The 46 Rules of Genius Read online

   Complex projects with interactive elements—parts that change dynamically with every change to the whole—require an all-at-once process instead of a step-by-step process. The way this unfolds depends on what the project is.

   Let’s take the case of building a brand for a new product. A brand is a customer’s perception about a product, service, or company. Therefore the task of brand-building is to give customers experiences that help them perceive your product in a favorable way. The proof of success is not the number of boxes you’ve ticked, but the change in the way customers think about the category in which you’re competing. You want customers to rank your brand as number one or two in your category, not as number five or six.

   The experiences you design for customers might include the product itself, a series of messages about the product, and a certain way the product is packaged, sold, or delivered. You might build in features that delight customers enough that they tell their friends or write positive reviews online. You might also train front-line employees to represent the brand in a way that makes customers happy. You might design a program to encourage loyalty, rather than risk losing customers to competitors. Beyond all this, you might want to imbue these elements with freshness and imagination, so your brand becomes a hard act to follow.

   Creating a program with this level of complexity has more in common with writing music than baking a cake. If you try to address these elements one at a time, you’re likely to end up with a “Frankenbrand,” a collage of experiences that customers perceive as mismatched and inorganic.

   A better process for designing a complex program is to address all the elements at once. Let the various parts influence each other dynamically as they emerge from your mind or your pencil or your team’s whiteboard markers. Let them crash into each other and create new elements. Keep them in a liquid state long enough to see them morph and mutate into surprising new possibilities. Stir them until they blend into a seamless whole, one that’s more than the sum of its parts.

   When employed by teams, this free-for-all process is known as “swarming.” It’s fast-paced, exhilarating, and well-suited to small teams of creative professionals. It’s also disconcertingly chaotic. Swarming is not for the faint of heart.

  Rule 15

  WORK TO AN APPROPRIATE STRUCTURE

  Every design has its own order. The job of the genius is to discover it. The best approach is to start with a logical structure, then deviate from it according to your needs, your skills, and the particular demands of your project.

   If you’re designing your own house, for example, the combination of site, neighborhood, budget, space requirements, and your personal taste may suggest a three-level, modernist cliff-hugger to take advantage of the views and adapt to its special engineering needs. Or it may lead you to design a farmhouse-like compound that blends into its setting and accommodates a range of specific uses. Every set of circumstances dictates a different underlying order.

   If you’re developing a website, parameters may include your skill set, your audience, their experience level, the navigational possibilities, and your brand’s personality. The functional purpose of the website may point to a magazine-style format with rich, emotion-laden photography. Or it may suggest an all-typography format with no-nonsense navigation and clear copywriting. Avoid cookie-cutter approaches. Every design should align with its unique purpose.

   This doesn’t mean that every project should be produced lavishly, or that it should break the mold on general principle, but simply that each project has a hidden structure that, if discovered, can bring out its full potential. When purpose and structure find the right fit, one and one make three.

  Rule 16

  EXPRESS RELATED ELEMENTS IN A SIMILAR MANNER

  The principle of grouping brings clarity to any design by signaling the purpose of each element. Related elements should look alike, and unrelated elements should look different.

   For example, the designer of a smartphone app can create a similar look for each of its functional icons, expressing that these functions are of the same type or have the same level of navigational importance.

   The leader of a company can direct the actions of employees by organizing her expectations into a long-term purpose, a medium-term mission, and a series of short-term goals, so every employee knows what to do, when to do it, and why.

   The writer of an instruction manual can indicate various levels of information by grouping the instructions according to steps, diagrams, captions, cautions, and tips. Steps can be numbered, diagrams drawn in blue, captions shown as italics, cautions displayed in boxes, and tips marked with stars.

   The goal of grouping is to simplify understanding so that the user—or the reader, the listener, the viewer, the follower, the citizen—can interact with a design intuitively instead of having to interpret the intentions of the designer. In other words, the designer should do the hard work to make the user’s work easy.

   By the same token, you should express unrelated elements in a different manner. If the dashboard in your car featured a large panel of look-alike buttons—five for the wipers, twelve for the radio, two for the headlights, seven for the air conditioner, and so on—you would find these difficult to learn without consulting the manual every time. But when each of these functions is placed into different groupings, they quickly become intuitive.

   There’s a reason supermarkets organize their items by affinity. With over 20,000 products, shoppers would find the store hard to navigate if all the boxed products were shelved together just because they were in boxes. We tend to categorize grocery products by their use, not by their container types. The ketchup is next to the capers because both are condiments. The walnuts are next to the flour because both are baking ingredients.

   Organizing, designing, and leading all benefit from a high degree of clarity. The way you group things can determine how well they’re understood.

  Rule 17

  MATCH FORM TO FUNCTION, FUNCTION TO FORM

  Form doesn’t always follow function. Sometimes it works the other way around. The rule is simply this: form and function should be inseparable. When the shape of something matches its intended purpose, the marriage seems inevitable, as if no other combination could exist. This is the rightness component of beauty, the quality that sends clear signals of authenticity, integrity, honesty, and wholeness.

   Reflect on the inevitability of a hammer, with its sculpted metal head and curved claw, and a handle shaped to fit your palm. Or the strong, angled strokes of an uppercase A, immediately recognizable as the first letter of the Roman alphabet. Or consider the intuitive gestures of a touchscreen interface that lets you scroll, swipe, click, or rotate. Think about the design of a business in which customers, employees, owners, and suppliers all get something they want, and are happy to give something valuable in return. These are examples of form and function in perfect alignment.

   Put yourself at the mercy of your material. Feel its desire. Spin the wheel of your imagination until the ball stops on the right answer. When you find the match, you’ll feel a tiny thrill of satisfaction. Tune your sensitivity to this feeling, and learn to be dissatisfied until you find it.

   This is not to say that a real genius would never purposely mismatch form and function. But even so, the mismatched pair would be a good match if it fulfilled its purpose. Remember, rule number one is to break the rules.

  Rule 18

  DON’T BE BORING

  The most common killer of a bright idea is a dull execution. Boredom interferes with understanding. It lets the mind wander as it searches for something to care about. It fails to engage the emotions of the audience, turning their experience into a tedious intellectual exercise.

   The antidote to boredom, unsurprisingly, is surprise. The element of surprise is the most powerful weapon in the creative arsenal. It confounds our expectations and rivets our attention. It makes competing stimuli fade into the backgrou
nd as we focus on what suddenly seems important.

   Surprise can take the form of drama, shock, wit, or even extreme beauty. It can take the form of contrast: dark vs. light, big vs. small, fast vs. slow, simple vs. complicated, and so on. It begins with a perceptual event—we notice something different—which then triggers an emotion. If the emotion is strong enough, we may store it as a memory and assign a meaning to it.

   Some examples of creative surprise:

  The punch line at the end a joke

  A burst of sweetness in a savory dish

  An invention that disrupts an industry

  A fancy word in a plain sentence

  A quiet movie interrupted by a gunshot

  A flashback in a fast-paced novel

  A tender ballad sung in a rough voice

  A sudden outburst of obscenities

  A huge sculpture of a small subject

  Self-deprecating humor

  A frozen moment in a dance routine

  A staid product with a new feature

  A brutally truthful observation

  Of course, if you overuse the element of surprise, it’s no longer surprising. It becomes the very background noise you had hoped to overcome. Surprise is your secret weapon. Use it strategically.

  Rule 19

  PUT THE SURPRISE WHERE YOU WANT THE ATTENTION

  The rule for surprise is this: Direct the most attention to the most important part of your idea. Don’t sprinkle surprise around randomly, or the result will be scattered attention and a loss of focus.

   Some examples of using surprise to direct attention:

   You write a particularly catchy musical sequence for a pop song. You make sure the most important lyrics are contained in that sequence.

   You add an exciting new feature to a product. You make sure the feature underscores your brand’s most compelling difference.

   You design a trademark for a business. You make sure the strategic uniqueness of the business is reflected in its symbolism and form.

   Your movie script has an emotionally charged scene. You make sure the scene creates a turning point or encapsulates the main theme.

   You make a slide presentation. You save your most compelling point for your most dramatic slide.

   You write a headline for an ad. You place the most powerful word at the end of the sentence.

   While these examples may seem obvious, their lessons can be easily forgotten in the heat of creation. It’s not too late to make changes after the first draft or the first pass. In fact, that’s usually the best time to do it—after you see what you’ve got, and before you present it to others.

  Rule 20

  APPLY AESTHETICS DELIBERATELY

  Aesthetics is a collection of tools, such as shape, rhythm, contrast, scale, color, and texture, used to create and appreciate beauty. Most creative people have a natural affinity for aesthetics, learning through experience the various tricks and tech-niques that produce the effects they’re looking for. They often apply these techniques unconsciously, without ever using the word aesthetics.

   Other people would just as soon throw the whole notion of aesthetics out the window. They contend there are no universal laws for creating beauty, and anyone who says there are is not a true artist.

   But aesthetics is not a book of laws. It’s more like a box of toys. When you play with these toys, applying them to your project in various ways, you’ll find they can bring clarity, excitement, and nuance to your work. Some of the more universal ones are shown on the facing page.

   If these aesthetic principles seem abstract to you, it’s probably because you haven’t felt their weight in your hands or applied them consciously to real tasks. With enough practice they’ll begin to make sense and become powerful extensions of your creative skills. Aesthetic choices are never right or wrong, just better or worse. Try them and see.

  Rule 21

  VISUALIZE WITH SKETCHES, MODELS, OR PROTOTYPES

  Our intuitive responses to new problems don’t always work. When you move directly from knowing to doing something, you can easily find that your response is inadequate, off-target, or wrong. This is because what worked for one problem doesn’t always work for another.

   But when you add the middle step of making, it changes not only what you know, but what you’re likely to do. It’s the imagination-based step of creating a range of hypotheses that you can prototype, test, and refine. The more ideas you can prototype, the more you’ll learn about the possibilities of your problem. When ideas flow, the music of chance plays faster.

   Get your mind and hands working together. Make a sketch, construct a model, or assemble a prototype. Then another. And another. With each attempt, you’ll reveal new possibilities for innovation. Your mind will talk to your hands, and your hands will talk to your mind. This dialogue is called generative thinking, and it happens only when you’re making something. It’s the active ingredient of design.

   But what if you have no drawing skills? What if you’re all thumbs? What if you couldn’t build a sandwich, much less a prototype? You’d be surprised at how little skill it takes to trigger new thoughts. While many challenges benefit from trained hands, other challenges need only the ability to draw stick figures, cut pieces of cardboard, or tape various objects together. The goal is to get the prototypes to talk back, surprise you, and make you think in new ways.

   Without prototyping your ideas, you can easily fall back into the know-do mode of problem-solving, unable to test whether your ideas will work in the real world. In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

  Rule 22

  EMBRACE MESSINESS

  It’s almost impossible to reconcile creativity with cleanliness. The sculptor gets metal dust all over his studio. The writer must wade through a clutter of notes, books, and crumpled drafts to get to her desk. The rock musician must weave through a tangle of cables, black boxes, guitar stands, and song notes to sit down and create. The business strategist must navigate a thicket of scribbles, arrows, and boxes on his whiteboard while avoiding the distractions of multicolored sticky notes on stacks of must-read articles.

   You may find that you can’t be creative until you clean up your desk or tidy your workspace. This makes perfect psychological sense. Each new project needs a clean slate. And with each new project you’ll need a little extra time to switch mental gears. But once the gears start turning and the project gets moving, the mess is part of the work. Don’t worry about it. Don’t try to clean it up until you need more space or you’re ready to start a new project. Let the mess be a mess.

   Organizations that depend on innovation must embrace this reality. They should provide open, flowing spaces that accommodate clutter for extended periods time while their people do battle in the creative dragon pit. Clutter at this stage is not a vice, but a virtue: Messiness is next to godliness. Cleanliness can wait.

  Rule 23

  TEST YOUR IDEAS IN REALISTIC SITUATIONS

  Question: How can you predict whether an idea will survive in the real world?

  Answer: Test it in the real world.

  Many entrepreneurs believe you can’t test new ideas. The reason they give is that people can’t predict what they’ll buy or endorse. While this is mostly true, what the entrepreneurs forget is that new ideas are tested all the time—as soon as they reach the marketplace. At this point the shortcomings are apparent and it’s too late to fix them.

   The solution to this seeming paradox is to expose ideas to the marketplace before they’re launched. You can do this by approximating real-world encounters using prototypes and a small number of test subjects.

   For example, you can gauge the potency of brand messages by A/B testing them with a limited audience. You can assess the features of a new product by handing prototypes to a cross-section of likely users. You can try out a new business model by first opening a store in a small market. You can test the sales potent
ial of a retail package by placing a range of mock-ups on a store shelf, then talking to customers who are shopping there.

   While none of these situations are perfect, they come close enough to real life to provide useful feedback. You don’t need precise information to make a confident decision about a new idea. You just need uncertainty reduction. Without pretesting your ideas, you have only two options: 1) take a substantial risk and accept the consequences, or 2) reduce the risk by removing the qualities that made it innovative in the first place.

   Tip: Don’t use focus groups to test new ideas. Focus groups were designed only to “focus” the thinking of product developers and marketers. They weren’t designed to predict future sales or judge the market-worthiness of new ideas. Instead of focus groups, use your best creative judgment, build prototypes, and show them to customers, one at a time, in realistic situations.

  Rule 24

  SIMPLIFY

  People tend to view simplicity and complexity as opposites. But this isn’t strictly true. The enemy of simplicity isn’t complexity, but disorder. And the enemy of complexity is also disorder. While complexity seeks order through addition, simplicity seeks it through subtraction.