What does origami have to do with space exploration?
The art of paper folding dates back centuries. Through the design of elegant three-dimensional shapes, origami artists developed ways of creating objects that are light yet incredibly strong and complex.
But it wasn’t until the twenty-first century that engineers started to take notice. Faced with designing solar arrays and telescopes that can fit inside rockets and then self-deploy in space, NASA scientists turned to origami-inspired methods.
That it took so long for these two areas to cross over reflects the historic barriers between art and science, says Julio M. Ottino, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, former dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern, and author of The Nexus, Augmented Thinking for a Complex World.
“The objects lived in museums. The equations lived in journals. The ideas remained isolated from one another, separated by disciplinary borders,” Ottino says. “The answer, conceptually, had been hiding in plain sight for five hundred years.”
It’s a historical lesson that companies looking to innovate should keep in mind. Facilitating innovation, Ottino says, means striking a careful balance between two contrasting ways of thinking—exploratory and systematic.
Exploratory thinking deals with issues that are amorphous and unpredictable. Systematic thinking focuses on implementation and operations. Drawing on the work of philosopher Karl Popper, Ottino also refers to these as “cloud” and “clock” thinking.
Business leaders who want innovation must be able to build a bridge between the artists and the engineers, the discoverers and the doers, Ottino says. “You need these nexus-type people, who can connect the people who are very good in the cloud-thinking part—the creative part, the divergent people, metaphorical thinking—with the clock-thinking people who are more logical, rational, and quantitative. You need both.”
Ottino offers three recommendations for how business leaders can balance exploratory and systematic thinking to make breakthroughs and carry them to fruition.
Develop a culture of curiosity throughout the organization
Surely, some of your employees will be more adept at cloud thinking, and others at clock thinking. However, it’s not enough for companies to open an innovation division where a small group is responsible for coming up with all the great ideas. Instead, curiosity and discovery should be built into the fabric of the organization, because great ideas can come from anyone involved.
“You want ideas to emerge because it’s part of the culture of the place, not because it’s dictated by leadership,” Ottino says.
But a culture of curiosity doesn’t just happen spontaneously. Setting the stage for ideas to emerge depends on active leadership at the highest levels, according to Ottino.
3M, for example, once stoked the fires of innovation by allowing workers to spend 10 percent of their time working on whatever they wanted. The goal for the company was not to rely on breakthroughs from the margins, but to foster an environment where employees were conditioned to explore.
“The encouragement to innovate has to flow constantly from the top,” he explains. Ottino says. “The way a culture of curiosity should work is that some component to every employee’s brain should be focused on discovery.”
Break down silos
Along with providing space and encouragement to individuals so they can pursue innovative ideas, leaders also need to bring different types of thinkers together, according to Ottino.
“Connectivity is essential,” he says. And empowering the entire organization to innovate can make buy-in for these new connections easier for everyone involved.
Ottino utilized this cross-disciplinary approach when he developed a first-year course for undergraduate engineering majors at Northwestern. “Design Thinking and Communication,” co-taught by faculty from the university’s writing program, brings students into small groups to solve what The Wall Street Journal, in an article about the course, calls “unsolvable problems.”
For example, students in one course met at the then–Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (now the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab) with a 10-year-old patient who was born without arms. The students proposed ideas to the child and parents to help the patient be more independent. They then received feedback about what may be effective.
“The students learn empathy, creativity, teamwork, and resilience,” Ottino says. “It’s called ‘Design Thinking and Communication,’ but it’s basically innovation leadership.”
This collaboration showed the importance of recognizing that the cloud thinkers you need might not be in a particular department—or even within the organization. During Ottino’s tenure, the McCormick school also launched new initiatives with the Block Museum of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to expand the relationship between cloud and clock thinkers.
These projects echo a longer history of successful art-and-science collaborations in the corporate world. For example, in the 1966 performance series 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, Bell Labs allowed 30 of its engineers to collaborate for 10 months with 10 artists, including composer John Cage, painter Robert Rauschenberg, and dancer Lucinda Childs.
“There are many technologies that were developed there for the first time,” Ottino says. “Why? Because the artists discussed things, these people were listening, and one thing led to another.”
While Ottino doubts any contemporary company would commit 30 of its engineers for months to a similar project, it’s important for business leaders to build partnerships and protect spaces where people from different disciplines may congregate and experiment.
“You have to dedicate resources for people to work on those things,” he says. “You have to commit to them even if they are hard to quantify in the short term.”
Communicate a vision
Cross-pollinating cloud and clock thinkers doesn’t guarantee that curiosity will be part of a company’s culture. A consistent message from business leaders about their vision for the organization is also vital, according to Ottino.
“You have to communicate constantly and consistently who you are,” he says. “This diffuses through the organization.”
A clear communication strategy is necessary in part because of the inherent tensions between exploratory and systematic thinking. In the “Design Thinking and Communication” course, for example, mistakes are inevitable, a reality that can jibe awkwardly with the typical engineering student’s drive for perfection.
“Failures are data,” Ottino says. “They are not setbacks. They are useful information.”
Leaders, he suggests, must relentlessly make clear how failures fit into a broader innovation strategy. Otherwise, businesses will be tempted to lurch away from creativity and back toward stable ground when ideas don’t pan out.
“People prefer clarity, and [in uncertain times] you will always, always go back to clock thinking,” he says, “when what you need is some patience for ambiguity.”
The culture of a place is its compass, he says, and the strategic plan is the map. An organization that successfully cultivates innovation will have both. To get there, though, business leaders must make it a top priority to balance the cloud and the clock.
“Most organizations are built to favor one mode and suppress the other,” Ottino says. “The rare breakthroughs occur when both modes coexist—when exploratory thinking identifies unexpected connections and systematic thinking makes them real.”