgency which has no time for "play", Necessity so easily and frequently couples with fear (e.g., of the competitive threat that is knocking at the door) that inventions never happen.   Father play never gets even close enough to mother necessity to even meet, much less…(well you get the point). 

This largely self-imposed separation generally means that we have lost the intuitively operative key to new discovery that every freed up kid knows by being alive.  An example is in order:

I am looking at a toy truck. My mood is light, and memories flow.  I see in my mind’s eye my grandson playing with it as he did yesterday. His glee, vroom-vroom motor noises, enthusiasm, and great spontaneity, bring back to me, via my imagination a joyful state of body-mind.

Then I see and feel myself at age 4 on the floor with my little yellow dump truck.  As I reflect happily, I am mentally in 3 time frames simultaneously:  I’m in the here-and-now, the scene of yesterday and the past.   Then, seemingly out of nowhere, without a break in mood, I know how I will deal effectively with a problem that has been bugging me for some time.   I've got a solution, where before I had none.

What’s going on here, and can we bottle it? 

A short explanation linked to evidence-based play observations goes like this (while not yet hard science, it is close). Imagine that my brain is being recorded by the latest brain imaging equipment. As the visual image sparked by the toy makes its way through the anatomic paths in my brain nature has designed, the specific pattern of “truck” hits my visual cortex and leaves specific "truck" electroencephalographic blips. This in-the-brain sequence once was thought to be sufficient for the brain to recognize this as a truck. Not so. We all “see” (and hear and feel, etc.) in much more complex and contextually organizing ways than was once physiologic dogma. What we now know is in that short instant of spontaneous brain activity before I “know” it is a truck, a 10-fold automatic feedback system roars into action, energized, guided and lit up in large part by the playful “state” of the moment.

Each neuro-physiologic sequence of the here-and-now sensory signals, coupled with the near instant interactions with the there-and-then stored signals in memory drive this 10-fold feedback system; each piece of this amazing integrated event, a play-directed symphony. Simultaneously, as long as the fun lasts, more and more of the superfluous “uncommitted” neurons that form play-incited and play-related circuits are recruited. Not a bad design, Seems necessary for fun, planning for an unexpected future, and more.  The fMRI, SPECT and PET scans confirm that this play-evoked process lights up the brain, particularly the “highest” prefrontal cortical areas like nothing else.

If my state of mind-body had been anxious, fearful, angry, time pressured, sad, hungry, or anything but playful, the integrated problem solving experience that “found me” would very likely have been missed.

In short, I was, at the moments above, in my own private playground. [And by having a good time on the 'playground', I was able to invent a solution (or did it discover me?) that I may not have discovered as easily or at all!

The day before yesterday, my playground was the annual TED meeting in Monterey, with periodic states of play induced by sparkling speakers, action packed presentations, all containing more complex objects of Technology, Entertainment and Design than my grandson’s truck. But the contagious search for novelty, which is part of maintaining a state of play, was in the air, confirming for me the value for adults to gather at their playgrounds.

Wherever you are in your pursuit of excellence, happiness, and preparation for the future, play belongs. It is not trivial, it can be achieved by the most compulsive and driven of us, and its by-products are worth the personal search for it… if, as is common, it has been lost or buried by the demands of the day.

“I don’t go to work, I go to play. If you allow yourself a bit of time to try stuff out before you get serious, before you make plans, before you say “this is the schedule of inventions going forward,” you can get a feeling in your finger tips for what could happen if you do something.” Floris Jansen, GE global research (from an imagination notebook, a gift to TED participants, 2006).



This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in March 2006. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

Innovation Stories: Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale?

As with most things in life, our experience colors our expectations. Innovation is no exception.  Most of us come to innovation with some personal and professional history and memories. The innovation stories born out of our actual experience, and those we tell ourselves tend to shape how we think and act in our innovation efforts. This holds true for the stories companies tell themselves as well—stories about their past and stories about their future.   

Whatever else our innovation efforts are, they are certainly attempts to tell new stories, before the narrative has been experienced, or played out. This, I suppose, is the “vision thing.” The success of an innovation can be measured by how closely its history follows the original fiction or vision.  Here is where a company's experience can so easily color its expectations; where past can shape future, even to the point wherein some inadvertently confine what we tell ourselves about our future to the same plot lines with which we have codified our past success. 

If narrative (or story) is the workhorse of how our memories organize experience, then it behooves us to take a closer look at some of the subtler but fundamental tales we tell ourselves about our company's own innovation experience. It may have a direct bearing on how we think about, act and talk about our current innovation efforts.

Our friend and associate Stuart Brown, M.D. gave us a copy of Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic published in 1997. Meeker has much to say to innovators, albeit indirectly. Meeker compares the tragic and the comic, not simply as literary categories, but as strategies for survival, with Dante and the natural world as his “database.” The comic, Meeker contends, is nature's much more successful (than the tragic) strategy for survival.   By analogy, the comedic way is a more robust strategy for sustaining a stream of innovations as well.

With apologies to Meeker for taking liberties with his original work, perhaps we might re-examine the stories we tell ourselves about our company's (and our own) experiences with innovation, and do so through the lens of three major literary archetypes: tragedy, comedy and fairy tale.

Many of us unwittingly take a tragic view of our company's innovation mythology. Meeker reminds us that the “tragic way of playing the game of life is the finite way, seeking a prize or a payoff that will bring status to the victor even if it does tend to end the game….rest[ing] upon the premise that for every question there is only one right answer, and for every possibility of behavioral action there is one correct choice.”

This tragic bias tends to show up in subtle way, as when we ask of the new stories we are writing—i.e., the innovations we are currently working on—whether they fit with the company's business model or with the company's core competencies. The newer the innovation, the more likely the fit question will be answered in the tragic negative, if we assume that our future stories must somehow be a continuation of the past.

Others of us might have become a little too cynical about our company's innovation history. Many a promising innovator has been burned so often they become crusty and skeptical of most of the organization's attempts to innovate, and retreat to the clearer realities of the operating world. “We tried that before” is so often really the speaker's expressed wish not to have to deal with the new, nor accept the possibility that now may be a much better time. The cynics among us might be too quick to judge the innovation stories being composed by our design teams and advance technology folks as fairy tales or fantasies, mid-summer’s nights' dreams. Yes, dreams are important. If your society's dreamers and philosophers out number the plumbers, then neither the theories nor the pipes will hold water. Thomas Edison's “innovation is 1% inspiration (read fairy tale) and 99% perspiration” is hard to deny. However, there is still something about that 1%, isn't there?

Meeker reminds us that the best and most successful innovation stories are comedies—not tragedies or fairy tales—but stories full of adaptations and twists and turns, oozing with improvisations, serendipity and coincidence. Those business theorists now espousing “dynamic capabilities” as the true capital of an enterprise seem to be saying something similar. Though his comments were originally directed elsewhere, Meeker's words are prophetic to all of us engaged in parenting innovations:

“We mammals, along with the birds, have been playing and living comic lives for some two hundred million years. There is no need to learn how to play, for that knowledge is deeply embedded in our bones and genes. Play is as natural as breathing, and the comic urge for normalcy is as basic as the need for balance. If we nevertheless fail to pay and feel off-balance much of the time, it must be because we have bent ourselves terribly out of shape, imposing crushing mental and cultural burdens that make gravity seem more important than levity.”

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in March 2006. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.