Engineering Creativity: Unlocking the creative potential in Engineers
My father trained as a civil engineer. My husband as an aeronautical engineer. One of my brothers is a electrical engineer. I spend much of my time in rooms full of engineers showing them that they are more creative than they might think…
Engineers often tell me that they are not creative.
I don’t believe this is true. Indeed, some of the most cunningly creative people I know are — or started out as — engineers.
What countless innovation projects and training sessions with engineers have shown me, however, is that engineers tend to be predisposed to a blind spot when it comes to innovating and this can impact both their ability to come up with more inventive and resourceful ideas and their tendency (if not capacity) to ‘stress test’ ideas and concepts once the wheels are in motion. In practice, they tend to overlook resourceful and inventive solutions that are hiding in plain sight.
So what is this ‘blind spot’ are why are they more predisposed to it?
Engineers are conditioned by the positivist paradigm whereby knowledge is objectively true or false and as perfectly observable (like gravity and voltage). For many of the things engineers do, this is a helpful mindset. A bridge really does either hold …or collapse.
Engineers are conditioned by the positivist paradigm whereby knowledge is objectively true or false and as perfectly observable (like gravity and voltage).
However, the positivist universe actually leaves no place for bias, because it leaves no place for interpretation. “If the positivist universe has a bias, it is the belief that bias has no influence”, explains my friend, Streicher Louw, a profoundly inventive engineer himself.
And yet, cognitive bias permeates our thinking on every level. Melbourne-based thought leader, Steve Glaveski, wrote that “there are over 100 biases impacting our perceptions and beliefs at any one time and 36 of them have an immediate impact on our ability to innovate”.
One bias that I find has enormous impact on our ability to innovate is ‘cognitive fixedness’. Cognitive fixedness is a state of mind in which it is easy and natural to perceive aspects of the world in a particular way and very difficult to see them any other way. It blinkers our thinking.
It may take one of three forms:
- Functional, where we cannot imagine an alternate function for a component (e.g. why did we take so long to use the brakes to charge the battery?)
- Structural, where a system is locked into a certain configuration (as GE did with the fridge for decades! The freezer stayed where the ice box had been way beyond its use by date! And why do EVs look so much like petrol cars?)
- Relational, where we lock in dependencies between two variables and can’t imagine alternatives (pre ‘Happy Hour’, for example when there was no relationship between the time of day and the price of a drink).
So how could engineers (and, indeed, the rest of us!) overcome this bias when coming up with ideas?
There are 4 very powerful skills that we can all hone to overcome this:
- Learn to work better with constraints. It is powerful to impose constraints on the problem solving process, product or system and then work more systematically with the resources they already have. Listing the inventory of resources available is a simple way of avoiding blind spots. Following a path of most resistance and avoiding adding new resources is a more realistic way to innovate in a resource-constrained world.
- Acquire thinking tools that help use existing resources in novel ways. Once constrained, we need ways of thinking differently about the resources they have. This is where it is helpful to harness thinking tools that are derived from great ideas. Innovation methods such as TRIZ or Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) offer this. These are methods that were founded on the observation of creative patterns in the best ideas. These patterns have been reverse-engineered into thinking tools that give you a greater chance of coming up with something innovative.
-Foster a flexibility to be able to think in counter-intuitive ways. Given how embedded this bias is in our thinking, we need ways of ‘suspending’ it. Many of us have mastered the art of thinking from a problem to a solution. This is the standard waterfall approach. What can also be powerful is to do the reverse: to learn to break away from waterfall thinking to think ‘Form to Function’ or Solution to Problem, so that they cannot embed default or biased thinking into the ideas at the outset. Both of these are the sweet spot of SIT.
-Acquire a tolerance for paradox and ambiguity. Thinking differently requires it.
And how does this relate to ‘stress testing’ ideas once the wheels are in motion?
Engineering projects should involve regular assumption challenging and bias-scanning sessions. This ‘inventive stress testing’ needs to become the norm just like the systematic due diligence we have around safety and quality assurance. Most projects cannot afford to leave better ideas on the table — or to generate them when it is too late in the schedule to implement them!
Picture this: In the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union were competing in the quest to explore the moon. Some of the smartest engineers in the world were put on the project. Unable to send up a manned ship, the Soviet Union decided to launch an unmanned lunar probe to take an autonomous vehicle over to the dark side. The light source was the incandescent light bulb. The problem was that they would not survive the impact of landing on the lunar surface; the light bulbs kept breaking!
Even the toughest bulbs cracked during tests. A major effort was started to figure out how to strengthen the glass bulb. The situation was reported to the director of the Moon Landing project who queried the role of the light bulb. Clearly the bulb served to seal a vacuum around the filament. However, given that this was an oxygen-free environment, this wasn’t required. [Read the full story in ‘Innovation on Demand’, V. Fey, E. Rivin, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 5.]
The solution was simple: remove what they had thought was an essential component: the bulb. The filament burnt happily in space without the bulb and the team were left looking at each other wondering ‘Why on earth didn’t I think of that?!’
Had they scanned for different types of fixedness from the start, the time, resources and expense of solving the problem could have been spared.
Being able to recognise cognitive fixedness, bust it and scan for it throughout any engineering project are skills that our engineers need to understand and hone if they are to be powerful innovators in a complex, resource-constrained world.
#innovation #creativeengineers #engineeringcreatives
Rachel is a facilitator, trainer, coach and writer based in Australia. Using Systematic Inventive Thinking and other powerful methods, she spends much of her time helping people scan for blind spots to unearth ideas hiding in plain sight. In practice, she is constantly showing people that they are richer than they think. www.rachelaudige.com
