[lit-ideas] Re: Illogical but true...

A few days ago, we discussed illogical statements. The logicians hold that it's 
impossible for a sentence to be both illogical and true. But I showed that this 
was possible. Why couldn't an expert in logic prove this? Here's an article 
from today's NYT about this.


Inovative Minds Don't Think Alike
By Janet Rae-Dupree
December 30, 2007, New York Times
IT'S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our 
creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of 
the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience. 

Andy Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an 
interviewer from Fortune, "When everybody knows that something is so, it means 
that nobody knows nothin'." In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to 
look beyond what you know and think outside the box you've built around 
yourself. This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in 
The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you've become an expert in a 
particular subject, it's hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your 
conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and 
jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it's time to accomplish a task 
- open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance - those 
in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as 
they barrel along the well-worn path.

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of 
knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set 
of people, called "tappers," a list of commonly known songs from which to 
choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the 
chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, 
called "listeners," were asked to name the songs. Before the experiment began, 
the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name 
the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right 
about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs 
tapped out, or 2.5 percent. The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear 
in their minds; how could the listeners not "hear" it in their taps?

That's a common reaction when experts set out to share their ideas in the 
business world, too, says Chip Heath, who with his brother, Dan, was a 
co-author of the 2007 book "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others 
Die." It's why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other 
engineers. It's why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt 
new processes. And it's why the advertising world struggles to convey 
commercial messages to consumers.

"I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is 
there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and 
believed I would want to use it, too," Mr. Heath says. "People who design 
products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can't imagine what 
it's like to be as ignorant as the rest of us."

But there are proven ways to exorcise the curse. In their book, the Heath 
brothers outline six "hooks" that they say are guaranteed to communicate a new 
idea clearly by transforming it into what they call a Simple Unexpected 
Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting 
acronym, Succes, refers to a different hook. ("S," for example, suggests 
simplifying the message.) Although the hooks of "Made to Stick" focus on the 
art of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering 
innovation. To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with 
a variety of skills. If those people can't communicate clearly with one 
another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization 
and expertise. "It's kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get 
across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly," 
he says. "You've got to find the common connections."

In her 2006 book, "Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can 
Imagine - and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It," Cynthia Barton Rabe 
proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep 
creativity and innovation on track.

When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to 
speed, she says, "it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a 
result, they come up with new solutions to old problems."

She cites as an example the work of a colleague at Ralston Purina who moved to 
Eveready in the mid-1980s when Ralston bought that company. At the time, 
Eveready had become a household name because of its sales since the 1950s of 
inexpensive red plastic and metal flashlights. But by the mid-1980s, the 
flashlight business, which had been aimed solely at men shopping at hardware 
stores, was foundering. While Ms. Rabe's colleague had no experience with 
flashlights, she did have plenty of experience in consumer packaging and 
marketing from her years at Ralston Purina. She proceeded to revamp the 
flashlight product line to include colors like pink, baby blue and light green 
- colors that would appeal to women - and began distributing them through 
grocery store chains. "It was not incredibly popular as a decision amongst the 
old guard at Eveready," Ms. Rabe says. But after the changes, she says, "the 
flashlight business took off and was wildly successful for many years after 
that."

MS. RABE herself experienced similar problems while working as a transient 
"zero-gravity thinker" at Intel. "I would ask my very, very basic questions," 
she said, noting that it frustrated some of the people who didn't know her. 
Once they got past that point, however, "it always turned out that we could 
come up with some terrific ideas," she said. While Ms. Rabe usually worked 
inside the companies she discussed in her book, she said outside consultants 
could also serve the zero-gravity role, but only if their expertise was not 
identical to that of the group already working on the project. "Look for people 
with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who've done work in a related area but not 
in your specific field," she says. "Make it possible for someone who doesn't 
report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes."

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