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The other half got the same documents reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense Haettenschweiler, the florid Monotype Corsiva or the zesty Comic Sans Italicised. These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention, to slow down and to think about what they were reading. Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.
These days Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing is called 3M, one of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. Given its origins, should we be surprised to discover that 3M has a ‘flexible attention’ policy? In most companies, flexible attention means goofing off on the company dime. In 3M it means playing a game, taking a nap or going for a walk across an extensive campus to admire the deer. 3M knows that creative ideas don’t always surrender to a frontal assault. Sometimes they sneak up on us while we are paying attention to something else.
Darwin could not get enough of earthworms.
They were a touchstone, a foundation, almost a security blanket. Whenever Darwin was anxious, puzzled or at a loss, he could always turn to the study of the humble earthworm.
Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box she tosses notes, videos, theatre programmes, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. If she runs out of space, she gets a second box. And if she gets stuck, the answer is simple: begin an archaeological dig into one of her boxes. She writes:
The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon. Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s
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I have a related solution myself, a steel sheet on the wall of my office full of magnets and three-by-five-inch cards. Each card has a single project on it – something chunky that will take me at least a day to complete. As I write this, there are more than fifteen projects up there, including my next weekly column, an imminent house move, a stand-up comedy routine I’ve promised to try to write, two separate ideas for a series of podcasts, a television proposal, a long magazine article and this chapter. That would potentially be overwhelming, but the solution is simple: I’ve chosen three
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each one represents Erdős’s launching into a serious piece of intellectual teamwork – a peer-reviewed scientific paper – with a stranger. He did this, on average, every six weeks for sixty years. In his peak collaborative year, 1987 – when he was seventy-four – he formed thirty-five new creative partnerships, one every ten days.
In 1973, Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist, introduced the paradoxical idea of ‘the strength of weak ties’.
Erdős’s biographer Bruce Schechter
Erdős was not your average sofa-surfer. Although he joked that a mathematician was ‘a machine for turning coffee into theorems’, he relied on amphetamines for his prodigious output. This homeless, drug-dependent genius was an exhausting house guest.
He owned very few clothes, although his vest and underpants were made of silk – these needed to be hand-washed frequently and not by Erdős. He couldn’t drive, so his hosts were forced to drive him. He couldn’t even pack his own suitcase. People found him impossibly demanding; it was like caring for an infant. And yet, everyone loved working with him. Years after his death, papers continued to be published listing Paul Erdős as a co-author, as the seeds he planted continued to bear fruit.
Assumptions that might have been allowed to ride among friends had to be examined carefully under the scrutiny of a stranger.
Members of diverse teams didn’t feel very sure that they’d got the right answer and they felt socially uncomfortable. The teams made up of four friends had a more pleasant time and they also tended to be confident – wrongly – that they had found the right answer.
The diverse teams were more effective, but that is not how things seemed to people in those teams: team members doubted their answers, distrusted their process and felt the entire interaction was an awkward mess.
As with the mixed student teams working on murder mysteries, Portfolio Associates did brilliantly and had a miserable time.
(No wonder that two other researchers, sociologists Howard Aldrich and Martha Martinez-Firestone, recently concluded that contrary to their reputation, most entrepreneurs aren’t terribly creative. One reason: most entrepreneurs hang out with other people who are exactly like them.)
With twenty-five thousand students to choose from, the University of Kansas offered a far greater range of views and lifestyles than the smaller colleges did. In principle, then, friendship networks at the large campus should be far more diverse. They weren’t. On the larger campus, students were able to seek out their ideological twins; on the smaller campuses people made friends with people very different from them.* Forced by circumstance to befriend people at least somewhat different from themselves, they did so.
those at the smaller colleges were actually closer and lasted longer than the friendships at the larger university. Offered a wider choice of friends, students at larger schools chose sameness. It’s astonishing how widespread this tendency to homophily can be, and it can be both deep-rooted and absurdly superficial.
The message of Muzafer Sherif’s work is that when you give people an important enough problem to solve together, they can put aside their differences. A good problem contains the seeds of its own solution. Rather than lubricating people with drinks at a networking reception or getting them to play silly games at a team-building event, the way to get conflicting teams to gel is to give them something worth doing together – something where failing to cooperate simply isn’t an option.
The families who occupied Le Corbusier’s homes defied his designs in a simple and practical fashion. They added old-fashioned shutters and windows; they erected pitched roofs over the flat ones; they put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences. They decorated their gardens with gnomes.
The empowered office was a great success – people got 30 per cent more done there than in the lean office and about 15 per cent more than in the enriched office.
It is one thing to sharpen and straighten all the pencils on one’s own desk, metaphorically or otherwise. To order someone else to sharpen and straighten the pencils on their own desk displays a curious value system in which superficial neatness is worth the price of deep resentment.
one similarity with Le Corbusier is striking: both men were unafraid to dream big dreams on behalf of other people.
What all the responses had in common was that they were undeniably human. Suddenly O2 wasn’t just a faceless brand letting down its customers. It was a collection of human beings trying to deal with difficult circumstances.
Listening is easy, in principle. In practice it can be terribly hard – especially when, like Karen, you have so much to lose. A really good conversation is mentally demanding. Listening and responding is messy, exhausting – and exhilarating. A great conversation is a rare joy because it is full of surprises and thus requires constant improvisation. As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle wrote, ‘To a partly novel situation the response is necessarily partly novel, else it is not a response.’
In 1995, Peter Smith, an economist at the University of York, attempted to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways in which targets might have unintended consequences. It’s a sobering array of potential calamities.
targets tend to be simple, while the world is complicated. Anything specific enough to be quantifiable is probably too specific to reflect a messy situation.
when two statisticians, Harvey Goldstein and David Spiegelhalter, looked at the report card data, they concluded that the main determinant of patient survival rates wasn’t the surgeon’s skill – they were all broadly similar – but pure luck. A surgeon might be one of the most dangerous doctors one year, and one of the safest the next.
Haldane reviewed what was known about banks that had gone bankrupt in the crisis, and how safe they had looked earlier according to the various sophisticated criteria laid out in Basel II and Basel III. He compared those numbers to the crudest possible measure of risk: had the bank borrowed a lot of money? At an annual convocation of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Haldane presented his conclusions: every single way you sliced the data, the highly rational, hyper-quantified risk management methods were less effective than a crude rule of thumb: ‘Beware indebted banks.’ Perhaps Basel
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psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has assembled a large library of simple heuristics that rival or even outperform complex decision rules that are widely thought to be theoretically optimal.
Making the targets more complex can’t be the right answer. A complex measure is just as likely to be gamed, and a simple rule of thumb is often an accurate guide to what is happening.
But ICCT did something simple and unexpected: it strapped emissions monitors to some VW cars and drove them from San Diego to Seattle. That was enough to reveal the scam.
The world’s toughest exam isn’t so tough if everyone is carrying a cheat sheet. A simple question from an unexpected direction can prove far more searching.
‘Putain la vache. Putain!’ – the French equivalent of ‘Fucking hell. Fuck!’
An alternative solution is to reverse the role of computer and human. Rather than letting the computer fly the plane with the human poised to take over when the computer cannot cope, perhaps it would be better to have the human fly the plane with the computer monitoring the situation, ready to intervene. Computers, after all, are tireless, patient and do not need practice. Why, then, do we ask the people to monitor the machines and not the other way round?
As Tom Vanderbilt describes Monderman’s strategy, ‘Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity.’ A confusing situation always grabs the attention, as Brian Eno has argued. Perplexed, drivers took the cautious way forward: they drove so slowly through Oudehaske that Monderman could no longer capture their speed on his radar gun. Earl Wiener would have recognised the logic: by forcing drivers to confront the possibility of small errors, the chance of them making larger ones was greatly reduced.
When showing visiting journalists the Squareabout, Monderman’s party trick was to close his eyes and walk backwards into the traffic. The cars would just flow around him without so much as a honk on the horn.
In nature, mess often indicates health – and not only in the forest.
Jane Jacobs, urban writer and campaigner, made the case for neighbourhood diversity in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Successful cities are a glorious mess of old and new, of houses and shops and workplaces, and where the richer residents and the poorer ones mingle together. And it is that diverse mess that makes them safe, innovative – and perhaps above all, resilient.
If we want to predict whether a city block’s residents think that it’s a mess, we would learn more from looking at data on race and poverty than we would learn from looking at videos of what the neighbourhood actually looks like. People feel that richer white neighbourhoods look neat and poorer black neighbourhoods look disorderly, regardless of what is actually happening on the street.
Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, authors of the exuberant book A Perfect Mess,
A fine research paper with the title ‘Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?’ by Steve Whittaker (again) and researchers at IBM Research concluded that, broadly, yes you are.
The daily plans were catastrophic. Students using them started by working 20 hours a week but by the end of the course they were down to about 8 hours a week. Having no plan at all was just as bad, although arguably it encouraged more consistent work effort: students began by working 15 hours a week and sagged to 10 hours a week later in the course. But the monthly plans were a tremendous success in motivating students to study – they put in 25 hours a week and even studied slightly harder at the end of the ten-week course than at the beginning.
Besieged by invitations and meetings, Andreessen decided that he would simply stop writing anything in his calendar. If something was important then it could be done immediately. Otherwise it wasn’t worth signing away a slice of Andreessen’s future. ‘I’ve been trying this tactic as an experiment,’ he wrote in 2007. ‘And I am so much happier, I can’t even tell you.’
Dan Slater’s book Love in the Time of Algorithms,
Jared Diamond, author of The World Until Yesterday,
James Scott, author of Two Cheers for Anarchy,
