A New Mantra for Creativity

Executives should apply the "Order of Magnitude" rule to any problem that demands a creative solution

by Bill Buxton

In 1992, having recognized that display technologies were going to evolve -- fast -- Bill Buxton and a team at the University of Toronto built the Active Desk, a precursor to today's touch screens

Visual display size shown according to Order of Magnitude physical size changes, growth and investment

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Let's start with a basic question: What differentiates the professional designer or innovator from the person who has one great idea (no matter how profitable)? For me, the difference is the same as that between the musician with a string of successful recordings, and a one-hit wonder. Yes, the latter demonstrates an act of creativity combined with execution. But the former is like the Duracell bunny—the creativity keeps going and going and going.

There is something to be learned from the ability of such serial offenders to exercise repeatedly their creative skills on demand without waiting for divine inspiration. Despite a problem that is perhaps not that interesting, they can nevertheless manufacture all the inspiration needed to complete the task at hand every time. That is their job. That is what "professional" means to them.

So how do they do it? Let me say straight off, I would be a fool—and lose all credibility—if I suggested I knew, or that there was a simple single answer. On the other hand, I'm eager to share one technique I have resorted to on many occasions when I was up against the wall with "idea block." It is something that I call the "Order of Magnitude" rule, which reads as follows:

If something changes by an order of magnitude along any meaningful dimension, it is no longer the same thing.

I like the name because its acronym, OOM, conjures up the prototypical Buddhist mantra, om. Let's meditate on it a bit by going back to 1801 and the classroom of Franklin Pierce Nitt, the inventor of the blackboard.

Misses the Point

To understand why this is relevant, first ask yourself what preceded the blackboard. Eventually, you will realize, "The slate." True enough. And equally true, the blackboard is just a big slate mounted on the wall. In the parlance of today, both use the same chip technology (calcium carbonate), have the same operating system and interface, and you can reuse the user manual! Technologically, there is no innovation here other than the manufacture of a big slate, and the challenge of mounting it on the wall.

But, while that is all true, it also misses the point—that despite the lack of technological innovation, there is a plausible argument that the innovation of the blackboard has had more impact on classroom education than any innovation since, including cheap paper (which came in about the 1860s), the PC, and the Internet. The blackboard fundamentally changed the social and physical organization of classroom education, by better supporting teaching and demonstrating to the group, rather than the individual, and by enabling timely support material to be displayed in the visible periphery, while the students worked on their personal slates. And as something that supported a new type of "social network" in the class, it did so because of one or two OOM changes—in this case, the dimensions of size and distance.

Now I am guessing that when I stated the OOM rule, you mentally enumerated a number of dimensions along which something could change. You came up with things like "faster," "smaller," "cheaper," "more of them," "easier to use," etc. I also guess that "change in distance" was not one of them.

Sweet Spots

Therein lies another valuable lesson: One of the areas where you can leverage the OOM rule is through the creativity and insights that you bring to recognizing or determining nonobvious (but important) dimensions along which something known might change—and how it might thereby be transformed.

And notice there is a multiple here. For sure, the rule applies even if there is an OOM change along only one dimension. But as our blackboard illustrates, some of the sweet spots emerge when one considers changes in two or more dimensions.