A Familiar Problem

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In a short presentation or pitch, you certainly cannot bring your colleagues or management up to your level of experience or understanding. But you certainly can use things like well-chosen stories, examples, or prototypes to give them enough of a taste to at least be willing to come back to the table for more. Ideas are like any other product. Regardless of how good they are, without an effective pitch, they will most likely fail. If we really want them to get traction, we can't afford to focus our creativity on only the ideas themselves, and ignore their explanation.

Now let's consider the second scenario. In all likelihood, you knew your competitor. You went to the same type of school, had similar grades, and read the same journals. You probably work just as hard, go to the same conferences, have access to the same data, and know similar people. Yet, the competitor saw something that you didn't. Why? Let's rule out luck (there is little you can do about that). It had to be that they were doing something different than you. They were not having the same meetings or using the same techniques.

What the GGR law suggests is that your competitor found a way to accelerate their familiarity with relevant materials in a way that you did not. Working at a far more refined level of granularity, they were first to see the subtleties that made the difference between being the innovator and being the observer.

Vision Quest

Viewed this way, the good news is you have proof that there is a way to achieve such acceleration. There is no magic. It is attainable. Your challenge, then, is to invest as much creativity into redefining your process as you have in your sought-after innovations.

It takes time to gain experience and familiarity that lead to the fineness of granularity wherein the sweet spots lie. And, no, we haven't found a solution to time travel. But the history of technology is full of discoveries of how to move faster, finer, smoother. That is the heart of your quest—to find ways to accelerate the rate and quality of gaining experience that get you to the fine level. What all of this says is that to be successful, we need to innovate around the whole package, not just one part.

In his classic book, Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust observes: "The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to have other eyes." Therein lies the key.

Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.