Weird Ideas That Work summary

The productivity of routine tasks can pretty much always be evaluated using a simple formula: draw on past experience to establish both how many errors and how much output you can expect for a certain amount of work. Then use this as a quality standard to measure your current process against. Generally speaking: the less garbage you produce, the better your process.

The makers of a car or a Big Mac already know exactly how the products should look, and so they put all their energy into ensuring that the manufacturing process is as accurate and efficient as possible.

In simple terms, the evolution of all living things goes something like this: random mutations cause the creation of new variations, and of these most fail and disappear; only a very certain few survive. Every living being descends from an almost infinite number of experiments where only one proved adaptive to a certain environment. For example, one branch of hominids might have had only a limited ability to vocalize, but, if so, they couldn't compete with our ancestors, who, through the power of speech, could exchange ideas, warnings and advice among themselves.

And that’s exactly how innovation works: successful results arise through constant experimentation. Although most of these experiments fail, every now and then a new idea crystallizes. By producing many new things and maximizing diversity, these experiments will inevitably yield a valuable innovation somewhere down the road.

Innovation refers, first of all, to the creation of something new and useful. However, this something does not necessarily have to be created from the ground up. In other words, innovating can also mean rearranging existing ideas and components to make something new, introducing a familiar idea into a foreign context or simply using an existing idea in a novel way.

Take the programming language Java, for instance: it was considered a major breakthrough in programming, though actually it emerged from the combining of existing components. Its virtue – and novelty – lay in the clever arrangement of these components.

Most companies seek to employ so-called fast learners, i.e., people who are communicative, have a social edge and can adapt quickly to a company’s standards and conventions.

Such employees are important for the day-to-day operations and routine tasks that earn a company money in the short term. But, if a company has its eye on innovation in the long term, it needs to hire slow learners as well, i.e., people who are either slow in accepting a company’s dogma and conventions or who don’t accept them at all.

Groups are particularly innovative and creative when they include an amalgamation of varied ideas, skills and personalities. Companies should therefore not lose sight of the need for diversity when carrying out an applicant selection process.

But more often than not, something stands in the way of achieving this desired diversity – namely, that commonality engenders sympathy. The expression “birds of a feather flock together” is an apt way to describe this psychological effect. We like people who are like us, and so we tend to surround ourselves with people with the same skills and interests.

Many big companies invest huge amounts of money each year on consultants whose job it is to represent an outsider’s perspective and provide the company with innovative and fresh ideas.

However, hiring young people with an impartial view of the company and then giving them the freedom to introduce their own ideas would be far more intelligent. Their ideas might be just as fresh as those of the consultants but come at a fraction of the cost.

Successful creatives are not afraid of mistakes or failure: they know that good ideas often arise from tireless experimentationand a chain of failed attempts. People who avoid mistakes and failures suffocate all potential innovation. Unmindful of this, many companies punish their employees for making mistakes, and thus inadvertently create an environment where people just try to conform rather than experiment.

Hence, companies that are driven to be innovative need the right incentive system. Employees should be encouraged to take creative risks and put themselves to the test. In other words, they should feel confident enough to fail – and not be punished for making mistakes.

Creative work is easily hindered. When supervisors or executives put constant pressure on the members of a creative team, the team’s chances of coming up with viable findings sink rapidly. How many creative risks would you take with someone constantly looking over your shoulder?

The reason a company’s higher-ups act this way is simple: in general, people feel comfortable with the familiar and repelled by the unfamiliar. Outsiders tend to be very critical of the work of creative teams and dismiss new ideas as nonsense. Plus, it’s not uncommon for executives to believe they know better than their employees.

The main message in this book:

Innovations are the fruits of constant experimentation and are often associated with frequent failures. When companies want to promote innovations, they should hire non-conformists, reward failures as necessary steps in the search for great ideas and give their teams full creative freedom.