1. The Marshmallow Challenge: Why have we lost our ability to innovate?
Let's start with a team building game. It's called the Marshmallow Challenge, and it was developed by Peter Skillman, an industrial designer, and his friends. Participants in the game are divided into groups, and each group is given a brown paper bag. Inside the paper bag were twenty spaghetti noodles, raw of course, not cooked, a piece of string, a piece of tape, and a marshmallow. The goal of this game was to build a tower that was as tall as possible and to be able to place the marshmallow on the tip of the tower. Each team is given 18 minutes and can't hold the tower they've built with their hands by the time limit.
This game is a team-building game, which is about how well teams coordinate and work together, not the same as a "brain teaser" type of test. You can build the tower in a variety of ways, such as breaking up spaghetti, tying it with string, or taping it with duct tape. Skillman found that the best-performing teams were five- and six-year-olds. The kindergarteners built towers that averaged 27 inches high, the CEOs could only build towers 21 inches high, the lawyers built 15-inch towers, and the worst performers were the business school students, who built towers that averaged 10 inches, or roughly one-third the height of the towers built by kindergarteners.
Why is that? It's not because business school students aren't as smart as kindergartners. The biggest difference, Skillman found, was that the kids did the work as soon as they came up for air, whereas the business school students would start with a half-dozen discussions. Kindergarteners would try to put marshmallows on the tower at an average of five minutes into their 18-minute time frame, and then, they'd keep trying again. Business school students usually only put the marshmallow on the tower once, and mostly at the last minute. It's only when they try to put the marshmallow on the tower that they realize, bad, the marshmallow is actually heavier than they thought.
This test tells us one thing: innovation is about thinking in action, not acting after thinking.
2. Passion drives innovation more than rewards
After the first experiment, let's look at how monkeys innovate. This experiment was done by Prof. Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Harlow was one of the gifted children in Lewis Terman's study that we talked about yesterday. He went to Stanford University to get a PhD in psychology on Professor Terman's recommendation, and then went to teach at the University of Wisconsin.
Harlow built one of the world's first primate laboratories. He kept a group of monkeys and then left puzzles in their cages. For example, he would leave some tangled hinges and then watch to see if the monkeys would undo the hinges. If the monkeys learned to untangle the hinges, Harlow would give them another, more difficult puzzle. After a week, the monkeys had all learned to untangle the hinges, and they enjoyed it. One monkey has solved the hinge 157 times in less than five minutes.
Harold changed the rules of the game. He wanted to see if he could incentivize the monkeys to solve the puzzles even further. This time, the rule was that if the monkey solved the puzzle, it would be rewarded with food. The result is surprising: with the food reward, the monkeys are less motivated to solve the puzzles.
People are the same as monkeys. When we do creative work, our biggest motivator is interest, not reward. If you let kindergarteners improvise their drawings, they draw more enthusiastically and at a better level without rewards, and if you link drawing to rewards, drawing becomes uninteresting. There's a saying in the pop music world called "second album syndrome", that some bands' first albums that make a big splash are made when the band members are at a low point in their lives, with no money or support. When the first album is a big success, they tend to spend more money and record a second album in a more elaborate studio, which, unfortunately, is often not as good as the first.
The good news is: innovation is not to be encouraged. The bad news is: you can't buy good innovation even if you encourage it with money and other means.
3. Working alone
Having talked about the motivation to innovate, let's talk about the working model of innovation.
You've heard of brainstorming. The idea was invented in 1939 by advertising manager Alex Osborne. It was so popular that many organizations are still in the habit of holding "brainstorming" sessions, where everyone contributes their own ideas. However, it has been proven that "brainstorming" is not effective in improving innovation. The more people you gather in a brainstorming session, the less effective it is. The best way to do this is not to have a "brainstorming" session, but to think "behind closed doors", which means that innovation is not a "square dance", but a "lone wolf".
Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple and the inventor of the company's first computer, has long understood this. He said, "You will be most likely to design revolutionary products and features if you work alone, not in a committee, not on a team."
Of course, we can't take Wozniak at his word. If he wasn't inside Apple's team, just him alone, I'm afraid he wouldn't have been able to create the Apple myth. But he has taught us a very valuable lesson, which is that innovation is about doing something consistently and with interest. That's what we've been talking about, "deep work". In an age of constant distraction, it's not easy to keep doing something well.
Even better than being a lone wolf is to form a team. Innovation can be an individual thing, it can be a small team thing, but it is never a big organization thing.