“Let dead people solve your problems for you.”
That was my favorite line from this TED talk by former Cal Tech physicist and current professional origami master Robert Lang.
(Click here to see the video on the TED site if this player doesn’t work for you.)
Lang offers that line — about dead people solving your problems for you — by way of suggesting that we should see how our current challenges reduce down to solutions that have been pioneered by those who have come before.
That advice is clearly apt for mathematicians, who routinely write proofs only to the point at which a particular problem breaks down into previously proved mathematics. But I think it’s likewise apt for business, where all too often we try to reinvent the wheel — to come up with some bold new solution — when in fact we’d be better off to reduce a problem to its most basic elements and then use previously derived solutions.
In the talk, Lang points out that all of origami design comes down to four mathematically-expressible relationships, e.g. between the number of ridges and valleys in a particular folding pattern. Business may not be quite that mathematically elegant, but I do believe that many of our current challenges — be they ever so technological or ever so psychological in nature — boil down to some basic premises that are straightforward, albeit sometimes difficult, to apply.
I also liked Lang’s point that plenty of things like origami, which we see as frivolous or as “merely” aesthetic, end up having significant practical applications. In the video, he talks about how origami-based folding patterns have been used to design arterial stents and solar sails for spacecraft.
Now, let me ask you: What business challenges do you see that boil down to much simpler concepts?
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It was a very fun line. Funny version of the shoulders of giants, in a way.
Not to be snarky but, isn’t the business world already adept at boiling complex issues down to simple (some would say “simplistic”) ideas?
Also, isn’t the prevention of wheel reinvention in line with the tendency to think that everything which is done now must be completely new? Sounds to me like this tendency is even responsible for much inefficiency on the part of many institutions. A kind of “Not Invented Now” counterpart to the well-known “Not Invented Here” attitude.
Maybe I’m completely off. I’ve never worked in business.
Thanks for the smart comment, Alexandre.
1. The business world *is* often guilty of making things simplistic, but it often doesn’t make things “simple” in Einstein’s sense of “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
2. It’s funny — I had “Not Invented Here” in the back of my mind as I wrote this post, but I think you’re really onto something with “Not Invented Now,” which I’d never thought of.
I wonder, are too many folks in business too proud to say something like this:
“Well, basically this is a straightforward problem, because it breaks down to A, which we understand how to do; B, which we’re really good at; and C, which we can contract out. It won’t be *easy* to execute — but at least it’s clear to understand.”
Hmm . . .
@TWalk Good use of the Einstein quote.
The NIN principle is one I associate with “chronocentrism,” the historical equivalent of ethnocentrism. I observe it very frequently, especially among technology enthusiasts.
It probably is quite difficult to offer simple solutions. There might even be, on the part of employers or consulting clients, a notion that what they pay for shouldn’t sound like common sense.
But there’s also a matter of being oblivious to the simplest solutions. When people focus on a problem too directly, they tend to miss out on the obvious because they rarely apply creative thinking. In other words, experts on the inside of a corporation tend to “think inside the box.”
The “origami in space” case was quite convincing. It makes a lot of sense once you think about it but it’s quite likely that it took an abductive leap for people to come up with the initial idea.
One thing which tends to happen with the best TEDtalks is that the demonstration is so convincing that it hides the complexity of what went on before the presenter was able to reach a conclusion. The problem is mostly with the format, I guess, but it’s also clear that people aren’t too interested in discussing failed attempts unless they were steps along the path to the elegant solution. Plus, it’s quite difficult to document some of the most important steps in the path toward a solution. The “it suddenly hit me” parts doesn’t sound very useful. And though epiphanies can be narrated, they’re difficult to reproduce.
An idea which originated in architecture and is becoming popularized in the tech world is “design patterns.” One definition from Wikipedia is “a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem.” Software engineers have used them for a while and now they’ve spread through micro-level interaction design patterns to broader categories like social design patterns.
For more info and examples see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/
I think design patterns might have applications in business, at least in business practices which are subject to “design,” perhaps for example in business plans, organizational structures, and marketing.
Alexandre — Good points all.
I think that you’re right about “common sense” solutions. A high-priced consultant isn’t going to make friends by coming in and saying, “You need to get clear on what you’re really after, and then you need to stop doing the bottom 80% of your projects that don’t feed that goal.” The execs are going to look around at each other and say “Why are we paying all this money to get such simple advice?”
The answer, of course, is that they apparently NEED it, or they wouldn’t need to bring in the consultant in the first place.
Prentiss — I’ve long been a fan of Christopher Alexander’s work, and in fact just this weekend I put my copy of “A Pattern Language” on my nightstand for browsing. I hadn’t thought about how that work might apply to business . . . but now the wheels are definitely turning.
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
G.K. Chesterton
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
chiming in on the ‘design patterns’ comment above, i was working with a company trying to move from retail silos — store, catalog, web — to true customer centric multi-channel retail. everyone was getting caught up in the enormity of each channel and the cross-interactions and then it occurred to me that as an organization “we sell things to people”. while there was variation in the sequence of actions and physicality, there was a simple common denominator. by recognizing the concepts of a common base and variations, we were better able to get our minds around the problem space and solution.
[...] question comes to mind because of this great comment Brenda Michelson made on last week’s post, “Let dead people solve your problems for [...]