A note from the author:
I first wrote this blog as the basis for a talk in the UK last year when the only thing worrying us was the "crisis' of Brexit. Now we’re facing some much more serious challenges – and yet the inventive responses from communities trying to think outside the box suggests that the core themes do hold up and may offer us some hope during these troubled times.
Imagine you're flying over the Sahara Desert. Your plane runs into a sandstorm, the engines sputter and then die one by one until there's just the sound of sand rasping against the windows. The nose dips, you feel a dreadful lurching in the pit of your stomach, the world outside the windows turns black, and you crash. Miraculously, no one is hurt. But the plane is smashed, the radios destroyed, and your last-known position was over 100 miles from anywhere. What do you do?
Fortunately, this isn't real – it's the plot of the 1964 novel "The Flight of the Phoenix." But it does offer a powerful reminder of how human creativity can get us out of trouble. In this scenario, there is just enough of an airframe left, plus a trickle of fuel and one engine which could be coaxed back to life.
The plane had carried a strange mixture of passengers with different skills and experience, including an older man who used to design airplanes. To cut a long story short, they manage to assemble a new airplane that just holds together long enough for them to fly back to safety – the "Phoenix" of the title.
That might be fiction, but we don't have to look far to see similar stories playing out in real life. Crisis provides a trigger for innovation, especially because doing nothing is not an option even if conventional solution pathways are blocked. Let's take a look at a few examples.
When a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, much of the city of Port-au-Prince lay in ruins. Within a short time, aid workers and locals began to piece together makeshift solutions to their problems, using resources such as mobile phones and a cellular connection. Solutions co-created and diffused included:
Another example comes from 1943 at the height of World War II. A small team at Lockheed's Burbank, California-based factory were given the apparently impossible task of designing and building a jet aircraft within six months. They'd never built a jet before, and there were no designs to work from. The technology was unknown, and the only engine was in the UK and wouldn't be available to experiment with until near the end of the project. The factory was already working flat out on producing bombers for the war effort.
Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, the young engineer appointed to run this project, made one of his first tasks renting a circus tent to work in because there was no space available for his team. Time was of the essence – the Germans were already flying their fighter jets at speeds twice that of allied aircraft and had been working on jets since 1938. Yet, despite all these barriers, his "skunk works" team achieved their target with weeks to spare, producing and safely flying the P-80 Shooting Star, the first jet fighter used by the United States Army Air Forces.
From aircraft to automobiles, we can look to Toyota for another example of crisis-driven innovation. Toyota wasn't always the great car-maker we know today. Back in the post-war years, resource shortages hampered Japan's slow and painful recovery. In essence, its physical infrastructure was still severely damaged, and skilled labor was in very short supply. All of this on an island economy that had to import most of its key industrial resources.
The stuttering local car market was small and fragmented; under these conditions, it was impossible to run a car factory in the profligate style associated with mass production. Working under these constraints forced experiments towards a radically different approach to manufacturing, emphasizing reduced waste at every stage. From these unhappy beginnings (and a long learning process), the idea of "lean" was born, one which went on to become one of the most powerful process innovations of the 20th century.
Something is going on here that is clearly not about having lots of resources – instead, it's often the shortage of them that forces a different mindset. It's also about roadblocks – the obvious way ahead is impassable, and so we need to find a new route. Crisis triggers a different kind of search, one with several important characteristics:
Crisis provides a trigger for thinking differently. There's a clue in the etymology; the word comes from the Greek and means "turning point." Not necessarily a negative thing but a change in direction. The Chinese characters for crisis capture this well; the word is assembled from two pictograms, one for "threat" and the other for "opportunity."
Psychology tells us something about why a crisis can provide a useful trigger. Human beings have evolved as problem-solvers – but we're also rather lazy. Our first response, when faced with a challenge, is to search our repertoire of existing solutions and try to pull one off the shelf. We might need to adapt it a little, but we generally like an easy "plug and play" strategy. But if that doesn't work, we engage in an active search for something new.
We might feel annoyed, frustrated, or might even grumble about the work we're required to do – but the chances are we will eventually end up with a new solution. This isn't just a feeling; research shows that the brain is actively forcing new neural connections and pathways during the search process. In studies at the University of Amsterdam, it appears that obstacles and constraints actually help the creative process.
So sometimes creativity doesn't flourish as well as it might in comfortable resource-rich environments. It seems to thrive under challenging conditions; as Google (and many other organizations) has come to recognize, "creativity loves constraints." One reason our thinking often stays inside the box is that it's very comfortable there!
That's where crisis comes in – it forces us to move, especially because the "normal" trajectory is blocked off in some way, and we must follow a diversion. Necessity becomes a rather harsh mother of invention.
"Necessity becomes a rather harsh mother of invention."Research on problem-solving not only helps us understand this challenge but also suggests ways in which we might break out of the comfortable box. For example, Carl Duncker's famous candle experiment reminds us about "functional fixedness," and how we make assumptions about what we can and cannot use. In the experiment, the solver must stick a candle to a cork wall and light it in a way that the candle won't drip on the table below. They are supplied with only a box of thumbtacks and a book of matches. Many solvers fail to see that they might be able to make use of the box in which the thumbtacks and matches are supplied.
Similarly, Gestalt theory teaches us that we are pattern recognizers – and sometimes seeing alternative patterns is hard work until we receive a nudge. Think about those 3D pictures that take time to reveal their hidden content, or familiar brain-teasers, which remind us of how focusing on one pattern blocks out our ability to see an alternative. Or the phenomenon of mindset – Einstellung – which means we often try to apply familiar solution approaches to unfamiliar situations. Essentially, it's a reminder that "to a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail," and that there might be alternative tools we could use.
So how might we use some of these insights and construct a toolkit to help our organization use crisis as a way of triggering radical innovation?
Here are five possible pathways to explore:
It's a tricky world out there, and we'd all rather avoid crises, stay safe, and have a quiet life. But given that they are going to happen – and that innovation flourishes in such a context – it might be worth practicing some of these skills.
John Bessant also has an audio version of this article, which you can find here.