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The Role of
Empathy
Creativity From Knowledge
Rearranging Elements
Innovative
Openings
Creativity From Knowledge
 Most
people waste their imagination on flights of fancy. Competitive ingenuity
doesn't come from daydreams. According to the principles of Sun Tzu's classical strategy,
only creativity based on knowledge can be transformed into competitive force. You
must know the standard approaches before you can imagine surprising ones. While it takes time and
training to master skills in any field, once you master any set of skills, you
are in a position to start innovating.
To
work, an innovation cannot be used alone. It must work as part of a larger system.
Too much of what people think of as creativity simply comes from ignorance.
People imagine that other people are much simpler, both in the sense of a
lack of complexity and a lack of brains, than they really are. People are, on
the average, exactly as smart as we are. Every complex problem has a simple
solution. Unfortunately, that solution doesn't work. The real world works using all the hard information in the minds of
more than six billion people and their attendant machines. You cannot replace
that information by waving a magic wand.
Look at the computer keyboard. Everyone
knows that there is a better design for a keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard was
designed to slow down typing on mechanical typewriters so they wouldn't jam. Coming up with a
better design today is easy.
Implementing that design is impossible. At least it is in a world where
everyone knows QWERTY. The QWERTY design is embedded into society, so it is impossible to change.
Sun Tzu taught that creativity could only come from knowledge of the complete
system and could only be implemented as small, painless changes to that system.
We must first know how things are done in a given area and why they are done
that way. This is why organizations are advised in the various books on
excellence to "stick to their knitting." You must know something well
before
you can make useful innovations to it.
Even then, before we can offer any useful innovation, we must identify what
can be easily changed. And a lot of what can be easily changed depends on
people's expectations. This brings us back to our first point about sympathy. We
must know how these changes fit into people's thinking. If you think people are
going to move to a non-QWERTY keyboard simply because they will type faster, you
need to learn more about people.
A great small, simple innovation to a strong working system can conquer the world,
and has many times. Phillip of Macedonia changed the length
of the spear in the Greek phalanx. The phalanx was a successful formation used by the Greeks for hundreds of years. However, Phillip was able to
conquer all of Greece by making the simple change of lengthening the spear.
Phillip's son, Alexander, coupled this more aggressive form of infantry with the
use of the horse cavalry to conquer the known world. We know him, of course, as
Alexander the Great. These relatively small changes are what take an existing
standard method and push it over the tipping point into something great.
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