You Can Overcome Fixations and Achieve Insight

An interesting strategy for innovation.

Published on April 13, 2012 by Art Markman, Ph.D. in Ulterior Motives
There are many different roads to innovation. James Dyson developed his vacuum
cleaner by noticing an analogy between vacuum cleaners and sawmills. George DeM
estral created Velcro after looking at cockleburs sticking to the fur of his dog
.
One strand of insight comes from breaking functional fixedness. The idea behind
functional fixedness is best illustrated with the television show MacGyver. In
this show, the main character would routinely get into a jam. To get himself ou
t of it, he would fashion a device using all sorts of objects around him. The f
ascinating thing, though, was that he would use these objects in novel ways. Pa
per clips became wires; a toolbox was emptied and used to float something on a
lake; a clock was taken apart to use some of its gears.
Related Articles
More Reasons To Be Thankful We're Living NOW and Not in the Good Old Days
The Attack of the Inanimate Objects
Forget Terminator and Skynet: The machines are already in control
Mystery Tramp: the deal
Dogs, Depression and Real Life
Find a Therapist
Search for a mental health professional near you.
Find Local:
Acupuncturists
Chiropractors
Massage Therapists
Dentists
and more!
Broadly, we tend to think of objects having particular functions. Paper clips a
re for holding together papers. Toolboxes are for holding tools. We don t think
about all of the parts of those objects and the materials they are made from, an
d so we don t recognize that we might be able to use those same objects for many d
ifferent functions. The fun of MacGyver was watching him rig up a device by usi
ng objects in new ways.
For MacGyver, of course, it was all in the script. What can the rest of us do?
An interesting paper by Tony McCaffrey in the April, 2012 issue of Psychologica
l Science suggests that everyone can get better at breaking out of functional fi
xedness.
The key to breaking out of habitual ways of looking at objects is to list all of
the features of the objects and then to describe them by looking at what they a
re made of rather than by thinking about their function. In the paper, McCaffre
y gives the example of trying to combine together two metal rings using a candle
and a block of metal. People have a lot of difficulty with this problem. Howe
ver, if you start to list the parts of the objects, you recognize that a candle
is made of wax and a wick. That wick is made of string. If you scrape the wax
off the candle, you can use the string to tie together the rings.
In a study exploring this method, McCaffrey compared one group that was taught t
o list out all of the properties of the objects with another group that did not
get this instruction. Then, the groups were given a series of six insight proble
ms to solve that all required overcoming functional fixedness The control group
solved about half the problems, while the group listing features solved over 80
% of the problems.
This strategy is a nice one to use when you get stuck solving a problem. Wheneve

r you get stuck, it is possible that the knowledge and tools you need to solve a
problem are easily available. The key to effective problem solving is to descri
be a problem in a way that allows you to use your knowledge to solve it. Listin
g the parts of objects around you in a function-free way is a nice method for he
lping you to redescribe a problem in ways that might allow you to find an innova
tive solution.