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What Niels Bohr Taught Us About Creativity and Leadership

One of the most potent techniques in creative problem solving, and perhaps also the most difficult, is holding two contradictory points of view at the same time. Albert Rothenberg, who extensively studied Nobel Laureates and other eminent people, found that the ability of “actively conceiving multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously” underlies many creative accomplishments. He coined the term “Janusian” thinking after the Roman god, Janus, who has two faces that look in opposite directions. 

A salient example of Janusian thinking, one that laid the foundation of quantum mechanics, is wave-particle duality. The nature of light had been a topic of vigorous debate because different experiments revealed contradictory aspects. Diffraction indicated a wave like nature while photoelectric effect pointed to its particle characteristic. It took Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and winner of the 1922 Nobel prize in physics, to resolve this apparent contradiction. More than four decades before Rothenberg came up with Janusian thinking, Niels Bohr had arrived at the concept of complementarity during a ski vacation in Norway. The key idea behind complementarity is that objects have certain complementary properties that cannot be observed or measured simultaneously, with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle being the most well known example. So depending on the measurement apparatus, you could either get a wave like behavior or a particle like behavior. Yet, both those behaviors are equally valid and together they provide a fuller picture of reality. 

The true nature of light, according to Bohr, is impossible to visualize because mathematically speaking, it requires more dimensions to represent than the three dimensions of the cartesian world. Even Einstein, who predominantly relied on visualization for his creative breakthroughs, found the juxtaposition of these two conflicting ideas too jarring. Along with Podolsky and Rosen, he offered a rebuttal to the quantum mechanical description but unfortunately it couldn’t stand up to Bohr’s complementarity argument. 

A vital aspect of Janusian thinking, that Bohr brought to light, is the idea of additional dimensions. Imagine you and a friend are looking at a can of soup on a table. Your friend sees the top of the can and insists that the object is circular, while you see the side and believe it’s rectangular. As is obvious, without including the third dimension both of you cannot recognize the object as a cylinder. Finding the hidden dimension or underlying aspect is key to resolving Janusian contradictions. 

One reason why most people find Janusian thinking hard, is that holding two conflicting concepts simultaneously leads to cognitive dissonance. Our brains naturally rush to alleviate the feeling of discomfort that cognitive dissonance brings by resolving the contradiction as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it often takes the easy way out by “picking a winner” based on an easily available argument instead of trying to view the conflicting ideas as truly complementary and finding hidden factors to resolve contradictions. 

You don’t need to be a nuclear physicist to find Janusian thinking useful. Niels Bohr, who also had strong philosophical leanings, found complementarity to be a foundational aspect of life. Much like yin and yang, he saw complementarity in thoughts and feelings, instinct and reason, and different cultures. Thinking about a feeling makes the feeling disappear, and while thoughts and feelings may not be observable at the same time, they represent valuable facets of human behavior. 

Bohr’s way of thinking is just as valuable in today’s world as it was back then. Here are three ways Janusian thinking can help businesses:

  • Creative Problem Solving: The most obvious area that benefits from Janusian thinking is in creative problem solving. Engineering problems often involve tradeoffs between different factors – improving one lowers another. Janussian thinking can cut through the Gordian knot by solving the problem on a different plane. Creativity expert Michael Mikhalko shares an example from foundries that use sandblasting to clean parts. To clean thoroughly, particles need to be “hard” but hard particles also get stuck and are difficult to remove. So the paradox is that you need something that can be both hard and soft. One clever solution is to use particles of dry ice that are hard enough to clean and then evaporate. In this case, by adding a new dimension of temperature, which transforms the material, the problem gets solved at a completely different level.  
  • Conflict Resolution: Applying Janusian thinking in resolving conflicts aligns naturally with transformational leadership. Leaders routinely face conflicting information – one team believes a particular feature will be a hit with users while the other team feels the exact opposite. Instead of jumping in to make a quick decision, adopting a mindset that both teams have a valid rationale naturally leads you to ask more questions and dig deeper to find underlying factors at play. Once those factors are surfaced, the conversation shifts into a more productive state – the group arrives at a more complete mental model and actively engages in discovering new pathways to make progress.  
  • Building Effective Teams: Bohr believed that different cultures represent a  “harmonious balance of traditional conventions” that reflect the richness of human life. This lesson has even more relevance today when companies have to appeal to global audiences. A travel booking site found that German users were less likely to book compared to Danish people. On investigating further they realized that cultural differences were at play. Germans have a high threshold for uncertainty avoidance compared to their Danish peers, so showing them more details about the trip improved booking rate. Having a more diverse team ensures that decisions in product design are more creative and effective. Leaders who recognize the complementary nature of cultures choose more diverse teams not because there is a mandate to do so, but because it leads to superior results.

Holding two contradictory thoughts in your head is a challenging cognitive process, but it can yield groundbreaking ideas. There are plenty of situations ranging from product design to resolving disagreements where such thinking can lead to new insights. The next time you face a seemingly intractable conflict, apply Janusian thinking to discover a deep insight because as Bohr quipped, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” 

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3 Ways Leaders Can Enable Disruptive Innovation

The story of how the sticky note became a huge market success is a story of ingenuity and persistence. It’s also a story that exemplifies why disruptive ideas are so hard to manage inside a company.

In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was working on making a super-strong adhesive but accidentally ended up creating a weak adhesive that could be peeled off easily and was reusable. Intrigued by the new material, Silver tried to get support within the company to find ways to commercialize it. Over the next five years, he gave seminars to different groups and talked to many leaders in the hope that it would spark new ideas. The most promising idea a product group came up with was a reusable bulletin board that people could stick paper to but that idea was abandoned because bulletin board sales are not large enough to make this a profitable business. Without any good commercially viable use case, Silver couldn’t garner any support for his new adhesive. That changed in 1974 when Art Fry, another colleague at 3M who had attended one of Silver’s seminars, came up with an idea to use the adhesive on pieces of paper to act as bookmarks for his hymn book. Fry then tested the idea within the company some more. He sent a report to his manager with a sticky note on top, who then responded back on the same note. Soon other employees started using it and 3M decided to take the idea more seriously. They did a limited launch of the sticky note in four cities but it failed to generate much sales. Fortunately, they realized that the launch failed because the concept was new and customers were not able to gauge how useful the sticky notes would be. So, they did one final test in Boise, Idaho, where they handed out free sticky notes to businesses and waited to see the response. Over 90% of businesses ordered the sticky notes when they ran out giving 3M a very clear signal of success!

Despite the skepticism they received, Silver and Fry’s persistence paid off eventually and led to a category defining product for 3M. But their story illustrates why it’s so hard for companies to identify and grow disruptive ideas. 

Companies are optimized for incremental innovation

Most companies have a dominant thinking style that favors short-term incremental innovation. Consider how new features get incorporated into a product. In most places, there is a well established protocol starting with user studies to identify how the product might be made more efficient or intuitive. However, this approach can only result in incremental innovation. Imagine you were a leader at 3M faced with evaluating Silver’s discovery. You would most likely ask the same (logical) questions like what pain point or unmet need of the customer gets addressed by the new idea. And you would end up rejecting the idea in the first meeting. Unfortunately, they are the wrong kind of questions to ask for disruptive innovation when you are creating a new product category. 

In the case of 3M, even the marketing team fell victim to established thinking and only after recognizing that people can only evaluate a product once they are familiar with it, did they hit success. 

The issue here isn’t that managers are not capable of identifying good ideas or that they let their egos get the better of them, but instead, as researchers found, “…managers face two distinct hurdles: They are not empowered to act on input from below, and they feel compelled to adopt a short-term outlook to work.”

Handling Disruptive Ideas

To manage disruptive ideas, companies need to create a different channel where radical ideas can survive, and the most recommended approach is to create a different team to incubate such ideas. However, this approach still requires managers and employees to understand radical ideas so they can be fed into the new channel. Without this step, the incubating team starves for good ideas coming from product teams that can potentially be successful. 

Boost ideas before evaluating them

Transformational ideas don’t always sound convincing or practical in the beginning. One mistake leaders tend to make is to focus on evaluating the idea when they first hear it. This works well in the case of incremental innovation where the value proposition is easy to understand – whether it is improving performance or making the design more intuitive. As a result they end up blocking ideas too early. For transformational ideas, it helps instead to first understand the full potential of an idea before starting to evaluate it. This requires looking at an idea from multiple angles, finding new use cases or connecting with other products that the person proposing the idea may not have thought through. 

Leaders need to create an exploratory phase where ideas can be built up in different ways to see their full long-term potential. Most radical ideas tend to get blocked early on but by adding a boosting phase, companies can significantly increase the number of potentially disruptive ideas they see.  

Idea evaluation shouldn’t be the manager’s job

Managers are often the first hurdle that an innovative idea has to cross. If a manager gets convinced that an idea has merit, then they can champion the idea further up the chain. This works quite well for incremental innovation, where a manager’s experience can play a meaningful role in evaluating and shaping the idea more. However, for radical ideas, the same strength becomes a weakness. Like in the case of the sticky note, where a colleague from another part of the company was able to identify the potential of the adhesive, evaluating ideas should be a broader effort. When it comes to creativity, no one person is going to consistently pick winners but by including more people in the mix, companies can start tapping group intelligence towards innovation. 

Leaders should recognize when an employee is bringing a radical idea, and push it through a boosting stage. In the simplest form, managers can bring the team together to brainstorm on the idea with the intent of finding the most promising incarnation. 

Remove individualistic biases 

Most companies disproportionately reward the person who “first came up with the idea”. The reality is that most ideas in the initial formulation are weak and it often requires significant contributions from many others before an idea can fly. When incentives are misaligned, employees might choose to propose their own idea instead of helping other ideas become successful.  As a result, instead of one or two killer ideas, companies are left with multiple mediocre ones. 

To combat individualistic tendencies, leaders should set expectations with the team that ideas become groundbreaking through many people’s contributions and routinely reward people who help others’ ideas become more successful. 

As AI becomes more prevalent in society, businesses will need to innovate at a faster rate than ever before to stay competitive. Companies that figure out the formula to churn out disruptive ideas will have a big edge over others. This requires companies to understand ways in which disruptive innovation differs from incremental innovation and reengineer incentives and processes to support transformative ideas from employees.

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Creativity Hack: One-Hop Associations

Finding ways to connect two unrelated concepts liest at the root of many innovations. Combining unrelated objects or concepts is one hack to finding novel ideas. However, combining completely random ideas has one drawback – it often leads to incongruous ideas that don’t always resonate with people. The One-hop association method is a way to connect unrelated (but not completely random) concepts and leads to ideas that are perceived as surprising in a good way.  

About The Hack

For this hack, you start by building an association map of an object. Suppose your task is to make a new and interesting ruler. You first start with the ruler in the center and choose a few ways that a ruler might be connected to other objects. Attributes like “used with”, “material” and “similar to” tend to be easier to work with for younger children. Then, you list different values for each of those attributes like a ruler is used with paper and pen. This gives the first order of concepts that are directly associated with the ruler. Next you extend the association map by one more level and list second order concepts that are associated with the first order ones. Finally, you try to connect back the second order concepts with the original object and see if that leads you to any interesting ideas. 

As an example, a ruler is used with paper which is used with scissors. Trying to connect a ruler with scissors might give you an idea to make a ruler with a sharpened edge that can also help cut paper. The reason this hack works well is due to the incongruity theory. When people notice an incongruity, they can either find it amusing or be disappointed. When people can tie the incongruity back to the product, the product feels more fun, interesting or amusing, but when people can’t find an underlying connection, the idea appears confusing. 

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it in product design or with students.

DescriptionTo find a creative idea for product improvement, try to build an association map and combine concepts that are one hop away. 
ExampleIn designing a new kind of ruler, start by listing concepts that are connected with a ruler using attributes like “material”, “used with” or “similar to”. Then repeat this exercise one more time to find the next level of concepts. Finally try to combine second order concepts with a ruler to   
Tips Instead of combining objects directly, use attributes of the second order object to combine which can lead to novel ideas  
ExtensionsTo extend the association map, use more types of attributes like “similar to”, “environment”, “sounds” and more. The more extensive the map, the more opportunities to find new ideas. 
Creativity Hack: One-Hop Associations

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Creativity Hack: Combining Unrelated Ideas

One of the most potent ways to find creative ideas is to take two completely unrelated concepts and try to combine them. This ability to associate unrelated ideas is a natural process for our brains but we often underuse this capability in finding novel ideas.  

About The Hack

Associative thinking, the ability to combine unrelated ideas, underlies a lot of innovation we see in the real world. Google search, one of the most well known inventions, is the product of associative thinking. When Sergei Brin and Larry Page were students working on improving search, they hit upon an interesting insight. The problem that they were trying to solve is to point users to high quality web pages that contain information users would find useful But how do you determine which websites are good and which ones are not? Their “aha” moment came when they realized that academic journals have a mechanism to identify high quality papers — the number of times a paper is cited by others. Applying the same concept to web pages, they realized that the more a web page is linked to by others the more authoritative it must be. They used that idea to create their first algorithm to rank web pages and Google was born! 

To use associative thinking in product design, find random objects or concepts and try to connect it to your central problem. For example, suppose you are tasked with making a new kind of mug. You then think of different objects or attributes, not typically associated with a mug, and see if there are ways to combine it. Suppose you picked a ball to combine with a mug. The simplest way to combine would be a ball-shaped mug. But, you could go further and use an attribute of the ball in a more meaningful way. Let’s say you pick “inflatable” as an aspect to incorporate. That leads you to creating an inflatable mug that is easy to pack on trips and provides good thermal insulation thanks to the layer of air in between. 

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it in product design or with students.

DescriptionTo find a creative idea for product improvement, try to combine a random object or attribute with the product. 
ExampleIn designing a new kind of mug, you combine it with a ball. One attribute of the ball is “inflatable” which leads to the idea of an inflatable mug. The mug is useful because it packs more easily for hiking trips and also provides better thermal insulation due to the layer of air in between.  
Tips Instead of combining objects directly, use an attribute of the random object to combine. That often leads to more interesting and novel ideas  
ExtensionsTo build associative thinking in students, ask them to incorporate other famous characters (fictional or otherwise) into their stories, or do a project that combines their hobbies with a subject they are learning (e.g. music and math)
Creativity Hack: Combining Unrelated Ideas
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Creativity Hack: Designing Through Metaphors

Metaphors by themselves are creative acts — they bring together two unrelated concepts and provide a fresh way of looking at something familiar. Consider the overused and cliched metaphor about creativity, “thinking outside the box”, which implies stepping back and approaching the problem from a different direction. The origin of the metaphor is believed to come from the nine-dots puzzle, where you have to connect a 3×3 grid of dots using four lines or less without lifting the pen. The only way to solve the puzzle, that most people miss, is to connect the lines outside of the imaginary “box” created by the dots. Once you understand the principle behind the puzzle, the meaning of “thinking outside the box” becomes much more clear. 

About The Hack 

Metaphorical thinking can be extended to help trigger creative ideas in product design. The type of ideas that this process generates might come across as more surprising and fun, compared to the typical incremental innovation ideas, and therefore this hack makes for a useful addition to the initial ideation phase. 

As a real world example, suppose you are trying to come up with new feature ideas for your document collaboration tool (e.g. Google Docs). To trigger creative ideas your goal is to try and combine “collaboration” with different natural or artificially created phenomena. Let’s say you pick your phenomenon to be “shadows.” You then explore characteristics of the phenomena that might apply to collaboration. One aspect of shadows is that they hide or make something less visible than the parts that are well lit. Applying this to your product, an idea could be to use AI to selectively add shadows to parts of the document that are more solidly fleshed out. This simple mechanism can nudge collaborators or reviewers to focus on parts of the document that need more work or clarity, thereby improving overall group productivity. 

You can iterate through the process to generate more ideas. For example, another phenomenon could be “name carved on a tree”. What does this phenomenon imply? Why do people carve their names (e.g. “Josh was here”) on trees? It could be that people want to memorialize their presence or perhaps a way to mark their achievement after a long hike. Applying that to our example of collaboration, one idea could be to use AI to determine the order of authorship on a document based on how much different collaborators have contributed to the document. Many times the order of authors is predetermined before the work is actually done and doesn’t get updated based on actual outcome. This feature could make the process more fair for everyone.  

The idea behind this hack is to explore different metaphors because not all of them will yield immediate insights. However, once you get an opening it might help trigger more ideas in that direction.  

Summary

Finally, here is a quick summary of the creativity hack and how to use it.

DescriptionApply metaphorical thinking to come up with new product design ideas. Come up with a few natural or artificial phenomena (like shadows, fresh tracks on snow etc.), identify characteristics of the phenomena and apply that to the product under consideration.
ExampleApplying “shadows” to a document collaboration tool could suggest an idea where parts of the document are shadowed to indicate that those sections are complete and nudge collaborators to focus on other sections. 
Tips Not all phenomena will lead to fresh insights, so if no ideas get triggered in a few minutes then pick a different one.  
ExtensionsOnce you get a new direction through metaphors, you can reframe the problem and come up with more ideas. Using the previous example, you could reframe the problem as “how can we guide collaborators to the section that will improve efficiency?” Reframing then leads to a different set of ideas, for example guiding someone to a particular section because someone else is already working on another. 
Creativity Hack: Designing Through Metaphors