Some of you may remember a series of TV commercials aired decades ago, where two people, one eating out of a jar of peanut butter, one eating a chocolate bar, somehow collide into each other, or in some other way get the peanut butter and chocolate mixed up. Each person ends up with their snack tainted by the other’s. The dialog would go something like, “Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter,” and “Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate.” They would then simultaneously taste the result, and follow with exultations of joy and wide-eyed discovery. This was a marketer’s make-believe story about how the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup may have come into existence – in attempt at coaxing us into buying the product – through the accidental juxtaposition of two foods that were up until one mythological moment categorically exclusive.
Trite and silly as it may seem, I’ve chosen it as a way of illustrating my point, in part because it gives us a goofy game that we can play that will actually produce real world results, and not least because Reese’s is my wife’s favorite candy.
At some point during the 1980s someone said something like “you got your desk top on my computer screen,” which gave birth to what is commonly known as the computer’s graphical desktop, a fusion of an actual desk top, where people would have various tools, such as typewriters, staplers, tape dispensers, scissors, and a text-based computer screen, which was up until then just a dark place with streams of esoteric codes. While there had been personal computers previous to that, it was the more user-friendly desktop design of Apple’s Mac and Microsoft’s Windows, that revolutionized personal computing and made it universally usable.
There are examples from the history of popular music: somewhere in the past, folk singer Bob Dylan shocked and disturbed his fan base by touring with electric instruments, creating what would be known as folk rock, and later alternative music, while soon afterward, African American kids in the Bronx started uttering streams of words in a half sung, half shouted, chant over clips of previously recorded music, creating what would eventually be called Rap or Hip Hop music. In the case of Dylan, he joined two musical styles that were until then held apart by a what posed as almost a strong ethical code. For the kids who gave birth Hip Hop, it was kind of a hybrid of speech-making and R&B.
These are examples of what entrepreneurial guru James Altucher calls “idea sex,” and what cognitive grammarians Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner call Blending, or Conceptual Integration. You can follow along with James Altucher’s discussions on website, which I wholly recommend, especially for people thinking about starting their own businesses.
In all cases above, we’re talking about the blending of, or integration, of ideas. In Fauconnier’s and Turner’s book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (from which I borrowed the above desktop illustration) we are given a multitude of examples, and some very specific structures we can use to generate new ideas, and analyze how a particular idea arose from the marriage of two or more others. We will leave these details for a later discussion. For now, we will begin with a really simple set of rules. The seed ideas from which the blend comes about need to have:
- Something between them that is different
- Something between them that is common
An example from your every day life may be systems integration, or the data mapping of interfaces between two systems. There needs to be something in common between the output system and input system or else there would be little justification for sending data back and forth between them, while at the same time, they are intrinsically different applications, with different purposes and functions. They also likely have a mismatch of data elements between them, places where you need to build in rules that say that these two or three variables from system A mean that these other variables from system B need to be set in a specific way, although there is no direct one-to-one translation. This is how stock price movements become those crooked lines you see on CNBC, and how the number of gallons of milk you may be getting from your cows, if you happen to be a dairy farmer, may be tabulated against expected weather conditions, supplies, and a number of other variables into what is called the “Futures Market.”
Use this as a mind hack to get through blocks whenever you need to. Start with the most unlikely pairs. You can take a guitar and an umbrella, and imagine something like a new type of satellite dish. Or an air conditioner and entertainment system, to create a new sort of home environment system that lets you tune precise degrees of temperature, humidity, lighting and sound to simulate the weather at a place you have vacationed, to enhance your every mood, or to motivate your employees, if you are a business owner. Eventually you can work your way back to the issue at hand, perhaps by blending two things you hadn’t thought of, perhaps a some aspects of the Whole System we had been discussing in a previous post. Very often the point where real valuable innovation takes place is between the way a system current operates, and the needs, desires and behaviors of someone who may some day use it.