How Disruption & Frustration Can Make Us Solve Problems Better & Be More Creative
The science & evidence behind how disruption & difficulties makes us problem solve better & be much more creative
There are a wide variety of studies done on how to improve performance & how we can solve problems better & be more creative, but they don’t entail rigorous practice & repetition as the key ingredient, which you might think is the case.
There is the case & argument that practicing makes you better at a skill, especially at skills that demand extensive practice in the initial stages like learning an instrument, but when it comes down to problem-solving & creativity, randomness, confusion, disruption & disorder make us more creative & make us solve problems with higher efficiency.
It’s a late Sunday night & I’m sipping my hot chocolate on this tepid monsoon night this year in Mumbai while writing this piece — a short break, a short disruption. The rains have been intermittent this year, so the day's heat manages to stick around in the air longer. The Spain vs Georgia Euro 2024 Round of 16 game is going on, & as usual, I’m multitasking between watching the game, finishing a bit of pending work, playing some piano, working on producing & doing some reading/audiobook listening via Audible.
Over the past month I’ve plunged myself headlong into a new electronic album while managing work as well but earlier this week I felt considerable creative block & didn’t know what to do. So I decided to change what I was doing & write for a bit & do some other activities, or distract myself from doing my producing by doing stuff that’s completely different & unrelated.
But when I got back to working on my DAW, my laptop which is a 2018-19 Mac model, started giving me all kinds of latency & processing issues & it just got very slow to run over thirty or forty or more software instruments (VSTs) & effect chains along with several tracks layers loaded with them in the song.
As it turns out the disruption & difficulty & change of activity are just what you need & make you far more creative & better at performance & problem-solving after it. In my case, my break & my laptop’s poor processing capability made me strip down certain sections of the song & the minimalism & renewed approach made that song sound much better.
“I think we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess. So let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science, from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll.” says Tim Harford
The Font Test
The first example is of certain high school students being given their coursework to study in fonts that were different & difficult to read. The results were starkly impressive for the portion of students who had to read their coursework in difficult fonts, as compared to the portion of students who had the usual easy-to-read fonts.
“So cognitive psychology first. We've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacles, can actually improve our performance. For example, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer(not the Christopher Nolan movie guy), a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers.”
“And he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were giving to some of their classes. So the regular handout would be formatted in something straightforward, such as Helvetica or Times New Roman. But half these classes were getting handouts that were formatted in something sort of intense, like Haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce, like Comic Sans italicized.”
“Now, these are really ugly fonts and they're difficult fonts to read. But at the end of the semester, students were given exams, and the students who'd been asked to read the more difficult fonts, had actually done better on their exams in a variety of subjects.”
“And the reason is, the difficult font had slowed them down forced them to work a bit harder, to think a bit more about what they were reading, to interpret it . . . and so they learned more,” explains Harford.
Attention Filters
Harford delves into another example of a Harvard study of students whose attention filters were weak, i.e. they got easily distracted by random things in an environment where they were supposed to focus.
“Another example. The psychologist Shelley Carson has been testing Harvard undergraduates for the quality of their attentional filters. What do I mean by that? What I mean is, imagine you're in a restaurant, you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversations going on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focus on what's important to you. Can you do that?”
“If you can, you have good, strong attentional filters. But some people really struggle with that. Some of Carson's undergraduate subjects struggled with that. They had weak filters, they had porous filters - let a lot of external information in.”
“And so what that meant is they were constantly being interrupted by the sights and the sounds of the world around them. If there was a television on while they were doing their essays, they couldn't screen it out. Now, you would think that that was a disadvantage.. but no.”
“When Carson looked at what these students had achieved, the ones with the weak filters were vastly more likely to have some real creative milestone in their lives, to have published their first novel, to have released their first album. These distractions were actually grists to their creative mill. They were able to think outside the box because their box was full of holes,” says Harford.
Complexity & Randomness In Problem Solving
Harford elucidates an example of how to approach a problem as complex as building an airplane. He suggests that a step-by-step process to building the plane might seem like the best idea, however, it’s counter-productive because you’re more likely to run into dead-ends, roadblocks & bottlenecks in those particular sequential phases. However, although it may seem counter-intuitive, “if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely and your problem-solving becomes more robust.”
Approaching a problem from several angles & utilising several different procedures often leads to creative breakthroughs & solving the problem better, more uniquely & more effectively.
From the examples above, if you’re raising a child & they’re old enough, you could try the above strategies to improve their problem-solving abilities & make them solve problems in a more creative & effective way.
You could use the difficult fonts technique for what they’re studying, or make them try to concentrate in a distracted environment, and also, to keep things interesting, make them alternate between activities.
The Stranger Effect
Harford talks about one particular study that involved testing people who were familiar with each other working together on a problem versus people who were also familiar with each other working on a problem, but with a stranger present.
“Let's talk about social psychology. So the psychologist Katherine Phillips, with some colleagues, recently gave murder mystery problems to some students, and these students were collected in groups of four and they were given dossiers with information about a crime - alibis and evidence, witness statements and three suspects. And the groups of four students were asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime.”
“And there were two treatments in this experiment. In some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well. In other cases, three friends and a stranger. The groups with the stranger solved the problem more effectively.”
“Actually, they solved the problem quite a lot more effectively. So the groups of four friends, they only had a 50-50 chance of getting the answer right. Which is actually not that great in multiple choice, for three answers — 50-50's not good.”
“The three friends and the stranger, even though the stranger didn't have any extra information, even though it was just a case of how that changed the conversation to accommodate that awkwardness, the three friends and the stranger, they had a 75 percent chance of finding the right answer. That's quite a big leap in performance.”
“But I think what's really interesting is not just that the three friends and the stranger did a better job, but how they felt about it. So when Katherine Phillips interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job.”
“They were complacent. When she spoke to the three friends and the stranger, they had not had a nice time - it's actually rather difficult, it's rather awkward . . . and they were full of doubt. They didn't think they'd done a good job even though they had.”
This particular study can be used as a productivity hack if you’re a business owner or in a senior position at a company. Introducing a stranger into a problem-solving group or for a task can dramatically change the results & help the said team do tasks better & in a much faster & innovative way.
Introducing a stranger or a surprise supervisor in a workgroup can aid in effective problem-solving & in getting the task done with higher chances of success.
Brian Eno & His Disruptive Production Process
I’ve written about ambient music pioneer Brian Eno in an old piece. That was about reading Eno’s book & his creation of the ambient genre & the inspiration for producing my own ambient album titled ‘Music For Motion’ (You can stream my album at the end of this piece)
Apart from pioneering ambient music, Eno has produced or been involved in a host of successful rock & roll albums over the past 40 years including working with the likes of David Bowie, U2 & Coldplay.
Harford who is a friend of Brian Eno explains how Eno uses a deck of cards called ‘Oblique Strategies’, which essentially disrupt things in the music studio while recording albums.
Some examples of the cards read, “Change instrument roles.” which means the drummer sits on the piano, the bass player plays a synth, the guitarist tries the trumpet & so on.
Others read:
"Look closely at the most embarrassing details. Amplify them."
"Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action. Incorporate."
Despite the session musicians despising these cards, they actually work, and the albums Eno has worked on whether solo or with other artists have all gone platinum.
These “oblique strategies” can be applied to any field of work, and at its core, it’s the disruption that creates groundbreaking breakthroughs & newer approaches to tackling professional problems. So if you’re a business owner or in any field of work where you’re not seeing enough efficiency & results, you can try shaking things up with some oblique strategies pertaining to your line of work.
I will perhaps write about Oblique Strategies in another article, but you can check out this website for randomly generated prompts:
Disruption Works But Doesn’t Feel Good
“I think that really exemplifies the challenge that we're dealing with here. Because, the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move . . .these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative. But we don't feel that they're helping us. We feel that they're getting in the way and so we resist,” adds Harford
The main point to note in incorporating disruptive strategies is the trade-off with not feeling too good about the problem, the mess, and the complexity. The key is to labour past the mixed feelings & tackle the problem with refreshed vigour & a different perspective whilst also shaking things up a bit. That will allow using a newer unique lens while approaching, working at or solving a problem.
With examples from several studies & stories, in his TED talk about disruptive strategies, & working with frustration, Tim Harford argues that disruption, complexity & a bit of disorder may just be the key to creative breakthroughs and problem-solving. While the advantages of working with a bit of a mess are aplenty, if we can just get past the mixed feelings we harbour about them, we can be more effective & creative in the way we take tasks head-on.
In another post based on a talk by Tim Harford, I explored how slow-motion multitasking works & how it can help you get more done while also exploring all your passions, and interests.
You can also stream my ambient LP ‘Music For Motion’ here below, it’s very relaxing to work to & just have playing in the background, especially in the monsoon!
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