How to think wrong in the right way
I am a professional idiot. I get paid to be stupid. What do I do you may ask?
Well, I am a designer.
It’s a liberating confession but don’t get me wrong. Being stupid is hard than it might seem. In fact, most of our lives revolve around understanding what is right and what is wrong. Our entire notion of learning stems from separating what is true from what is false. We defend our actions based on truths which give us reason to perform them.
Well most of us do.
Designers separate from the pack. This might be why it is hard to understand designers if you don’t have a designers mindset. Sure we have dos and don’ts, rights and wrongs. Have a look around for “How to articles” on design. You will find plenty of designers eager to tell other designers what is right or wrong. But at the same time, we rarely apply this rule to the core of what we do.
Why? is a good question and the answer has to do with the reason for why we are called upon. It does not matter which type of designer we are talking about. Be it a UX designer, product designer, service designer, architect or fashion designer. The core function we provide is the same, namely, innovation. Big or small it does not matter but to some extent, everything we do is to create something new. If the thing we create is not novel in some detail then it would be a replicate of something else. A copy of something that already exists. Still, not every aspect of what designers do is novel. In fact, if you try to be novel in everything you do as a designer it will be very hard to make any money. Partly because a 100% novel ideas are actually hard to relate to.
Completely novel ideas make no sense to most people.
The 1%
I would say that design is 99% reproduction and 1% innovation. Our job is about figuring out what has worked in the past and adding something small to make it work in the near future. Making ideas accessible and relatable to the people we design for.
This might sound like that designer spends most of their time stealing from other designers. Well, this is true, if you are a good designer at least. But we don’t call it stealing, we call it inspiration.
So 99% of the time we are not that different from other occupations. We base most of our work on what has been proven to work in the past. But the 1% is what sets us apart. Innovation is not hard but good innovation is trickier. For example, replacing the motors in busses with 1000 cats running on a treadmill is an innovative idea. A practically and ethically unsound idea maybe, but still innovative. Good innovation is about adding just enough novelty while remaining feasible to implement. What is feasible is usually a shared understanding of a social group.
Sound judgment in these groups usually builds on proven facts. Doctors, for example, would never ordinate vitamin-c as medicine for headaches. Studies might indicate that vitamin-c has a positive effect on relieving headaches. But it has no proven track record of actually doing so. So, it would be unsound for doctors recommending it as a treatment.
This is how most occupations work, we relate to a shared understanding of how things should be done. We try to apply occupational common sense to what we do. This is the reason why you would hire someone else to do something for you because they know how to do it and you don’t.
Famous idiots
But getting back to the role of the designer and the 1%. We can only apply common sense when we have a proven track record and facts to base it on. Innovation by definition is something new. So how can we build a common sense of something we don’t know anything about yet.
In my case, I apply stupidity. You see the definition of being stupid is to show a lack of common sense. Yet, I found it to be the fastest way to innovate. If there is no way telling what is the right way of doing something. Doing something is still a valid option that beats doing nothing. In fact, doing what is completely the opposite of what’s considered right or true can be a stroke of genius.
Let me present three famous idiots
Idiot number 1: Galileo Galilei
What would you call someone the defies everything we know as true about our world? Besides, tries to prove everyone wrong. You can call them many things and “idiot” might come to mind. You see, in the 1700th century, the teachings of the Bible was known as common sense. The consensus was that everything in the bible was true. If you asked the catholic church at least.
Galileo was not convinced. He did not think truths about nature whereas complicated as described in the bible. He thought that truths about nature could instead be proven by observation and experiments.
At the time the church was not an organisation that you messed with. The teachings of Galileo undermined their views on some major points. Galileo stuck to his beliefs and in turn the church band some of his books. Eventually, the even placed him in house arrest until he died. The reason the did not execute him was due to his old age.
Galileo probably seemed pretty stupid to a lot of people at the time. Going against the teachings of the church knowing what they could do to him. Turns out he was right though.
Idiot number 2: Steven Hawking
In his theory about black holes, Hawking suggested that the event horizon (the point in a black hole where nothing can escape being pull in) can never shrink. Some suggested he was wrong but never provided any definite proof. Hawking set out to prove that he was right. He did the opposite, proving himself wrong.
Some might consider that stupid. Trying to prove someone else wrong, instead, you prove them right. Still, by accidentally proving they could shrink was compelling evidence for their existence. Something he had not to be able to prove before.
Idiot number 3: Steve Jobs
Proclaimed as a modern-day genius by many still has one of the longest lists of stupid decisions made. First off he managed to get fired from the company he founded. He founded another computer company that failed. Bought an animation studio to make computer-generated full-length animation movies which at the time was unheard of. Came back to Apple and forced them to add USB ports into the computer when there was nothing to connect over USB. Then removed CD-ROM from the computer while people were using them. Removed the buttons on mobile phones and replaced them with a fragile screen made of glass. Then he was the first one to remove USB ports from computers while people still used them. The list goes on.
So what do all these three idiots have in common? They all choose to discard common sense at some point.
Risk takers
In fact, discarding common sense is a vital part of human progression. Have you ever picked mushrooms and wondered. How did we figure out which mushrooms are eatable and which ones are poisonous? We have known long before we had scientific methods to distinguish them safely. The answer is very simple. People tried to eat them. If a person died or got sick it was safe to assume that those mushrooms should be avoided. If you did not want to try yourself you gave it to the village idiot and made them do it for you.
The “idiot” or daredevil was a vital part of our first civilisations when we started living in tribes. If you did not know if it was safe to cross to the other side of the mountain. Send the daredevil over and if he came back it was probably safe for the others to follow. Not sure if you can cross the river? Send the idiot first. Not sure if you can eat those berries? Give them to the idiot.
In war, idiots have also played a vital role. Some armies used low-grade and inexperienced combatant to achieve strategic goals. These troops were sometimes referred to as cannon fodder. If you don’t know where the enemy is hiding you could send these troops out in the open. Then the enemy would reveal themselves by shooting at them.
In a sense, we as designers are intellectual cannon fodder.
If you don’t know the next step or what to do. Send in a designer to step on the business mines to figure out the safe path forward. This is the reason why design thinking builds upon an iterative process.
Design thinking is not about knowing what to do, it’s doing even if you don’t know what.
The more iterations we do the more ground we will cover. This also provides us with better options or even multiple ones. Rather than stepping on all the mines at once, we step on them one at the time.
Bias thinking
So if all we do is 99% replication and 1% doing what might be wrong why is it so hard. Psychology has some insights and there is a phenomenon, called “Not invented here bias”.
We as humans have a tendency to oppose ideas and innovation that originate outside our social groups. This underlined by four social dynamics:
1.We often find internal skills superior to an external one. As a group, it’s easier to define what skills are good to have in the group rather with people from outside our groups. Why would front-end developers know anything about design, right?
2.Fear of losing control. Changes are always scary and if we keep things within a group it’s easier to predict the next step. Anything outside the group is unknown variables which are harder to predict.
3.The desire for credit. We want credit on our achievements. This is hard to get from outside our group. An outsider may lack the competence and insights to judge our efforts. So we look inwards.
4.Emotional and financial investment in internal initiatives. Being a successful member of any social group is a complex operation. It requires a lot of time and investment. Thus we feel bound to the group in many ways.
These dynamics makes us bias to new ideas and especially from outsiders. But I would like to add a dynamic to the list and its the fear of being perceived as stupid. This fear might be rooted in the fear of being discarded from the social groups we are apart of. What has considered a stupid idea is often something unknown to us or something we can not relate to. It is also hard to distinguish the person from the idea. Our way of thinking is part of what defines us as a person. Personally, I often feel lonely and misunderstood in my professional life. But it has taken some time to come to this realisation. This is necessarily not a bad thing or but a burden of the trait. Because being misunderstood is a good indicator of design progression.
As a designer, we are training not to think like others. Thinking as everybody else will never result in the 1% of novelty needed. But too much misunderstanding is not good either. This is often an indicator that you moving too far from feasibility. At some point, we as designers have to provide clarity or our designs will never become a reality. The 99% founded in common sense is important. Still, it is usually the 1% of our work we are judged by. So how do we do most of our work by the book and a small part doing the opposite?
It’s all about thinking wrong but in the right way.
Think like a designer
Thinking like a designer is often unsurprisingly referred to as Design Thinking. This is a methodology which involves a solution-based approach to solving a problem. It consists of five stages:
- Empathise. Understanding the person having a problem is key to solving the problem.
- Define. What we defined is the problem area, not the problem itself. The problem might occur in one place but the solution might be best suited in another place. Think of problem areas as the description of a problem in its context.
- Ideate. We think about the solution to the problem.
- Prototype. Make something but not the full thing. Make just enough so you can present it to someone.
- Test. To test your ideas is as important as coming up with them
These stages are nonlinear. As designers, we are free to jump from one to the other based on the insights we gain from performing them. This is what it means to iterate, to change the next step based on insights from the stage that precedes it. For example, during the ideation phase, you might find that the problem area is ill-defined. The problem is actually something else. Then it would be stupid to carry on coming up with a solution to the wrong problem.
But wait, didn’t I say stupid is a good thing?
Yes, you are right, but it’s all about being stupid in the right way. You can apply a waterfall process to the 5 stages above. You define the problem, come up with a solution, design and develop it and then test it in a linear process. But what if you were wrong in one of your conclusions, facts or made a mistake in one of the stages? You won’t know until you reach the test phase. Even worse if you skip the test and go straight to launching your solution. If you are wrong there will be a lot of backtracking and a lot of work done in vain.
The difference with thinking like a designer is that we don’t avoid stupidity or being wrong. We allow for it when the cost and negative impact are low.
Productive stupidity
Having ideas is cheap so why limit your self to having only good ones. Again, what makes up a good idea is not only up to the designer (remember the “not invented here bias”). To only way to define a good idea on its own is that some else has already had it and implemented it successfully. This works very well for the 99% part of what we do but how about the 1%.
If you don’t limit your self to only good ideas you will see it’s much easier to be productive. Having a lot of bad ideas to compare to will also make the good ones easier to spot.
This type of thinking is nothing new but we don’t call it “coming up with a lot of ideas, mostly bad ones”. We call it convergent and divergent thinking.
The divergent part is when we create as many solutions as possible. The convergent part is where we make choices. Divergent thinking relies on creativity and convergent thinking is base on logic.
Creativity is linked to innovation. Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. The reason for why we are employed as designers.
For some and even for myself, creativity has always been this mythical thing. It’s easy to spot a creative idea but it hard to define how you go about creating one. It seems that all people defined as creatives only have this in common. Artist, musicians, architects, engineers, doctors, scientist, athletes have all been creative in their field at some point. But it’s very hard to see that there is one single methodology that unites them.
I have worked as a creative on call for a long time and for long creativity has always been a stress factor. Not to be able to be creative when the time comes. After many years I have come to this simple but very powerful realisation about my self. My best ideas are not very different from some of my most stupid ones. The essence of good and bad ideas are almost the same. They only differ in the details. So to become more productive I allow myself to be stupid.
The good thing about being stupid is that it needs no training or any education.
In that sense, anyone can and knows how to be creative. We probably just forgotten how. Or more likely we developed a fear of being perceived as stupid.
My 4-year-old daughter is the most creative person I know. Give her a pen and paper and she will give you a wonderful story with great visuals on the spot. She never questions if the story she is about to come up with will be good or not. She just makes it up and then changes as she goes along.
Creativity never flourishes under fear. Thus I have made it my professional practice to be more stupid. Or how to think wrong but in the right way.
So the next time you need a good idea, try a bit of stupidity. You never know, you might end up a genius for doing so.
