You Have Been Found Guilty of Obstruction
Your conscious mind is concerned with immediate environment. It might even be said that everything you think of, consciously, is concerned with self-protection in some way or other. You can’t quite accept that? All right—let’s say ‘self-interest’ instead.
One of the functions of your conscious mind is to stop you infringing the rules of society—to stop you appearing inadequate or foolish. To stop you being eccentric. (The self-preservation instinct has its roots deep in the subconscious, of course, but we would get lost in the labyrinth if we mixed up our ‘two brains’ again, so let’s not.)
The reason why some people are more disrespectful than others of society’s rules is that they have a higher threshold of guilt. You will appreciate that I am speaking now of ‘honest’ guilt—not the criminal type or the exhibitionist type, although there may well be a parallel line of enquiry here. (Criminals do seem more imaginative than the police, don’t they? But perhaps it’s simply that they must take the initiative?)
By ‘honest’ guilt, I mean the degree to which you are prepared to suggest and accept change, when change means inconvenience to others. The lower your threshold of guilt the more orthodox and conventional you are likely to be, and the less you will welcome change. In this context, is it not highly amusing to study the cavortings of politicians? With very few exceptions, they are conventional thinkers who want to be seen as responsible (i.e. orthodox) men. Yet they are forever chatting about changing things. ‘A radical approach’, ‘pragmatism’, ‘dragging the country into the twentieth century’ and so on. But they all try to imply that no inconvenience will occur—except perhaps for the rich (who have few votes) or for the big corporations (who have no vote at all). In short—change without tears.
It can’t be done of course. And this attitude of mind permeates business activities just as much as politics. It even affects areas where it is quite clearly out of place, such as fine arts. It would be unrealistic to pretend that publishing, film making, opera, ballet and such activities can be contemplated outside the economic disciplines of supply and demand. Most of these activities are basically marketing operations. But even when art is practised for its own sake, the artists seem to be more concerned with acceptability than with originality.
What are your own reactions to change? Do you immediately respond in a logical, sensible, negative way? Do you immediately see the inconveniences that will result? This is not a bad thing, in itself. Being a good, quick, daring adjudicator is part of the process of innovation. Such talents are vital. But they have a chronological place in the process, as I hope to prove. At the actual moment of illumination, the reactionary state of mind is anathema to innovation.
The instinctive self-protective reaction—not rocking the boat, not appearing foolish—is but one of the hurdles we must bear in mind. There are others. Vested interest is a tough, tough cookie. Suppose you devised a new method of medical diagnosis such as this: by taking a spot of blood from the patient’s thumb and examining it under an electron microscope, with a series of different light frequencies and positive and negative stains you are able to build a complete history of the state of metabolism, covering the entire seven-year cycle of cell regeneration. You can see what has afflicted the patient, what is afflicting him, and what is going to afflict him. A detailed diagnosis and prognosis, duly computerised in ten minutes. You present your paper. It is irrefutable. Now, are the Harley Street battalions going to down tools and cheer you on? Not bloody likely. Those worthies got where they are by being experts in quite a different method of diagnosis. They are going to find something wrong with your idea if they can. They are going to delay its introduction by hook or by crook. You can’t really blame them, either.
Another form of vested interest stems from innovation itself. Innovators can become obstructionists. A man who makes a significant breakthrough becomes an acknowledged expert in the new idea he produces. This acknowledgement is useful to him, since he can now promulgate the new development with a degree of authority. (If he is a real innovator, personal acclaim or wealth will not interest him greatly; we’ll touch on that later.) But he will tend to become a crusader. So when another innovator threatens to undermine his position with a subsequent and radically different development, he may well react in a strongly orthodox manner.
You must expect strong negative reaction from all experts when presenting a new idea to them. This is because you are posing a threat to their authority. Just in case you think businessmen are the main culprits, listen to this. After the publication of Arthur Koestler’s book ‘The Act of Creation’, a group of advertising people made it the subject of an evening dinner meeting. Each of the four ‘top-table’ speakers prefaced his opening remarks by saying that he had either not read the book being discussed or had only been able to skim through it! Nevertheless, they criticized it—and implied, severally and with feeling, that it was downright arrogance to dabble in such things. The speakers from the floor also waxed wrathful about it. Yet one would have thought that writers and visualisers of advertising would have welcomed a singular and important essay that promised to improve innovation techniques. Even if they disagreed with its arguments they should have applauded the attempt. But they saw in it a threat. Hell, if someone was telling the world that there was nothing mysterious about creative thinking they might lose their jobs. It’s difficult to exaggerate the hostility that filled the air, yet these people are normally genial, witty and urbane. They too, wanted to keep things unchanged, to preserve the mystique that surrounded them.
Another obstruction to innovation is the impersonalised system. Logical, sensible administrators are constantly devising foolproof working modes and introducing standardised techniques and equipment. You can see where this leads, in terms of innovation. It makes introduction of variables very difficult. When you invest a lot of money and time in establishing an efficient system, you simply cannot allow rogue elements to creep in. So attitudes to innovation harden. There doesn’t seem to be any way out of this dilemma, but it does indicate the tremendous courage required both in conceiving and in implementing ideas that involve major reorganisation.
Think of the Jumbo jet operation, requiring changes of airport layout, buildings, customs and immigration facilities, catering, cleaning, fuelling, servicing, crewing, booking, scheduling and baggage-handling systems. Not to mention the financing, designing, building, insurance, testing and overall co-ordination problems. Isn’t it remarkable that the man who first proposed it stuck to his guns?
However, the main credit for this operation must attach to the evaluator, who may very well not have been the originator. The more one looks at the nature of innovation in a complex society, the more it seems that the process requires at least three types of mind—an originator, an evaluator and an exploiter. Each should understand the workings of the others’ minds. The phrase ‘keeping an open mind’ usually has the tacit rider ‘… but’ attached to it. If there is to be a smooth, productive association between these different functional groups there must be no qualification about it at all.
This leads to another obstructive device—judgement. To be precise, premature judgement. Sometimes it is merely a reflex defensive reaction, as has been mentioned already, above, but sometimes it simply springs from a habit of mind. If your job calls for quick decisions and you are good at making them, it might be as well to consider whether you react too quickly to new idea proposals. Please don’t think of the term ‘premature judgement’ in the bland sense in which it is normally used. We are talking not about hasty, ill-considered judgements but about specific mental reactions at specific moments; quick, logical appraisals that reveal all the disadvantages and dangers of a new suggestion. Such appraisals must be made eventually but it is best to delay them if possible until the subconscious brain has had time to communicate its whole case to you. And that is a very difficult function.
Yet another obstruction is shock and fear. This may be, in fact, another manifestation of guilt. But let’s treat it separately. Being wiser than you, your subconscious knows about the hazards of being antisocial and knows how your conscious brain is likely to react to sudden revelations (by suppressing them). So it has to approach the new idea with great care. Think of Newton and the gravitational theory. If it had been presented to him in all its simple glory, just like that, it would have been so terrifying that the shutters would have crashed down at once. So the subconscious—already moving in mysterious ways—has to become even more devious. It has to find a gentle way of telling you things. It has to pick its time, and monitor what’s going on in the conscious mind—then pounce. And the chances are you still won’t get the message.