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The Curse of Knowledge Bogs Down Innovation
Secret of Raising Smart Kids writes ""I have a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too," says David Heath, co-author of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." The "curse of knowledge," is the paradox that as our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off because the walls of the box we think inside of thicken along with our experience. An article in the NY Times proposes a solution to the curse: bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track. When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, "it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems." Another solution is to force yourself to become a beginner again like making yourself shoot basketball left-handed."
I thought it was fairly standard when doing usability trials to include a wide range of users, with a wide range of abilities. What's good for the n00b might not be right for a poweruser.
As to self handicapping, we were encouraged do that at judo practice when we were kids - when practicing against a smaller or less experienced opponent, you don't use your best techniques. This cuts both ways, he gets a fair go and you improve your weak areas.
Finally, the reason it has 52 buttons is probably because a competitor's had 51.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The point in the NYT article was much more profound that just user interfaces. I spent my entire career in engineering software battling the tendency of engineers to build ever thicker walls around their thinking boxes as their careers advanced.
Most difficult were engineers who learned clever tricks to conserving memory in their programming. As Moore's progressed, those skills devalued, then became worthless, and finally became negative in value. I had one engineer at late as 1987 who would spend two days effort to save three bytes of memory in his program. Engineers are trained to build on experience, and they expect their experiences to add to their value synergistically as the years pass. The idea that past experience could have negative value was a threat to their personal credos and their career strategy.
It got so bad in my company that I once advocated hiring programmers at age 13, taking them out of school and exploiting them until age 23. At 23 we would force them to retire and finance them to finish high school and college, then move on to some other career. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with that policy.
What should we expect? The whole profession of engineering is based on the concept of incrementally adding to and improving on past experience, from the Romans up to today. Every time a bridge collapses or some other engineering disaster occurs, the public demands that we learn lessons and never ever commit that error again. After 2,000 years of that, how much innovation can you expect?
Contrast that with what is happening at Google. According to reports, Google employees dink around with their own ideas. Sometimes they show up for work on Monday with a bit of prototype code, then they circulate it around the company looking for reactions. The winners survive and the losers disappear without any bridges collapsing or innocent people being killed. That's what so great about software -- it is so easy to prototype. To fully exploit it, you need people who don't know what they can't do.
There was a great book called Computer Wars made the same point about innovation and corporations rather than individuals. The book's point was that if and when the time comes to change the base business model and technology upon which the company was founded, that the founders feel threatened and the company fails. The battle fields re littered with the corpses of countless companies that fell victim to that trap. Now think of Google again. If and when the day comes that the Internet is no longer the big thing, will Google be flexible enough to reinvent itself or will it just die?
How about yourself? if someday the sun came up and the Internet was no longer important, could you reinvent yourself? Can you even imagine that possibility? Probably not -- your thinking box won't allow for such possibilities.