E19: What Innovators Can Learn from Magicians

What if innovators could learn a lot from magic? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week, we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com with that. Let's get started with today's episode. Today, we're going to cover two different topics. The first one is a love of mine, a passion of mine. It is magic. Now, I'm a terrible magician, but I love magic for a variety of reasons, and I think that there's a lot that innovators can learn from the world of magic. Also, we're going to talk about one of the lenses from Invisible Solutions and how that one lens could become one of your greatest tools for solving some of your most complex problems. So, growing up, I was a terrible athlete. Terrible could swim. But I wasn't really good at any kind of team sports. And I remember that somebody once told me a joke that I thought was pretty funny. They said, anytime that you have a sporting event, the player that is the worst as a consolation prize gets a magic kit. Well, I loved magic because I thought magic was really cool. What I love about magic is, yes, it's entertaining, but for me, magic is actually a very intellectual endeavor. I love the fact that the way magic works really just. It tells us a lot about the brain, the way we think. And it also is a great tool for innovators because, well, let's face it, we're trying to do similar types of things. Magicians make the impossible possible. That's what they do. You cut someone in half, they don't die. Well, as innovators, it sometimes feels like that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make the impossible possible. And for me, maybe it's just the nerd in me, but one of the things that I always love about magic is that I'm trying to figure out how the illusion is done. Now, for some people, they want to watch it and they want to be mystified. For me, I actually love the process, and the actual solution doesn't matter that much to me. It's really that process of thinking about the effect. And there used to be a show that many of you may know called Breaking the Magician's Code. Breaking the Magician's Code. Each week, this masked magician would reveal how some of the most popular magic tricks were done. And the show, I think it's on Netflix right now. I remember watching a few episodes recently on Netflix. And what he will do is he will perform the trick. He would perform the illusion as the audience would see it, and then he would do the trick again, showing how it was done. So what I would do is when I would watch the show, and I think this was back in the day of VCR when I used to first watch it, I'd watch the show and I'd pause the tape after he first performed it. And then I would try to figure out all the different ways that he could have done it. And I would come up with a number of different theories, and in many cases, I could come up with a partial solution, sometimes a full solution. But I loved that whole thought process of really trying to stretch myself and not just find the one way, but find multiple ways it could be done. And only after I had at least one solution would I turn the VCR back on and watch how it was done. By the way, those of you who don't know what a VCR is, it is a video cassette review recorder. Imagine a DVD with read and write capability, sort of like a dvr. So after I figured out how the illusion was done, I would turn the VCR back on and the masked magician would basically reveal the solution. And the solution was revealed, typically from a different camera angle. And that was really the key is if you change your perspective, if you change the camera angle, look at the effect from behind, or from the side or from the top, then the solution becomes obvious. So I had this love affair with magic. And I really think that there's just a lot for us to learn as innovators from magic. And I'm just going to share with you three things that I found in thinking about magic that I think is relevant to the world of innovation. The first thing is that we can't trust our brain. The brain can't be trusted. Now, the reason why magic is often so impressive is because the brain doesn't always process everything it sees accurately. It makes shortcuts, it makes assumptions, and it often fills in the gaps from what's actually happening. And unfortunately, in the process of filling in those gaps, it does it incorrectly. For example, when you see someone going into a box to conceal their body, only revealing their head and feet, we automatically assume that the feet are from the same person and the head is is the same person that we're looking at. But what if they aren't? With innovation, our brain is also often fooled. We take shortcuts, we fill in gaps leading to incomplete solutions. So be sure that anytime you're developing a new idea that you look at it from multiple perspectives, what are you missing? What assumptions are you making? And just like the reveal in magic, you often need a different camera angle, a different angle. You need to look at the problem from a different point of view in order to find a better solution. And that's actually the whole point of the lenses from invisible solutions. The invisible solutions. Lenses are just that. They are multiple camera angles. In fact, the word reveal to me is something which I love. In fact, I originally wanted it to be in the subtitle of the book, 25 lenses that reveal the Most Hidden but Incredible Solution type of thing. We didn't end up doing that, but I love that word. And to me, that's really the whole idea is using the lenses reveals things that are right in front of your nose. You just can't see it. So that's the first thing. With magic, multiple perspectives challenge your assumptions. The second thing, which we can learn from magicians, is that we need to start with the illogical. And in my book, Best Practices Are Stupid, I have a chapter which is a technique that you can use to make the impossible possible. And it's built on a different mindset than the way we typically would do, innovation. So what's really cool about magic, and it might seem obvious for me to state this, but magic tricks, they appear to be impossible. Something must be done that defies the laws of the universe somehow, like I said, you can cut somebody in half without killing them. You can make somebody disappear. You can read someone's mind. Whatever it is, we're doing something that probably is not possible, but we're making it possible. And that's what magicians do. And that's really what, in many cases, we should be thinking about as innovators. So what can we learn from this mindset? Most of the time, when we're looking for solutions to a pressing problem, a difficult problem, what we tend to do is base the solutions on our past experiences. So what we do is we say, this is where we are today, and we try to think of an incremental way to make it better. And in most cases, we are limited by reality. Now, I know that sounds obvious, but when we're trying to solve a problem, we almost always ask ourselves, what would be a possible solution to this problem? But what if you ask yourself a fundamentally different question. What if, instead of saying, what's a possible solution? What is something that's impossible, illegal, immoral, something that would get us arrested, something would have people in an uproar? Well, now we're actually taking a solution that is impossible. And then we can ask ourselves, what are the attributes of that impossible idea, that magical thinking, and how can we leverage it to find an unusual yet workable solution? And I found when I do this exercise with my clients, I remember I was doing one time with a client and the exercise doesn't take very long. It's about 15, 20 minutes. And in the middle of it, we're probably like at the 10 minute mark, there are these two people who get up in the middle and they leave the room. And I thought, that's pretty rude. And when they came back, they said, we've been working on this problem for six months, we've not been able to find a solution. And within seven minutes of doing this exercise, we found a solution. So I encourage you to try that. Don't look for logical possible solutions. What's impossible? And then the last point about magic, which is sort of related to innovation, is that the performance is as important as the method. So we can go to a store and buy a magic trick. Anybody can perform magic tricks. I was performing magic tricks when I was a little kid. But real magicians know that there's much more to magic than knowing the secret. And I remember this must have been a year or so ago that on Britain's Got Talent, one of the finalists performed a trick that I bought for $20 in a local magic shop. Now, this trick blew them away. The judges were like, gasping. They could not believe what they were watching. It is really simple to do. Now, here's the thing is when I do it, it's mildly entertaining, it's nice. But when he did it, it was a miracle. And I think the same thing is true with innovation. The performance is as important as the solution. New technology is great, but you need to back it up with excellent human support. The experience, the experience your customers have with your new innovation is as important as the innovation itself. Technology can be easily replicated by your competition, but a good performance is much more difficult to copy. And building on that, I just want to point out also something which I think is important, which is that sometimes the trick doesn't have to be super complicated to really impress people. So that person on Britain's Got Talent, very cool, did a great job. But I remember I was speaking at an event and we were playing personality poker. So there are poker cards actually during the speech that I was giving. And so when I do personality poker, I like to just carry a deck of cards around later on. And that evening we had this night of entertainment and they hired a professional Magician. Now I got to tell you, this guy was doing minor miracles with these cards. I know how a lot of card tricks are done, doesn't mean I can do them, but I had no clue how he was even doing them. These, these were just like mind blowing. Drove me crazy trying to think about how they were done. And I pull out a deck of cards and I did what's called a self working trick. Basically you can't screw it up unless you do something terribly wrong, but it's a really killer effect. And so I did this one trick and it was the only trick that I was going to do because I wasn't looking to compete with the magician. He's the star, he was incredible. But I did my little trick, a self working trick, something that I could teach everybody here to do, and it knocked people over. The reason why I mention this is because the professional magician has spent his life developing the skills to do what he does, and he does it incredibly well. They're complicated, but sometimes complicated isn't the key to being great. Sometimes you can have a very simple, like in my case a self working trick and have it be incredible. In fact, I remember another magician friend of mine, he was doing a few card tricks and I knew that most of them were incredibly, incredibly difficult and the audience was impressed. But then he did this one trick that is something which a five year old could learn and, and people thought it was the most incredible thing in the world. So sometimes complicated does not equal better. It just has to be better in the mind and the eyes of the consumer. And that's really important when it comes to innovation, is give them what they want. If it's complicated to do and they don't want it, or if it's complicated to do and they like it no better than something that's easy to do, give them what's easy to do. That's the key to magic and I think it's a key to innovation. So let's move on to one of the lenses. And people often ask me, what's your favorite lens? I don't have a favorite lens, but I will say that there are some that I use more often than others. And one that I use quite frequently is the variations lens. This IS lens number 24 and the variations lens says don't design for a one size fits all approach designed to handle variations. And this one was actually born out of something that I was told by a supervisor of mine back in 1987, 1988 timeframe I think it was, I believe was Jerry Rose. When I was working at then it was Arthur Anderson and he said, designed to handle the exception, not for the exception. And this blew my mind. Designed to handle the exception, not for the exception. What ends up happening is when we're designing businesses, when we're solving problems, we tend to think about the most complicated, yet the rarest situation. And we often design our solutions for that. But if that happens only 10% of the time, basically what we've done is we've sub optimized data, 90% of the transactions or occurrences that take place. This is clearly not the right strategy for being able to create a great solution. So come back to my last point with the magic. Simple simplicity. Simplification is often the best innovation. And so what we need to do is just start thinking about how can we simplify what we're doing. When you think about how this could be used, let's just take an example. This is actually an example from my very first book, 247 Innovation, where I talked about an insurance company. And this insurance company, one of the things they found is it took way too long to process claims. It just took way too long. And the reason for that is that they had this underlying assumption that all claims were complicated and therefore needed to be handled by specialists. And what ended up happening was when they looked at it, they realized that 60 to 70% of their claims were slam dunk, super easy, didn't require any kind of expertise. It could be done by a generalist, it could be done by a lower paid employee. And now a lot of that is being done by technology. So what they were doing is designing for the exception, not just to handle the exception. Everything became big, bloated and slow. But then they used something that was called process pipelining. And basically what that meant was think about things trickling down in different levels of complexity. If you make the assumption that everything is simple, then the first step is to determine how simple is the claim. And if 60% of the claims are super simple, boom, process them. Low cost, high speed, very few touch points, get it done quickly. Now sometimes we need to escalate it. Okay, this is a little more complicated. We need to bring in a specialist, one specialist, but that's all we need. Okay, that's now maybe 30% of the claims and then that last 10%, maybe we have multiple specialists with different areas of expertise who have to come together and that's much more complicated. But everything was assumed to be that 10% case rather than the the other 60 and 30% cases. And here's the bottom line is when they used this approach, when they didn't design for the exception, but rather to handle the exception, they were able to cut costs by 40%. And they were able to significantly reduce the time that it took to process claims because they eliminated all of the handoffs. So there you go. Sometimes what you can do is you can make some simple changes using one of the lenses and get a completely different solution. Originally, they thought that they were gonna have to blow up the entire process. They're gonna have to blow everything up and start from the beginning. But actually, they just needed to question this assumption that all claims were equal, or at least they needed to be handled in an equal way. And when they realized that they could use variations, the variations lens, now they were able to create a very efficient claims process. So on this episode, we started off talking about magic and we talked about the three tips that I think you can learn from magicians. The first one is the brain can't be trusted. Therefore you need to challenge your assumptions and look at the problem from multiple angles. The second one is that don't just start with logical solutions. Start with illogical solutions, impossible solutions, illegal solutions, immoral solutions, things that actually may not ever work in practice, and then scale back from there. And then we talked about why the performance is as important as the method doing it. Well, having a great product with terrible service is not going to give someone the experience that they expect. And equally important, as part of that, I talked about the need for simplification. Complexity doesn't equal greatness. Value is determined by the customer, and we need to be able to design around their needs and provide them the simplest and most elegant solution. Then we closed with a variations lens, which basically says, don't use a one size fits all strategy. Or as my supervisor used to say, designed to handle the exception, not for the exception. And with that, we are at the end of this week's episode. As always, to submit problems you want solved in this podcast, go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com youm'll have an opportunity to submit them there. And remember to download the lenses, go to getthelenses.com I look forward to being with you next week. Until then, Happy problem solving. It.