When faced with obstacles the brain becomes more creative. We all know this. One manifestation is how much more difficult it is to write an excellent brief essay than it is to ramble on page after page. It takes significantly more intense thought and creativity to tease out the most important points and express them simply and concisely than to hide them inside an overlong, wordy, and rambling essay. This is why so often a short and interesting report on something written for a magazine becomes a ridiculously boring book without any new ideas but with lots of repetitive verbiage.
The computer age has brought us many wondrous things but one thing that’s not so good is how easy it has made just about everything. This ease has brought a noticeable degradation in the quality of much thinking and how it is expressed. Professor Virginia Berninger of the University of Washington has even found that handwriting activates more of the brain than writing on a keyboard. Among the parts of the brain more engaged when you write by hand are the areas responsible for thinking and memory.
It also seems that having something distracting going on in the background increases your cognitive ability. You are more likely to make unusual connections, see a bigger picture, and come up with new and different ideas. That grating song playing softly behind you actually is improving your ability to think while annoying your conscious mind tremendously.
Memory is enhanced when your brain is stressed a bit. Type that is difficult to read leads to better retention. It seems that making it too easy leads to having a lazy brain that barely bothers to think at all much less remember what happened around it.
In my work at the Wharton School we use this idea to get the best work from the MBA students in the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum and encourage them to greater heights of creativity as they work on international marketing consulting projects. For a six month project for a real and paying client they are given a brief project overview at the beginning and then turned loose to figure out how to proceed. By brief I mean as short as a few paragraphs.
The Project Faculty give guidance but work hard to leave the path of the project as unstructured as possible. It is exhilirating to watch the MBA student team as they explore options, figure out what the project really is, and how to develop the ideas and concepts that lead to exceptional recommendations. Recommendations that are often unusual and unexpected since given an openended opportunity where they are forced to think through difficulty and unknown territory their ideas soar.
At the opposite extreme is Twitter. 140 characters and no more. You are boxed in by the difficult task of expressing a complete idea in this small space. Within this restriction I force myself to write a clear thought in good English each and every time I Tweet something. It stretches my brain.
In your work…do the same. Make things difficult. Leave some things open. Remove the straight paths and guide people in circuitous routes. Play a bit of off kilter music in the background rather than those soothing instrumentals. Print things in odd typefaces that are a bit harder to read. Encourage simplicity and brevity…without losing any of the depth and insight.
Force yourself and your people to think. Make things a bit more difficult.
“One manifestation is how much more difficult it is to write an excellent brief essay than it is to ramble on page after page.”
Hence one of my favorite acronyms:
IIHMTIWHMIS
“If I Had More Time I Would Have Made It Shorter”