Five For Your Hive: Leap of Imagination

The Power Broker, Adobe Illustrator, Train Station Names, Airbnb, Truths of Nature

Leap of Imagination

In his seven years of research of the great American urban planner Robert Moses, Robert Caro learned something bigger than political power: A peculiar type of vision and imagination that was so unique and unparalleled that it amounted to a rare kind of genius. “When he began talking to me about his plans for future accomplishments,” Caro writes, “[he was standing] in front of the map, pointing at the relevant places [like] an artist in front of his canvas, using [a] pencil to make big, sweeping gestures”. And while Caro’s eyeballs trailed the route markings, Moses would explain, with meticulous clarity, the renderings of his mind. “You see?”, circling out a section of a grid map pinned against the white wall, “if we put the road there, there’d be room for parks there, and there,” swirling another circle before looking over his shoulder at Caro, “see that?”, and “over there,” circling another section, “we’ll have room for the baseball diamonds…the housing….” Moses saw the whole canvas—city, suburbs, slums, beaches, bridges, tunnels, airports, Central Park—as one single whole. He “molded the city to his vision”, Caro writes, “allowing him to put his mark upon so deeply that today, fifty-years after he left power…we are still…living in the city he shaped.” Any road in New York that had the word “expressway” on it was a road built by Robert Moses—a man who possessed a rare kind of genius, where he, from time to time, sprang forth a “leap of imagination” that could look at a “barren, empty landscape and conceive on it” a series of highways and buildings and parks that shaped the city we know today.

Shoot Where The Duck is Going To Be

Charles Geschke, co-founder of Adobe Systems, learned a lot through the years of building and shipping products. One particular experience stuck out for him. “[A] lesson that we had to learn,” he says, “is that you can’t be a one-product company.” Doing so would become a risky affair “that eventually,” he says, “a combination of changes in the technological landscape…will cause you to begin losing market share.” To create more than one product—to create a series of products that users will want to use—will require innovators to know what they want. In the 80s, Apple developed the LaserWriter, a printer that could “combine graphics and images and text in innovative ways”, but not quite in the way graphic designers would envision their work to be. “Designers knew they wanted to be more creative,” Geschke says, “but had no tools to enable their creative expression”, and to get it out perfectly on the LaserWriter, there was a need for an application that could use “lines and bezier curves to render infinitely scalable graphics”. So out came Illustrator in 1987. Then, Geschke realised, as with design, they had no application that could “deal with photographs.” Three years later, Photoshop was born. “If you want to shoot a duck,” he says, “you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not where the duck is.” And if you’re fixated on where the market is today and misunderstand your customers—if you’re not using your imagination to leap to where the duck is going to be—by the time you introduce your product to the world, you would already have lost your market share.

Others Turned a Blind Eye

Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works, like how Silicon Valley startups harnessed the concept of “spare capacity”—in the form of real estate and private transportation—available everywhere. Airbnb recognised untapped supply (privately-owned homes) and unaddressed demand (travellers looking for cheap accommodation) as a business model to serve an existing market. And likewise for Lyft and Uber: “connecting people who want to go places with people willing to drive them there.” Again, untapped supply (private cars) and unaddressed demand (quick-and-easy transport service). These founders saw something where others turned a blind eye. “If insights that look so elementary in retrospect can support important and valuable [multi-billion dollar] businesses”, Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One, “there must remain many great companies still to start.” But, Thiel says, “we will never learn any of these secrets unless we demand to know them,” to be relentless searchers, to make a leap of imagination and force ourselves to look at places no one else is looking.

Train Station Names

Susan Kare was hired to design fonts for the Macintosh. When it came to naming them, she took after the stops on Philadelphia’s Main Line commuter train where she grew up: Overbrook, Menon, Ardmore and Rosemont. She thought it was a novel way of identification with a tinge of familiarity and connection. Jobs found the process rather fascinating, but the more he thought about it, the more unsettled he became. He stopped by Kare’s office and began brooding over how foreign the names were to him, which also meant that Macintosh users will find it disconnecting. “They’re little cities nobody’s ever heard of,” he complained, “they ought to be world-class cities!” This reminded me of the “Einstellung effect”—a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available, in this case, naming fonts with familiar subway stations. One way to avoid the Einstellung effect, David Epstein writes in Range, is to “[classify] problems with distant analogies”, and to connect with it’s users, the fonts on the Macintosh were renamed to New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco, Toronto and Venice.

Truths of Nature

Sir Ken Robinson once asked a professor of mathematics how PhDs in pure math were assessed. “Normally,” the professor says, “they’re right.” Normally? What do you mean, like…“how do you assess one?”, Robinson asked. “A key factor”, the professor replied, is “originality.” Why is that an important consideration? “Mathematicians believe strongly that”, the professor explained, “mathematics is one of the purest way we have of understanding the truths of nature” and since nature is innately beautiful, “there is an equally strong assumption that the more elegant the proof, the more likely it is to correspond to the beauty of nature and to be true.” Those who can see what others can’t—those who can imagine a unique future and leap forward—are the rare kind of geniuses who can break new ground and tell us something we didn’t know before.