Creative People Must Be Stopped Read Online Free Page B

the floor when they are told what it is made of. Fundamentally, Sow-N-Gro, an economically and technologically sound product, fails at the societal level—at least in our culture—by clashing with the values of the people it was designed for. So oblivious to this constraint were the manufacturers of the product that they actually boasted about Sow-N-Gro’s fatal flaw.
    Beyond casting light on what exactly went wrong with Sow-N-Gro, this diagnosis suggests what we need to do to give the innovation a better chance of success. We need to somehow “enlarge” the societal-level constraint in a way that allows it to enter the full overlap—that is, the area where the constraints can all be satisfied (see Figure 1.3 ).
    Figure 1.3
    At this point I ask people how they might go about fixing the innovation problem in this way. With this little bit of coaxing, the ideas come pouring out. First, use a different material—anything but human hair. Another common piece of advice is to prevaricate about the contents: disclose the truth, but not too much of the truth. Simply call it “organic material” or “natural keratin” or, as human hair is described scientifically, “filamentous biomaterial.” Clearly the company received and acted on similar advice; the latest iterations of the product describe it as “all-natural organic plant-growth supplement.”
    A later version of the product shows several other ways that an enlarged overlap was pursued. The name Sow-N-Gro is confusing. When heard aurally it is not clear which meaning of the sound “so” is intended: So? Sew? Sow? Changing the name to SmartGrow alleviated that confusion. The new name SmartGrow also served to enlarge the constraint by enacting a basic strategy of marketing: change the basis of comparison. The consumer is led to conclude, Since this stuff is the smart grow, that other stuff on the shelf next to it must be “dumb grow”! Another tactic was to change the color of the packaging. The original packaging was bright yellow, which brought to my mind the last time I had spilled a large quantity of Roundup herbicide on my lawn. Changing to a “healthy” green color makes for a much more coherent presentation to the consumer.
    This example suggests that if we can identify the key constraints for a particular innovation, we can usually come up with ideas for interventions that increase the odds that our innovation will succeed. Quite often the knowledge we need is already at hand. We already know the things we need to know; we just need to remember that we know them.
    With the benefit of hindsight, identifying the key constraint may seem quite simple. Yet the showstopping constraint on what came to be known as SmartGrow managed to elude the smart people who invented, manufactured, and packaged it. And their case is not at all uncommon. Why? The problem is that we tend to interpret situations using only our “favored” constraint perspectives, the ones that we are most comfortable with, based on our experience, training, area of expertise, and so on. As a result, we may spend a great deal of time and energy on the wrong set of problems. For example, the makers of Sow-N-Gro may have initially congratulated themselves on having come up with a new idea and conquering every technological challenge in producing it. At that point they might have felt that their key problem was “industry economics.” In that case they might have devoted their attention to the question, How can we cut our costs so that we can price our product more competitively? Now this may have been wise, in that price might well have been a significant constraint, one that could sink their product if it were not met. However, there was an even more binding constraint that became evident only after the product was already on the market.
    What we need is the kind of vision correction that will enable us to see in