Metaphor and the Seashell

New inventions can take years from the start of the process to realisation. Sometimes decades. With lots of creative problem-solving necessary along the way.

But occasionally there’s a key barrier that appears insuperable and the people involved just can’t imagine that there could be a solution at all, let alone what that solution might look like.

That was the case for Sydney doctor, Graeme Clark, and his team, who were working on ways to bring back hearing to people with deafness problems by tapping into the cochlea part of the ear. The basic idea was to introduce electrodes into it.

The problem was: how to squeeze twenty wires into a curling tube within the ear, where the available gap was no wider than a needle.

Then, one day, Clark was on the beach and looking at a Turban shell. Picking up some blades of grass, he discovered that they had exactly the right combination of flexibility and stiffness to enable him to push them into the shell, curling around until they reached the centre.

Eureka!

This was exactly the mechanical principle used for electrodes in the cochlea implant – an invention that became known as the bionic ear – giving back hearing to thousands.

 

Adland and collective memory

Things always seemed to be so urgent and important in the advertising business. It never occurred to me that adland’s collective memory was virtually non-existent.

I was to teach creative problem-solving to a group of young admen and women at Lintas in Melbourne. At the start of the first day, getting to know each other, one of the women asked me a series of questions.

“Have you been to Australia before?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“And to Melbourne?”
“Oh yes.”
“What do you think of it?”
“Great city. Love it.”
“Ah… Have you worked with ad agencies here before?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, have you been to this agency?”
Pause.
“I started this agency some ten years ago.”
Longer pause.
Was I bullshitting?
Apparently not.

Creative problem-solving in Paris

When it comes to collaborative creativity, there are indeed many ways to skin a cat.

I started teaching a group of young French managers in Paris as usual, by asking them how they normally went about it. They looked puzzled.

“Well, when you want to brainstorm or problem-solve, what do you do,” I asked.
Silence.
“Don’t you do it at all?”
“We do it all the time.”
“Yes, but what do you do? How do you go about doing it?”
Another pause.
“We go into a room together.”
“Yes, and…”
“We shut the door.”
“And…”
“Er, we argue with each other for a while.”
“And…”
“Then someone decides what we’ll do about it, and who will do it. And we leave the room.”

Job done.

Does every culture have its own default way of problem-solving?