Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age 9780226607023

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Creativity on Demand

Creativity on Demand The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age

E I T A N Y. W I L F

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America

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28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­60683-­5 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­60697-­2 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­60702-­3 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Wilf, Eitan Y., author. Title: Creativity on demand : the dilemmas of innovation in an accelerated age / Eitan Y. Wilf. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018025832 | ISBN 9780226606835 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226606972 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226607023 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability in business. | Corporate culture. | Organizational behavior. | Business anthropology. | Industrial management. Classification: LCC HD53 .W56 2019 | DDC 658.4/063—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025832 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Old La Honda, Page Mill, Tunitas Creek, Kings Mountain, and Alpine Roads

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / ix

/ The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 1

INTRODUCTION

ONE

TWO

/ Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan: Planned Accidents Are Good to Innovate With / 28

/ “Putting This Mess into a Structure”: Cultural Contradictions and Discursive Resolutions / 55 THREE

FOUR

FIVE SIX

/ “Listening to the Voice of the Product”: Human Creativity Displaced / 77

/ The Post-­it Note Economy: Understanding Post-­Fordist Business Innovation / 101

/ Clutter: Unpacking the Stuff of Business Innovation / 124

/ “Life Design”: The Omnivorous Logic of Business Innovation / 147 CONCLUSION

/ Institutional Myths of Innovation / 177 Notes / 189 List of References / 199 Index / 211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to express my deepest thanks to my interlocutors in the field of business innovation who let me into their world and were generous with their time. They were willing to answer my questions regardless of how far removed from their practice these questions were. I hope those of them who end up reading this book will recognize themselves in it, especially the complex, multidetermined, and often contradictory subject positions they occupy. This book took shape during the 2016–2017 academic year when I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Science at Stanford University (CASBS). This place proved to be ideal not only because of its location at the center of Silicon Valley, the origin site of many of the discourses and practices that this book analyzes, but also because of the nurturing environment it provided me. This environment consisted of CASBS’s amazing natural setting, wonderful staff, and other fellows who spent the academic year with me. Among the latter with whom I had countless enriching conversations, I would like to thank Steven Feld, Miyako Inoue, Zephyr Frank, Cate Zaloom, Tara Behrend, Eric Klinenberg, and Margaret Levi. Special thanks are due to Don Brenneis—a longtime interlocutor—for making Palo Alto a warm and welcoming place. I am grateful to the people who engaged with my research when I presented it in the departments of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Diego; Yale University; the University of Amsterdam; the University of Pennsylvania; the Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University; the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews; the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University in Berlin; and at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for the So-

x / Acknowledgments

cial Studies of Science. I especially want to acknowledge the helpful feedback given in these venues by Niko Besnier, Don Brenneis, Ilana Gershon, John Haviland, Mette High, Paul Kockelman, Paul Manning, Keith Murphy, Katharina Schramm, Lucy Suchman, Greg Urban, and Kathryn Woolard. Priya Nelson, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, should be thanked for supporting this project and for giving me invaluable stylistic advice that helped breathe life into an initial version of the manuscript that badly needed it. A number of anonymous reviewers for the press provided crucial feedback that helped significantly improve this book. Related versions of certain portions of this work have been published elsewhere as follows: portions of chapter 1 appeared in “Routinized Business Innovation: An Undertheorized Engine of Cultural Evolution,” American Anthropologist 117, no. 4 (2015): 679–92; portions of chapter 2 were first published in “Ritual Semiosis in the Business Corporation: Recruitment to Routinized Innovation,” Signs and Society 3, no. S1 (2015): S13–­S40; portions of chapter 4 and the conclusion first appeared in “The Post-­it Note Economy: Understanding Post-­Fordist Business Innovation through One of Its Key Semiotic Technologies,” Current Anthropology 57, no. 6 (2016): 732–60; and portions of the introduction were published in “The ‘Cool’ Organization Man: Incorporating Uncertainty from Jazz Music into the Business World,” in Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, ed. Limor Samimian-­ Darash and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 29–45. I am grateful to the editors and reviewers involved in the production of these publications for their feedback on the arguments developed therein. The research at the center of this book would not have been possible had it not been for the financial support given to me in the form of a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Research Council, an Individual Research Grant from the Israel Science Foundation, and a Research Grant from the Shane Center at the Hebrew University. Lastly, I thank Anneke Beerkens for sharing with me her passion for creativity and for modeling it in her thoughts and existence.

INTRODUCTION

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation

The Innovator’s Dilemma One early September day I finally managed to have a long conversation with David, a business innovation consultant in his midthirties. In 2012, after pursuing an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in design, David had founded Newfound, a design and innovation consultancy firm, together with two business partners. During the three months before our conversation, I had participated in different innovation workshops organized by Newfound in New York. David was the most verbal and articulate among the innovation consultants I worked with, and I was eager to have a one-­on-­one conversation with him. However, it was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting because his consultancy practice at the time of my fieldwork required him to travel extensively inside and outside the United States. One afternoon, however, he texted me to say that if I still wanted to interview him, he could make himself available during a two-­ hour slot the following morning. I immediately responded with “Yes!” The next morning I arrived at the same shared workspace on the twenty-­first floor of a new office building in Manhattan’s midtown in which Newfound’s workshops took place. I found David sitting in a nook next to a floor-­to-­ ceiling window, looking at the busy street below. Upon seeing me, he smiled and without further ado said “Go for it.” I was not disappointed by our conversation. David responded in detail to each of my questions, taking them in directions that I had not anticipated. As our conversation drew to a close, I asked him what the participants in the innovation workshops he facilitates find the hardest to learn. “The hardest thing of all is finding ways to do this in your job,” he immediately responded. “Some people come to us and say, ‘I want a job in innovation.’

2 / Introduction

And I’m like, ‘There are no jobs in innovation! Go be innovative in whatever you do!’” David’s tone became frustrated. “The world deserves people who know something about a thing and then choose to innovate that thing. Like, HR managers should be innovative HR managers. And product managers should innovate methods of product management. People should be innovating in place!” He went on to explain that “people look at what we do and think of innovation as something separate from the field of knowledge and experience that they have. But, in fact,” he argued, “you gotta have a minefield of knowledge and experience to innovate—people, teams, organizations, change management.” David paused for a second and added, “and innovation processes: so I get to innovate innovation, you know?” he laughed. “I’ve been doing this for seven years, and I’m an amateur. So you cannot just show up and do this.” After the interview, as I walked along Broadway to the Times Square subway station, I kept thinking about David’s words. David argued that innovation has become such a popular buzzword that everyone—companies and people—wanted to become innovative. His words resonated with some of the flickering advertisements, billboards, and storefronts that surrounded me on the busy street and that announced new products, services, and technologies by using some form of the word innovation. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more ubiquitous trope than innovation in today’s business world. A 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal presented data that pointed to innovation’s exponential increase in visibility: A search of annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows companies mentioned some form of the word “innovation” 33,528 times [in 2011], which was a 64% increase from five years before that. More than 250 books with “innovation” in the title have been published in the last three months, most of them dealing with business, according to a search of Amazon.com. . . . Apple Inc. and Google Inc. mentioned innovation 22 times and 14 times, respectively, in their most recent annual reports. But they were matched by Procter & Gamble Co. (22 times), Scotts Miracle-­Gro Co. (21 times) and Campbell Soup Co. (18 times). . . . Four in 10 executives say their company now has a chief innovation officer. (Kwoh 2012)

However, later, sitting in the subway train on my way to Brooklyn, I realized that David suggested that the immense popularity of innovation has become a double-­edged sword. People often came to him thinking they could innovate independently of domains of professional practice and in-­ depth knowledge of such context-­specific domains because innovation’s

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 3

popularity turned it into a reified notion, a kind of catchall phrase that was fast becoming devoid of meaning. His assessment resonates with a widespread suspicion. In tandem with the data about the rising ubiquity of the notion of innovation, the same Wall Street Journal article argued that “like the once ubiquitous buzzwords ‘synergy’ and ‘optimization,’ innovation is in danger of becoming a cliché—if it isn’t one already” (Kwoh 2012). A 2013 article in the Atlantic went as far as suggesting that although “mentions of innovation are resurgent,” “actual innovation might be in decline” (Green 2013). Quoting a George Mason University economist, the article argued that since the 1970s, “the forward march of technological progress has hit something of a dry spell, regardless of what all the talk about innovation may indicate.” It concluded with the puzzling fact that “measurable innovation might be on the decline, but, for some reason, we just can’t stop talking about it” (Green 2013). Finally, back home in Park Slope, as I was transcribing the interview with David I noticed a third dimension to his commentary. Although David first argued that people erroneously think that there is “a job in innovation,” he then acknowledged that his job is precisely such a job. David first claimed that people should be innovating in their own domains of professional practice and that to do so they must have in-­depth knowledge of these context-­specific domains: the “people, teams, organizations, [and] change management.” At this point, however, he suddenly paused and added “and innovation processes,” thus turning the spotlight to himself. Knowledge of “innovation processes” was something innovation consultants must be intimately familiar with if they wanted to “innovate innovation”—that is, to offer their clients better and more advanced strategies of innovation. David’s expert knowledge was thus a metalevel kind of knowledge of innovation, one that could be applied not only to consumer products and processes across different domains but also to itself. David belongs to the steadily growing number of innovation consultants, a professional group of people who help companies innovate their products, services, and structures by means of general, rule-­governed innovation strategies that transcend specific contexts. As the Wall Street Journal article noted, “the innovation trend has given birth to an attendant consulting industry, and Fortune 100 companies pay innovation consultants $300,000 to $1 million for work on a single project, which can amount to $1 million to $10 million a year,” according to estimates (Kwoh 2012). Thus, reading the full transcription of the interview with David later that night, it struck me as provocative of more questions than answers. How can we explain the fact that according to David, the popularity of the idea

4 / Introduction

of innovation has led people to want to master innovation as if it were a “thing” that could be abstracted from the context of different business practices when he presented himself as someone whose professional practice revolved around the development of innovation strategies that transcended the specific contexts of business practices? What should we make of the fact that David emphasized that he has been offering innovation consulting services for a number of years and yet still considers himself “an amateur. So you cannot just show up and do this,” when the notion that one can “just show up and do this” has been popularized in large part because of the many short innovation workshops and executive training sessions that innovation consultants such as David offer to business executives? Lastly, how should we reconcile the widespread suspicion that innovation has lost its specificity together with the rise of numerous innovation consulting firms that have developed highly specific innovation strategies as well as with the fact that many of these consulting firms have been successfully selling their services to different kinds of business organizations, from small start-­ups to established Fortune 500 companies?

An Undertheorized Dimension of Post-­Fordist Flexible Accumulation Since the 1980s, post-­Fordism has been at the center of critical studies of capitalism. In this context, scholars have focused on the nature and implications of the development of new strategies to reduce further the turnover time of capital, that is, the time it takes for capital to complete a cycle from the capitalist’s investment of capital in the means of production to the return of capital to the capitalist after the sale of commodities (Azari-­Rad 1999). Their analytic focus has tended to be on the development of more efficient production and distribution technologies. For example, they have discussed the transition to part-­time and temporary labor force (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012; Ho 2009), cheaper manufacturing of goods in small batches and new distribution systems such as just-­in-­time inventory-­flow delivery systems (Elam 1994; Shead 2017), geographical dispersal and mobility (Esser and Hirsch 1994), and the ability to take advantage of up-­to-­ date information through computerization and electronic means of communication (Zaloom 2006; Holmes and Marcus 2006). However, post-­Fordist flexible accumulation depends on reducing the turnover time of capital not only via more efficient production and distribution technologies but also via a higher rate of product innovation. Organi-

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 5

zations must not only instantaneously respond to but also orchestrate and anticipate market changes by generating a constant stream of ideas for new products and services. The plethora of studies of post-­Fordism has thus left relatively undertheorized a key dimension of post-­Fordist flexible accumulation, namely, the “acceleration in the pace of product innovation together with the exploration of highly specialized and small-­scale market niches” (Harvey 1990, 156). Against this backdrop, what kind of professional expertise might emerge in response to organizations’ need to routinize the fast production of ideas for new products and services? How might such an expertise help organizations generate solutions to future crises whose nature they cannot know in advance, namely, the introduction by their competitors of new products and services that can upend their operations? Put more broadly, what kind of professional expertise might help organizations prepare themselves for and constantly generate the unpredictable in a predictable way, the future in the present, the unknown by means of the known? Scholars have argued at length that the post-­Fordist development of more efficient production and distribution technologies has had concrete societal implications. For example, the transition to part-­time and temporary labor forces has affected workers’ well-­being in numerous ways (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012). Against this backdrop, how might the promise of the fast innovation of any entity by means of abstract, rule-­governed strategies affect cultural notions of newness as well as individuals’ relation to their world—including their own lives—when such a world and lives are seen through the prism of endless innovation within reach? The very idea of the intentional design of organizational structures meant to routinize the fast production of new cultural entities takes us to a relatively uncharted theoretical domain in cultural anthropology. Anthropologists have tended to view innovation as the result of copying errors in the process of social learning and the diffusion of social practices (Boas 1896; Kroeber 1940) or as the contingent, loosely guided, and often unconscious product of individuals’ experimentation with existing practices and constraints (often glossed as “improvisation” or “emergence”) in response to unexpected new situations and crises (White 1943, 339–40; Mead 1953; Lévi-­ Strauss 1966, 17–19; Bateson 1967, 148; Bourdieu 1977, 79; Chibnik 1981; Gell 1998, 215; Hannerz 1992; Hallam and Ingold 2007; Pandian 2015).1 In light of this intellectual tradition, what theory might account for a professional expertise that turns on the ability to systematize the fast production of ideas for new cultural entities by means of the development of rule-­governed strategies that become part of the organization’s everyday practice?

6 / Introduction

The Book’s Argument Based on a four-­year ethnographic study of routinized business innovation norms and practices as they find expression in the work of innovation consultants, I address these and additional questions, offering a threefold argument. First, the consultants I worked with were not selling their clients snake oil that entailed little more than the appearance of entrepreneurship and an organizational cool branded with an unspecific catchall phrase. Rather, they were busy developing and helping their clients learn to implement highly specific and rule-­governed strategies of generating and imagining ideas for new products and services. Such strategies problematize a number of assumptions about both the business organization and the creative imagination. On the one hand, scholars have rarely viewed creative imagination as one of business organizations’ key dimensions. Yet the rise of norms and practices of business innovation, in which ideation strategies play an important role, suggests that creative imagination is fast becoming one of business organizations’ key components. On the other hand, scholars have often conceptualized creative imagination in terms of fleeting liminality, evanescence, a radical individual property, and a horizon that is removed from the here and now. Yet many strategies of business innovation bring creative imagination into the office or conference room as a stable property or “technology” (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009) that a number of people can generate, share, and debate together for a sustained length of time. Business innovation thus turns out to be a sphere of professional practice that generates new cultural entities by reconciling a professional ethos—with its ideals of rationality, systematicity, and reliability—and a modern-­Romantic creative ethos, with its ideals of unpredictable emergence (Wilf 2014a). The possibility of such reconciliation has captured the imagination of business executives and the wider public and played a key role in the rise of a professional class of innovation consultants. Second, many consultants’ substantial achievements notwithstanding, contemporary business innovation takes place in an economic and organizational environment that prizes speed and instantaneous results. This environment significantly shapes the social life of business innovation. Clients’ pressure for immediate results pushes innovation consultants to streamline the production of insights and ideas for new products and services. They consequently abstract and decontextualize the innovation process from the market to which it purports to refer. Although consultants argue that their strategies are oriented toward and take into account the consumer, the latter is often erased in the process of innovation. I show two

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 7

forms of this erasure. In the first, the innovation process discards the need to engage with end users altogether because of a belief that all the needed information about future innovative products and services already inheres in existing products and services. In the second, although the innovation process begins with data collected from end users, these data undergo textual transformations that gradually decontextualize them from any meaningful connection to users. Third, in addition to decoupling the innovation process from the market, some strands of business innovation have become self-­reflexive and self-­sustaining professional practices whose role is to mediate post-­Fordist normative ideals of speed, instantaneity, and creative flexibility both to innovators and to their clients in addition to, and often at the expense of, generating end results that can actually be monetized. The rhetorical power of such practices to signal to clients and to innovators that “innovation is now taking place” emanates from their multimodal resonance with widespread ideologies of organizational creativity. This rhetorical power is responsible for business innovation’s contemporary status as a bulletproof panacea for any entity in need of innovation, including one’s life and self. These different, interrelated, and sometimes contradictory dimensions of routinized business innovation underlie David’s commentary. David complained that people think that innovation is “a thing” that can be abstracted from contextual factors, yet he presented his own professional practice as one that has reached the kind of level of generality that makes innovation appear to be “a thing” that transcends contexts, a perception that has also been encouraged by business innovation’s self-­reflexivity, reification, and decoupling from the market. David lamented the fact that people think they can quickly master the principles of innovation and that they do not understand that business innovation consists of highly specialized skills and procedures, yet it is innovation consultants who have formulated easily learnable principles and recipes of innovation, disseminated them in relatively short training sessions, and applied them in concrete innovation sessions to quickly generate insights. Routinized business innovation is thus neither the empty shell that its detractors claim it to be nor is it the holy grail of organizational success that its supporters insist it is. Rather, innovation consultants constantly need to negotiate the tension between their desire to come up with specific practices that could lead to ideas for new monetizable products and services— a goal that requires time and sensitivity to context—and the need to speed up the innovation process and signal to their clients and to themselves that “innovation is now taking place”—an achievement that requires them to

8 / Introduction

decontextualize, abstract, and reify the innovation process. To understand this complexity, an ethnographic approach that is sensitive to innovators’ everyday practice is needed. As the author of a recent Wired magazine article noted, “the overuse and generalization of the term ‘innovation’ has led to a loss of understanding of what it is we need when we say we need more innovation. We lose sight of the specific skills and behavior needed to be innovative. . . . We should start talking about innovation as a series of separate skills and behaviors” (O’Bryan 2013). Against this backdrop, I provide a detailed analysis of the skills and behaviors of business innovation consultants based on participant observation in a number of key institutional sites in which they develop, crystalize, and apply those skills and behaviors and inculcate them to business people who are later supposed to implement them in their own organizations. In doing so, I unpack both the potentialities and cultural contradictions of routinized business innovation and tease out their theoretical and practical implications.

Commodity Fetishism, “Unmet Consumer Needs,” and the Production of the Future The study of business innovation provides an opportunity to engage with and contribute to critical studies of capitalism as a future-­producing and future-­oriented social configuration. One focus in this strand of research has been capitalism’s future-­oriented discursive practices. For example, in his study of biotechnological start-­ups in the United States and India, Sunder Rajan highlights “the grammar of biocapital,” which he describes as a promissory futuristic discourse, an orientation to the future when there is nothing in the present that prefigures it (Sunder Rajan 2006). This orientation is based in an ideology and culture of risk taking (Sunder Rajan 2006, 110; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Appadurai 2011; Miyazaki 2007; Maurer 2002; Riles 2004; Preda 2009) and is a condition of possibility for biotechnological start-­ups, which depend on significant capital investment when there are no tangible products and revenues in the present that can justify such an investment (see also Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013). Other studies have focused on the production of new subjectivities for capitalism. For example, Rudnyckyj has studied the ways in which moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia learn to reconfigure their approach to Islam and their understanding of themselves as Muslims and thus, “to make the religion compatible with principles for corporate success found in Euro-­American management texts, self-­help manuals, and life-­coaching sessions” (Rudnyckyj 2010). Similarly, Dumit has argued that the pharmaceutical industry expands its

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 9

market by making Americans perceive themselves as subjects who are inherently ill and in need of chronic treatment (Dumit 2012). I complement these studies by arguing that innovation consultants produce the future not only by means of discursive practices and the production of new subjectivities but also by engaging with existing products as future-­producing sites in which this future already inheres in embryonic form, awaiting the innovator’s intervention to help it materialize by means of specific practices that involve the innovator’s corporeality and imagination. The conditions of possibility that underlie this approach include culturally specific notions of form, potentiality, evolution, determinism, and prediction. This mode of producing the future provides an opportunity to engage with what Marx called commodity fetishism (Marx 1978). Marx argued that under capitalism, commodities appear to have a nature or life of their own that is reflected in their price. Although it is human labor that is responsible for products’ existence and “life,” this labor remains concealed from consumers (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Recent studies of commodity fetishism have tended to focus on branding, that is, strategies of imbuing specific products with quasi-­human personality traits with which consumers can identify (Arvidsson 2006; Foster 2007; Lury 2004; Moore 2003; Manning 2010; Lee and LiPuma 2002; Gershon 2017). Against this backdrop, I theorize a different form of commodity fetishism in the course of which innovators conceptually transform existing products into quasi persons that are endowed with a unique creative potential for developing into new products. The innovator does not assign specific personality traits to a specific product but rather invests it with a potential for creative development that, to be sure, is responsible for its present form but also for its future, potentially highly different forms. These innovation strategies migrate to spheres outside of the business world, too, such as that of self-­help, where commodities and technologies eventually become models of creative development that human individuals are asked to emulate, as if products’ potential for creative development were antecedent to that of human individuals. Business innovation’s future-­ oriented approach ultimately turns on efforts to tap into “unmet consumer needs.” Scholars have studied “consumer needs” and their production under capitalism primarily through the prism of the ways in which marketers and advertisers recruit consumers to specific roles and encourage them to experience and inhabit needs associated with those roles, which existing products can presumably satisfy (Mazzarella 2003; Moore 2003; Applbaum 2003; Lury 2004). I highlight instead the coconstitution of products and consumers in the course of the

10 / Introduction

innovation process. Ideas for new products shape, and are shaped by, innovators’ ideas about consumers. Future products and “unmet consumer needs” thus come to share an interrelatedly emergent and contingent nature that is nevertheless shaped by the specific post-­Fordist business environment in which it is anchored and by the innovator who mediates between them and whose self and expertise, too, are constituted in this process of mediation.

The Ethnographic Setting and Fieldwork Beginning in April 2012, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with four innovation consulting firms, mainly in New York City. The bulk of the fieldwork took place with two of these firms, Newfound and Brandnew.2 Newfound was founded in 2012. It has offered innovation corporate training as well as contract work with individual companies on specific projects. Since its foundation, it has collaborated with companies from the banking, apparel, food, education, and tourism sectors and industries on a wide range of projects. Its founders and facilitators base their expertise in design, business management, and advertising. They trace most of their professional lineage to design thinking, a highly influential user-­centered design and innovation method that is widely associated with the iconic Silicon Valley innovation consultancy firm IDEO and Stanford’s Institute of Design.3 This lineage has ties to the psychological study of creativity in that design thinking’s key method of ideation—brainstorming—is embedded in the context of the psychological study of creative problem-­solving in the mid-­twentieth century (Osborn 1953, xiv). I attended four different innovation workshops given by Newfound, the longest of which extended to five weeks. Participants in these workshops came mostly from the start-­up sector and the creative industries. The cost of Newfound’s workshops was in the range of a few hundred dollars. Each workshop was usually led by two facilitators and attended by fifteen participants. The shorter workshops focused on the transmission of abstract principles, whereas the longer ones were structured around specific problems presented by real clients. By trying to solve a client’s problem by means of the innovation strategies inculcated in a workshop, participants hoped to gain hands-­on experience and what they considered to be crucial skills in the contemporary marketplace. Clients hoped to benefit from the insights generated in the workshops and were consequently willing to underwrite some of their costs. Brandnew was founded in 1994. Since its founding it has collaborated with major companies from different sectors on a vast spectrum of con-

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 11

sumer products and services, one of which has become a standard of innovation in the field of consumer electronics. Its facilitators base their expertise in cognitive science and the study of creative problem-­solving with a focus on engineering problems in addition to business management. Participants in its workshops and training sessions tended to be senior executives in large, established companies, some of which were Fortune 500 companies. They were mostly C-­level executives (e.g., Chief Innovation Officers) with business management degrees. The cost of Brandnew’s workshops was in the range of a few thousand dollars. Each workshop was usually led by four facilitators and attended by twenty-­five participants. In addition to attending Brandnew’s workshops, I participated in a course on business innovation in one of the top five US business schools.4 The course focused on the core principles of Brandnew’s signature innovation strategy. It lasted six weeks and was attended by close to seventy students. It has been offered a few times a year at this school. Although this book does not provide a systematic comparison between the two consultancies, juxtaposed, Newfound and Brandnew offer a good view of the wide spectrum of routinized business innovation strategies and services that are now prevalent in the business world and of the wide range of executives and entrepreneurs interested in mastering and incorporating these strategies. Newfound’s focus on design thinking provides a window into an innovation strategy that has become highly popular both within and outside the business world. In contrast, Brandnew provides insights into consultancies that offer more specialized proprietary innovation strategies. The innovators who work for Brandnew explicitly reject design thinking and its adherence to brainstorming as a method of creative ideation in favor of a much more systematic, quasi-­algorithmic approach to creative problem-­solving inspired by the field of engineering and cognitive science. Their “no-­nonsense” approach found expression in the fact that Brandnew’s workshops that I attended took place in dull, windowless hotel conference rooms, whereas Newfound’s workshops took place in a trendy shared workspace in a new office building—the kind of workspace that has become identified with the start-­up sector and the creative industries. Equipped with floor-­to-­ceiling windows, open spaces, long communal tables, espresso machines, games, and other forms of a “fun” atmosphere, Newfound’s choice of location reflects the younger demographics of its clients, which stands in contrast to Brandnew’s clients, who tend to be senior executives in established companies.5 Inasmuch as the consulting firms I worked with collaborated with major companies in a wide array of sectors, they provide a platform from which

12 / Introduction

it is possible to generalize about the normative ideals and practices of routinized business innovation in the contemporary moment. That said, I am not suggesting that the innovation strategies that these consulting firms develop and disseminate exhaust the entire spectrum of innovation practices that exist now. Indeed, it is important to emphasize that the scope of the analysis I present in this book is intentionally limited in two ways. First, the routinized business innovation strategies developed by the innovation consultants I worked with are highly abstract, formalized, and characterized by rule-­governed rationality. These features make those strategies applicable to products and services across different business sectors. Such strategies are thus different from “in-­house,” frequently informal innovation strategies and routines developed by many companies that are meant to be applied only to the specific products and services those companies produce and that are not immediately relevant to companies in other business sectors (cf. Moeran and Christensen 2013). Consider, for example, Google’s famous “20% time” policy, which Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, highlighted in their 2004 IPO letter: “We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative” (quoted in D’Onfro 2015). To begin, this innovation strategy is highly unspecific, offering no clear procedures for innovation save for the general allocation of “free” time. Second, it is characterized by a low level of routinization. It does not get “formal management oversight—Googlers aren’t forced to work on additional projects and there are no written guidelines about it” (D’Onfro 2015). Indeed, it appears that only “10% of Googlers are using” this policy because “it became too difficult for employees to take time off from their normal jobs.” In addition, as a former top Google executive put it, for those who do use this policy, “it’s really 120% time,” that is, 20 percent additional time to their normal jobs. Third, even if it were routinized and enforced, this innovation policy could not be easily applied in other business sectors, such as the pharmaceutical industry, where a highly different production model prevails and a high level of collaboration between many people and coordination with regulatory authorities is required. Thus, in comparison with “in-­house,” informal innovation strategies and routines, innovation workshops and business school courses provide a vantage point from which it is possible to discern higher-­level normative ideals and practices of business innovation as innovators reflexively construct and understand them. The scope of the analysis I pre­sent in this book is intentionally limited in a second way. I focus primarily on the idea-­generation dimension of rou-

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 13

tinized business innovation, although in practice successful innovation consists of other dimensions, such as market analysis, feasibility considerations, regulatory issues, and organizational politics and resources (Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002). Indeed, it is indicative that although in practice, idea generation plays a relatively minor role in the overall innovation process (Schumpeter 1943, 132), it has almost always remained the primary focus of the innovation strategies that the consultancies I worked with developed as well as the dimension that their clients were most eager to learn, master, and implement in their home organizations. Rather than assume that this discrepancy distorts the reality of business innovation, I take it to be an important dimension of this reality, one that is indicative of the cultural order of business innovation that begs for a detailed explanation and analysis. The rise of innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world as well as the public fascination with innovation have largely been propelled by the fact that norms and practices of business innovation resonate with powerful ideologies of creative agency and selfhood in the modern West. A focus on the idea-­generation dimension of the innovation process is thus justified both by this dimension’s saliency in the field of business innovation consulting services and by the role it plays in business innovation’s broader appeal outside the business world. During my fieldwork I attended innovation workshops, training sessions, courses, and conferences. Although participants and facilitators in Brandnew’s and Newfound’s workshops were aware of my presence as an ethnographer, I engaged in data collection, ideation sessions, data analysis, and presentation of final insights to clients as a full participant. I was paired with other participants and worked in teams on specific innovation problems. I complemented these forms of direct participant observation with formal interviews and many informal conversations with innovation consultants and the participants in the innovation sessions and workshops they organized. Against the backdrop of the lack of specificity in critical discussions about business innovation, my purpose is to describe and give voice to what innovation consultants do and how they understand and explain to others what they do as well as to anthropologically theorize this ethnographic material in order to better account for routinized business innovation as a salient contemporary cultural phenomenon.

Outline of Chapters The book is divided into three parts that reflect its threefold argument. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the concrete innovation strategies innovation

14 / Introduction

consultants develop and inculcate as well as on the cultural contradictions with which they need to contend and the discursive means with which they do so. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the ways in which the contemporary business environment’s emphasis on speedy and instantaneous results shapes the social life of innovation strategies, which become pervaded by decontextualization and increasingly decoupled from the market to which they purport to refer. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 focus on the self-­reflexive and performative nature of business innovation, including the ways in which it shapes the innovator’s self and notions of selfhood in the wider public. The second half of this introduction provides a detailed analysis of one historical context that explains the emergence of business innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world. This context revolves around a series of transformations in the ways in which organizational and management theorists understood and managed the business organization throughout the twentieth century with respect to the role of uncertainty. Until the mid-­twentieth century, organizational and management theorists approached uncertainty as an undesirable feature of organizations, one that must be eliminated as soon as possible. In contrast, in the second half of the twentieth century, they began to conceptualize organizations as entities whose logic encompasses uncertainty as a natural component that provides a crucial resource for their survival by allowing them to cope with unforeseen events in their internal and external environments and even to generate unforeseen events in the form of ideas for new products. Organizational design consequently focused on developing structures that could integrate and generate uncertainty as a routine dimension of organizations’ logic of operation by tapping into and harnessing employees’ creative agency. A number of organizational theorists turned to the creative arts in general and jazz music in particular in search of adequate organizational models. Chapter 1 unpacks in detail the results of these conceptual transformations as they find expression in the radical productivity of the innovation strategies developed by consultants when they are enacted in practice. Drawing on ethnographic examples from one of Brandnew’s workshops in which its signature innovation strategy was inculcated and put to use, the chapter highlights two procedures that account for this strategy’s productivity. The first procedure helps the innovator imagine new products by means of the deformation of existing products according to a series of well-­defined steps. The innovator’s strict adherence to a highly focused, rule-­governed procedure of imagination and his complete agnosticism to the status of the entities that he deforms by means of this procedure account for the latter’s potential for radical productivity. The second procedure is systematic ab-

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 15

duction. Abduction is the reasoning process typically theorized in the context of scientific practice in the course of which the scientist, in view of a strange situation, forms a hypothesis such that if it were true the situation would cease to be strange. Faced with the deformed objects the innovator created by means of the first procedure, he must think of the functions those objects might be able to perform for a hypothetical consumer such that their strange forms would make sense. Brandnew’s innovation strategy in effect systematizes and professionalizes abduction. The chapter contextualizes the emergence of this productive organizational structure in the broader hypercompetitive world of business innovation that is dominated by the idea that any existing business organization faces the immediate danger of being undone by up-­and-­coming competitors who are about to launch new “disruptive” products. This framework requires business organizations to prepare themselves for imminent crises whose exact nature they cannot know until they emerge by constantly producing the potential solutions for them in advance in the form of a steady stream of ideas for new products and services. However, innovation consultants must not only develop productive innovation strategies but also contend with the macrosociological landscapes in which business innovation is anchored. Set within a specifically Western modern normative framework, consultants’ promise to build and foster a stable corporate culture of innovation and organizational creativity embodies a basic cultural contradiction because modern-­Romantic normative ideals of creative agency connote unpredictability and resistance to formalization and routinization. Their promise to help corporations build a culture of innovation that will generate a stable pipeline of ideas for new products and services is thus the promise to routinize that which ideologically cannot be routinized and whose value is precisely in its resistance to being routinized and professionalized. Against this backdrop, chapter 2 draws on fieldwork in Brandnew’s workshop to analyze the ways in which workshop facilitators attempt to reframe this cultural contradiction and thus encourage workshop participants to inhabit the—on the surface, counterintuitive—idea that innovation can and should be routinized, formalized, and rationalized. They do so by means of different ritual communicative events. They first bring into being the specific macrosociological order that opposes a Romantic ethos (associated with mercurial human creativity) and a professional ethos (associated with rule-­governed rationality). During the workshop this macrosociological order then becomes the basis for suggested transformations in the roles that participants inhabit with respect to innovation, namely, from associating innovation with a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to accepting at its end

16 / Introduction

that a professional ethos can lead to successful innovation as a permanent feature of the organization. In chapter 3 I argue that although it might appear that Romantic notions of creativity have been eradicated from Brandnew’s innovation strategy by means of the latter’s algorithmic-­like structure, in practice those notions have become this strategy’s very condition of possibility, albeit in a different and rather hidden guise. Focusing on Brandnew’s innovation strategy as it is explained in a business management book, I argue that this strategy transforms human creativity, understood as an unruly property, into a manageable and reliable resource by displacing it from the innovator and consumer to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process, namely, the products and services that are in need of innovation. Brandnew’s consultants argue that all the information the innovator needs in order to generate ideas for future successful products can be found in the history of the evolution of existing successful products. This evolution reveals crucial information about products’ “creative potential” to develop into new products that will tap into consumers’ “unmet needs” before consumers know that they have those needs. The innovator consequently is not required to engage with consumers at all in the ideation phase of the innovation process, only with products. At stake is a double inversion in which the innovator transforms the product into a quasi person endowed with a unique creative potential for development and growth and the consumer into a static, inert, quasi object whose needs and wants emerge deterministically and can be algorithmically inferred in advance by the innovator based on the rule-­governed analysis of the product. Creativity is thereby both retained and tamed. The decontextualization that characterizes Brandnew’s innovation strat­ egy can also be found in innovation strategies such as design thinking that, in contrast to it, explicitly emphasize the importance of empathizing with consumers by directly engaging with them. As I demonstrate in chapter 4, at the core of this decontextualization stands the most ubiquitously used material artifact in business innovation, namely, the Post-­it note. Drawing on fieldwork in one of Newfound’s workshops, I argue that whereas existing explanations attribute the Post-­it note’s ubiquity to the fact that it is a convenient tool with which to conduct brainstorming sessions, an important reason for its omnipresence lies elsewhere: it enables innovators to quickly generate insights in line with post-­Fordist ideals of speed and instantaneity. First, Post-­it notes enable innovators to produce pseudodata and to decouple data from the market under the guise of its reflection. In the course of the innovation process, innovators represent data about con-

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 17

sumers by means of a series of textual artifacts of decreasing dimensions until the data are represented in the form of single words and even single graphic sketches on single Post-­it notes. This kind of representation results in decontextualization and pragmatic ambiguity, that is, signs that point to a wide spectrum of potential objects for those who are supposed to interpret them. Such ambiguity and decontextualization are one condition of possibility for the faster production of ideas for new products, because context is weight. Once the innovator loses the context, he or she can move through the ideation phase more quickly. Second, Post-­it notes’ weak adhesive properties enable the innovator to arrange such pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like. Such templates might include a two-­by-­two matrix or a Venn diagram. When innovators arrange and combine Post-­it notes with one another on such templates, the result is a quickly generated “ritual insight,” that is, an insight that receives its validity from the conventional prestige of the ready-­made visual template that underlies it. Thus, shaped by a post-­Fordist business environment that mandates the quick production of insights, Newfound’s innovation strategy is pervaded by decontextualization, too, even though, as opposed to Brandnew’s strategy, it begins with, and purports to be focused on and empathetic toward, consumers. Against this backdrop, in chapter 5 I address the puzzling fact that although business innovation is often decoupled from the market to which it purportedly refers, this decoupling has only partially undermined the perception of its value in and outside the business world. The reason lies in innovators’ efforts to signal to clients by means of different performative practices that “innovation is now taking place.” Drawing on fieldwork with both Brandnew and Newfound, I argue that innovators use specific material artifacts and communicative practices to mediate the notion that their expertise is based in the ideals of flexibility, speed, minimalism, free information flow, and organizational creativity. However, these acts of mediation also have unintended consequences. They clutter the work of innovation and create centers of gravity, opacity, and rigidness. In other words, they both mediate and undermine the ideals with which innovators would like to be associated. I explore this contradiction as it finds expression in innovators’ efforts to mediate their workspace, expert body of knowledge, thought processes, and selves as organizationally creative. In chapter 6 I look at the migration of norms and practices of routinized business innovation outside the business world as a consequence of the rising prestige, visibility, and bulletproof status of those norms and prac-

18 / Introduction

tices. I provide an in-­depth analysis of “life design,” a set of commercially successful strategies developed by business innovators to help individuals “innovate” their lives and thereby achieve happiness. I argue that the same modern-­Romantic notions of the self that provided innovation consultants with a model of creative potentiality and the cultural conditions of possibility for developing design thinking strategies for innovating technologies are now ironically being transformed as a result of the fact that the self has become the subject of those strategies as if it were a technology in need of innovation. The chapter unpacks what reflexivity means for the self as technology, what constitutes a well-­designed life, what prototyping potential future lives entails, how the normative ideals of speed and instantaneity that suffuse business innovation affect notions of self-­transformation when one’s life is approached as an object of innovation, what the presentation of self in the quest for a well-­designed life means when it is the object of brainstorming sessions, and what socioeconomic conditions of possibility enable such a method of “self-­innovation,” to begin with. In the conclusion I first tease out a number of theoretical points about routinized business innovation. I then provide a general sociological argument about the function that innovation consultancies perform in the business world, namely, the function of an institutional myth that organizations are ready to embrace as a ritualized, though not necessarily effective, way to cope with the uncertainty and ambiguity that pervade business innovation. The conclusion ends by drawing parallels between knowledge production in anthropology and the arguments made in the book about knowledge production in business innovation. Based on this comparison, I argue that business innovation provides a cautionary tale in light of which recent calls made by anthropologists to revamp and “innovate” anthropological training and work in the model of design should be critiqued.

“How Did You Get from the Village Vanguard to Wall Street?” The person asking me this question, a chief innovation officer in a Fortune 500 company whom I met in an innovation workshop, was not interested in the actual route one should take if one wanted to go from the Village Vanguard jazz club, located in Manhattan’s West Village, to the city’s financial hub on and around Wall Street in Manhattan’s downtown. A New Yorker for many years, this person could probably generate the shortest and most efficient route in an instant. Rather, he asked me this question after I had described to him my previous research on the rise of academic jazz music

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 19

programs in the United States (Wilf 2014a). His question was a figurative expression of his surprise at the, on the surface, total disconnect between my previous and current research. To him, the short physical distance between those iconic meccas of the jazz and business worlds was in inverse proportion to what he considered to be the long conceptual distance that separated them. And yet, as I argue in the remainder of this chapter, throughout the twentieth century the conceptual distance between the two worlds has gradually become smaller as a result of a series of transformations in the ways in which organizational and management theorists understood and managed the business organization with respect to the role of creative uncertainty. Those transformations culminated in the idea that business organizations should adopt some of the organizational features that are found in the creative arts in general and jazz music in particular if they want to boost their organizational creativity and potential to innovate. These conceptual shifts heralded the transformation of creativity into an alienable means of capitalist production and of business innovation into a key dimension of the business world, thus providing an important contextual and historical backdrop for the story told in this book.

Contexts and Histories: From Designing Predictability to Incorporating Uncertainty Joseph Schumpeter has provided an early and highly influential definition of business innovation. Innovation, according to Schumpeter, is the creation of any new economic structure that can be monetized and commercialized. Such structures can include “the introduction of new commodities[,] . . . technological change in the production of commodities already in use, the opening up of new markets or of new sources of supply, Taylorization of work, improved handling of material, the setting up of new business organizations such as department stores—in short, any ‘doing things differently’ in the realm of economic life—all these are instances of what we shall refer to by the term Innovation” (Schumpeter 1939, 84). The notion of innovation as something that is not limited to technological change in a narrow sense has recently found expression in Clayton Christensen’s (1997) highly influential book The Innovator’s Dilemma, in which he clarifies that “technology . . . means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value. . . . This concept of technology therefore extends beyond engineering

20 / Introduction

and manufacturing to encompass a range of marketing, investment, and managerial processes. Innovation refers to a change in one of these technologies” (xiii). Throughout the twentieth century (i.e., before the recent exponential rise in the number and visibility of innovation consultants), different kinds of professionals—such as psychologists, sociologists, economists, designers, and organizational theorists—had already developed and disseminated business innovation as a policy-­driven concept (Godin 2008, 41; Scott 2003, 38). Two strands of research played a particularly important role in this history: (1) economics and (2) management and organizational research. Economists contributed to the study of innovation via the quantification and measurement of productivity in relation to technological change and its commercialization (Christensen 1997; Godin 2008, 34; Schumpeter 1939). Meanwhile, organization and management theorists worked to identify and design organizational models that could boost productivity. Although organization studies did not exist as an institutionalized scholarly field until the late 1940s, by that time the subject already had important precursory work in the contributions of administrative and management theorists (such as Frederick Taylor), who, from the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, attempted to formulate managerial principles and rationalize and standardize production. These theorists approached organizations as instruments designed to attain specific and predetermined goals in the most efficient and rational way, which was itself amenable to clear formulation. Taylor’s scientific management of production was “the culmination of a series of developments occurring in the United States between 1880 and 1920 in which engineers took the lead in endeavoring to rationalize industrial organizations” (Scott 2003, 38; see also Shenhav 1999). The image of the organization as a well-­ oiled machine in which different parts work in precise and reliable coordination with one another and nothing is left to chance governed these engineers’ vision. They restructured the tasks workers performed as well as the design of the workspace in an attempt to facilitate efficient and reliable coordination. Ultimately, they also restructured the principles of managerial decision-­making. Taylor famously argued that under scientific management arbitrary power, arbitrary dictation, ceases; and every single subject, large and small, becomes the question for scientific investigation, for reduction to law. . . . The man at the head of the business under scientific management is governed by rules and laws which have been developed through hundreds of experiments just as much as the workman is,

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 21 and the standards which have been developed are equitable. (Quoted in Scott 2003, 39)

Their goal was to reduce uncertainty and even eliminate it entirely or, if it should arise, to resolve it by means of predetermined, rational procedures. Industrial psychologists influenced subsequent approaches to organizational design. As opposed to their predecessors, they viewed the organization as a much more complex entity. They highlighted the existence of discrepancies between intended organizational goals and the goals organizations actually pursue and between the ideal of formal structure and the reality of informal structure. Key among those industrial psychologists was Elton Mayo, who, through a series of studies, demonstrated that individuals do not always function as atomistic, rational, and economic agents but rather follow a complex set of motivations that involve feelings and sentiments that are based in group solidarity (Scott 2003, 62). Mayo’s findings led to a heightened focus on the capacity of managerial leadership to influence the behavior of subordinates. Managers were encouraged to be more sensitive to workers’ psychological and social needs. This organizational perspective highlighted emotional control, anger management, empathy, and strong interpersonal skills as key managerial resources (Illouz 2008). It subsequently led to managerial notions such as job enrichment, employees’ participation in decision-­making, and work satisfaction. In contrast to the rational system approach, this framework acknowledged uncertainty as a possible component of organizational reality. However, similar to the rational system approach, its goal was to train managers and restructure the work environment in such a way that this uncertainty would not arise or, if it should arise, it could immediately be resolved by managers who were equipped with adequate emotional skills. In contrast, the third dominant approach in organization studies, which emerged after World War II, conceptualized the business organization as an entity whose logic encompasses uncertainty and flexibility not as undesirable features but as natural components that provide a crucial resource for the organization’s survival (Scott 2003, 82–101). Inspired by cybernetics and information theory, this approach emphasized the distinction between different systems in terms of their complexity. In less complex systems such as simple machines, the interdependence between parts is rigid, and the behavior of each part is highly constrained. These systems are nonreactive to their environment. They function well in stable environments and are suitable for the completion of predetermined, unchanging tasks according to predetermined schemes of operation. In contrast, in more complex

22 / Introduction

systems such as social systems and business organizations, the interdependence between parts is less constrained. These systems are loosely coupled and flexible. Uncertainty is one of their key dimensions. Proponents of this approach viewed uncertainty as an organizational resource rather than an anomaly that must be eliminated as quickly as possible. They argued that complex systems can successfully cope with and even mobilize uncertainty because they are able to process informational input of different kinds— both internally and externally derived—and thus change their means for the attainment of specific goals and the goals themselves according to shifting contextual conditions (cf. Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002, 189). A significant share of organizational theory subsequently focused on determining proper work flows, control systems, and information-­processing templates in relation to human individuals’ ability to manage and capitalize on uncertainty. Karl Weick, one of the key figures in this strand of research, argued that “the basic raw materials on which organizations operate are informational inputs that are ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal”; hence, the goal of organizing should be to establish “a workable level of certainty” in the context of which human individuals could function well (Weick 1969, 40; see also Scott 2003, 98). On the one hand, theorists pointed to the limitations of human individuals as information processors in terms of their “low channel capacity, lack of reliability, and poor computational ability”; on the other hand, they pointed to the advantages of “the human element,” such as “its large memory capacity, its large repertory of responses, its flexibility in relating these responses to information inputs, and its ability to react creatively when the unexpected is encountered” (Haberstroh 1965, 1176; see also Scott 2003, 95). They consequently defined the outstanding task for system designers as “how to create structures that will overcome the limitations and exploit the strengths of each system component, including the individual participants” (Scott 2003, 95). Inspired by nascent psychological research on creativity (Guilford 1950; Osborn 1953; Rossman 1935), they approached “individual participants,” especially their potential to act creatively, as crucial resources that can enable business organizations to function better vis-­à-­vis the increased uncertainty and volatility that characterize their institutional environment. Significantly, a key strand in this research agenda turned to the creative arts in general, and jazz improvisation in particular, as sources of inspiration for the design of organizational structures that could cultivate and tap into employees’ ability to respond flexibly to conflicting and ambiguous information inputs and “to react creatively when the unexpected is encountered” (Haberstroh 1965, 1176). Theorists argued that the jazz template

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 23

could provide inspiration for the design of business organizational structures that were not only flexible enough to cope with unexpected events but also capable of producing unexpected or “virtual” events in the form of novel ideas for new products. These ideas could then be developed into innovations in fields in which to remain stagnant is to perish (Akgun et al. 2007; Dyba 2000; Kamoche and Cunha 2001; Mantere, Sillince, and Hamalainen 2007; Moorman and Miner 1998).

Incorporating Jazz Improvisation At the 1995 Academy of Management National Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a symposium titled “Jazz as a Metaphor for Organizing in the 21st Century” took place. The symposium consisted of a series of scholarly presentations, “a demonstration and discussion of jazz improvisation by panelists who were professional jazz musicians, followed by a concert and social event during which these musicians regaled the audience with superb jazz” (Meyer, Frost, and Weick 1998, 540). The presentations, together with additional articles on this topic, were eventually published in the top-­tier journal Organization Science. The authors explained that the symposium had been organized in response to the significant changes in the nature of the challenges that organizations would have to cope with in the twenty-­first century. As one author put it, to come up with organizational models that would be adequate to this changing environment, we need a model of a group of diverse specialists living in a chaotic, turbulent environment; making fast, irreversible decisions; highly interdependent on one another to interpret equivocal information; dedicated to innovation and the creation of novelty. Jazz players do what managers find themselves doing: fabricating and inventing novel responses without a prescripted plan and without certainty of outcomes; discovering the future that their action creates as it unfolds. (Barrett 1998, 605)

Elsewhere the same author added The mechanistic, bureaucratic model for organizing—in which people do routine, repetitive tasks, in which rules and procedures are devised to handle contingencies, and in which managers are responsible for planning, monitoring and creating command and control systems to guarantee compliance—is no longer adequate. Managers will face more rather than less interactive complexity and uncertainty. This suggests that jazz improvisation is a useful meta-

24 / Introduction phor for understanding organizations interested in learning and innovation. To be innovative, managers—like jazz musicians—must interpret vague cues, face unstructured tasks, process incomplete knowledge, and yet they must take action anyway. (Barrett 1998, 620; see also Weick 1998)

The term jazz music encompasses a wide range of stylistic genres and is thus a fuzzy category with porous boundaries. Almost all of the organizational theorists who turned to jazz in search of organizational models focused on straight-­ahead jazz, in which a group of musicians improvise on a given (“standard”) tune that consists of a melody and a basic harmonic sequence (a string of chords). Players improvise on these minimal structures by using a stock of conventional building blocks such as short phrases and modes of articulation, which they combine in inventive ways and in response to the real-­time contribution of their bandmates. The real-­time, improvised nature of this art form means that it is inherently an emergent phenomenon; that is, it results in new meaningful structures that to a great extent cannot be anticipated in advance. Although it is not creation ex nihilo because mature improvisers must master different stylistic conventions and have a thorough knowledge of the canon, the actual outcome of group improvisation remains uncertain and unpredictable. Its creativity resides precisely in these features.6 Organizational theorists who turned to the jazz metaphor usually relied on ethnographies of jazz improvisation or their own experience as semiprofessional jazz musicians to emphasize a number of jazz’s features that are related to the uncertainty that pervades it and that is constitutive of jazz’s very creativity.7 For example, Barrett (1998, 609–12) enumerates a number of features of jazz improvisation that are directly related to creative uncertainty and follows these with concrete advice on how these features can be used in organizational design. First, Barrett argues that jazz musicians intentionally disrupt their habituated playing patterns and put themselves in unfamiliar musical situations that are likely to produce errors and unexpected outcomes. They keep pushing themselves beyond their own comfort zone and thus ensure that their playing does not become stagnant and predictable. Second, musicians use the unexpected outcomes and errors that result from this emphasis as resources and musical opportunities to redefine the context: something that at one point seems like an error subsequently becomes coherent within this new context. In this way, musicians constantly generate and develop new meaningful structures. Third, musicians use minimal structures of communication and planning, which foster flexibility and indeterminacy. A player has only a tune’s basic harmonic

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 25

structure and melody to improvise on as well as the ongoing contribution of his bandmates. These minimal structures foster uncertainty of information. Fourth, the jazz band is structured around distributed task negotiation and synchronization between bandmates. This means that information constantly flows in all directions rather than hierarchically. With respect to each of these features, Barrett makes concrete suggestions for organizational design whose goal is to infuse the business organization with creativity and to create the organizational conditions of possibility for continued innovation. First, organizational leaders must encourage and require their employees to abandon habituated modes of doing things and instead to take risks. Second, they must change their modes of evaluating their employees by treating the latter’s errors as an inseparable part of learning rather than as punishable events. This recommendation first treats errors as an inevitable outcome of learning and then embraces them as a resource. By creating “organizational climates that value errors as a source of learning . . . organizational leaders can create an aesthetic of imperfection and an aesthetic of forgiveness that construes errors as a source of learning that might open new lines of inquiry” (Barrett 1998, 619).8 Third, organizational leaders must develop the equivalent of minimal structures that will sustain maximum flexibility and maintain ambiguity while providing employees with sufficient orientation. Such equivalent structures might be “credos, stories, myths, visions, slogans, mission statements, trademarks” (612). Fourth, organizational leaders must cultivate a work environment characterized by “distributed, multiple leadership in which people take turns leading various projects as their expertise is needed” (618). These and similar recommendations were the outcome of the paradigmatic shift in organization studies that culminated in the realization that contingency and uncertainty have become part and parcel of the environments within which many organizations must function and that a flexible organizational structure has a better chance of coping with such environments for two reasons. First, a flexible organization can better respond to unexpected events in its external and internal environments. Second, it can generate unexpected events that are essential for innovation. Many programmatic calls for business organizations to adopt organizational models from the jazz world and the creative arts have been motivated by the hope that such models can foster a culture of innovation and new product development. If the jazz band enables musicians to produce unexpected events continuously and then to elaborate some of these events into new meaningful structures, then, it is hoped, an organization that adopts the jazz band’s organizational model might be able to produce unexpected ideas continu-

26 / Introduction

ously and then develop them into viable innovations in business sectors and niches in which to remain stagnant is to perish. It is for this reason that organizational models inspired by jazz improvisation have been discussed predominantly in the context of “new product development in turbulent environments” (Akgun et al. 2007; Moorman and Miner 1998), “product innovation” (Kamoche and Cunha 2001), and the functioning of small software organizations (Dyba 2000) rather than in the context of organizational change in general (Mantere, Sillince, and Hamalainen 2007). The distinction anthropologists have made between “possible uncertainty” and “potential uncertainty” can clarify the appeal of this organizational strategy. Whereas “possible uncertainty . . . is dependent on past knowledge, calculation, and evaluation (the chances of a particular risk being realized),” “potential uncertainty, by contrast, does not derive from the question of whether one future possibility or another will be realized (as in the case of possible uncertainty) but from a virtual domain with the capacity to generate a broad variety of actualizations” (Samimian-­Darash 2013, 4, emphasis added). The “actualizations” that this “virtual domain” can generate may have never taken place before and hence are not known and cannot be known in advance. Creativity in jazz is based in “potential uncertainty.” Organizational theorists found inspiration in the idea that the jazz band functions as a “virtual domain” in which musicians can generate a wide variety of new and hitherto unthought-­of musical events and then develop them into new structures whose full meaning becomes apparent only retrospectively because of their emergent nature: The improviser can begin by playing a virtual random series of notes, with little or no intention as how it will unfold. These notes become the material to be shaped and worked out, like pieces of a puzzle. The improviser begins to enter into a dialogue with her material: prior selections begin to fashion subsequent ones as these are aligned and reframed in relation to prior patterns. (Barrett 1998, 615, emphasis added)

Organizational theorists found jazz’s “virtual domain” appealing in light of their belief that in turbulent environments that require organizations to incessantly develop new products, services, and structures, organizational structures that engage with uncertainty only in the form of calculating the chances of the realization of a particular possibility that is already formulated and imagined in advance (“possible uncertainty”) might not be very useful. Although managers certainly make conjectures about what might be “the next big thing” and are engaged in calculating the probability that this

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 27

or that next “big thing” will actually materialize, to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, their organizations must also develop structures that can constantly generate new events that were not hitherto thought of and allow for their development into new products.9 Some of the innovators I worked with specifically referred to the stage in the innovation process in which ideas for new products and services are generated as “the virtual situation,” thus pointing at the fact that “potential uncertainty” rather than “possible uncertainty” was the form of uncertainty to which they oriented their professional practice. The organizational need to foster this specific configuration of creative uncertainty and virtuality that will give rise to hitherto unimagined events explains why many organizational theorists have turned to the creative arts in general in search of new organizational models. Modern Western art is based in the Romantic idea of the creative, as opposed to the imitative, imagination (Abrams 1971). Whereas the imitative form of imagination entails the representation of existing worlds, the creative form of imagination entails the creation of new, hitherto unimagined worlds. I will discuss these and related modern-­Romantic normative ideals of creativity in detail in subsequent chapters, for they provided some of the cultural conditions of possibility for the innovation strategies that the innovators I worked with developed. The intimate historical and cultural links between routinized business innovation and normative ideals and practices of creative agency have contributed to making business innovation a powerful cultural trope that has captured the imagination of business executives and the wider public. At the same time, these links have also produced significant complications for innovation consultants who have to convince their potential clients that they have developed the means to routinize creativity and transform it from a mercurial human faculty, as it has for long been understood in the modern Western popular imagination, into a reliable and stable organizational source of ideas for new products and services. Before unpacking these contradictions, however, it is first necessary to have a better sense of what routinized business innovation strategies actually look like and what their added value for business organizations might be.

ONE

Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan Planned Accidents Are Good to Innovate With

A Cheeseburger Soaked in Water In March, 2013, I participated in a three-­day innovation workshop organized by Brandnew in a hotel in downtown Manhattan. For a long time I could not bring myself to book a flight from Tel Aviv to New York to attend Brandnew’s workshops given the long time that I would have to spend on airplanes, let alone the jet lag that would await me. However, after receiving another email from Brandnew announcing one of their approaching workshops, I decided to book a flight, hoping that my decision would not result in a major waste of time and resources. And so it happened that on a cold and bright early morning I left my hotel in downtown Manhattan in a foggy cognitive state, having barely slept the previous night. After a short walk, I entered another hotel and, after losing my way in a maze of corridors, finally arrived at a conference hall where I found most of the workshop participants—twenty-­four business people, some of whom were chief innovation officers in Fortune 500 companies—already seated at the tables that were arranged in a semicircle facing the four facilitators. After all the participants had arrived, the facilitators asked them to briefly pre­sent their names, the companies they worked for, and their roles. Following this presentation, the facilitators devoted the next few sessions to explaining the origins and principles of Brandnew’s signature innovation strategy in very broad brushstrokes that did not reveal any concrete applicable tools. During the short breaks between those sessions, some of the participants muttered to one another that they were losing their patience. They wanted to see the tangible results that they would be able to produce by means of whatever it was that Brandnew had to offer. Perhaps sensing this general mood, Tom, a facilitator in his early forties, opened the last session of the first day by announcing, to everyone’s relief: “And now we will

Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan / 29

get our hands dirty. Find a partner and within thirty seconds find a product that your company does not make but which you like, and make sure to discuss what you like about it. It should cost less than fifty dollars.” The participants grouped themselves in pairs and followed Tom’s instructions. My partner was Angela, a woman in her early fifties who was a chief innovation officer in a major pharmaceutical company. Angela immediately suggested a cheeseburger as our product. She did not tell me what she liked about it, perhaps because she thought it was self-­evident. Tom then asked the participants to describe some of the products they chose. He then gave them further instructions: “Your next task is to make one change to your product—you’re going to innovate now—this is the part where we become innovative!” He laughed. “Your task is to make one change to your product, but that change has to ruin it. It will make it absolutely horrible. That’s going to be your innovation. Make a horrible product by means of one change to the thing that you love.” I turned to Angela to discuss how to change the cheeseburger but it was clear that she had already had something in mind. She told me with a smile, “Let’s soak it in water, the bun and the beef, everything. This seems like a nice way to ruin a good cheeseburger, no?” I agreed. Soaking a cheeseburger in water seemed like an excellent way to ruin it. Tom continued by instructing everyone, “Now you get a full minute to take the ruined version of your product—don’t change it anymore, you’re stuck with it—but think of somebody who would be willing to pay you money to buy that product. So you have to identify what’s good about it, what’s better about it compared with the original product, why someone would be willing to pay for it. But,” he cautioned, “the person who is going to pay for it can’t be a masochist and it can’t be used as a paperweight—it has to have a real use, OK? There has to be a real market that is willing to pay real money for this ruined version of your product. And if you have extra time you can name it and come up with a campaign.” Angela and I turned to our soaked cheeseburger. Who would be willing to pay for such a disaster? The mere thought of our “product” was unpleasant. After a few minutes of reluctantly tossing around ideas in which neither of us truly believed, Angela, knowing that we had to come up with something in the next ten seconds, suggested in an almost apologetic tone, “How about branding it as a combination of food and drink for the person on the go?” She paused, almost too embarrassed to continue. “That way, you get your food and liquids at the same time,” she finished her thoughts. We remained silent. I wondered if the rest of the workshop would be as senseless as this exercise and if I had made my long journey for nothing.

30 / Chapter One

After collecting a few ideas—all unconvincing—Tom gave the participants a long explanation about the rationale behind the exercise. He started with a reassurance: “This was a silly exercise but it demonstrates one of the most fundamental principles of our method, which we will now learn.” Angela and I listened attentively, eager to learn what kind of principle could justify ruining a perfectly fine cheeseburger.

Accidents Are Good to Think With Tom explained that one of the key obstacles that prevent people from coming up with innovative ideas for new products and services is different kinds of cognitive fixedness they have with respect to existing products and services. One type of fixedness is “structural fixedness,” which prompts people to approach an existing product or service as something whose parts can be arranged temporally or spatially in only one way: “Structural fixedness, like all types of fixedness, is usually there for a very good reason—or at least at one point in history it was there for a very good reason.” Tom showed a slide with a picture of a refrigerator from the 1970s. “We like to show refrigerator freezers as an example of structural fixedness because decades after the first refrigerator was invented, where was the freezer placed? On top. Until at some point somebody said, ‘Maybe they can be side by side, maybe on the bottom,’” he said while showing a slide with a picture of a new refrigerator model. “Why did it persevere for so long, the freezer on top? What was the original refrigerator? An icebox. And you wanted the ice block to be on top because of physics—cold air dropping down. And later, even though they had compressors rather than ice blocks, it didn’t matter because they still saw it as one piece—the freezer on top.” Gabriella, a facilitator in her late thirties, added that because of such fixedness, “you have to find a different trigger, a different starting point to come up with something surprising.” Asking consumers what new things they might want or letting product developers hypothesize about this might yield a steady stream of ideas, but those ideas are likely to be identical to existing products and services because of consumers’ and product developers’ cognitive fixedness. If a product’s form becomes ossified and taken for granted, Gabriella explained, then a good strategy for coming up with innovative ideas about this product would be to cast its form into doubt by changing it, much like accidents might do. “Are you familiar with the example of the Post-­it or sticky notes?” she asked. A few of the participants smiled affirmatively. “They were actually looking for more adhesive glue, but they accidentally came up with the weaker glue. In a way, it was a ruined product, but it was also an oppor-

Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan / 31

tunity because it could provide an answer for the need for the sticky notes. So a manufacturing error can be a very solid trigger for a new product.” This idea intrigued me. How can a manufacturing error be approached as a feature rather than a bug? “Accidents are basically opportunities for innovation,” Gabriella continued. “Things that are broken are opportunities for doing things that are better. Now,” she said in a reassuring voice, “we are not in the business of just ruining products or making bad things happen around us and saying, ‘Wow, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to us.’ We are actually doing the manipulation of form using thinking tools and templates in a systematic way.” Tom added that Brandnew’s method of innovation (henceforth the Method) consisted of strategies of systematically engineering “in our minds” hypothetical accidents in existing products and services. Those hypothetical accidents are likely to trigger innovative ideas for new products and services by prompting the innovator to find the function that a “ruined” product or service might be able to perform for a consumer. The invention of the Post-­it notes by the company 3M has become a popular case study in the business management literature on innovation (Molotch 2003, 45), one that many of the workshop participants were familiar with. Gabriella used this case study to make it clear that the Method approached accidents as an effective trigger for innovation. In the business innovation class I attended, whose focus was the Method, the teacher, Dan, a man in his late fifties who is an internationally recognized expert in marketing research, new product development, and diffusion of innovation, discussed another standard case study of accidental innovation, Ivory soap, whose floating features are believed to be the result of a manufacturing accident. Like the Post-­it note, Ivory soap is frequently found in lists of “products [that] were happy accidents” (Wong 2011). After describing to the students the story of Ivory soap, Dan concluded, “So the process was the same—there was an accident and someone tried to understand the benefit of this accident. The point is that I do not have to wait for this accident. I can generate in my mind all the right accidents using specific kinds of templates.” To paraphrase Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s (1991, 89) statement about the function of animals in myths, accidents are good to think with in the world of business innovation. In these and other commentaries Brandnew’s innovators reassured their audience that the fact that the Method approaches accidents as an effective trigger for innovation does not mean that it is based on random trial-­and-­ error experimentation. As Gabriella told the workshop participants, “we are not in the business of just ruining products or making bad things happen

32 / Chapter One

around us and saying, ‘Wow, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to us.’ We are actually doing the manipulation of form using thinking tools and templates in a systematic way.” Brandnew’s method of innovation is based in the notion (unpacked in detail in chap. 3) that it is possible to generate ideas for innovative products based on the careful and systematic analysis of the history of the formal changes that successful products went through in the past. Such an analysis allows the innovator to detect the patterns that underlie the “evolution” of successful products, synthesize those patterns into a limited number of “templates,” and methodically apply those templates to existing products to change their form. By trying to think of the functions that the new and, initially, strange forms might be able to perform for consumers, the innovator can generate ideas for how existing products might “evolve” into “future” innovative products. An example frequently used by Brandnew’s facilitators is the promise by Domino’s Pizza to reduce the price of its pizza whenever delivery takes longer than thirty minutes. An analysis of this innovation reveals that it is based on the creation of a new dependency between two components of the product that were previously independent of each other: the price of pizza and the time of delivery of the pizza. The Method stipulates that many innovative products are based on this formal transformation, which can be synthesized into a template. This template can be applied to existing products and services from highly different domains (including to existing innovation strategies) in order to generate ideas for their future innovative versions. An example of a potential innovation generated based on this template would be a drinking glass whose color turns red when the temperature of the liquid it contains is above a certain threshold. A new dependency is thereby created between two previously unrelated components of the product: the glass’s color and the temperature of the liquid it contains.1 At the same time, Brandnew’s facilitators made it clear that a modicum of contingency does play a role in the Method. This is why they found it useful to use the trope of the accident as a chance-­based event that can function as “a very solid trigger” for generating ideas for new products by breaking people’s “cognitive fixedness” or habituated modes of thinking about existing products. Their expert knowledge, so they argued, consists of their ability to develop strategies that generate a delicate balance between predictability and unpredictability, or what I call “structured contingency.”2 To be sure, societies have found different ways of facilitating structured contingency that might be conducive to cultural creativity. For example, Ulf Hannerz has argued that the modern city, and certain sites within the city,

Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan / 33

can be regarded as social structures for organizing and generating productive contingency: The café . . . the amateur society for learning, the book store, the feuilleton can thus all serve as the instruments or arenas of quickened and not very predictable cultural flow. In a way, as Simmel suggested, urban life as a whole can be richly serendipitous, involving accidental and unexpected experiences and discoveries. Yet institutions like these bring an even greater concentration of this quality of life. (Hannerz 1992, 209–10)

Indeed, a key trend in contemporary managerial theories and practices has focused on the purposeful engineering of productive contingency precisely along the model of the Viennese café of the late nineteenth century. For example, an increasing number of biosciences buildings are designed today specifically “to encourage creative sociability arising out of and fueling further unpredictable interactions. From cafes to temporary dens to informal meeting rooms to walkways that force their denizens to interact, the idea is clearly to encourage a ‘buzz’ of continuous conversation oriented to ‘transactional knowledge’ and, it is assumed, innovation” (Thrift 2006, 293; see also Eagle 2004; Lange 2016). These are strategies of “not so much taming as harnessing chanciness to produce ‘small miracles’” (Thrift 2006, 286). However, the Method is different from these forms of facilitating structured contingency. Consider the fact that Hannerz has argued that although purposefully walking to a café might seem to border “on the nonserendipitous,” “it is on the whole an undirected search, a strategy of situating oneself on the scene of surprises” (Hannerz 1992, 210). He has made this qualification to redeem rather than condemn this strategy, that is, to legitimize it as a genuine strategy of cultural productivity that is akin to experiencing the “urban swirl” because it is unhindered, “undirected,” by preexisting guidelines or blueprints (Hannerz 1992, 171–216; Welz 2003). In contrast, it is precisely because such strategies are too open ended and unreliable in terms of producing a stable pipeline of innovative ideas that the innovators I worked with do not plunge into the “urban swirl” that is beyond the walls of their conference rooms or make do with chance interactions with people from different departments in their business organizations when they need to innovate. They prefer instead to develop and master rational rules and procedures for generating a very specific form of structured contingency that can systematically and reliably produce ideas for new consumer products, services, and processes across different domains. Understood in these

34 / Chapter One

terms, routinized business innovation emerges as an undertheorized form of cultural creativity.

A Challenge to Anthropological Theories of Innovation In anthropology, innovation has frequently been discussed in the context of studies of cultural evolution and change. One intellectual source of modern studies of cultural evolution and change can be traced to early anthropological efforts to theorize cultural diffusion and similarity. Anthropologists considered cultural similarity between different groups to be the result of diffusion and dissemination of cultural elements rather than independent invention in multiple loci. They similarly thought of cultural dissimilarity as more likely to be the result of copying errors in the process of diffusion (Boas 1896; Kroeber 1940). These early theories thus deferred “explanation of local changes with reference to diffusion from afar. Independent invention was recognized as an alternative to diffusion, but little effort was made to theorize innovation” (Fitzhugh and Trusler 2009, 203). This early focus on “diffusion from afar” and neglect of “independent invention” comes to the fore in a report supervised by Margaret Mead, Boas’s student, in 1953 for UNESCO, titled Cultural Patterns and Technical Change. The report focuses on “the ways in which changed agricultural or industrial practices, new public health procedures, new methods of child and maternal health care, and fundamental education” (Mead 1953, 12) can be introduced by external experts to cultures “in areas of the world which can visibly benefit from the knowledge which the peoples of other areas have” (9), using contextually sensitive knowledge about such cultures so that they “will be disrupted as little as possible” (12). The report’s description of the attitudes toward change in five cultures or case-­studies is telling. These cultures either introduce change on the individual rather than societal level (75), “cope” with unforeseen events via unsystematic improvisation that essentially leaves the cultural status quo intact (109), copy new practices from “neighbouring tribes” but only insofar as these practices can find a place within the existing cultural “pattern” (140, 168), embrace change when it doesn’t fit the cultural pattern only when it is introduced by “conquerors . . . by fiat” (140), or embrace and assimilate “foreign ways” (149) rather than invent new ways in the context of an “unshaken conviction that new ways do not mean the dissolution of [the] society” (150). The possibility of independent invention, let alone its theorization, is entirely ignored. In another intellectual source of anthropological studies of cultural evolution and change—one that was more directly evolutionary in its concep-

Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan / 35

tual orientation—the question of the mechanisms that may account for the actual process of invention and innovation was either posited as irrelevant or glossed as the product of accident (Morgan [1877] 1985; Tylor 1916; White 1943). Thus, Leslie White argued that whatever may have been the intentions and motives (if any) of the inventors or discoverers of the bow and arrow, the wheel, the furnace and forge, the steam engine, the microscope, etc., the fact remains that these things have been seized upon by mankind and employed to make life more secure, comfortable, pleasant, and permanent. So we may disregard the psychological circumstances under which new cultural devices were brought into being. What is significant to the cultural evolutionist is that inventions and discoveries have been made . . . and that these improved tools and techniques are kept and used until they are in turn replaced. (White 1943, 340)

When White cursorily addressed the mechanisms that could underlie invention, he did so with the qualification that “we do not say that man deliberately set about to improve his culture,” adding that “whim, caprice, accident, and play” are more probable sources of invention and innovation (White 1940, 339). Contemporary scholars of cultural evolution and change have developed a more sophisticated understanding of “rates of change, rates of error during transmission, what conditions might foster greater or slower rates of error, [and] different transmission mechanisms” (Eerkens and Lipo 2007, 241). They have done so by drawing on Darwinian models of evolution and by taking as an analytical unit of study “the actions and decisions of individuals” instead of “culture” as a bounded entity (ibid.). However, even these more recent studies of cultural evolution have left the purposeful generation of innovations undertheorized. They have tended to gloss innovation as the contingent and accidental product of individuals’ experimentation with existing practices and knowledge or, yet again, copying errors in the process of social learning. Given the fact that these theories have drawn their inspiration from theories of evolution in which sources of novelty are mostly attributed to chance (e.g., copying errors of genetic material qua mutations that are selected for the competitive advantage they provide), the fact that they have left purposeful innovation undertheorized is not surprising. Consequently, as in early anthropological theories of cultural diffusion and similarity, “the process of innovation [has been] left outside the explanatory frame of reference” (Fitzhugh and Trusler 2009, 205). Indeed, even when these theories have focused on evolutionary forces that are “non-

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random”—such as “guided variation” (Richerson and Boyd 2005, 69), that is, “individual trial-­and-­error learning and the selective retention of behaviors found to be successful” (Larson 2010, 71)—the result has been conceptually remote from the institutionalized—that is, purposeful and systematic—production of innovations that routinized business innovation entails (Boyd and Richerson 1988, 81–98; O’Brien and Shennan 2010, 10; Richerson and Boyd 2005, 115; Schiffer 2010, 238).3 A number of economists have developed evolutionary theories of routinized or institutionalized innovation. For example, Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter (1985, 129) have offered a theory that emphasizes “the subtler connections between routinization and innovation,” ultimately indicating “how the existence of innovative activity relates . . . to the general image of firm behavior as governed by routine.” However, whereas their theory points to the “way in which the routine functioning of an organization can contribute to the emergence of innovation in that useful questions arise in the form of puzzles or anomalies relating to prevailing routines” (Nelson and Winter 1985, 129), many business innovation strategies consist of routines of purposefully producing puzzles or anomalies whose solutions can function as innovations. How they do so has remained mostly unexamined. Similarly, theories that point to lead users as “the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products” (von Hippel 2005, 2) do not address the question of how such users do so. These approaches are limited to recommended ways for “systematically searching for innovations developed by lead users” (von Hippel 2005, 133; see also Rogers 2003, 137–45), thereby leaving out the structures that can lead to the systematic production of innovations. The same lacuna characterizes arguments made by economic anthropologists who have reacted against the emphasis on “an undescribed process of random trial and error” that is prevalent in theories of cultural evolution by approaching individuals as agents who “consciously calculate efficient methods to solve environmental problems” (Chibnik 1981, 256, 257–58). For example, Michael Chibnik has argued that “the ethnographic evidence shows that when human groups or individuals first confront an unfamiliar environmental or sociopolitical problem, they conduct a variety of low-­cost experiments designed to gather information about the probable consequences of alternative responses. After assessing many such experiments, they develop cultural rules that guide decision making in similar situations” (Chibnik 1981, 256; see also Dewees and Hawkes 1988; Gladwin and Butler 1984, 208; Rogers 2003, 169). Hence, “novel experiments are the basic source of variation in cultural evolution” (Chibnik 1981, 258). This is

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an argument about the factors that determine how innovations are adopted and diffused (Chibnik 2011, 74; Henrich 2001). Yet again, what has remained unclear is how the innovations, which people weigh and assess via experiments—novel or not—are generated to begin with and whether innovations can be generated in the form of rule-­governed abstract strategies that are meant to be applied to a wide variety of objects and situations, including to themselves.4 Scholars of cultural evolution have only cursorily entertained the possibility of such an orientation. They have argued that humans “can acquire information as traits, sets of traits, or simply as rules on how to acquire additional traits or rules. . . . As a result, behaviors transmitted culturally have the potential to evolve (i.e., change) quicker than those passed on genetically” (Eerkens and Lipo 2007, 243, emphasis added). Innovation consultants who develop and teach corporate people general rules and strategies for how to innovate are the locus of production of this metalevel kind of knowledge that might be responsible for a faster pace of cultural evolution. Indeed, consider the fact that Brandnew’s facilitators emphasize the need to systematically problematize forms of cognitive fixedness in an effort to eliminate features of a product or a process that once had a crucial function but are now redundant (e.g., the location of a freezer at the top of a refrigerator). Their emphasis can be theorized with respect to the evolutionary phenomenon of vestigial features or skeuomorphs. These terms denote an “element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but [which] was essential to the object made from the original material” (Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland 2004, 8). Scholars of cultural evolution have discussed such features in relation to phenomena such as the institutionalization of the QWERTY keyboard layout that “was designed in the 19th century to reduce jamming of the hammers in typewriters by making typing as slow as possible” but which today, with the shift to computers, has lost its original function (ibid.). Innovators’ purposeful and reflexive knowledge of, and action on, potentially vestigial features of existing products suggest that their professional practice consists of a metalevel kind of knowledge that can accelerate the pace of cultural evolution. The purposeful, general, and routinized nature of this kind of business innovation also sets it apart from the numerous examples of serendipity in scientific discovery that historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have discussed at length and that might be relevant to many strands of business innovation in which scientific research plays a key role. These scholars have acknowledged the important role played by unanticipated

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facts or occurrences in the development of new scientific theories and findings. They have also emphasized how important it is for scientists to remain open to such facts and occurrences. However, they have not considered the possibility that scientists might be able to plan systematically potentially productive accidents (Merton and Barber 2004, 195–98; Rogers 2003, 137– 41). Indeed, scholars in this tradition have often explicitly stated that serendipity cannot be programmed or planned (Van Andel 1994, 646; see also Mendonça, Cunha, and Clegg 2008, 5; Merton and Barber 2004, 190–91; Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland 2004, 3; Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002, 195) but, rather, could at most be facilitated by creating conditions similar to those highlighted by Hannerz (1992) and Thrift (2006), that is, facilitating chance encounters between people (Eagle 2004; Rosenman 2001, 192) or unguided chance occurrences (Merton and Barber 2004, 192–93). Similarly, in her pioneering study of human-­machine interaction, Lucy Suchman has argued that “however planned, purposeful actions are inevitably situated actions. . . . The circumstances of our actions are never fully anticipated and are continuously changing around us” (Suchman 2006, 26). Suchman’s research has been crucial in setting an agenda for the study of the inherently embodied, material, distributed, and emergent nature of human action (cf. Lave and Wenger 1991). However, it has also led to the study of innovation mainly in terms of the emergent nature of problem-­ solving wherein problems are encountered rather than deliberately produced and precipitated. For example, in a research directly informed and commented on by Suchman, Julian Orr (1996, 3) has studied the ways in which technicians respond to “breakdowns of the interaction between customers and their [photocopying] machines.” Orr (1996, 2) has argued that “work in such circumstances is resistant to rationalization, since the expertise vital to such contingent and extemporaneous practice cannot be easily codified.” Although the practice of routinized innovation is also a form of “situated action,” one of its crucial dimensions is the production of ideas for new products by means of the rational, systematic, and rule-­governed production of problems.

How to Plan an Effective Accident: The Real-­Time (De)Formation of Newness This dimension found concrete, real-­time expression when Tom and the participants used the Method in a concrete mock innovation session. After he explained to us the rationale behind the “silly exercise” with which he opened the session, Tom continued to say that the first stage in planning an

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effective accident is taking inventory of the components of an existing product or service and writing these components, as well as the functional relationships between them, down on paper: “We always begin with an existing situation. It can be a product, a system, a process—anything that we want to innovate and can break into components. And the first thing we want to do is to create, in a very mechanical way, an inventory of everything we have. It’s a snapshot of the existing situation.” The reason this action constitutes the Method’s first stage, he explained, is that it forces the innovator to clearly outline the product’s form. Such an outline enables the innovator to effectively deform the product’s form, that is, to produce in his mind a potentially effective “accident” according to one of the templates that represent the kinds of formal transformation that products undergo during the process of becoming innovative products. This “accident” is likely to problematize different kinds of “cognitive fixedness” the innovator might have about this product and consequently prompt him to come up with innovative ideas for new products. Tom gave “Division” as an example for a tool or template that can problematize the type of fixedness he described with the example of the freezer, that is, “structural fixedness.” He explained: “Division is defined as—first we divide a product, process, or service into its components—that’s always going to be the first stage,” he reiterated. “But then we have to rearrange the parts either in time—so one component comes before the other and one component comes after the other, or in space—we put them in a different place within the structure.” The result is “something that we can visualize, describe, and put into words. It’s tangible enough that it has a kind of life in our minds, but only in our minds. It’s not the real product, we’re not going to prototype it yet, but we can actually describe it and visualize it.” Producing these “accidents” in one’s “mind” rather than in the “real world” is a faster and cheaper way to generate effective ideas for new products. After he finished his explanation, Tom paused for a minute to allow everyone to finish taking notes. He then told the participants that they would be using this template together to innovate a hypothetical business service. “So let’s say we’re an airline company,” he said, “and we want to create a new product or service. And we are trying to figure out how. That’s pretty much what we are starting with. So that’s our situation. What categories of components can we take? We are an airline company, so what can we do?” Terry, a man in his midtwenties who was the only participant from the start-­up world, raised his hand and said, “How about taking a process?” “So let’s say we are trying to work on a process,” Tom immediately replied. “So we’re an airline company and we want to create a new process that might

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lead to a new service or an improved process or service. And when we do that we have to define our starting point and our ending point; otherwise, it can pretty much go on forever. So let’s say that our starting point is the customer’s decision to go on vacation and our ending point is when the person arrives at his destination airport. Now, I made a decision to go on vacation, what’s my next step?” A few of the participants suggested different components, which Tom quickly wrote down on a whiteboard. After two minutes the list consisted of the following seventeen stages:

1 decision to go



2 research about destination



3 cost compare



4 ask for approval from boss



5 decide where to go



6 decide when



7 book it



8 pay



9 pack



10 home logistics



11 leave to the airport



12 arrive at airport



13 check in

14 security 15 board 16 fly

17 land—arrive at destination

Tom looked at the list and said: “So we have seventeen stages in our process. And now we are going to apply Division. What would we do in Division? Rearrange. What we know in Division is that we want to rearrange these components. Now,” Tom cautioned, “if we take these components and just throw them all in the air and see what order they fall back in, it would be a huge mess. That would be more like brainstorming—we don’t want to do that,” he laughed. “But we are going to randomly choose one stage and place it after another random stage. So, choose two numbers.” Mike, an executive in a large investment bank, quickly offered: “I want to pay first!” referring to the eighth stage on the list. “Wait, wait, wait! Just choose a number,” Tom resisted. “Seventeen!” Angela, who sat next to me, said loudly. “Seventeen, and?” Tom asked while he circled stage seventeen on the list. At this point Samantha, a chief innovation officer in an apparel

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company who sat farthest away from Tom, said something that was barely audible. Tom looked at her and said, “Five. So we are going to move seventeen over to after five.” As he was saying this, he circled stage five and drew arrows that indicated the change in the order of the stages. “I wasn’t saying five,” Samantha objected, “I was saying”—“It’s alright,” Tom interrupted her. “That’s what random means. Somebody says a number and you run with it. So what do we have here?” He looked at the newly arranged list. “Let’s try to describe it: you decided to go on vacation, you researched where, you compared the costs, you’ve gotten approval from your boss, you’ve decided where you’re going to go, and then you land there, and then you decide when you’re going to land there”—at this point some of the participants started to laugh—“and you book it and you go through the process. That looks quite strange,” Tom agreed, looking at the amused and incredulous participants. “But let’s try to hold on to this for a little bit, just for a few seconds, and see if we can interpret what it would mean to go through all this process of deciding where we want to go, immediately get there, and then go through other processes. What could that mean?” he looked at the participants with patience. There was an awkward silence. Some of the participants looked at one another uncomfortably. I suddenly had a flashback to the disappointment I had felt during the “silly exercise,” when Angela and I had ruined our cheeseburger and I had asked myself whether the entire workshop would be as useless as that exercise. This time, however, those sensations quickly disappeared and were replaced by excitement when Chris, a high-­level manager in a German conglomerate that specializes in industrial manufacturing, broke the silence by asking, “Do we have to interpret it as if we’ve actually physically landed there?” Tom turned to him and replied, “When we talk about the interpretation of the strange form, we don’t have to interpret it in any specific way. It only means that it triggers an interesting thought that we wouldn’t normally have. So the answer is no, we don’t have to.” Chris, satisfied with Tom’s reply, said: “OK, so how about if at the ‘we land’ stage [i.e., stage seventeen turned stage six], before we decide when we’re going, we have a virtual tour so we can see the seasons there and determine when we want to go there?” Tom smiled. “OK,” he said, “so now we are an airline company and we want to provide a different function or an additional service. We are creating a new paid service that allows you, once you’ve decided where you want to go, to know what it looks like in different seasons so that we can help you make the best decision of what’s the right time for you to go, what’s the best season for you, what’s the advantage of going there in the winter, summer, spring, or holidays. That’s our new service,” he concluded.

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This vignette crystallizes the Method’s rule-­governed nature as well as its promise to help the innovator produce ideas for new products and services in an efficient and quick way. First, the innovator chooses an already-­ existing service (or product) that one wants to innovate. This service becomes the focus of attention. The innovator narrows down his scope of attention rather than expanding it outward in an unguided way. Second, after choosing the specific template (such as “Division”) that he will use to innovate the service, the innovator breaks down the service into specific, clearly articulated and tangible components. Third, the way in which these components are arranged (in the example of the airline company, temporally) represents a specific fixedness, a habit of thinking about the service as a very specific configuration. Fourth, the innovator uses the template to rearrange the components of the service. The template consists of randomly choosing one stage or component in the process and placing it after another randomly chosen stage or component. Note that Tom emphasized that the innovator should use the template as if he were performing an automatic operation—that is, he should be oblivious to meaning because it is precisely habitual meaning that often becomes the basis of structural fixedness. Contingency is an inherent part of this process, but it is a controlled part. According to Tom, “Division” does not mean that we take “these components and just throw them all in the air and see what order they fall back in, it would be a huge mess. That would be more like brainstorming.”5 Indeed, doing so would be like immersing one’s self in the “urban swirl” celebrated by Hannerz or espousing the random variation understood in theories of cultural evolution to be the source of cultural novelty: both are too chaotic to generate meaningful input in a consistent and quick way.6 Finally, the purpose of this restricted use of contingency is to generate a kind of hypothetical “accident” that can function as a trigger. Because the “accident” is a deformed consumer service that the innovator’s company offers at the present, trying to solve the problem—that is, trying to understand the function that such a deformed service might be able to perform for a consumer—can help the innovator come up with ideas for a new service. As Tom described it, such a deformed service might be a situation where “you’ve decided where you’re going to go, and then you land there, and then you decide when you’re going to land there, and you book it and you go through the process.” The strangeness of this deformed consumer service first made some of the participants laugh, but it also motivated them to try to find a function that the service could perform for a hypothetical consumer. They came up with the suggestion that “landing there” could be

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interpreted as virtually allowing consumers to see what different destinations look like in different seasons before they actually book their flight. In cultural evolutionary terms, this potentially new service was the product of “competition for limited ‘slots’ or functionally equivalent ‘solutions’ to specific ‘problems’” (Mesoudi, Whiten, and Laland 2004, 4). It represented a slight modification to an existing product (6). Crucially, the participants did not accidentally encounter the “problem” to which they offered the new service as a solution. Rather, they purposefully produced the “problem” as an “accident” in order to start up the innovation process and trigger their imagination. Their idea for a new consumer service was the result— generated in just three minutes—of their intentional effort to innovate by means of a systematic and rule-­governed procedure.

Rule-­Governed Imagination At the end of this session, after the facilitators had packed their stuff and left the conference hall, some of the participants remained seated and busily jotted down sketches of products and services that might be amenable to innovation by means of the template that Tom had just discussed. They were obviously impressed by what they had just seen. How might the Method’s potential for radical productivity, as it found expression in the short innovation session, be explained and theorized? A careful analysis suggests that two key dimensions are responsible for the Method’s productivity. First, the Method represents a form of procedural or rule-­governed imagination. When the innovator uses templates to deform existing product forms and thereby create hypothetical new product forms, he engages in the procedural imagining of new entities even if he does not yet understand their nature. This highly routinized form of imagination problematizes a number of assumptions about both the business organization and the imagination. On the one hand, scholars have rarely theorized imagination as one of business organizations’ key dimensions. Organizational scholars first conceptualized business organizations as the locus of instrumental rationality, then of irrationality that needed to be mitigated by means of emotional skills, and finally of creativity that, to be sure, involved imagination but only as the epiphenomenon of the creativity of individual employees. In contrast, the growing importance of ideation strategies in business innovation, in which the production of “virtual products” takes the center stage, suggests that imagination is fast becoming one of business organizations’ key dimensions. On the other hand, scholars have often theo-

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rized imagination in terms of fleeting liminality, evanescence, radical individuality and interiority, and a horizon that is removed from the here and now (Crapanzano 2004). In contrast, many business innovation strategies are predicated on routinized procedures for bringing imagination into the office or conference room as a stable “technology” (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009) that a number of people can generate, share, and debate for a sustained length of time. This is what Tom meant when he described the result of “Division” as “something that we can visualize, describe, and put into words. It’s tangible enough that it has a kind of life in our minds, but only in our minds. It’s not the real product, we’re not going to prototype it yet, but we can actually describe it and visualize it” for other organization members. The end results of this highly focused, rule-­governed form of imagination are often radical in terms of the degree to which they can break “cognitive fixedness” or habitual modes of thinking about existing products. In an interview, Gabriella described an innovation session that she and Tamara, another Brandnew consultant, had once facilitated for one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies. “We had an experience where we facilitated a project involving [Gabriella mentioned the name of the company] on producing fuel extracts,” she said. “It was this crazy chemical project. Now, I worked with another facilitator. We gave the company representatives the task of using this specific template where one of the product’s components changes in relation to another of the product’s components. And then,” Gabriella smiled, “I heard from the end of another room this exchange. Tamara told the participants something like ‘This molecule changes in relation to this molecule,’ and then I heard one of the participants say, ‘But Tamara, it’s God-­given!’” Gabriella looked at me and asked, “Do you understand? There was this kind of distress, almost exasperation in his voice. He was like, ‘You can’t just say that a molecule will change and make it true!’” “So how did Tamara handle this?” I asked. “She handled it well,” Gabriella replied. “She suggested that we first understand what is God-­given in that specific situation and then that we understand if there is something that can affect or produce change. So it won’t be temperature but it will be something else. And they did manage to come up with a relevant dimension. The lesson in that,” she concluded, “is that even when someone tells you that something is God-­given, there is a space to figure out what can be relevant to change.” Gabriella’s story exemplifies the Method’s iconoclastic nature: even what counts as the universe’s basic physical, “God-­given” properties are not immune to hypothetical deformation, change, and innovation. The innova-

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tor’s strict adherence to a highly focused, rule-­governed procedure of imagination and his complete agnosticism to the status of the entities that he deforms by means of this procedure constitute one dimension that explains the Method’s potential for radical productivity.

Systematic Abduction A second, more complex dimension finds expression in the stage at which the innovator attempts to find the function that a deformed product might be able to perform for a hypothetical consumer. A key to the nature of this dimension can be found in one of the Method’s main principles, titled “function follows form.” “If anyone has ever taken design courses, then they’re probably familiar with the phrase ‘form follows function.’ It comes from where?” Tom asked the participants. Cynthia, a designer in a clothing company, immediately offered, “Bauhaus!” “Yes,” Tom said, “the Bauhaus school of architecture introduced it to the world. The idea behind it is that when you want to design something, whatever it is, first decide what it’s supposed to do. Once you decide what it’s supposed to do, you’ll be able to most efficiently design how it should look. So the form follows the function. And that’s a very important design rule.” Like a skilled rhetorician who praises an opponent just before undermining him, Tom continued, “But when it comes to creativity—not to design, but to creativity specifically— people have a better ability to look at something strange and think about what it can do. I don’t even have to know what it is, but when I look at it, I can figure it out, I can solve the riddle of what it might be able to do or how it might be able to help me. It’s much easier for people to interpret strange abstract shapes, to understand what the shapes can do for them, than to come up with the abstract shape given the function.” Tom paused and then drove his point home: “So ‘function follows form’ is a better approach when you want to come up with creative ideas than ‘form follows function.’ So we have adopted that principle and figured out how to generate these forms and run through this process and ask ourselves questions around function.” By “function follows form,” Tom effectively described abduction, a mode of reasoning that Charles Sanders Peirce (1998, 226–41) theorized at length. Although Peirce’s ideas never came up during the workshop and, to the best of my knowledge, the Method was developed independently of them, Peirce’s notion of abduction can provide a theoretical framework within which it is possible to explain the Method’s potential for radical productivity as well as its distinguishing features that are anchored in its capitalist context.

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According to Peirce, abduction takes place when, upon encountering a strange situation, we come up with a hypothesis such that if it were true the situation would not be strange anymore. We continue to hold on to this hypothesis until further evidence proves it wrong. Peirce argued that whereas deduction does not add any new knowledge and induction involves an act of inference from one set of facts to another set of similar facts, abduction is the source of ampliative knowledge. It is conducive to establishing new facts and is the basis of creativity in science. Peirce initially theorized abduction as an evidencing procedure, a quasi-­syllogistic logical form through which the scientist can assess the probability of a new hypothesis (see, e.g., Anderson 1986, 148). He later revised his understanding and came to see abduction as an unfolding mode of reasoning, a living process that is generative of new hypotheses rather than a closed logical structure that the scientist can use to test the probability of already-­existing hypotheses. He thought of abduction as a logical or strategic mode of reasoning that has a higher chance of leading to the discovery of new truths. The Method in effect routinizes and systematizes abduction. First and foremost, by asking the innovator to find the functions that the strange product forms might be able to perform such that these forms might make sense and could be developed into new products, the Method perfectly aligns with abduction as “a process in which a reasoner must deal with the otherness . . . of both facts and ideas” (Anderson 2005, 9) by “introducing an idea not contained in the data but one bringing together in an intimate and intelligible manner what would otherwise be disparate and thereby unintelligible” (Colapietro 2015, 425). If abduction is productive of ampliative knowledge or new facts, the Method is productive of ideas for new products. If abduction “is a strategic affair in which strategic rules of inquiry are justified by their propensity to lead the inquirer to new truths when consistently pursued as a general policy” (Anderson 2005, 11), the Method’s “function follows form” core principle is justified by its greater propensity to lead the innovator to ideas for new products when compared with the efficacy of trying to come up with ideas for new products by first thinking of new functions or by waiting for accidents qua new product forms to appear.7 The Method’s specificity comes to the fore with greater clarity against the backdrop of Peirce’s recommendations for how to cultivate good habits of inquiry that might be conducive to successful abduction. According to Anderson, Peirce argued that as a form of reasoning, abduction “is a self-­ controlled activity . . . an art or techne” that can be learned as a “practical science of abduction” (Anderson 2005, 10). The scientist can cultivate the habits of reasoning that will make him more likely to find himself in situa-

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tions in which abduction can and will take place. This is in effect an argument for the possibility of professionalizing scientific creativity. This argument has a number of components that align with those of the Method. First, Peirce argued that abduction takes place in context. To come up with new productive hypotheses, the scientist must be intimately familiar with the relevant contextual data—both facts about empirical phenomena and the existing theories about them. Peirce advised the scientist to arrange these facts and theories in a methodical manner, which is reminiscent of the Method’s first stage of taking inventory of an existing product’s form in what the facilitators called “the existing situation.” Peirce’s recommendations often took the literal form of inventory taking: “Now in order to draw up hypotheses systematically and methodically, you have to arrange all your tools of concepts as the tool-­room of Seller’s machine shop is arranged; and all the gauges have got to be kept in the same methodical manner” (quoted in Anderson 2005, 9). He further argued that an indispensable condition of systematization of any kind is systematic records. Everything worth notice is worth recording; and those records should be so made that they can readily be arranged, and particularly so that [they] can be rearranged. I recommend slips of stiff smooth paper of this exact size. By ordering 20000 at a time, you get them cheap. . . . Upon these slips you will note every disconnected fact that you see or read that is worth record. . . . After thirty years of systematic study, you have every fact at your fingers’ ends. (Peirce 1992, 188)

The facilitators’ emphasis on the need to methodically list the components of existing products and these components’ functional relationships with one another is reminiscent of Peirce’s recommendation to methodically have all the pertinent facts at one’s disposal. The second similarity between Peirce’s recommendations and the Method also points to a crucial difference between them. The reason Peirce advised the scientist to have all the pertinent facts and theories at his disposal is that such intimacy with facts and theories can help him notice puzzles and inconsistencies in them that need to be resolved in the form of new hypotheses and theories. Peirce discussed in detail the obstacles that might prevent the scientist from perceiving such puzzles in terms that are quite similar to the “cognitive fixedness” that Brandnew’s facilitators discussed at the workshop. Peirce “recognized that it is often difficult to see what stares one in the face. Our attention is easily, and often habitually, drawn to the ordinary features of a thing or event thus preventing us from seeing what we might need

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to see to begin or carry out a scientific inquiry” (Anderson 2005, 15). Peirce believed that the scientist can cultivate the proper attitude to help him overcome this difficulty by being aware of the conceptual filters that condition our perception: “We have the ability to prohibit our theories, dogmas, and philosophical outlooks from over-­determining and perverting our perception. . . . We can improve our ability to perceive by remaining aware of and attentive to our conceptual filters” (Anderson 2005, 16). Brandnew’s facilitators, too, emphasized the fact that different kinds of cognitive fixedness and filters often prevent innovators from coming up with ideas for new products and services. However, instead of asking the innovator to suspend whatever he is used to thinking and believing and thus allow the existing situation to surprise him, the Method undermines these kinds of fixedness by means of specific procedures that mechanically reconfigure the form of existing products, which embodies such fixedness. In other words, where Peirce’s recommendations rely on the scientist’s characterological ability to keep his cognitive fixedness in check by means of self-­control so that he would be able to notice puzzles and anomalies in the world that surrounds him, the Method professionalizes and routinizes the production of such anomalies and surprises. Inasmuch as it replaces a human-­based characterological property with a rational, rule-­governed, and abstract procedure, the Method is thus predicated on a professional ethos through and through (Larson 1977, 190–91). Compared with the Method’s clear algorithmic procedures, Peirce’s advice for professionalizing abduction is vague. There is an additional point that explains the Method’s productivity. In trying to account for the nature of abduction, scholars have argued that abduction is “ampliative reasoning [that] can be thought of as involving a question-­answer sequence” (Hintikka 1998, 522). Therefore, “from the strategic viewpoint, the crucial question about abductive reasoning is: Which [question] to ask first?” (528). The reply is indicative: “Probably the only general answer, which unfortunately does not yield any directly applicable recipes, is to say that the choice of the right questions depends on one’s ability to anticipate their answers. . . . In interrogative inquiry, the crucial consideration is to anticipate the epistemic situation brought about by the answer” (ibid.). Against this backdrop, note that the Method’s developers argue that they have managed to identify “the right questions.” “The right questions” are the kinds of formal transformation (“templates”) that products undergo in the process of becoming innovative and that the Method’s developers identified based on the analysis of the history of successful products. Consequently, the innovator who uses the Method does not have to

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figure out how to come up with the right questions vis-­à-­vis the existing products he wants to innovate. The right questions become the Method’s “built-­in” components. By definition, that is, within the Method’s framework, the “templates” represent the kinds of formal transformation that successful products underwent with respect to their previous versions and that future successful products will undergo with respect to their present versions. This means that the Method has a greater propensity to help the innovator come up with ideas for new successful products. In this way it is strategic. If this comparison suggests that the Method is a professionalized form of abduction, it also points to one of the Method’s distinguishing features that radically separates it from abduction in science, that is, in the domain of knowledge production that Peirce was concerned with. For Peirce, abduction was a mode of reasoning in which the scientist generates hypotheses in light of a surprising or unintelligible facet of reality. These hypotheses are then tested in a longitudinal process of inquiry by a community of scholars whose end result is the gradual approximation of the truth. In contrast, the “hypothesis” in the case of the Method, that is, the idea for a new product that can make a deformed object intelligible, produces the truth because innovators, despite their claim that they cater to “unmet” or “latent consumer” needs (more of which in chap. 3), often produce such needs by means of mediating cultural and symbolic institutions such as marketing. In other words, the innovator begins by producing a surprising fact (i.e., a deformed product), comes up with a hypothesis that might make it intelligible (i.e., a function that the deformed product can perform for a consumer), and then “helps” the hypothesis become true (i.e., by producing a new product and then marketing it to consumers whose consumption of the product validates the hypothesis’s “truth”). As opposed to Peirce’s notion of abduction in science as world discovering (Colapietro 2005, 422), abduction in business innovation is thus world making or performative (cf. Preda 2009, 150–51, 240, re technical analysis in finance). It is a self-­fulfilling and performative prophecy that provides an additional explanation for why routinized business innovation is endlessly generative: business innovation does not necessarily approximate any “truth” about consumers but rather “produces” an unending number of “truths” in the form of “consumer needs and desires.”

Imminent Crisis and Systematic Bricolage Despite its novelty, there are a few features that routinized business innovation shares with forms of cultural evolution and change that anthro-

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pologists have long theorized, yet even these features ultimately reveal the Method’s specificity. To identify these features it is first necessary to acknowledge the sense of imminent crisis that pervades the business world. This sense of crisis found a clear expression when, during the workshop’s second day, Tom explained to the participants another of the Method’s core principles: “One of the most basic principles of our method, the most important, perhaps,” he emphasized, “is ‘the closed-­world principle,’ and it says that when you’re looking to invent a new product or a system, the only resources you’re allowed to use are resources that are already there. You have to imagine yourself in a closed world as if you have nowhere else to go. The only things you have that you can use are the things that are already there in your existing products or services.” This principle becomes important when the innovator, after manipulating an existing product according to one of the templates synthesized by means of the analysis of the “evolution” of past successful products, is faced with a strange object and needs to find the function it might be able to perform. The innovator must resist the temptation to add external components to the strange object to make sense of it because adding external components would violate the very specific kind of formal transformation (or template) that was used to generate the strange object to begin with. To dramatize this principle, Tom approached the media unit and screened a short clip from the movie Apollo 13 (1995, 01:​20:00–01:​21:05). In the clip, the ground control team is frantically trying to figure out a way to save the lives of the astronauts, whose air supply is rapidly diminishing because of a malfunction in their spacecraft. After being ordered to find “a way to put a square peg in a round hole, rapidly,” on a table situated in a small room, a number of engineers place replicas of all the resources that the astronauts have at their disposal on the spacecraft. One of the engineers then says, “OK people, listen up. The people upstairs handed us this one and we gotta come through. We gotta find a way to make this [holding a cubical object with his right hand] fit into the hole for this [holding a tube with his left hand] using nothing but that [pointing with his head toward the replicas scattered on the table].” After screening this clip, Tom turned to the participants and said, “So, this is the part where they realize there’s a problem and they’re looking for a solution. So it’s that image and that sentence ‘You gotta find a way to make this go through this using nothing but that.’ That is our closed-­world principle—that image of pouring everything, their available resources, on the table—that allows us to really make an inventory of our closed world and find innovative solutions.” The movie clip and Tom’s explanation of the “closed-­world principle”

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immediately conjured in my mind the image of Robinson Crusoe, trapped on an island with nothing but the stuff he had managed to salvage from his sunken ship. Tom’s argument that the closed-­world principle “allows us to really make an inventory of our closed world” resonated for me with the detailed descriptions of how Crusoe carefully took inventory of his resources immediately after arriving on the island.8 To be sure, Crusoe’s situation, as well as that of the astronauts, was imposed on them. It was not the result of their deliberate choice. Furthermore, all that Crusoe and the astronauts could hope to achieve was to survive or, at best, to reproduce rather than improve their state before their disaster (Cascardi 1992, 88). In contrast, the workshop participants came to New York to learn how to innovate, how to come up with new things. Innovation, rather than reproduction, is a defining feature of their professional ethos (Urban, Baskin, and Koh 2007), as is often reflected in the names of the numerous innovation consultancies that now offer their services.9 However, this contrast masks a profound similarity. The sphere of contemporary business innovation, too, is pervaded and, indeed, motivated by a sense of imminent crisis. This sense has found expression in the highly popular notion of “disruptive innovation” (Christensen 1997), which denotes the ability of new companies to undermine established ones by introducing innovative economic structures on which established companies fail to capitalize because of the inertia that follows their success. As Jill Lepore (2014) has argued, “disruptive innovation” has come to dominate the ideologies and practices of business innovation. It has institutionalized the idea that any business organization faces the imminent danger of being undone by up-­and-­coming start-­ups. The business innovators I worked with were thus akin to Robinson Crusoe and the astronauts in that they, too, operated in the context of imminent danger and crisis. At the same time, as the previous chapter’s discussion of “potential uncertainty” made clear, business innovators do not know in advance the nature of the danger and crisis they might have to face, such as a new product that their competitors might introduce, as opposed to the crises that Crusoe and the astronauts had to cope with. Consequently, to avert disaster, they must themselves generate such “problems or crises,” that is, innovative products, so that they can better prepare for them, as it were (Knight [1921] 2009). They must use routinized innovation strategies that can function as “virtual domains” in which they will be able to generate a wide variety of events that they have never entertained before and that they will be able to develop into viable commercial entities before their competitors are able to do so. It is important to note this high level of intragroup competition that

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suffuses the contemporary business world and that tends to characterize complex societies in general because it can provide an explanatory context for the emergence of routinized business innovation strategies whose goal is to help the innovator purposefully generate new cultural entities before he encounters any concrete problem or crisis. This orientation is highly different from the one presumably found in “egalitarian and organizationally simple societies, [in which] the main catalyst for innovative behavior, at least as far as technology is concerned, would be crises of one kind or another” that human groups unintentionally encounter rather than intentionally produce (Fitzhugh and Trusler 2009, 206; see also Fitzhugh 2001, 147). These continuities and discontinuities can be articulated in more directly anthropological terms. Robinson Crusoe and the astronauts are archetypes of the bricoleur, the improviser that Claude Lévi-­Strauss immortalized in his theory of the “science of the concrete.” Drawing from linguistic structuralism, Lévi-­Strauss argued that bricolage and mythical thought are constrained by an already-­existing set of objects or constitutive units. Each of these objects and units already has its own sense and purpose that limits its potential combination with and substitution for other objects and units (Lévi-­Strauss 1966, 19). Although Lévi-­Strauss (1966) emphasized that the engineer resembles the bricoleur in that he, too, must “begin by making a catalogue of a previously determined set consisting of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, which restrict the possible solutions” (19), he also argued that they are different in that “the engineer is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the ‘bricoleur’ by inclination or necessity always remains within them” (ibid.). Later studies have problematized the difference that Lévi-­Strauss assumed to exist between the bricoleur and the engineer. For example, in his study of the politics of technology, nature, and development at the French and European comanaged Guiana Space Center, Peter Redfield (2000) has argued that whereas the neat designs are carefully planned in Europe, when it comes to their implementation at the Guianese facility, it is bricolage as problem-­solving that becomes the modus operandi. Western engineers, when relocated to Guiana, come to inhabit Crusoe’s predicament in that Crusoe, too, “when on his island,” had to learn “to mingle engineering and bricolage, to both plan and improvise” as a way of solving different unanticipated problems (Redfield 2000, 20). Similarly, Bruno Latour (1996), based on his ethnographic study of scientific practice, has argued that “engineers think like savages, . . . as Lévi-­Strauss does not say. It’s a matter of tinkering with what you have on hand to get yourself out of terrible muddles” (109).

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On the one hand, the business innovators I worked with indeed turned to bricolage to get themselves “out of terrible muddles.” They did so to get themselves out of the muddle of being “disrupted” by other companies in ways they could not yet anticipate. They turned to bricolage both to produce “accidents” in the form of hypothetically deformed products and to solve those “accidents” in the form of ideas for new products. Taking inventory of the components of an existing product or service—a distinguishing feature of bricolage—allows the innovator to produce effective “accidents” by carefully manipulating those components and the functional relationships between them. Staying close to and working only with one’s available resources (the “closed-­world principle”)—another distinguishing feature of bricolage—allows the innovator to solve those accidents in a way that guarantees the solutions will not violate the kinds of formal transformation (templates) that are supposed to ensure the innovativeness of the solutions and that they will not be unrelated to the company’s present context of existing products, services, and technologies.10 Bricolage is thus an inherent part of the Method’s architecture. On the other hand, the Method reconfigures bricolage in that it uses inventory taking to produce rather than solve “accidents,” it transforms bricolage into a highly systematic and methodical rather than improvisatory problem-­solving technique, and it can use bricolage self-­reflexively—that is, to innovate itself too. These ways of reconfiguring bricolage crystalize the continuities and discontinuities between the Method and forms of cultural evolution and change that anthropologists have long theorized and that are based in a nonreflexive, random, trial-­and-­error kind of experimentation, often in response to already-­existing problems or crises. Indeed, if I had any lingering doubts that routinized business innovation represents a new and undertheorized form of cultural evolution and change, they disappeared when, at the end of an interview I conducted with Gabriella two months after the workshop had ended, just as we were about to leave the coffee shop, she turned to me and said, “Look, today innovation is being taught at the university. It is undergoing processes of institutionalization. And it’s interesting to see how innovation, which is anti-­ institutional, is becoming institutional. So whenever something that by definition intends to break fixedness becomes stable, it also creates an internal tension that is not trivial.” She shook her head with a kind of disbelief. “Suddenly we [i.e., Brandnew] pride ourselves with the fact that we have been dealing with innovation for twenty years. Perhaps it’s not right. Perhaps it’s a profession where every three years companies need to disappear and reappear, disappear and reappear. I don’t know.” She paused, adjusted

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the strap of her bag on her shoulder, and said with a detached voice as if she were a physician diagnosing someone else’s malady, “It’s interesting. An innovation facilitator who is doing the same thing for ten years is herself ridden with fixedness.” Thus, the almost ethical imperative to consider everything as worthy and in need of innovation brought the innovator to doubt her own knowledge of innovation and to entertain the possibility of her own “disruption” by her competitors as a potentially positive thing. Such is the logical end of the cultural-­organizational ethos of business innovation and its rule-­governed practices.

TWO

“Putting This Mess into a Structure” Cultural Contradictions and Discursive Resolutions

“A Few Intuitive Guesses” versus “Click-­Click-­Click” In the very first session of the first day of Brandnew’s workshop, following the brief introduction of the participants and facilitators, Alice, a woman in her early forties who was one of the workshop’s four facilitators, took the stage. Standing next to the media unit, she began by telling us that Brandnew’s method “stands for a systematic way of innovating. Usually when we talk about ‘systematic’ this is the picture we have in mind.” She showed us figure 1. She looked at it and said, “This is very structured, very systematic way of doing things. This picture is a bit scary. Where is the innovation in it? It looks very organized, yet where’s the passion? Where’s the place for coming up with something different?” While asking these questions, she surveyed the participants with her eyes. “Yet raise your hand if you’ve ever participated in a brainstorming session,” she continued. A number of participants raised their hands. Alice looked at them and said, “Usually a brainstorming session looks more like this, right?” She showed us figure 2. Upon seeing it, some of the participants laughed and nodded in approval, looking at one another as if they were found to be complicit in a minor crime. “We know what the beginning of the process was, we know what the end was, but we have no idea what happened during it. And this is not good enough for us!” Alice emphasized. “We don’t want just one inspirational moment or idea. We want to be able to repeat those ideas again and again and again. We want to be able to create a pipeline of ideas and not one kind of a brilliant solution once in a while. So this,” she pointed at figure 2 as if it were a defendant in a trial and she the prosecutor, “is not good enough for us.” She concluded, “So the question is how to put this mess into a structure, and this is actually what we will try to share with you in the next few days.” As she said this, she showed us figure 3.

Figure 1. Diagram of a systematic thought process.

Figure 2. Diagram of a brainstorming session.

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Figure 3. Diagram of the Method.

On the surface, Alice was simply making a very general comparison between Brandnew’s method of innovation and brainstorming. Brainstorming emphasizes the importance of producing as many ideas as possible in a short time frame without critical filters and on the basis of minimal prompts as well as of loosely guided association (Osborn 1953). In contrast, the Method represents a set of clear instructions that are supposed to yield innovative results in a predictable and reliable way. However, Alice’s narrative did not unpack the Method’s principles. The latter’s nuts and bolts thus remained a complete mystery to the participants at this early stage of the workshop. What, then, was her narrative’s function, and why was it so strategically placed at the very beginning of the workshop? Rather than functioning primarily as a comparison between the Method and brainstorming, Alice’s narrative had the kind of poetic structure that anthropologists associate with rituals, that is, events that crystalize and bring to the fore key cultural categories. It brought into being a macrosociological context of opposed and stereotyped emblems of ideation and identity in the modern West, which then became relevant to the interactions that ensued throughout the workshop. Note that Alice organized her narrative around two opposing clusters of terms. The first cluster consisted of the following terms: systematic, structured, organized, repeat that again and again and again, and a stable pipeline of ideas. Alice used figure 1 to diagrammatically represent this cluster. The second cluster consisted of the following terms: brainstorming, passion, mess, you have no idea what happened, one inspirational moment, and one kind of a brilliant solution once in a while. Alice used figure 2 to diagrammatically represent this cluster. Alice brought into being a contrast between a professional ethos and

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a Romantic ethos, respectively, each ethos involving a different stereotypical mode of agency, ideation, and aesthetic. Historically, the terms Alice associated with brainstorming derive from a Romantic ethos that conceptualizes creativity as a spontaneous and uncontrollable process, often accompanied by powerful sensations, ecstasy, and altered states of consciousness. According to Romantic ideologies of poetic inspiration, “an inspired poem or painting is sudden, effortless, and complete, [no longer] because it is a gift from without [e.g., from the gods], but because it grows of itself, within a region of the mind which is inaccessible either to awareness or control” (Abrams 1971, 192). This association of creativity with uncontrollable passion and ecstasy received its most potent form in the eighteenth century Romantic Sturm und Drang movement—literally, “storm and stress”—which posited extreme, uncontrollable emotions as a viable and commendable source of knowledge and action (Frank 2003). Brainstorming—the template for creative ideation that Alice contrasted with the Method—connotes these tropes not only by means of some of the principles that Alex Osborn highlighted in the book in which he popularized it (e.g., “the all-­importance of imagination” [Osborn 1953, 1–3], “no formula possible” [118–20]) but also by means of its very name, which invokes the Romantic Sturm—literally “storm”—hence brainstorming, and via the explanations that accompany this name that invoke the Romantic Drang—literally “stress,” as when Osborn claims that “ideas flow faster under emotional stress” (Osborn 1953, 181). Alice ultimately argued that brainstorming, despite the fact that it is based on “principles and procedures of creative problem-­solving,” as Osborn stipulated in the full title of his book, is too contingent for business organizations that are predicated on a professional ethos that is associated with predictability, reliability, and rationality of action in the Enlightenment tradition—an ethos that Alice invoked by means of the terms found in the first cluster.1 Alice, then, consolidated a broader historically specific macrosociological landscape of two opposing ethos or narratives about modernity and the stereotyped emblems and roles associated with each narrative or ethos (Wilf 2014a, 8–12). In the context of this landscape, creativity and innovation are tightly coupled with a Romantic ethos and opposed to a professional ethos. Most of Alice’s listeners probably recognized this landscape. The Romantic ethos has become part of the fabric of the popular imagination in the modern West, a taken-­for-­granted script about creative agency that has been widely disseminated and circulated and thereby reproduced in different artifacts and narratives (Taylor 1989, 376).2 To illustrate the degree to which creativity and innovation are tightly

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coupled with a Romantic ethos and opposed to a professional ethos in this business corporate context, consider a recent article that appeared in the New York Times titled “The Genius of Jobs.” At one point the author describes a dinner he had with Steve Jobs—one of Apple’s founders—and a few other people. When someone presented the attendees a riddle, Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought how Bill Gates would have gone click-­ click-­click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune. So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius . . . his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. (Isaacson 2011)

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs emerge from this vignette as two opposing, quasi-­ totemic figures who organize two radically distinct clusters of cultural meanings around them. Bill Gates stands for “logical,” “rigorous,” and systematic problem-­solving—hence “click-­click-­click”—as well as “intelligence” and “science,” whereas Steve Jobs stands for “unconventional,” “unexpected,” “imaginative leaps,” “instinctive,” “genius,” and “magical.” This basic opposition invokes and reproduces the opposition between a professional ethos and a Romantic ethos, respectively. In the New York Times article there is never any doubt who of the two figures epitomizes the spirit of business innovation as well as its material consequences (indexed by the opposition between the failed and decommissioned Zune and the highly successful iPod) and which ethos—Romantic or professional—aligns with this spirit. Gates and Jobs have become emblematic figures of identity that serve as cardinal points of orientation for many people in the business world and outside it (Durkheim 1995, 207–41; Agha 2006, 233–77). The characterological aesthetic they emblematize found expression in commercial videos produced by Apple that show two young males—one representing a PC and looking very much like a young Bill Gates, and one representing a Mac and looking very much like a young Steve Jobs—interacting with one another.3 All the “boring” qualities that the New York Times article mentions and associates with Gates and all the “cool” qualities it mentions and associates with Jobs find aesthetic expression in these videos: the clothes, the bodily demeanor, the hairstyle, the speech, the “sexiness” or the lack thereof, and, of course, the specific features that a Mac has versus a PC—PC’s features

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amounting only to a calculator and a clock according to one video. One can almost hear the dreadful “click-­click-­click” noise made by Gates as he would have solved the riddle, according to the author of the Times article. On the surface, the fact that Alice, by means of her narrative’s densely poetic and ritual structure, brought into being a culturally salient contrast between a professional ethos and a Romantic ethos in the context of which innovation and creativity are strongly associated with the latter ethos, might seem to be counterproductive. After all, one of the key goals of any innovation consulting firm is to convince potential clients that it has developed a successful strategy of routinizing innovation, that is, that it can make innovation a stable organizational feature. However, rituals do not only crystalize key cultural categories. They can also alter the meaning of these categories. This multiplicity of functions explains Alice’s narrative. The challenges that workshop facilitators need to contend with should be understood on two levels. On one level, they must teach participants a number of innovation techniques in a relatively short time frame and in a way that will convince them that there can be added value in buying the consultancy firm’s services. On another level, however, they must also reframe the culturally salient opposition between a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos in the context of which their promise to help corporations build a culture of innovation that will produce a stable pipeline of ideas for new products and services is the promise to routinize that which ideologically cannot be routinized and whose value derives precisely from its resistance to being routinized and professionalized. In other words, they must discursively foreground, stereotype, and, crucially, invert features of the participants’ institutional and cultural landscape not only to make sure that participants learn the techniques inculcated during the workshop rather than resist them but also to make sure that participants “buy into” the consultancy’s philosophy of innovation in a deep and permanent fashion that will motivate them to hire the consultancy’s services after the end of the workshop. To understand how they do so, it is first necessary to unpack the distinguishing features of rituals in general and business rituals in particular.

Understanding Business Rituals Scholars have long argued that business corporations rely on strong reflexive discursive processes to produce and reproduce a cultural framework that will align with the corporation’s business goals and with which corporate members can identify. This line of research has highlighted the role played by rituals, narratives, myths, and slogans in corporate efforts to re-

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flexively solidify specific corporate cultures according to shifting conditions (Urban and Koh 2013, 150–51; Krause-­Jensen 2011; Kunda 2006). However, it has focused on the denotational or referential content of rituals, narratives, myths, and slogans such as the surface-­level comparison that Alice made between brainstorming and the Method. To make sense of the interactional force of Alice’s narrative in particular and of business ritual events in general, it is necessary to draw on theoretical advances made in the past three decades in the fields of linguistic anthropology, discourse studies, and sociolinguistics. Scholars in these fields have clarified the ways in which denotational (or surface-­level) coherence that is produced in real-­time communicative events can become the basis for interactional coherence, that is, “the ways that individuals of various social characteristics are ‘recruited’ to role-­relations in various institutionalized ways, and consequentially, through semiotic behavior, reinforce, contend with, and transform their actual and potential inhabitance of such roles” (Silverstein 1998, 268). A classic example is the use of tu and vous in French (Brown and Gilman 1960). Denotationally or referentially, both terms can be understood as “you.” However, the use of tu implies a relationship of familiarity between interactants, whereas that of vous implies a formal and potentially hierarchical relationship between them. This multiplicity of meaning gives interactants the tools to try to change or solidify existing role-­relations. For example, a person in a socially inferior position in relation to his interlocutor might try to “recruit” this interlocutor into a position that is equal to his own by addressing her by means of tu rather than vous, thereby potentially bringing into being a new reality. Of course, this reality might be short lived, depending on the interlocutor’s reply. By discursively manipulating social categories in the communicative event itself—whether it is a conversation or a memorial service— participants in such events can try to precipitate parallel changes outside of the event. At stake is a kind of ritual semiosis, that is, ritual events that are meant to precipitate in the “outside” world the processes that are diagramed in the “bounded microcosm of ritual social-­spacetime” (Silverstein 2009, 273; see also Stasch 2011, 160–68). Ritual semiosis takes place in business organizations, too. Throughout the workshop, the facilitators orchestrated densely multilayered and multimodal discursive events that diagrammed differences in value between the Romantic and the professional ethos as well as suggested transformations in the roles participants inhabit with respect to innovation and the ethos in which it should be anchored.4 They constantly brought into being the specific macrosociological order that opposes a Romantic ethos (associated

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with mercurial creativity) and a professional ethos (associated with rule-­ governed rationality and predictability). This macrosociological order then became the basis for suggested transformations in the roles that participants inhabit with respect to innovation, namely, from associating innovation with a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to accepting at its end that a professional ethos can encompass and productively channel innovation. Their hope was that these suggested transformations during the ritual event itself (i.e., the workshop) would precipitate parallel transformations outside of it, that is, that the participants would come out of the workshop convinced that innovation could and should be routinized and that there was value in buying Brandnew’s consulting services. Routinized business innovation cannot be understood apart from these discursive and macrosociological dimensions.

A Multimodal Dynamic Figuration of Process and Development Returning to Alice’s opening statement, when she compared brainstorming and the Method she did not simply outline a synchronic, atemporal system of presupposable oppositions. Narratives have a durational real-­time aspect. They pro­gress from one point to the next on a temporal axis. This fact allows narrators to diagram and thereby naturalize the idea of development or a hierarchical and unequal relationship between different terms without, or in addition to, explicitly spelling out this idea or relationship (Ochs 2006; Ochs and Capps 1996, 26; Silverstein 1998, 274). This can have concrete effects on the roles their listeners might come to inhabit. Alice began her narrative with the Method by saying that it “stands for a systematic way of innovating,” showing figure 1, which diagrams it. She immediately acknowledged that her listeners might see that diagram as antithetical to innovation because of its systematicity. She then proceeded to brainstorming as the method of creative ideation that her listeners were more likely to associate with innovation, showing figure 2. She emphasized the limitations of brainstorming, namely, that it is unreliable and unpredictable. She then came back to the Method, which promises “to create a pipeline of ideas and not just one kind of a brilliant solution once in a while.” At this point, Alice showed the participants figure 3. In figure 3, figure 1 encompasses figure 2: each neat geometrical shape shown in figure 1 encompasses a little “storm,” that is, a miniaturized version of that big storm that Alice mentioned earlier in her narrative and that is shown in figure 2. Now each such “storm” is well controlled and can be deployed rationally and

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effectively (as implied by the straight lines and angles that connect the geometrical shapes to one another in fig. 3). By successively arranging figures 1, 2, and 3, Alice diagrammed a process in which the Method gradually encompasses brainstorming and harnesses its unruly chaotic nature into fruitful routinized innovation. Alice diagrammed this encompassment in time, too, that is, on the temporal axis of her narrative. She addressed the Method both at her narrative’s beginning and end, thus encompassing brainstorming, which she addressed in the middle of her narrative, from both sides. Crucially, Alice translated the above encompassment of brainstorming by the Method into suggested transformations in the roles participants inhabit, from a Romantic ethos via brainstorming at the beginning of the workshop to a professional ethos via the Method at the end of the workshop.5 She did so by strategically using personal pronouns, of which tu and vous are examples (cf. Brown and Gilman 1960; Errington 1988; Wortham 1996). Alice began her narrative by saying, “[Our method] stands for a systematic way of innovating. Usually when we talk about ‘systematic’ we have this picture in mind,” at which point she showed the participants figure 1. Alice’s use of the deictic we at this point was only partially inclusive, that is, it only partially included the participants because the workshop had just begun and the participants had not yet become familiar with the intricacies of the Method and with a “systematic” way of innovating. The deictic was inclusive of the participants only to the extent that Alice suggested that the participants might be familiar with the general contours of what a systematic procedure might look like as diagrammed in figure 1. When Alice turned to brainstorming, she shifted to using the deictic you. She asked the participants to “raise your hand if you’ve ever participated in a brainstorming session,” after which a number of participants raised their hands. When she showed them the chaotic figure that diagrams brainstorming (fig. 2), some of the participants laughed and nodded in approval. Alice thus associated the participants with the Romantic ethos via brainstorming at the beginning of the workshop. In a different session later that day, Tom repeated this specific association by telling the participants that “it’s called brainstorming because there’s this little storm going on in your brain when you’re doing it. And remember that chaotic form [i.e., fig. 2]: you know where A is and where B is, but there’s a lot of mess going on between them, pretty much characteristic of the storm that’s going on.” In addition to repeatedly using the deictic you, Tom associated the participants with brainstorming (and a Romantic ethos) at the beginning of the workshop by suggesting that brainstorming literally inhabits the participants, for the “little storm” was “going on” in the participants’ “brain[s],” no less. Alice’s and Tom’s poetic

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and strategic use of the deictics “we” and “you” thus created a context in which the facilitators and the participants inhabit different and opposing roles at the beginning of the workshop. Significantly, after associating the participants with brainstorming by means of the deictic you, Alice immediately shifted back to using the deictic we to enumerate the limitations of brainstorming and to describe the alternative mode of ideation that the Method offers, only this time this deictic could be interpreted as being inclusive of the participants: “We know what the beginning of the process was, we know what the end was, but we have no idea what happened during it. And this is not enough for us! . . . We don’t want just one inspirational moment or idea. We want to be able to repeat those ideas again and again and again. We want to be able to create a pipeline of ideas and not one kind of a brilliant solution once in a while. So this [fig. 2] is not good enough for us. So the question is how to be able to put this mess into a structure,” whereupon she showed the participants figure 3. By repeatedly using the deictic we when speaking about the Method at the end of her narrative and in terms of goals that her listeners were likely to identify with (e.g., “We want to be able to create a pipeline of ideas and not one kind of a brilliant solution once in a while”), Alice incorporated the participants, to whom she had earlier referred with the deictic you when discussing brainstorming, into the role that Brandnew’s facilitators inhabit, according to which the professional ethos can and should encompass the Romantic ethos. Her narrative was thus a diagram of a process in which participants come to inhabit the Method and the philosophy of innovation it represents. Her last sentence, which resumed the deictic difference between we and you (“and this is actually what we will try to share with you in the next few days”), reestablished the knowledge difference between the facilitators and the participants after the suggested identity of roles, a knowledge difference that provides the rationale for the workshop. In itself, the deictic structure that organized Alice’s narrative as a whole provided only a minimal interactional framework (Wortham 1996, 344), but inasmuch as it cohered with the other forms of figuration I discuss above, which include the strategic succession of the three figures and the parallel arrangement of the Method and brainstorming on the narrative’s temporal axis, it provided and was provided with added interactional force. Alice’s narrative was thus a multimodal and multilayered dynamic figuration of brainstorming’s encompassment by the Method whose goal was to precipitate parallel transformations in the participants’ roles both during and after the workshop.

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A Story of Corporate Origins Other sessions during the workshop gave rise to interactional texts very similar to the one I have just described. In addition to reinforcing by mirroring one another, those texts revealed additional cultural dimensions of routinized business innovation. Consider the long story with which Tom opened the first session of the workshop’s second day. “This morning’s learning starts out with a story,” he began. “It’s not a very well-­known story. It’s about an important event in world history,” he laughed. “Maybe I went overboard with the buildup but it’s a story of how the Method was born. Maybe it’s not world history but it’s important to us.” Tom looked at the other facilitators who smiled at him. “It all started in the early 1990s. Two students were studying in a very interesting program—a joint program for aeronautical engineering and marketing. Quite interesting. And as good friends do, especially when they’re studying for their doctoral dissertations, they went out one evening, had a good time, and they finished their going out very late at night. They got into their rental car that they had rented for a short while and they said—‘OK, it’s really late, we gotta get back to the city, let’s take a shortcut.’ They started driving home on an off road in the middle of a nowhere area, and all of a sudden they got a flat tire.” Tom paused for a second and said, “It happens, especially when you’re looking for shortcuts and maybe having too much to drink,” he laughed. “So they are aeronautical engineers—they said, ‘No problem changing a flat tire.’ So what did they do? Has anyone ever had to change a flat tire?” Tom did not wait for the participants to respond. “So you pretty much know. What they did is they opened up the trunk, took out the jack, positioned it next to the tire, took out the cross wrench to affix to the bolts, started to release the bolts to remove the old tire. They removed the first bolt and the second bolt and then they got to the third bolt and it wouldn’t budge. And with closer inspection with their flashlight they saw that it was rusted on, and although they started jumping on the cross wrench and both of them pushing at the same time it just wouldn’t turn. That was the situation.” As he was saying this, Tom wrote on the board “existing situation/ problem.” He then asked: “Do you agree that there was a problem involved there? Would you characterize this as a problem if you encountered the story?” Some of the participants nodded with approval and Tom continued. “So this morning we are going to learn our approach to problem-­solving. It’s completely new. It’s a different approach to problem-­solving. And we’ll learn it through some of the things that they noticed during this really im-

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portant event, which they later studied and tested in order to form the basis, the foundation of the Method.” Pointing at the participants, Tom instructed them, “So now in pairs, just as you’re sitting, jot down a few thoughts on what can be done, how to solve this problem.” Tom’s story is an origin or creation myth, that is, a story that “tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution”; such myths “disclose [the Supernatural Beings’] creative activity. . . . [They] describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred . . . into the world” (Eliade 1998, 5–6). Although origin myths are often associated in the modern Western popular imagination with nonmodern, “archaic” societies, they pervade different kinds of cultures, including business corporate cultures. Tom explicitly framed his story as an origin myth by saying, “It’s about an important event in world history. . . . It’s a story of how the Method was born.” Indeed, not only was Tom’s story about the origin of an “institution”—that is, Brandnew innovation consultancy—it was also literally about a “breakthrough”—that is, a solution to the problem of the flat tire, which promises to be paradigmatic of all innovative solutions to all problems. Origin myths have a number of functions. One of their important functions is to explain and naturalize key principles that structure the world. These are the basic coordinates, forces, and overall logic that underlie the relevant universe for a specific culture. The Method’s origin story performed a similar function. After the participants worked in pairs for two minutes, Tom solicited from them a few solutions. He then revealed the solution that the “founding fathers,” that is, the two students, had come up with: “I would like to suggest another solution that typically doesn’t come up and the solution is as follows: let’s use the jack to remove the bolt. The jack lifts the car by providing a lot of leverage. What do we need to move the bolt? Leverage. So maybe we can place the jack under the wrench and use the jack to turn the wrench. This is the solution they came up with.” Tom explained that the reason people do not come up with this innovative solution in particular, and innovative solutions in general, is that they do not stay within the boundaries of their existing resources. They do not abide by “the closed-­ world principle.”6 Another reason people can’t find the proper solution is that they tend to think that objects can only perform their present function. It is hard for them to think of alternative functions the same objects can perform, as in the case of the jack. Tom thus used the origin myth to naturalize two of the Method’s key principles.

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To be sure, origin myths’ capacity to naturalize key cultural principles can be limited because an origin myth often “relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the ‘beginning’” (Eliade 1998, 6). Such an event is separated from the present by a radical temporal disjuncture. The origin myth and the present represent distinct time-­space configurations, or chronotopes (Bakhtin 1996). However, when narrators narrate events that took place in a past that is understood to be radically different from the present, they can use specific discursive means to align the two chronotopes as coeval (Perrino 2007), thus closing the temporal gap between the narrating and narrated events (Jakobson [1957] 1995). Such chronotopic alignment is precisely what the ritual enactment of origin myths aims for. This alignment can have significant experiential dimensions for members of a culture who desire to reenact “fabulous, exalting, significant events . . . [to witness] the creative deeds of the Supernaturals . . . to re-­experience that time . . . to meet with the Supernaturals and relearn their creative lesson” (Eliade 1998, 19, emphasis added; cf. Urban 2001, 91; Wilf 2012). Tom orchestrated such chronotopic alignment by asking the participants to find a solution to the problem of the flat tire “in pairs.” In doing so, he transported the participants into the chronotope or time-­space configuration of the origin myth so that they could reenact the deeds of the original pair of founding fathers when they had tried to find a solution to the same problem. In this way the participants could literally learn a mythical “creative lesson.” Although the participants were not members of Tom’s business corporate culture, and therefore it can be safely assumed that the origin story was unlikely to be as meaningful to them as it was to Tom and the other facilitators, the purpose of this reenactment was to bring the participants closer to the “creative lesson” that the origin story epitomizes, such as the Method’s two basic principles. Another common feature of myths is that they do not merely describe and naturalize the culturally specific structure and principles of the world but also provide a narrative that, as Malinowski suggested, “safeguards and enforces morality” (Malinowski 1992, 101). In an earlier session, Gabriella explained that the Method counteracts people’s instinctive tendency to break away from the closed world of their available resources as well as their tendency to immediately replace broken resources with new ones rather than think of new functions that such broken resources can perform. She added, “What we are trying to offer here is the path of most resistance as opposed to the path of least resistance that corresponds to the principle from nature—that water will always take the path of least resistance in the same way that our way of thinking and our cognitive processes do, where we will

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always try to find the shortest way from point A to point B. But the shortest way will usually also be the most fixated one, and the path of most resistance is trying to encourage us to explore new ways of generating ideas.” She concluded by adding, “So the Method is sometimes counterintuitive when it comes to trying to improve things and making things better, but it is a very effective way to break fixedness.” At the same time that Gabriella conveyed information about our thinking processes by comparing them to natural processes like the flow of water, she consolidated the same historically specific macrosociological opposition between a professional ethos and a Romantic ethos. The Romantic ethos celebrates the independent gestation and spontaneous growth of each individual’s inborn “inner nature” as the only valid source of action that the individual should follow (Taylor 1989, 185–98). Against this backdrop, when Gabriella argued that the Method offers “the path of most resistance” that is the opposite of “the principle from nature—that water will always take the path of least resistance,” her purpose was not to engage in hydraulics, that is, in the surface-­level meaning of these terms. Rather, it was to align the Method with a professional ethos and contrast it with a Romantic ethos that espouses immediate intuition as the most valuable path to true knowledge. Against the backdrop of such alignment and contrast, the fact that Tom, in the origin story, narrated the story of the flat tire as the result of the two founding fathers taking “a shortcut” becomes significant. His reference to the two students “taking a shortcut” invoked what Gabriella had said earlier about cognitive fixedness, namely, that “the shortest way” that “we will always try to find . . . from point A to point B . . . will usually also be the most fixated one.” The succession of Gabriella’s remarks and Tom’s narration of the Method’s origin myth thus resulted in a moral lesson that reproduced the opposition between a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos and naturalized a hierarchy between them. This moral lesson stipulated that it is precisely following “the principle from nature,” or a Romantic ethos— that is, one’s intuitions, brainstorming, and everything that falls into this category—that is likely to create problems (such as a flat tire) because it does not involve carefully thought-­out (i.e., rational) principles of innovative action. Conversely, the Method and a professional ethos, namely, the scientifically rigorous innovation tools developed by Brandnew, can systematically lead to breakthrough solutions in the form of innovative and profitable products and services by helping innovators break their cognitive fixedness.7 This moral lesson represents an ironic and even radical ideological reversal. Whereas a dominant contemporary ideology of the modern-­Romantic

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self stipulates that following one’s own nature and intuitions is the surest way to break free from societal conventions that hinder individuals from realizing their unique and creative potential, the facilitators suggested that it is precisely “the principle from nature” that becomes the source of different kinds of “fixedness” and conventions that prevent corporate members from coming up with unique and innovative ideas for new products and services. Conversely, it is the Method—a predesigned set of rules, procedures, and, indeed, conventions—that can play the recuperative role of helping to realize the potential of one’s business corporation to innovate. Inasmuch as “nature as a source” has become a taken-­for-­granted dimension of the modern Western ethos of creative agency, the Method indeed becomes “counterintuitive,” as Gabriella suggested, although not because it does not align with a key principle of hydraulics, but because it posits a predesigned, rational template and procedure as the key to creative ideation and ultimately to successful business innovation.

Divide and Conquer When participants used the Method in real-­time mock innovation sessions during the workshop, they enacted and inhabited the contrast between a professional ethos and a Romantic ethos as well as the “moral lesson” that business innovation can be accomplished only when the professional ethos harnesses and tames the Romantic ethos. This moral lesson thus became a concrete experiential reality and spectacle for everyone involved, a fact that further naturalized it. Crucial to this naturalization was the fact that, as Tom explained during a session on the workshop’s third day, whenever a team focuses on a specific innovation project by means of the Method, it is crucial to make sure that different people take the roles of “the owner, the facilitator, and the documenter.” The owner is “the person to whom the project or issue belongs and who can make decisions along the way such as ‘yes, this is a good direction,’ ‘no, this is completely ridiculous, I know most about it and I’m in charge.’” The facilitator “is the person who decides on what tool we should work with on this topic and is in charge of the process, in charge of making sure that we’re working properly with the Method, that we’re applying the tool properly.” Finally, the documenter is “somebody who’s writing down the ideas. He is not writing down everything that’s going on during the discussion, but he has to make sure that each time an idea comes up, it’s captured so it doesn’t get lost.” One reason for this trichotomy of roles—especially for separating the roles of owner and facilitator—is anchored in the Method’s ideation mecha-

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nism. The innovator who uses the Method first alters the form of existing products and services according to specific templates and then tries to figure out the new functions that the altered products and services might be able to perform for potential consumers. Because of the nature of the alterations— for example, removing the most important component from an existing product—the altered product often appears to be bizarre and meaningless, especially for members of the organization who are most familiar with the existing product because they were involved in its development. Those organization members are most likely to take the role of the owner in innovation sessions that focus on their product. They are also most likely to experience and express resistance to the process of altering it. Hence, it is important to make sure that whoever takes the role of the facilitator in charge of the accurate application of the Method, that is, the process of altering the product, is not the owner. Tom explained this rationale by ascribing fixedness to the owner time and again: “One of the good reasons the facilitator isn’t the owner is because ownership has a lot more fixednesses, assumptions that are built into it, and the facilitator can take a step back and properly apply the process by avoiding those fixednesses.” In another session he added that “It’s usually the owner who says ‘Forget it, it’s not going to work, that’s not going to work,’ because they are prefiltering the ideas. And usually it’s an excellent indication that there’s fixedness. It means there is fixedness involved there and that’s why it’s the facilitator’s role to really push, to say ‘OK, we understand that it doesn’t really make sense right now, but we are going to give it a chance, and if we don’t find something we will move on.’” This trichotomy of roles naturalizes the ideological inversion and moral lesson I discuss above. Tom and Gabriella framed the owner’s fixedness in terms of emotional involvement that connotes proximity to and entanglement with the product that needs to be innovated. They thereby aligned the owner with a Romantic ethos that posits emotions as viable sources of action. They framed the facilitator as the one who is in charge of making sure that the Method is properly used in terms of dispassionate, distant observation. They thereby aligned the facilitator with a professional ethos that connotes methodical and distant rationality—remember that Tom described the facilitator as someone who is able to “take a step back.” Gabriella added: “Our advice would be that, if you can, don’t be the owner of the topics that you facilitate. Since we are so attached to our topic we might be the ones who are the most fixated about it. I think that the owner is so emotionally involved in a session, as opposed to the facilitator who can actually look at things from a distance and manage the process.” Tom concurred: “There are certain problems that come up when you’re both the facilitator and the

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owner. As the owner you get excited about an idea, and that can stifle the discussion and not allow for other directions to come out. So it’s even more complicated when you’re also the facilitator trying to lead the group to different directions.” These are almost textbook applications of the macrosociological context of the stereotyped opposed emblems of ideation and identity that contrast a Romantic ethos with a professional ethos. By arguing that the facilitator is the one who is able to “take a step back” and avoid different kinds of fixedness, Tom and Gabriella suggested that the professional ethos, with which they aligned the Method, holds the key to successful innovation. A theoretical framework that can shed further light on the ritual semi‑ otic function of this trichotomy of roles is Erving Goffman’s theory of the kind of participants who might be involved in a communicative event (Goffman 1981). Goffman has argued that participants can include the animator—the person who utters the content that is exchanged during an interaction; the author—the person who composes this content; and the principal—the person who is socially responsible for the content and on whose behalf it is composed and uttered. Goffman’s framework points to the ways in which what on the surface appears to be a simple dyadic interaction involving only two participants, namely, the speaker and the listener, is often much more complex. With respect to the Method, this theoretical framework points to an important difference between the owner, who animates and authors himself, that is, who is the principal of and responsible for what he says, and the facilitator, who animates and authors for a principal different from himself, that is, the Method. This difference is consequential because inasmuch as the owner represents the union of the Goffmanian animator, author, and principal, he epitomizes specific ideals of authenticity and nonalienability that are the hallmarks of the Romantic self (Wilf 2013a). Conversely, inasmuch as the facilitator animates and authors on behalf of someone or something else, he represents a form of alienation of the self, its usurpation by something external—in this case, an abstract, rational process, no less (Lukács 1972; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). However, when the workshop participants inhabited these three roles and interacted with one another in mock innovation sessions, the “authenticity” of the self in the owner’s case proved time and again to be a hindrance to successful innovation because it led the owner to follow all kinds of fixedness, whereas it was the split of the self in the facilitator’s case that enabled successful innovation. Thus, by taking these different roles, participants had the opportunity to experience and inhabit this difference firsthand and also to witness other participants experience and inhabit it.

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For example, toward the end of the workshop, I participated as a documenter in a mock innovation session. Jill, a midlevel manager in a multinational confectionery, food, and beverage conglomerate, took the role of the owner and presented the team the problem of how to innovate an existing product that the corporation she worked for produced, namely, packaged jam. The team applied one of the innovation tools or templates they had learned the previous day. They needed to subtract one of the crucial components of the existing product and figure out the functions that the altered product might be able to perform for consumers. Angela, the chief innovation officer in a major pharmaceutical company, took the role of the facilitator. She suggested we remove the glass jar in which the jam is packaged. She then wanted to list the benefits of having jam without a jar when Jill interrupted her by exclaiming, “Hang on! We need to determine what the alternative package would be before listing the advantages. We have to understand what the packaging would look like.” I lifted my head from the notebook on which I recorded the session and told her that the idea is to not have any package at all. “But there’s got to be some package,” Jill repeated. Angela looked at her and said, “That’s our altered product. That’s the idea. We have to stick to it.” Jill appeared to be somewhat distressed. She said, “All right, so if you lose the jar you have to lose the lid, too.” “Do you?” asked Angela. “Tom said that we don’t have to do anything like that, that we should stay with the altered product and list the advantages.” Jill lifted her hands with visible exasperation and said, “Why would you have a lid?” “Let’s think about it,” Angela replied. “It’s part of the challenge. If you don’t have a jar, what would you put a lid on, what would you put your label on? What could we do with them? We need to think about that.” Jill, the owner, inhabited and displayed to the other participants different kinds of fixedness such as the certainty that a package was essential or that the lid and the label cannot perform any function without the jar. These are precisely the kinds of fixedness that the Method’s origin story describes, which the pair of the Method’s founding fathers managed to overcome. Angela, the facilitator, managed to resist these kinds of fixedness simply by animating the Method and following it to the letter. After a few minutes, Angela came up with an idea that Jill agreed was both innovative, feasible, and potentially profitable, in part because of the significantly reduced costs that would result from eliminating the package.8 At the end of a number of mock innovation sessions in which each participant had the opportunity to experiment with different roles, Tom and Gabriella asked the participants to share their experiences and the lessons they had learned. Two participants, Angela and Chris, offered commentaries

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that resonated to some degree with those offered by a number of other participants. Angela said, “I had a great team. The thing that I want to call out is the facilitator role [taken by another participant] challenged my thinking early on because I was fixed into thinking what the end goal needed to be and the question the facilitator asked was: ‘Wait, hold on, you’re already thinking about the solution. Let’s first get into the process.’ It was— ‘Oh my gosh, I really am!’ And it was really valuable just to get back into it.” Chris, the high-­level manager in a German conglomerate that specializes in industrial manufacturing, concurred: “I like it when I, as a project manager, am not the facilitator because I noticed that I come with my own fixedness, and it is good that someone else facilitates the session to prevent that from happening.” These commentaries suggest that the experience of inhabiting and watching other participants inhabit the roles of owner and facilitator led some of the participants to internalize the lesson that being an ­owner—a position that unites animator, author, and principal—entails a lot of fixedness, whereas being a facilitator—a position that animates and somewhat authors the Method—results in open-­mindedness and fresh ideas. Inasmuch as the owner invokes a Romantic ethos whereas the facilitator invokes a professional ethos, this lesson, too, naturalized a hierarchy between a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos in the context of which the latter becomes superior to and capable of channeling the former as a condition of possibility for successful business innovation.

“What We Are Doing Here Has Nothing to Do with Creativity”: The Aftermath of Ritual Semiosis and the Displacement of Creativity It would be tempting to read Angela’s and Chris’s commentaries as evidence that they experienced a quasi conversion as a result of the fact that they inhabited and watched other participants inhabit the “moral lesson.” However, their commentaries belong to a specific genre that is prevalent in business workshops, where facilitators often ask participants to share their “learnings” after specific exercises and where participants consequently provide precisely the kind of commentaries they are expected to provide for reasons that do not necessarily suggest any long-­term transformations in the roles they inhabit with respect to the workshop’s content. To assess whether or not such transformations do, in fact, occur, it is necessary to look beyond the immediate business ritual event. In conversations I had with a few of the participants outside the workshops and training sessions, it became clear that at least some of the par-

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ticipants have come to inhabit in a more permanent fashion the role into which the facilitators tried to recruit them. Thus, at dinner in a steakhouse in midtown Manhattan, when I explained to Garry, a chief innovation officer in a health-­care company of four thousand employees and annual revenues of about 1.3 billion dollars, that my interest in the workshop was motivated by my desire to understand the culturally specific meanings of creativity in the twenty-­first century business corporate environment, he immediately interjected by saying, “What we are doing here has nothing to do with creativity. The people I supervise are not creative—this is not some sleek software company. They are not creative.” He paused to admire the giant ribeye steak that the waiter had just served him and then looked at me again and said, “You know, I already attended another workshop that these guys [i.e., Brandnew’s consultants] facilitated, and then I taught my people some of these tools, and it was amazing: one, two, three; step, step, step—my people came up with amazing solutions. So there is this process and it works. It is mechanical: this is the idea. You don’t need to be this amazing genius. This is the idea of bringing the culture of innovation into the organization.” Garry firmly rejected the notion of creativity because he believed that many types of innovation had more to do with ordinary people following steps in a procedural way than with creative visionaries taking imaginative leaps. Garry’s outlook on innovation aligned with the professional ethos as stereotypically depicted in the New York Times article that I discuss at the beginning of this chapter, which associated this ethos with the image of Bill Gates and contrasted it with the image of Steve Jobs and a Romantic ethos. Compare Garry’s description of the Method as “one, two, three; step, step, step” and as being “mechanical” with the New York Times’s description of Bill Gates’s mode of thinking as “click-­click-­click and logically [nailing] the answer in 15 seconds.” Gary, I suggest, has come to inhabit the emblematic figure of identity that is Bill Gates, but whereas the New York Times article described the solutions that Gates was likely to generate as boring and not innovative, Garry argued that when his employees applied the Method, they “came up with amazing solutions.” Whereas the New York Times article celebrated Steve Jobs for being a quasi-­Romantic “genius” of ex nihilo creativity and suggested that such genius is a condition of possibility for successful innovation, Garry argued that “you don’t need to be this amazing genius” in order to bring “the culture of innovation into the organization.” Most important, the fact that Garry had already attended a previous Brandnew workshop and, as he told me, had consequently bought Brandnew’s consulting services is perhaps the most significant indication that he has come

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to inhabit the role into which the facilitators tried to recruit the workshop participants by means of the discursive processes I have analyzed thus far. Garry’s commentary, which aligns with Brandnew’s key innovation principle according to which a methodical, rule-­governed system can and should tame creative inspiration, points to the Method’s specificity. This specificity further comes to the fore when the Method is compared with the “creative revolution” in the advertising world, as Thomas Frank has described in his book The Conquest of Cool (Frank 1998). Frank has problematized the notion that the counterculture revolution of the 1960s signified a break from mainstream capitalist culture and that mainstream capitalist culture played a marginal role in that revolution. Taking the advertising and fashion worlds as his case studies, Frank has argued that before the 1960s, the reigning practices in the advertising world were thought of as a kind of “‘science’: ads were to be created according to established and proven principles. . . . Advertising men were professionals, and the effectiveness of their works could be proven scientifically” (Frank 1998, 39). Instead of “creativity . . . with its implications of the intuitive, the nonrational, and the eccentric,” this professional world emphasized “process” and “rigorous logical analysis” (42). In contrast, during the 1960s these principles “would be swept away . . . in a ‘creative revolution’ that celebrated the mystical carnivalesque properties of creativity” (39). Proponents of this revolution in the advertising world such as William Bernbach, whom Frank describes as “an ideologue of disorder,” declared that “rules were to be scrupulously ignored” and that “no amount of formulas could replace the talented creative individual” whose task is to create convincing advertisements (56). Bernbach claimed that “rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerges from a formula” (57). This creative revolution, which led to changes in the organizational structure of advertising agencies, also led admen to embrace reified markers of creativity such as “longer hair, beads, loud colors, and wide ties” (111) as well as the use of marijuana in the workplace. Against this backdrop, Brandnew’s innovation strategy seems to emphasize the very same things that were rejected during the creative revolution in the advertising world. Brandnew embraces rules, process, scientifically proven principles, rigorous logical analysis, order, formulas, imitation of deep structures, and the innovator as a professional rather than a creative bohemian. Brandnew’s consultants argue that these elements are conditions of possibility for successful and sustainable business innovation. And yet, as I argue in the next chapter, despite these emphases, Romantic creativity has not been eradicated from Brandnew’s innovation process.

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Indeed, it has played an important role in it, albeit in a different, hidden guise. The Method’s developers have displaced Romantic creativity from the human to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process, that is, from the consumer and innovator to the products that are in need of innovation. This displacement has provided the cultural foundation for (and thus naturalized) the Method’s key principle, namely, that the innovator, by means of a systematic procedure, can tap into and help realize existing products’ “potential” to develop or “evolve” into innovative products that will cater to “unmet consumer needs.”

THREE

“Listening to the Voice of the Product” Human Creativity Displaced

His Product’s Voice To better understand Brandnew’s innovation strategy, I enrolled in a class at one of the best business schools on the East Coast. The teacher, Dan, based his class in large part on Brandnew’s core strategy of business innovation. I became aware of Dan’s class when Tom, one of Brandnew’s consultants, mentioned it to me. I then wrote an email to Dan to ask whether it would be OK for me to attend his class. Dan immediately wrote back that he welcomed my presence in his class because of my relationship with Brandnew and my interest in how innovation could be routinized. After the six-­week course had ended, I still had lingering questions, so I asked him whether I could interview him. He readily agreed. One September morning we met in his office at the business school, which overlooked the university’s main quads. I first asked him whether he could articulate what sets the Method apart from other innovation strategies that are popular in the business world. “Well, take design thinking,” he said. “They begin with the users, whereas the Method begins with the product.1 The Method’s argument is this: you have some kind of a system, service, product, whatever. And these systems evolve. According to what?” he asked rhetorically. “According to their adaptability to the environment. So if there is suddenly some kind of need, the system needs to respond. So this is an evolutionary development because there are engineers that adapt the product according to the demands of the environment. A product that won’t do this will disappear.” Dan went on to explain that we can collect information about how consumer needs develop by investigating the history of a given product’s adaptation to those needs: “Inside the product there is a certain movement or move that the product makes according to the demands of the environment. If we can identify the

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pattern—imagine a regression,” he offered. “There are points on a certain line [i.e., on the identified pattern]. If I proceed a little bit ahead, I will be able to know what the next point is before the market even knows. Design thinking needs the market to already know about this unmet need. Our approach is that the data about the unmet needs can be found not in the market but in the product and that we can predict this data before the market gives off signals. So we can get to the unmet needs sooner.” Taken at face value, Dan was making three arguments. First, new consumer needs emerge according to a pattern. Second, successful products and services become commercially viable because their manufacturers changed them to meet emerging consumer needs. Third, as a result, developers can decode the pattern of the emergence of consumer needs by tracking the history of the evolution of successful products—specifically the evolution of their form. Using this decoded pattern, they can generate innovative products that will anticipate unmet needs before they even arise. Dan thus provided me a crucial piece of information about the nature of the templates that are synthesized from the analysis of the “evolution” of past successful products and then used in innovating existing ones: such templates, or kinds of formal transformation, represent a response to shifting “consumer needs.” However, while I was sitting in front of Dan and listening to him describe the Method, I noticed that it was unclear who, in his vision, was responsible for the evolution of products and systems. Dan began by saying that “systems evolve . . . according to their adaptability to the environment” and that “the system needs to respond” if a new need arises. Was he ascribing some kind of agency to products and systems? Perhaps, but then he mentioned the “engineers that adapt the product according to the demands of the environment,” thus shifting agency to the people who design and develop the product or system. From that point on, though, any trace of human agency disappeared, and the product’s agency came to the fore. Dan argued that “a product that won’t do this will disappear” and that “inside the product there is a certain movement or move that the product makes according to the demands of the environment.” These descriptions of the product as an entity inside which there is a “certain movement or move” and that is capable of taking adaptive steps vis-­à-­vis its changing environment, seemed to me at the time of the interview to anthropomorphize the product, but I dismissed them as merely figures of speech. At home, however, when I started reading a business management book about the Method that Dan had recommended, entitled Creativity in Product Innovation, I found the same explanation. The authors, Goldenberg and

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Mazursky (2002), argued from the very beginning that “marketers may hear the voice of the customer by listening to the voice of the product” (xi) and that a “source of ideas for new products, a source that would be able to predict accurately the possible future or latent needs . . . is the product itself and its ‘voice’” (26). This “voice” is the product’s potential to “evolve” into future innovative products according to one or more identifiable “laws of evolution,” which Goldenberg and Mazursky call “creativity templates”: We initially identified Creativity Templates through a backward analysis of product innovations, a process we call mapping research. We traced the history of a product through its former versions. By portraying the configuration of each product version and, subsequently, examining the stepwise changes between versions, we were able to observe common patterns of change that we later classified into the Creativity Templates. In other words, we tried to discover “laws of product evolution” through the observation of changes in successful product configurations over time. The application of these “laws” to an existing product and predicting a new product thereof is the basis of the Creativity Template approach. (179)

Goldenberg and Mazursky added that to listen to the “voice” of the product means to “‘read’ the information embedded in the product as if we were reading a map of potential changes” (76), and that even “a simple product seemingly lacking any ‘creative spark’ [such as] a drinking glass” has the potential for creative transformation: “there are no unglamorous prod‑ ucts” (79). These statements reminded me of the modern-­Romantic normative ideals of creative agency that, so I had initially believed, the Method was supposed to discard by virtue of its systematic and algorithmic-­like nature. More specifically, I was surprised to find hints of the Romantic expressive-­ individualist notion that each individual has his unique and original nature, voice, and creative potential for development with which he must be in touch and to which he must remain faithful. This notion stipulates that “fulfilling my nature means espousing the inner élan, the voice or impulse” (Taylor 1989, 374) and “realizing a potentiality that is properly my own” (Taylor 1992, 29). According to these Romantic notions, because the individual’s nature is “a potential which is also being shaped by [its] manifestation, . . . what the voice of nature calls us to cannot be fully known outside of and prior to our articulation/definition of it” (Taylor 1989, 375–76). Note the ways in which Goldenberg and Mazursky approach the product as a quasi person endowed with a creative potentiality following these

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modern-­Romantic normative ideals. First, in the same way that every human individual has a unique nature and the potential to live a creative life, every product has a unique nature and the potential to manifest creativity by evolving into new innovative products—“there are no unglamorous products.” Second, in the same way that each individual must be attuned to the “voice” of her unique nature so as to make sure that she realizes and follows it, the innovator must “listen” to the “voice of the product” if she wants to innovate successfully, for the product’s “voice” or inner nature contains clues about its potential to evolve into future products. At stake is not the coincidental attribution of cultural tropes of voice, creative agency, and potentiality to objects, which can be found in everyday speech, but rather the systematic and patterned weaving of such tropes according to a culturally specific model of creative agency—a modern-­Romantic one—to achieve specific ends. The Method’s displacement of modern-­Romantic notions of the self as creative potentiality to products sets it apart from other capitalist practices that conceptualize and approach products as persons, such as branding. In branding the marketer endows “an object with a personality, modeled putatively after human personalities but transformed through the process of translating a personality type associated with a person to one that could be seen as emanating from an object. . . . A brand personality is metaphorically linked to a person’s personality in the sense that a few of the words one might use to describe someone’s personality can be selected to describe an object too” (Gershon 2017, 231–32). A specific “brand personality” might consist of adjectives such as experienced, educated, smart, and cutting-­edge (Moore 2003, 342; Lury 2004). Branding is thus a process in which a specific product is conceptualized as a specific person with a specific personality that characterizes it in the p ­ resent. In contrast, the Method personifies products by conceptualizing them as entities that possess a specific potentiality for creative development that, to be sure, is responsible for their present form but that will also be responsible for their future, potentially highly different forms.2 If branding almost always focuses on the “personality traits” of a specific product in order to convince consumers that the product stays the same whenever they encounter it (a can of Coca-­Cola will provide you, the consumer, with the same experience whether you buy it in New York City or in Moscow [Gershon 2017, 235]), the Method focuses on products’ creative potential to change and morph into new and often highly different products. At the same time that Goldenberg and Mazursky invest the product with creativity as if it were a person, they transform the human person—both

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the consumer and the innovator—into a static, inert, quasi object that is divested from creativity and potential for change. First, with respect to the consumer, Goldenberg and Mazursky argue that future consumer needs can be algorithmically inferred from the history of past successful products and the ways in which they changed in response to past consumer needs. There is consequently no need to engage with consumers at all in the ideation stage. In so doing, they in fact argue that consumer needs emerge deterministically and unchangingly.3 Brandnew’s highly decontextualized innovation strategy thus discards a key time-­consuming aspect of the innovation process—namely, engaging with consumers and gathering context-­sensitive data—and instead focuses on the abstract procedural manipulation of objects as the path to innovation. Their approach reflects “the tendency for design firms to skimp on analysis . . . due in part to financial pressures,” that is, their difficulty “to persuade clients to fund adequate labor time for researchers to develop well-­grounded interpretations” and clients’ pressure “for immediate results” (Wasson 2000, 385). Second, with respect to the innovator, Goldenberg and Mazursky argue that because “creativity templates” represent the formal transformations that lead to innovative products, the innovator no longer needs to understand the nature of human creativity. She can now generate creativity’s end results—innovative products—in an automatic way by following a strict procedure. The Method consequently “precludes the need to enter the brains and the thought processes of innovators such as Edison and the Compaq engineers” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 3). Thus, to prove that they have developed a systematic, rational, dependable, and speedy strategy of business innovation, the Brandnew innovators I worked with displaced modern-­Romantic notions of creativity from the human to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process, namely, from the innovator and consumer to the product. In this way they both retained the promise of these notions and discarded their potential threats—­ including the unpredictability and unruliness of human inspiration. Human creativity—primarily of the consumer and partially of the innovator—was thereby erased. Meanwhile, the product itself became a controlled locus of creativity. In this chapter I explore how this systematic reversal works and what its implications are by analyzing in detail the book in which Goldenberg and Mazursky outline the principles of Brandnew’s innovation strategy. To do so, I unpack the intellectual history and cultural import of a number of concepts that play a key role in this innovation strategy, such as evolution, form, potential, algorithmic prediction, consumer needs, and human creativity. This analysis reveals the Method’s cultural specificity that belies

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the claims made by its developers for its universal, quasi-­scientific validity. It also points to the ways in which these historically specific and contingent concepts naturalize a number of the Method’s key principles.

Innovating Kant: Product Forms and Their Transformations As Goldenberg and Mazursky articulate in their book, at the Method’s core stands the following idea: Products evolve in response to “environmental pressures” taking the form of market needs and desires. In a process resembling “the survival of the fittest,” products that fail to fulfill these needs and desires disappear while products that satisfy them survive until the next change takes place. Over time, market needs and desires are “mapped” or “encoded” into a product, the configuration of which becomes a physical representation of past selection of the market or an “echo” of past customers’ preferences. Moreover, since failure in need and demand satisfaction does not leave any traces, this information represents an effectively selected knowledge base. . . . Over the years, due to the Darwinian relations between the market (environment pressure) and the product, the market-­based information is captured by the products attributes. Creativity Templates are, in fact, a well-­defined sequence of operators that manipulate this knowledge base. Just as market research attempts to identify trends in the marketplace on which to base a new generation of products, so can market trends be identified by analyzing the product itself in order to predict the basic characteristics of a new product. Because Creativity Templates inherently carry important codes for the evolution of successful new products, they can be exploited to generate a competitive advantage based on minimal market information. (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 23)

The possibility of the transformation or evolution of forms is essential for Goldenberg and Mazursky’s argument that the product is a locus of creative development and radical newness that the innovator, by means of the “creativity templates,” can decipher to his or her advantage. It is this possibility that allows them to build their theory of the evolution of product forms. This possibility is a legacy of Romantic idealism. As George Herbert Mead has argued, the general idea of evolution emerged in the nineteenth century as a result of Romantic idealism’s challenge to Kantian philosophy with respect to the notion of form (Mead 1972, 153). The notion of static forms had a long intellectual history in the West. Aristotle theorized the development of the individual according to a form that already exists. Such a

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form was “a metaphysical entity” that “existed in and directed the development of the form. The species—which is the Latin word for the Greek term ‘form’—was actually conceived of as a certain nature that supervised the development of the seed of the embryo into the normal adult form” (160). Premodern theories of biology similarly stipulated already-­existing forms. Some versions “even conceived of a complete man as given in the very cells from which the form of the embryo developed” (159). This intellectual history culminated in Kant’s theory of mind, which the Romantic idealists challenged: “Kant conceived of the basic forms of the world as being given in the character of the mind itself. . . . If the object, as such, arises under Kant’s doctrine, it is because of certain contents of the sensibility passing into these forms. . . . The logical pre-­existence of the form to the object cannot be stated in terms of process; therefore it falls outside of evolutionary ideas. . . . The Romantic idealists changed all that” (153–54). By challenging the Kantian notion of static forms, the Romantic idealists prepared the way for Lamarckian and Darwinian theories of evolution, which “undertook to show how, by a certain process, forms themselves might come into being, might arise. Starting with the relatively formless, how could one account for the appearance of forms?” (159). The idea of an evolutionary process that is responsible for the emergence of multitudes of new and as of yet unknown forms is thus post-­Kantian and Romantic through and through. It also provided the context for the emergence of modern notions of the self as a unique, inchoate creative potentiality for development and transformation that the individual can realize by experimenting with and articulating it. Brandnew’s innovation strategy depends on the discursive displacement of these modern-­Romantic notions of evolution and creativity from the human to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process.

“Consumer Needs” From Culture to Nature, Part 1 If products and their forms emerge as a result of dynamic evolutionary processes, the Method nevertheless promises to tame the randomness associated with these processes by revealing the deep structures that underlie them, namely, the “creativity templates.” By differentiating between forms at different levels of reality, that is, by claiming that at a surface level, product forms change through dynamic evolutionary processes but at a deeper level, these dynamic processes turn out to be governed by specific templates,

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Goldenberg and Mazursky in fact argue that they have discovered static forms of transformation that govern the dynamic transformation of forms.4 This is an ingenuous rhetorical construction. Evolution connotes chance-­ based changes that business executives might find unsettling because of the unpredictability such changes suggest. However, the notion of evolution only boosts the Method’s appeal because Goldenberg and Mazursky argue that they have discovered the deep structures that underlie “product evolution.” This is why they intertwine tropes of evolution and deep structure time and again. They keep emphasizing that there are specific “regularities underlying creative ideas or products” and that these regularities can be “revealed by observing the pattern in product evolution” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 3). Any such specific pattern or template “signifies a certain rule in evolutionary processes” (4). Ultimately, “the number of Templates that cover the majority of successful new product innovations” turns out “to be just five” (34). Chance is thereby both retained and restrained in the same way that the Method discards human creativity only in theory whereas in practice it merely displaces it from the innovator and consumer to the ­product. This rhetorical construction becomes important when Goldenberg and Mazursky argue that what the “rules” that govern “product evolution” actually encode is information about the emergence of “market needs.” Because the innovator can infer this information from the history of the evolution of successful products and synthesize it in the form of templates, he does not need to engage with consumers to generate ideas for innovative products. He can generate such ideas “based on minimal market information” by taking the templates that he synthesized from the analysis of “the evolutionary trends of successful products at their mature stage” and applying them in a procedural, algorithmic way “to non-­mature situations,” that is, to products in need of innovation (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 147). Thus, Goldenberg and Mazursky can characterize the Method as a clean algorithmic procedure for generating ideas for innovative products not only because they displace creativity from the human to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process but also because they purify consumer needs from the noise and heterogeneity that typically saturate them.5 This approach comes to the fore in a “thought experiment”: Let us assume that we have just arrived from another world, know nothing about the market, and have never conducted market research about preferences and attitudes of people residing on this planet. However, we have the intelligence and ability to communicate well with human beings. We are sur-

“Listening to the Voice of the Product” / 85 prised to discover that humans place their bodies on an object they refer to as “a chair.” We observe that different chairs have legs of the same length, indicating that the height of the chair is not an arbitrary parameter, and is dependent on humans wishing to be at a certain height in relation to their environment. We may conclude that the backrest is meant to support the back and that there is a relation between the height of the chair and the height of the table next to it. The armrests of the chair support the arms, the softness of the seat is meant for comfort and is related to the body build and the preferences of the user. We may make inferences about the needs and wants that a chair fulfills without actually asking the consumers a single question. This can be done due to the long period of evolution of the chair. Many changes and modifications have taken place over time. People have proposed ideas and improvements that the market accepted or rejected. The market itself constructs mechanisms for natural selection (in the evolutionary sense), through which a good idea survives and a poor idea disappears. A good idea is one that responds satisfactorily to an important need, leaving traces in the characteristics of the products. Over time, the product becomes a physical representation of the overarching market needs. (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 24)

The innovator can infer the functions that an existing product’s formal properties perform for consumers without having to know anything about consumers. So, for example, the benefit of a chair’s “length of legs” is to “bring body to required height,” and the benefit of a shoe’s “heel” is to “increase the height of the wearer” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 25). By articulating the benefit or function of an object’s formal features in terms of their action on the consumer’s “natural” body, Goldenberg and Mazursky can pre­sent “needs” as entities that naturally emerge from the consumer’s biological existence. They thus erase the role of cultural and symbolic structures, including mediating institutions such as marketing, in producing, reproducing, and transforming consumer needs.6 Ironically, a phenomenon that provides a counterexample to these principles is brainstorming’s continued success in managerial circles despite the fact that, so Goldenberg and Mazursky argue, “investigators” have found that “a brainstorming session does not generate more ideas or greater creativity than groups of individuals working independently” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 47). Indeed, as I discuss in the previous chapter, Brandnew’s consultants explicitly contrast the Method with brainstorming, which they view as an unsystematic and organizationally useless ideation strategy. Goldenberg and Mazursky concede that if brainstorming “was a case of a big promise that turned into a disappointing fad, we have to face the intrigu-

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ing fact that this so-­called management fad has struck roots and thrived for more than 30 years” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 47). This fact is “intriguing” because if the market is predicated on “a process resembling ‘the survival of the fittest’” in which “products that fail to fulfill . . . needs and desires disappear while products that satisfy them survive until the next change takes place” (23), then brainstorming’s survival given its uselessness as an innovation method begs for an explanation. Goldenberg and Mazursky try to extract themselves from this conundrum by arguing that brainstorming performs organizational functions that have nothing to do with creativity. For example, it allows employees to have “a pleasant and fun experience” and to compete “over status.” It also provides organizations with the opportunity “to impress clients” (50). Thus, when they have to explain the survival and success of an innovation strategy that competes with the Method, Goldenberg and Mazursky suddenly resort to mediating symbolic structures such as status seeking and impression management. They do so because only a disconnect between the need people think a product satisfies and the need it actually satisfies can mitigate the challenge that brainstorming’s continued success poses to the Method’s specific evolutionary framework. Aside from this instance, Goldenberg and Mazursky ignore the possibility of such a disconnect because acknowledging this possibility would jeopardize the Method’s clean algorithmic conceptual framework that is responsible for its appeal. From Culture to Nature, Part 2 Goldenberg and Mazursky naturalize consumer needs and erase mediating symbolic structures in another way. They argue that a product is innovative if it is perceived as such by consumers. Consumers’ “perception of innovativeness” of products is anchored in the properties of “the brain as a self-­ organizing system where paths of minimum energy serve as attractors for responses or preferences” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 212). Such a perception has unchanging and universal dimensions. The “creativity templates” capture these dimensions and can help the innovator generate ideas for new products that consumers will perceive as innovative. In the first week of his class, Dan discussed the reverse engineering of the deep structures that underlie consumers’ “perception of innovativeness” in advertisements. He showed the students an advertisement for the Nike Air shoe and then said, “I am going to make an argument that this is a creative ad. Am I allowed to do this?” he asked rhetorically. “The truth is that no, I’m not allowed to do that. Because who am I to tell you that this is creative?

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The only thing I can tell you is that I measured the creativity of this ad.” At this point I became curious. How does one measure creativity? “I can ask a lot of people to rate a lot of ads, not only this one, on a, let’s say, one to seven scale,” Dan continued, “and if there is agreement, and there is—the correlation is extremely high, people agree what is creative and what is not creative—so if there is an agreement then I can call it a creative ad. And the truth is that this ad received many awards and people graded it high on creativity.” Dan paused for a second and concluded, “But this is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that there are other ads like this with the same deep structure that maybe you can use in other cases.” This argument about universal “deep structures” that reflect consumers’ “perception of innovativeness” ignores the contingently unfolding social and cultural processes that are responsible for the fact that certain objects become recognized as exemplars of creativity and innovation.7 In functioning in this way, this argument solidifies the impression that the Method is a clean algorithmic strategy of innovation that can be easily applied in numerous domains and contexts. The reverse engineering of such deep structures was put into practice in Brandnew’s workshop. Tom began a session by telling the participants, “I’ll show you an advertising campaign. Three or four print ads selling the same product. And this whole campaign won awards at the Cannes Festival for creative campaign, so we consider this creative. It’s been considered creative by the experts in the industry.” After dividing the participants into teams, Tom instructed them to “understand the campaign, the logic behind the campaign, and to create the fifth ad which will be seamless with the campaign, which will fit with the other four ads of the campaign. Create one more print ad that has a logical connection to the rest of the campaign. You have three minutes.” The ads that Tom showed to the participants were organized around the principle of taking a minor benefit of an existing product and showing its extreme consequences in absurd situations. So, for example, a dress can be so alluring that when a woman wears it and walks in the street, the men around her become involved in car accidents and other forms of misfortune because they can’t stop looking at her.8 Tom asked the participants to share their ideas for new advertising campaigns based on the ads he had shown them before. He then asked, “Do you think your idea was creative? Do you think that it was at least as creative as the other ads?” Some of the participants nodded “yes” with their heads. “It’s because we understood the logic of the rest of the campaign that we were able to take that logic and create something completely new,” he continued. “We typically think of innovation as what’s different. But what we do is analyze what’s

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in common between things that are considered innovative and creative. Let’s learn the model behind them and use that model. We call that a pattern. When you can see through several award-­winning campaigns the same underlying logic, that’s called a pattern, and what we want to do is identify the underlying patterns of creativity, of things that lead to innovation. In this case it’s ad campaigns, but in other cases it’s products, technologies, solutions. Why do we want to do that?” he asked rhetorically. “Because when you are going to want to develop your next ad campaign you won’t have to think about everything but rather use a very specific formula of how to think. You’ll come up with additional innovations.” Tom promised the participants that in the remainder of the workshop they would learn “some of the tools that we have identified over the years across industries. We’ll teach them to you as actionable tools so that when you go back to your organizations you’ll be able to use them to come up with innovations.” In my interview with Dan, he emphasized that “the reverse engineering is of the logical structure and not of the product itself.” It was important for him to stress that the Method requires the innovator not to copy specific products and services but to find “the logic of creativity in reverse from products that the market decided are innovative so you’ll be able to use it again in the future to produce new products.” Although the ideas for products produced in this way are new, they adhere to already established styles of innovation. Scholars of creative cognition have argued that this form of innovation consists in “exploring [existing] conceptual spaces” or “structured styles of thought” (Boden 2003, 4). Conceptual spaces are spaces of possibilities that derive from a specific set of constraints or a style. In this form of innovation, any novelty or “a new trick” is “something that ‘fits’ . . . [an] established style: the potential was always there” (Boden 2003, 5). This form of innovation does not aim to transform an established style and to operate at a higher level of creativity in which “thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable” (Boden 2003, 6; Wilf 2013a, 2013b). Dan and Brandnew’s consultants justified their conservative approach to innovation by arguing that innovators should not be concerned with creativity per se but rather with monetizable creativity, that is, with creativity that results in monetizable new products and processes. Dan kept reminding his students that “in innovation, creative ideas have to offer value. If you come up with a highly original idea that offers no or little value for consumers, you didn’t innovate.” The innovator should be willing to follow the path of tried-­and-­true innovative products and processes if they can produce monetizable value. If consumers perceive a product as innovative and

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useful, it is good enough even if that product is based on templates that were synthesized from the analysis of previous successful products. Crucially, Goldenberg and Mazursky argue that because the “creativity templates” represent the “deep cognitive structures” that underlie consumers’ “perception of innovativeness,” using them “does not necessarily result in undermining the surprisingness of product ideas which fit a template” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 35). The consumer has immediate and conscious access only to “surface properties” as opposed to the “structural properties” that are processed at a subconscious level. “Templates seem deep because the analog lacks surface similarities, which are normally observable by consumers” (36). Hence, if two products are modeled after the same template, the consumer will perceive each of them as new and surprising because of shared underlying features that he or she will remain unaware of because of the products’ surface-­level differences: “Products that match templates may be perceived as superior because they elicit ‘unrecognized familiarity’” (35). This, in effect, is another form of the ingenious rhetorical construction by means of which Goldenberg and Mazursky both retain the promise of change and creativity and tame the unpredictability they entail: a limited number of “creativity templates” offer the innovator a way to generate an endless series of ideas for products that consumers will perceive as surprising, new, and innovative. In my conversation with Dan, I raised the possibility that consumers’ perception of what counts as innovative might change over time. He replied by saying that “yes, perhaps the templates will gradually change because the market defines something else as creative. So the templates might be dynamic but across decades or centuries, I don’t know. So far they haven’t changed because it’s been a short time span, and we don’t have documentation from before the 50s.” By framing the potential change of templates as something that might take place only across “decades or centuries,” Dan effectively dismissed such a potential change as an irrelevant factor in the ­present.9 Finally, note that according to Dan and Tom, there is no need for the innovator to directly engage with consumers to see what they consider to be innovative. Rather, innovators can rely on the measure of creativity decided on in industry-­specific contests in which experts evaluate products. The innovator should not be interested in participating in these evaluation processes, only in following the standards of innovativeness they establish.10 Ironically, Goldenberg and Mazursky fail to consider the possibility that judging consumers’ “perception of innovativeness” by proxy, that is, by following industry-­specific contests, might result in a self-­referencing system

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in which many award-­winning ads and products have the same deep structure because many advertising agencies and production teams—­including innovation consultancies such as Brandnew—reverse engineer the logic that underlies many award-­winning ads and products. This process might lead to a convergence around a very specific style of innovation. Any recurring deep structures in such ads and products might consequently have very little to do with the public’s perception of the innovativeness of such ads and products and more to do with the fact that business innovation has become a self-­reifying and self-­referencing professional practice that is decoupled from the market to which it purports to refer.

“Latent Needs”: The Seductions of Potentiality and of the World as a Matrix The notion of “latent consumer needs” provides an additional condition of possibility for the Method’s clean algorithmic architecture. It creates a link between the present, in which a need is “latent,” and the future, in which it is “active.” This link performs two functions. First, it enables Goldenberg and Mazursky to buttress their argument that future consumer needs, to which future successful products will cater, already exist as a potential in the present, that is, independently of mediating symbolic structures such as marketing and fluctuating sociocultural configurations. Second, and more important, it allows them to argue that the innovator can predict future needs and quicken their “activation” by discovering them at their latent form. The way to do so is to manipulate existing objects by means of the “creativity templates.” The promise of prediction, mediated by the notion of latency, comes to the fore when Goldenberg and Mazursky (2002, 17) discuss “the propagation of awareness for an emerging need”: A new, important need emerges, unnoticed by all but a few uniquely attuned individuals who spontaneously discover the need. . . . Gradually, the awareness of the need is diffused by a world-­of-­mouth mechanism which informs unaware consumers about the new need, along with additional consumers experiencing spontaneous discovery. From a market perspective, this transition from a latent to active need (characterized by market awareness) can be viewed as a propagation process. (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 17–18)11

Goldenberg and Mazursky argue that this process can be modeled as an S-­shaped curve divided into three phases. In the first phase, only “few

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people are aware of the idea for a certain product. The need for the product is latent: the potential exists, but it has yet to emerge as a recognized need. Any idea generated at this stage is likely to be perceived as creative.” The second phase “represents the stage of fast propagation of the awareness.” The third phase “represents a state in which the market is saturated with information about the idea, i.e., the consumers are aware of the need or want for the new product” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 19). Goldenberg and Mazursky ultimately argue that the key to lucrative innovation is to find the need at its latent rather than active stage. This would give the business organization a competitive edge. Market research and design thinking cannot generate meaningful information about the latent need in the first phase because in this phase only very few people are aware of the need. The probability of finding those people is very low. The information about the latent need can only be found in the potential of existing products to metamorphose according to the “creativity templates.” This is what the Method promises to help the innovator do. The Method “is meant to help us in finding new characteristics not overt in existing products—characteristics that the consumers are not yet aware that they need” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 90). It can be used “to predict accurately the possible future or latent needs,” to “foresee new market needs while the relevant product markets are still underdeveloped” (26). Goldenberg and Mazursky thus promise to teach innovators ways of accessing information about consumers’ future needs so that they can satisfy those needs before they show signs that their competitors can detect through market research. Effectively, this means that one can use the Method to speed up the course of a product’s “evolution,” which would normally take place at a slower pace. It is tantamount to gaining knowledge about the future course of the economy, by means of which the innovator can speed this course up and situate himself at strategic points in it in order to reap significant benefits. This is the “competitive advantage” that the Method promises to deliver, a kind of time travel into the future “evolution” of a product in response to future consumer needs. This promise of prediction, mediated by notions of latency and potentiality, resonates with recent anthropological studies of potentiality in biomedicine (Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013). Taussig and her colleagues identify three meanings of potentiality that are prevalent in popular, scientific, and anthropological texts: (1) “A hidden force determined to manifest itself—something that with or without intervention has its future built into it”; (2) “Genuine plasticity—the capacity to transmute into something completely different”; and (3) “A latent possibility imagined as open to choice, a

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quality perceived as available to human modification and direction through which people can work to propel an object or subject to become something other than it is” (Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013, S4). They note that these meanings can be easily combined, “so that a claim about potential as a hidden force resting in, say, human biology becomes subject to a (necessary) action or even choice. . . . By slipping from ‘hidden force’ to ‘choice,’ claims about potential may come to constitute calls for action” (S5). These claims often work “on and through morality, by making claims on us to do something” (S6). The Method combines the aforementioned first and third meanings of potentiality. On the one hand, the potential for new products already inheres in existing products as something that is likely to manifest itself in the future. On the other hand, this potential is open to intervention in that the innovator can use the Method to accelerate its realization or activation. This combination of meanings provides the basis for “calls for action”: the innovator has an almost ethical duty to realize the product’s potential before his or her competitors do. The ominous undertones of this call for action align with the fact that if “in biomedicine, potentiality generally is articulated . . . as a hopeful idiom through which to imagine the benefits of new mediation interventions, such visions are also often premised on disrupting the negative potentials of life—for example, various types of genetic mutations, deleterious microbes, unwanted cell growth and death, and injury and aging” (Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013, S4). Taussig and her colleagues’ use of the term disruption is felicitous. As I argue in chapter 1, disruption has become a key notion in business innovation, one that has been informed by potential’s capacity to become “a term with which one articulates worries and not just hopeful prospects” (Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013, S8). The potential to discover or develop a new product is intertwined with the hope to disrupt one’s competitors and their threatening potential to be the first to discover or develop that product (Christensen 1997; Lepore 2014). At the same time, the Method’s specific features suggest that finer distinctions about the social life of potentiality under capitalism are called for. Taussig and her colleagues note that “in the United States, the focus on the ‘promissory’ creates more explicit links to capitalism and financial markets” (Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013, S9). Indeed, the promise to “speed up” the course of history by manipulating the laws or rules that govern it has been a common trope in narratives that emerged from different strands of business innovation and capitalist techno-­futurism (Turner 2016). What has often remained undiscussed, though, is that the urgency to exercise such

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control as well as the appeal of the strategies that purport to help do so have often been boosted by narratives that represent the present as a point in time in which an exponential acceleration of events rather than their linear progression is about to take place. The idea of imminent exponential growth creates a sense of urgency to act in order to benefit from the impending bonanza and to avoid destruction by letting others benefit from it. Goldenberg and Mazursky describe a situation in which a specific cluster of products has remained unchanged for a long time, as “the quiet before the storm—an avalanche of new products will flood the marketplace as soon as the first new product is introduced” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 92). This point in time is the first phase of the S-­shaped graph. It is immediately followed by the second phase, namely, the “fast propagation” of awareness of a need, which the graph represents as an exponential increase. The idea of imminent acceleration that is not yet noticeable in the present because of its very exponential nature not only creates a sense of urgency but also boosts the status of the “prophet” who can notice the impending trend and provide others with the tools to prepare for and even benefit from it.12 Prediction, then, can find different expressions based on the assumptions made about the specific form of economic history’s ­progress. These different dimensions come to the fore in what Goldenberg and Mazursky call “the forecasting matrix” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 76–98). The matrix is supposed to help the innovator generate new product forms and ideas based on the template that requires him to find two hitherto independent variables in an existing product and establish a new dependency between them.13 The matrix, with its vertically and laterally homogenous grid-­like structure, is a diagrammatic representation of the simplification of reality that is part and parcel of the Method’s logic. The matrix consists of columns and rows that list different variables that are internal or external to the object in need of innovation. The matrix is then analyzed. If a matrix cell represents the intersection of two variables between which there is no dependency, it is marked as 0. If a matrix cell represents the intersection of two variables between which there already is dependency, it is marked as 1. The innovator needs to search for variables between which there is no dependency and then hypothetically generate such dependency and search for its potential benefits. First, note that at stake is a clear algorithmic procedure: “The matrix enables us to search for additional [dependencies] by a systematic scanning of all the elements, in order to find 0 modes and change them to 1 modes” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 84). Second, the purpose of this procedure is to harvest the product’s potential to morph into successful new prod-

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ucts: “Our aim is to ‘read’ the information embedded in the product as if we were reading a map of potential changes” (76). Finally, notions of potential and latency naturalize the assumption that this procedure can help forecast changes that are bound to unfold in the future: “The matrix is a tool for systematic scanning of variables, making it possible to predict developments in the product” (78). The idea that the innovator predicts rather than generates future products is a natural consequence of this conceptual framework.14 To reiterate, these are manifestations of the conceptual transformation of the product into a quasi person endowed with a unique nature, voice, and creative potential to metamorphose and change and of the simultaneous conceptual transformation of the consumer (and, to a lesser extent, of the innovator) into a standardized and unchanging quasi object. This dual transformation is a condition of possibility for the Method’s appeal as a reliable, algorithmic-­like strategy of innovation. It reaches its epitome in Goldenberg and Mazursky’s (2002) claim that they have developed a computer program that generates “Template-­based” ideas in advertising that, when “compared (by judges, in a blind experiment) to ideas proposed by subjects in four distinct control groups . . . were judged to be superior . . . on a number of scales of creativity, efficiency and effectiveness” (166). They conclude that “the computer was used to remove beyond any doubts the ‘human factor’ in the Template-­based ideation sessions” (ibid.). The drive to systematize and professionalize business innovation thus reaches its logical end in the removal of the “human factor” from the innovation process altogether—be it the consumer or the innovator—and its replacement with computer software.

The Problem of Competitive Edge and the Recrudescence of Human Creativity Transforming the world into a matrix and the innovation process into an algorithmic procedure can be a double-­edged sword. On the one hand, it supports the notion that routinized business innovation is a professional practice that is based in rational principles. On the other hand, it can create the problem of competitive edge. One of the key arguments for the Method’s superiority over market research and design thinking is that market research and design thinking can provide information about a new consumer need only when the market is already saturated with awareness of this need. As Goldenberg and Mazursky argue, at this point “the competitors, able to conduct a similar market analysis, will not be surprised either. In such a situation, it is more than probable

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that at least one other competitor may discover the same need at the same time. . . . None of the manufacturers [will gain] an advantage through marketing thinking” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 20). Dan dramatized to his students the futility of market research in the idea-­generation stage in the following way: “Suppose that you just graduated from the MBA program at Yale, and you are doing research for Citibank,” he began. “And you want to explore the market to come up with new services. But,” he paused, “someone else just graduated from NYU, and he’s working for Chase Manhattan and also doing research. So you both learned from the same professors of market research, you are talented in the same way, you use approximately the same budget, you are using the same sample sizes. If this happens— and it happens all the time—then don’t be surprised if you come up with the same ideas as that other person. Because you are using needs that have already evolved into the demand.” Dan gave his students the time to digest this ominous prospect. “You want the numbers?” he asked. “Ok, I’ll give you the numbers. What are the odds, if you have eight competitors, that through market research alone you can be the first?” At this point a few of the students raised their hands and offered their estimates. Dan shook his head. “I’ll give you a hint,” his voice suddenly assumed a grave tone. “It’s not twelve and a half percent. It’s less than a half percent! And the bad news is that there are more than eight competitors because millions of eyes are looking at the market, trying to make easy money by developing an idea, a concept, and then sell it to a company that can introduce it officially to the market. So by market research you cannot find something that your competitors can’t find in the same way. It’s practically impossible.” Conversely, as Dan told me, “the templates can predict data about unmet needs before the market gives off signals, and thus we can get there sooner.” He added that after the innovator generates an idea for a new product by means of the templates, he can use market research to assess the potential success of that idea. If this argument is accepted at face value, it raises the question of whence competitors can gain a competitive edge over one another if they all turn to the Method, especially given the fact that the Method is presented as a process that is made up of clear, algorithmic-­like steps. In principle, it is possible to take Dan’s dramatized argument about the futility of using market research at the ideation stage and use it to argue for the futility of using the Method at the ideation stage: if students graduate from different MBA programs in which they learn to use the Method and if they end up working in the same industry, should we not expect them to come up with the same ideas for new products and services?

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When I asked Dan to address this problem, it turned out that although the Method was explicitly intended to demystify creativity and remove the “human factor” from ideation sessions by means of clear algorithmic procedures, creativity as a mysterious quality that is unevenly distributed among people returned through the back door as a quality that guarantees differentiation and a competitive edge.15 “Let’s take the example of teaching people to become poets,” Dan replied. “If you learn the techniques to write poetry, you’ll write poetry better than before. So in terms of your productivity you’re a poet. On the other hand, let’s say that you give the same tools to Walt Whitman, and let’s say he can improve his poetry as a result. This means that he will be a much better poet than you. The same goes for someone who was born with the skills to write poetry and now has the tools to develop those skills. The gap between him and you will increase, not decrease. You will increase the gap between yourself and what you could have been, but you won’t minimize the gap between yourself and Whitman.” “So the gap stays the same or increases?” I wanted to clarify this analogy. “No, the gap increases,” Dan smiled. “Like in sports,” he offered. “Let’s say that you were born with some traits—a strong heart, big lungs, better muscles, better limbs—everything is more suitable for running. But you’re a couch potato. I, on the other hand, exercise all the time. So of course I will surpass you. That’s the meaning of training. But if both of us train, the gap between us will increase, not decrease.” Thus, the Method’s promise to discard creativity and the “human factor” by means of matrixes, algorithmic procedures, and computer software notwithstanding, creativity as a mysterious, unevenly distributed inborn trait is brought back to mitigate the risk of the absence of competitive edge—a risk that is itself a result of the Method’s algorithmic framework—and thus to guarantee differentiation in the hypercompetitive business world. Not only will differentiation between companies that use the Method be maintained, it will even increase because of the initial differences between innovators in terms of how “naturally” creative they are. In an interview I conducted with Gabriella, one of Brandnew’s consultants, she made a similar argument after I had asked her to address the issue of competitive edge. “Let’s say you work on waffles,” she said. “The components are the same components both at Nestlé and at Kraft. So you’ll use different creativity templates. It’s the same components. Even so, it’s amazing to see that even if two people are working on the same thing in the same room, each of them will arrive at different ideas.” At this point Gabriella used the by now familiar trope of “the brain”: “Because the tools are only triggers,” she continued. “The methodology is merely a trigger to produce associations in the brain that did not exist beforehand for some reason.

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And you will produce associations that relate to your own world of associations, and another person will produce different associations. So even with the same client, on the same product, on the same components—if three people work on them in the same room, they will come up with three different ideas.” She concluded by saying, “so by definition you’ll never get the same ideas. You might use the same methodology, components, etc., but you won’t get the same ideas.” To guarantee differentiation of results, Gabriella invoked individual idiosyncrasies and differences in the form of the unique cluster of associations located in each innovator’s “brain.” In effect, this is a kind of blackboxing.16 Dan acknowledged that although an innovator who uses the Method must be able “to be systematic and follow procedures—having a commitment to the process—there has to be creativity, too. You cannot implement the Method well without there being some creativity. Especially in the ‘function follows form’ stage—the ‘virtual situation’ stage. You have to be creative there.” Gabriella similarly acknowledged that “creativity becomes essential when you have to shift from the stage in which you have a strange and abstract product form, which is a mechanical result [of transforming an existing product form by means of the templates], to the stage in which you assign to this strange form specific functions or usages. It is the transition from the ‘virtual situation’ to the potential benefits and functions of the strange form—this is a stage that requires creativity.” The fact that Dan and Gabriella identified “the virtual situation” as the stage that requires creativity is significant. The workshop facilitators, as well as Goldenberg and Mazursky, ignored the reasons for which some people can think of more interesting functions for a strange product form. They blackboxed this dimension precisely because it conjures what is commonly thought of as the mystery of human creativity, which the Method is supposed to harness, control, and even discard. It is equally significant that the facilitators’ descriptions of the innovator’s experience in the “virtual situation” were clearly informed by the Ro‑ mantic idealist framework of creative agency. Mead has argued that the Romantic idealists stipulated that forms arise “in the very process of [the individual’s] experience, in the process of overcoming antinomies, overcoming obstacles”; hence “we [i.e., each individual] are responsible for the forms” (Mead 1972, 154). For the Romantic idealists, “the self involves a process that is going on, that takes on now one form and now another— a subject-­object relationship which is dynamic, not static. . . . To get the feeling for this Romantic idealism, one must be able to put himself in the position of the process as determining the form” (163). Similarly, the key locus

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in which the forms of new products can be purposefully generated is the innovator’s self, who is asked to put himself in the position of the process as determining form. In “the virtual situation,” the innovator is literally asked to “overcome antinomies” and “obstacles,” that is, the strange product forms that he procedurally generates by transforming existing products according to the “creativity templates.” For example, such strange forms might arise as a result of omitting an existing product’s most essential component, such as the legs of a chair. The innovator is asked to identify with and overcome the alien character of the resulting strange new forms. It is by virtue of such a synthesis between the innovator’s self and the strange forms that the innovator can come up with functions that the strange forms might be able to perform for potential consumers. Brandnew’s facilitators described the innovator’s responsibility to overcome the alien nature of the strange product forms in ethical terms that very much resemble the Romantic idealists’ description of the self’s ethical imperative to overcome antinomies and be “responsible for the forms.” Tom described the innovator’s experience in “the virtual situation” to the workshop participants: “Often you’ll get this experience when you start using the Method where you’ve created the virtual situation but you have no idea what to do, and you have to stand there with this strange form. Give yourself a few seconds and the chance to identify what the benefits of the situation might be. Don’t run away. It will be hard and it will seem strange,” he cautioned, “but you’ll have to cultivate that ability to stay with your virtual situation and discover the benefits of the strange form.” Gabriella added that “in the virtual situation the strange object is staring at you and you are staring at it. This is exactly what we call the virtual situation moment. And that moment is a very uncomfortable moment to be in because it’s something that doesn’t make sense and then you, poor thing, have the challenge of actually making sense of something that, by definition, doesn’t make sense. And that’s very labor intensive. It can be quite frustrating at times, but when done successfully it’s extremely rewarding in the sense that you’ve come up with something that is actually surprising, that’s worthwhile.” Such descriptions revolve around four dimensions: (1) the presence of the strange form qua an alien nonself, an antinomy, an obstacle produced by a process; (2) the discomfort the innovator feels in the presence of this alien nonself; (3) the innovator’s ethical responsibility to stay in this uncomfortable situation and to overcome the gap that separates his self from this nonself; and (4) the result of this effort being ideas for surprising new products that promise to be “rewarding” for both the innovator and his business organization. Thus, after all is said and done, human creativity, mod-

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eled after classic Romantic idealist notions, turns out to anchor one of the Method’s key stages, “the virtual situation,” but it is rarely acknowledged or discussed because it has the potential to undermine the innovation consultant’s promise to help business executives master rational, rule-­governed, and reliable strategies of innovation that harness and tame, if not entirely discard, creativity as an unpredictable and mercurial human trait.

Conclusion: A Culturally Specific Form of Commodity Fetishism The conceptual transformation of the product into a quasi person that is endowed with a unique creative potential for development and maturation and of the consumer into a static, quasi object brings to mind the theory of commodity fetishism developed by Marx. Marx argued that under capitalism, consumers become unaware of the labor that has been put into the commodities they buy (i.e., that they pay for the work of others). They believe that they pay a price that represents the value that is inherent to the commodity, to its “nature,” as if it came ready made and had a nature of its own. Commodities are thus transformed into objects endowed with mystical qualities. Marx argued that at stake is a form of religion in that “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race” (Marx 1978, 321). The Method represents a form of commodity fetishism too. The innovators I worked with endowed products with creative potentiality in an attempt to demystify and control what appeared to them to be the mystifyingly capricious and unpredictable reasons for organizational creativity and successful new product development. Their practice resembles other occult practices whose purpose is to make the obscure and unpredictable forces of modern capitalism intelligible and amenable to control and that, in their turn, produce new forms of opacity and mystification (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; West and Sanders 2003; Wilf 2018). By displacing creativity from the human to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process, the innovators I worked with attempted to make organizational creativity manageable and amenable to rule-­governed strategies and algorithmic manipulation. At the same time, the Method’s form of commodity fetishism has a specific feature that distinguishes it from the form of commodity fetishism described by Marx. First and foremost, whereas Marx argued that commodities start to “appear as independent beings endowed with life” (Marx 1978,

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321) in the most general sense—that is, as things that appear to have an independent existence apart from human beings, although it is the latter who give them this existence—Goldenberg and Mazursky model the product after a culturally specific notion of personhood, self, and life, namely, a modern-­Romantic one, which accounts for the Method’s specific contours. The Method would not have had its current form had it not been for these culturally specific notions of creative agency. Goldenberg and Mazursky can pre­sent the Method as a rule-­governed strategy of business innovation in which creativity is purified from its unruly, mercurial, and mysterious features because of the overall nonreactive or less complexly reactive nature of nonhuman objects (Suchman 2006), to which they displace such creativity from the human elements of the innovation process. The innovator’s displacement of creativity from consumers to nonreactive objects and his subsequent “interaction” with those objects via the analysis of their “potential” to “evolve” to new objects invites a comparison with Sherry Turkle’s analysis of a relationship with sociable robots, that is, the kind of relational artifacts that a growing number of children in developed countries play with and by means of which they are socialized into specific forms of sociality. Turkle argues that “the first thing missing if you take a robot as a companion is alterity, the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Without alterity, there can be no empathy” (Turkle 2011, 55). At stake is “narcissistic experience” in which one is “trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part” (56). Turkle adds that this kind of experience “consigns us to a closed world—the lovable as safe and made to measure” (66). By displacing creativity from consumers to products and claiming that there is no longer any need to interact with consumers because all the necessary information about future consumer needs inheres in existing products, Goldenberg and Mazursky, as well as other innovators who forgo context and history in favor of abstract algorithms and procedures, are similarly engaged in a narcissistic-­like relationship whose purpose is to transform the capricious and unpredictable world of business innovation into a safer world. Here, too, relationship with humans as consumers, which necessitates the laborious, costly, and time-­consuming process of coming to terms with their alterity and the multiply determined and contingent nature of their tastes and desires, is exchanged for the safer and much cheaper relationship with nonreactive objects. As the next chapter demonstrates, such decontextualization is also a distinguishing feature of innovation strategies such as design thinking that, in contrast to the Method, explicitly emphasize the importance of “empathizing” with consumers by directly engaging with them.

FOUR

The Post-­it Note Economy Understanding Post-­Fordist Business Innovation

“You’d Have to Already Have the Post-­it Note to Invent One!” To get a broader understanding of other kinds of innovation strategies that consultants develop and disseminate, especially strategies that involve design thinking—the innovation strategy that Brandnew’s consultants explicitly reject—I enrolled in a five-­week design thinking workshop organized by Newfound, an innovation consulting firm based in New York. The workshop took place in a conference room that was bounded by three glass walls and a fourth wall that functioned as a huge whiteboard. The room was situated in the middle of a shared workspace on the twenty-­first floor of a new office building in Manhattan’s midtown. Fifteen participants, mostly from the start-­up sector and the creative industries, attended the workshop. The facilitators structured the workshop around a specific problem that representatives of one of Newfound’s clients, an organization active in the education sector, presented to the participants at the beginning of the workshop: how to innovate the client’s website to achieve higher retention rates among its target audience. They divided the participants into three teams and gave each team a different subbrief of the problem to work on during the workshop. On a Wednesday night in the workshop’s third week, the conference room was buzzing with the voices of the participants who were busy generating ideas based on the data they had collected in the previous two weeks. Some team members scribbled words and doodles on new Post-­it notes and posted them on the walls, whereas other members stood in front of Post-­it notes that were already posted on the wall and rearranged them in new configurations. The glass walls were gradually transformed into a colorful tapestry of Post-­it notes. Within thirty minutes it was almost impossible to see through them the people who sat in front of their laptops in the open work-

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space outside the conference room. In the midst of all this activity, Carol, one of my team members, turned to Jennifer, another team member, and, as she posted a new Post-­it note on the wall, exclaimed, “Isn’t it crazy that Post-­it notes were a mistake, an accident? Can you imagine trying to invent them?” Jennifer, who was busy reshuffling some of the Post-­it notes that were already posted on the wall, turned to her and responded with laughter: “You’d have to already have the Post-­it note to invent one!” This exchange epitomizes the double iconic status of the Post-­it note in the business innovation world as both a model for and a means of successful innovation. In chapter 1, I discuss the ways in which Brandnew’s facilitators use the example of the company 3M and the invention of the Post-­it note as a model for successful innovation in which accidents can function as effective triggers for generating ideas for new products and services. The invention of the Post-­it note and its implications for the role of serendipity in business innovation have become a popular case study in the business-­ management literature on innovation (Molotch 2003, 45). Carol’s amazement at the fact that the Post-­it note was accidentally invented revolved around this dimension of the Post-­it note’s iconic status. Jennifer’s reply to Carol’s comment revolved around a different dimension of the Post-­it note’s iconic status in the business innovation world: the fact that it has become the most widely used means of ideation in innovation sessions. Whereas cutting-­edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologies have come to dominate many contemporary business production and distribution systems, the Post-­it note— a small rectangular piece of paper with weak adhesive properties—looms large as a key technology of idea generation in many contemporary business innovation contexts. Commentators have noted Post-­it notes’ surprising prevalence in otherwise increasingly computerized business innovation settings: “In a world of supposed declining paper use, Post-­it Notes are getting a second life, seeing a resurgence in a new and unforeseen way—as a tool for innovation and collaboration” (Lavenda 2014). When Jennifer argued that if it were not for the accidental event that had led to the development of the Post-­it note, one would need the Post-­it note to be able to invent the Post-­it note, she expressed the fact that Post-­it notes have become institutionalized and naturalized as the primary means of ideation in many business innovation contexts, so much so that one could almost not imagine developing any new product, including the Post-­it note, without using them. In this chapter I explore some of the reasons for Post-­it notes’ ubiquity in the business innovation world. Although commentators have explained Post-­it notes’ popularity by arguing that they make it easy to facilitate brain-

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storming sessions, important reasons for their popularity lie elsewhere. If the Method invests existing products with the creative potential to develop into new products, design thinking (i.e., Newfound’s key innovation strategy) invests an iconic product—the Post-­it note—with the creative potential to help the innovator quickly generate ideas for new products and services under post-­Fordist normative ideals of speed and instantaneity. The Post-­it note’s ubiquity thus stems from the fact that it can function as a specific semiotic technology of knowledge production that can help the innovator cope with the demands of a specific culture of knowledge production, namely, a post-­Fordist one.

A Semiotic Technology of Post-­Fordist Knowledge Production David Harvey (1990) has famously characterized the transition from Fordism to post-­Fordism in late twentieth-­century capitalism in terms of the development of new strategies to further reduce the turnover time of capital, that is, the time it takes for capital to complete a cycle from the capitalist’s investment of capital in the means of production to the return of capital to the capitalist after the sale of commodities (Azari-­Rad 1999). Fordism—with its new production technologies such as the assembly line, more efficient division of labor, and standardization of products—relied on innovations in means of production to reduce the turnover time of capital. However, it was still plagued with rigidities that post-­Fordism sought to overcome by turning to technologies of flexible accumulation whose purpose was to further reduce the turnover time of capital. Those technologies included the transition to part-­time and temporary labor forces (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012; Ho 2009), cheaper manufacturing of goods in small batches and new distribution systems such as just-­in-­time inventory-­flow delivery systems (Elam 1994; Shead 2017), geographical dispersal and mobility (Esser and Hirsch 1994), the ability to take advantage of up-­to-­date information through computerization and electronic means of communication (Zaloom 2006; Holmes and Marcus 2006), and, crucially, “an acceleration in the pace of product innovation together with the exploration of highly specialized and small-­scale market niches” (Harvey 1990, 156). Flexible accumulation depended not only on reduction of the turnover time of capital via more efficient production and distribution technologies but also on the faster generation of ideas for new products and services. The Post-­it note’s affordances provide the innovator the means to more quickly generate ideas for new products and services in response to the same pressure from clients for speedy results, which shapes the contours of

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Brandnew’s decontextualized method of innovation. As David, one of Newfound’s cofounders, told me in an interview, “It’s very hard to get the time to spend with a client to really dig into their life and their world. It’s hard to get the time to dig into the world and spend time with users. On both sides people just want results: ‘Make it good, make it great, you’re really smart.’” With visible frustration he added, “A lot of people are not willing to really ask, ‘Well, why do you want to change? What are you trying to get? What would success look like to you? What else have you tried?’ All of this stuff is very personally or intimately related.” Because they are pressured to streamline and quicken the production of insights, innovators use Post-­it notes as tools of fast data analysis that corresponds to similar trends in “for-­ corporations research” (Urban and Koh 2013, 147–49) such as “fast data,” that is, data “reported instantaneously by consumers via cell phones, Internet blogs, pagers, and so forth—[which] reflect and recreate the new managerial imperative for faster production, management, insights, and innovation that businesses now run” (Waal Malefyt 2009, 207). Recent semiotic and linguistic anthropological studies that have paid close attention to the role played by graphic artifacts in organizational knowledge production provide a conceptual framework that can help clarify the role performed by the Post-­it note in post-­Fordist business innovation. These studies have demonstrated that whereas organization members frequently view the documents they create and work with as representing entities in the world, such documents are actually constitutive of the world, including the people who deploy them. Rather than intermediaries that merely transport “meaning without transformation,” documents are often mediators that “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour 2005, 39; but see Appadurai 2015). Their analysis has accordingly shifted from reference and predication to “genre, material qualities, and sociotechnical processes of production and circulation [such as] paper quality . . . , typefaces . . . , mode of inscription . . . , organization of graphic space . . . , physical composition and compilation . . . , and non- or paralinguistic signs such as brackets . . . , bullet points . . . , signatures . . . , stamps . . . , and letterheads” (Hull 2012, 254). However, most of these studies have highlighted organizational contexts in which the generative capacity of graphic artifacts, that is, “their capacity to make things come into being” (Hull 2012, 259), is the result of competition between organization members; the subversive use of documents by people from within or without the organization, which undermines their intended use; or unacknowledged and unintended consequences (Hull 2003, 2008; Brenneis 2006; Reed 2006; Inoue 2011; Pellegram 1997).1 In contrast,

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business innovation is an organizational context in which innovators intentionally generate new cultural entities. Consequently, the graphic artifacts that they use to that effect, such as Post-­it notes, have a number of characteristics and become the center of social practices that are highly different from the characteristics and practices discussed in the aforementioned strand of linguistic and semiotic anthropological inquiry. For example, the Post-­it note is characterized by physical discardability and obsolescence rather than perdurance. Innovators embrace it because it affords a horizon of uncertainty and the production of new cultural entities (cf. Hull 2003, 290). In addition, because of its small dimensions, the Post-­it note provides little space for signs of individual authorship and history. It consequently has no “event-­like quality” (cf. Hull 2003, 296–97). The absence of contextual signs enables the innovator to more quickly generate insights by means of decontextualized data, pragmatic ambiguity, and the ritualized use of institutionalized templates. At stake is not a strategy of subversion but rather the conditions of possibility for business innovation under the post-­Fordist imperative to respond quickly to, anticipate and, ultimately, generate market changes in the form of new products and services (Harvey 1990, 159).2

“He Only Drinks Distilled Water”: The Post-­it Note between Mutability and Immutability When I asked David why Newfound’s innovation strategy relies so heavily on Post-­it notes, he replied that Post-­it notes allow the innovator “to put one idea per Post-­it note and thus to turn an idea into a mobile artifact, which helps with ideation: being able to collide ideas, being able to move ideas, have a spectrum of ideas, have clusters of ideas, pieces, chunks of information, breaking ideas into chunks of information.” His explanation brought to my mind Bruno Latour’s theory of “immutable mobiles” (1986). Latour has argued that one of the key conditions of possibility for the scientific revolution, modern state bureaucracy, and the new capitalist economy was the gradual perfection of “immutable mobiles,” that is, graphic artifacts such as maps and books on which knowledge could be encoded immutably and thus mobilized without being corrupted (as opposed to, e.g., a narrated myth; see Urban 2001). “Scientists start seeing something once they stop looking at nature and look exclusively and obsessively at prints and flat inscriptions.” At stake is a “drift from watching confusing three-­dimensional objects, to inspecting two-­dimensional images which have been made less confusing” (Latour 1986, 16). This “cascade of ever simplified inscriptions” (17) enables scientists to perfect their knowledge about nature because they

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no longer have to deal directly with it and can instead interact with its simplified representations. Immutable mobiles enable this “deflating strategy” in which “‘things’ [are] turned into paper [and] paper is turned into less paper” (23). They also enable the synoptic study of different data, which gives rise to organized skepticism, refutation, and theory making. On the surface, the Post-­it note seems to be a quintessential immutable mobile. The innovator can encode knowledge on Post-­it notes that will remain immutable and then mobilize and synoptically arrange the notes to discover meaningful patterns in the data they represent. Post-­it notes also fit well with the “deflating strategy” that Latour has highlighted. As David put it, the Post-­it note’s small dimensions mean that you “can only capture one idea” per Post-­it note. During Newfound’s innovation sessions and workshops, participants transferred the data they had collected to a series of textual artifacts of decreasing dimensions that culminated in Post-­it notes. However, a closer look at how Post-­it notes were used in those sessions and workshops reveals that they align neither with Latour’s definition of immutable mobiles nor with his description of their impact. These discrepancies clarify the functions that Post-­it notes perform in the business innovation world as well as qualify Latour’s theory. The first qualification pertains to the very notion of graphic immutability. When participants transferred data about consumers to a series of textual artifacts of decreasing dimensions that culminated in Post-­it notes, the data became increasingly abstract until they were represented in the form of single words or even single graphic sketches on single Post-­it notes. At this point their meaning became so ambiguous that, to all intents and purposes, their visual representation could be considered graphically mutable. Consider the following example. As opposed to Brandnew’s method of innovation, which stipulates that the innovator can derive all the necessary data about consumers from the analysis of existing products, design thinking emphasizes the importance of direct interaction with consumers and users as a way of gathering data about their needs. Accordingly, in the third week of Newfound’s innovation workshop, each team arrived with notebooks filled with the data they had collected in the previous two weeks by means of interviews with the client’s target audience, online search, and experimentation with the client’s website. Jeffery, a facilitator in his midthirties, instructed the participants to “transfer all the information over to Post-­it notes. Go to the actual notes that you have and look at that data, that information, to make sure you’re pulling out all the things that are interesting and compelling.” He then explained that “there are really good categories” of

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information that the participants should strive to capture on Post-­it notes: “First, who are the people that you talked to? What are their defining characteristics that are important to this conversation? Second, what were the objects, whether digital or physical, that you found? Third, what were the activities that were happening? Fourth, frames of mind—what are the belief systems that you found during your interviews? Fifth, what are the needs of the people you interviewed? And then, finally, what things do you have that do not fit into these five buckets?” At this point, Sean, a user-­experience designer in an online fashion start-­up, asked, “How general should the information on the Post-­it notes be? Is it one word?” “Fantastic, that’s a great question!” Jeffery replied. “So it’s going to be one cohesive idea per Post-­it note. ‘Facebook,’ for example, is a really bad Post-­it note. That means nothing to nobody. We have no context. So make sure there is actually a complete thought going on so somebody can walk up to that and be like, ‘This makes sense as an idea.’” This exchange reveals the difference between two kinds of abstraction. The purpose of the categories listed by Jeffery was to help the participants meaningfully abstract the data they had collected. These categories are informed by a specific theory of meaningful information. In contrast, Sean’s question and Jeffery’s reply reveal that the small dimensions of the Post-­it note force the innovator to abstract his data not meaningfully but arbitrarily and, moreover, that the information the innovator would have to abstract so that it could fit a single Post-­it note might consequently mean “nothing to nobody. We have no context.”3 As Jeffery’s reply indicates, the facilitators were not oblivious to the decontextualization and pragmatic ambiguity that might result from transferring previously collected information to Post-­it notes. However, despite their emphasis that each Post-­it note must represent “one cohesive idea,” they constantly pushed the participants to transform their data into one or two words or even a visual sketch that could fit the small dimensions of a Post-­it note. The result was the same decontextualization and ambiguity about which they had previously cautioned the participants. David and Jeffery stressed that the participants needed to learn to present data in a very succinct and catchy way, to “make ideas huggable,” as David put it, that is, easily embraced by the client. This was a skill they described as “distillation.” David defined “distillation” as “taking all your ideas and boiling them down to a very succinct pitch or distinct idea [akin to] a tagline.” His emphasis on distillation found its perfect material artifactual abode in the Post-­it note because the Post-­it note not only affords “distillation,” it forces it.

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The pressure to “distil,” in the sense of abstracting information to the bare catchy minimum, was so salient that it soon provided the backdrop for joking commentaries. At one point David asked my team members to narrate what they thought was important in the data they had collected in the previous two weeks: “Grab some Post-­it notes,” he instructed us. “If there’s something in these stories, capture it. You have to be active while listening. You need to think how I can distil all of this. So you need to start thinking how I can boil down all this.” Upon hearing these instructions, Jonathan, a team member in his early forties who was a freelance change management consultant, offered with a smile, “That’s why they call you ‘the distiller.’” “That’s true, actually!” David responded. When the team members started to convey their impressions, David sustained his reputation as a “distiller.” Time and again he stopped them in midsentence and “distilled” their impressions in the form of single words or phrases, which he wrote down on Post-­it notes or instructed the participants to do. When Cory, a team member, gave a two-­minute commentary and said that “they [the target audience] go online for resources. They don’t go [online] for conversations,” David stopped him and rapidly fired: “Tools versus conversations. Or tools versus dialogue. Somebody write that down—it’s really interesting!” whereupon Jenny, another team member, took two Post-­it notes and wrote “tools” on one Post-­it note and “conversations and dialogue” on another Post-­it note. When Jonathan said that “we talked to an administrator—she was not tech savvy. I think there is a generational issue when it comes to congregating online,” David interrupted him by saying, “great—young versus old, in [organization] versus out of [organization],” whereupon team members wrote each of these terms on separate Post-­it notes and then posted them on the glass wall. When Jonathan continued and said that “either because it’s harder [for the target audience] to structure online conversations as part of their day or more because it’s actually useful, they limit interaction to face-­ to-­face interactions within the organization,” David quickly took a Post-­it note and wrote on it “structured conversations” and then attached it on the glass wall. The vigor with which he did so produced laughter among the team members. Jonathan, riffing on the same theme as before, said wryly, to everybody’s laughter, “He only drinks distilled water.” Participants implemented these lessons in “distillation” very quickly. They came up with catchy phrases such as “treasure trove” and “time-­ starved” as well as with doodles to accompany them. Indeed, at one point Cory demonstrated his quick mastery of “distillation” when he distilled “the distiller” himself, no less! During a short coffee break that involved donuts, David declared that he was going to wash his hands before touching the

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food. Cory then quickly grabbed a Post-­it note, drew something on it, and posted it on David’s back to everyone’s laughter. The Post-­it note was inscribed with the word germaphobe and a doodle of a germ. Participants were effectively being trained in producing the same kind of powerful rhetorical devices that Urciuoli (2000) has described in her analysis of the language of liberal arts college recruiting literature, namely, terms such as “skills, leadership, and multiculturalism” that are “semantically vacuous” and “denotatively empty” and whose rhetorical force emanates from their ability to index “different discursive fields” (Brenneis 2006, 44). Post-­it notes, because of their small dimensions, encourage the innovator to produce such denotatively empty rhetorical devices. The phrases participants encoded on Post-­it notes during the workshop reflexively indexed the discursive field of business innovation itself and its normative ideals. More specifically, these phrases reflexively indexed the skill of “distillation” and the ideals of speed and fast insights that underlie it (cf. Urciuoli 2008; Urciuoli and LaDousa 2013). “Distillation,” understood as a self-­reflexive marker of an occupational group and its normative ideals, became a key focus in the workshop in addition to and often at the expense of the production of referential content about the market. To be sure, early in the workshop David and Jeffery instructed the participants to anchor Post-­it notes in some “context” by, for example, posting each Post-­it note on the wall next to its related person-­board. A person-­ board is a template the facilitators distributed to the participants on which they could represent the data they had collected by means of interviews with the client’s target audience. The template was a sheet of paper on which small rectangles were printed, each rectangle giving space for one of the following categories: name of interviewee, location of interview, date of interview, a sketch of the interviewee, a key story from the interview, key quotes from the interview, and general notes. On the surface, a person-­board, with its assortment of small rectangles, resembles an assortment of Post-­it notes. However, because all the rectangles refer to the same person and cannot be separated from one another, the person-­board represents deeper context. It has an “event-­like quality” (Hull 2003, 296–97). Pointing at the person-­ boards that the participants had prepared, Jeffery explained that “those person-­boards are going to go up on the wall as well. Those are going to be great reference points. Because when you’re looking at a Post-­it note, you’re going to be like, ‘Who is this person? Who is this human?’ And the person-­ board will help you.” He then gave more specific instructions: “So important things to think about: both lower corners of the Post-­it notes are great places to put information. And when you’re looking and connecting these Post-­it

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Figure 4. A Post-­it note with minimal information (“Coach”) in proximity to another Post-­it note that contextualizes it (lower left).

notes back to the person-­boards, if you put someone’s [an interviewee’s] initials in the lower-­right corner of the Post-­it note, you will always know who that person is or who that quote is attached to. So think about how you can label your Post-­it notes so they have information on them that’s going to be supportive, so if you see an entire cluster of Post-­it notes and you’re like, ‘Wow, everybody thinks this way!’ you’d then realize, ‘Oh, no, this is all one guy.’ That’s good for us to know. We don’t want to have these beliefs that are fundamentally wrong,” he cautioned.4 Although the facilitators made the participants aware of the risk of pragmatic ambiguity, at a later point in the innovation process, they instructed the participants to decouple Post-­it notes from their relevant person-­boards in the same way that, although they emphasized the importance of having “one cohesive idea” per Post-­it note, they eventually instructed participants to represent their data on single Post-­it notes in the form of highly abstract single words and sketches. Thus, in the first half of the session, participants inscribed Post-­it notes with more detailed information and with the initials of the names of interviewees, and they placed them in physical proximity to their relevant person-­boards. Even when they inscribed a Post-­it note with a very basic single word and drawing, they usually posted it near another Post-­it note that contained some contextual information about it, however minimal (see fig. 4). By the second half of the session, however, most remaining Post-­it notes represented a single or very few words and catchphrases,

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Figure 5. Growing levels of decontextualization (note the absence of person-­boards and of the Post-­it note that contextualized the “Coach” Post-­it note, now placed on the left side of the whiteboard).

sometimes accompanied by equally basic diagrams or doodles, while the context-­giving Post-­it notes and person-­boards disappeared (see fig. 5). These textual transformations enabled the participants to produce “pseudodata,” that is, data that appeared to emerge from and reflect the market but that were so ambiguous and decontextualized that they were decoupled from the market. Thus, the information that innovators inscribe on Post-­it notes might be graphically immutable, but it often becomes so ambiguous that to all intents and purposes it can be considered graphically mutable.5 Such decontextualization and ambiguity vis-­à-­vis the market under the guise of its reflection, which the Post-­it note affords and even mandates, are one condition of possibility for the faster generation of insights in a post-­Fordist context that is heavily informed by “the values and virtues of instantaneity” (Harvey 1990, 286), for context is weight. Once the innovator loses this context, she can move through the innovation process more quickly. By means of textual transformations that culminate in Post-­it notes, ambiguity becomes the real-­time achievement rather than the starting point of the innovation process.6

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“Showing the Movement Is Important”: The Post-­it Note between Mobility and Immobility A closer look at how Post-­it notes were used in Newfound’s sessions and workshops reveals additional discrepancies in relation to Latour’s theory of immutable mobiles. These discrepancies point to additional functions that Post-­it notes perform in the business innovation world as well as qualify Latour’s argument about the function of immutable mobiles’ mobility rather than immutability in knowledge production. To reiterate Latour’s argument, graphic artifacts such as maps and books not only allow knowledge to be encoded immutably but also to become mobile. This is important because knowledge that can be mobilized can be collected and “synoptically” studied. This becomes a condition of possibility for organized skepticism, refutation, theory-­making, and recruiting allies into knowledge communities (Latour 1986, 11, 15). Against this backdrop, observe, to begin, that Post-­it notes are quintessentially amenable to synoptic display not because they are mobile but because they combine mobility and immobility in their very materiality because of their weak adhesive properties that make it possible to arrange them in different configurations on vertically flat surfaces. More significant is the fact that because of their enhanced synoptic presentability, the innovator can easily arrange them on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like. Because Post-­it notes appear to be reflective of the market by virtue of the knowledge inscribed on them—although in practice they are decoupled from it—the result of their arrangement on such conventionally prestigious templates is the fast production of “ritual insights” that may have little to do with furthering knowledge about the market. For example, the facilitators dedicated the workshop’s third week to learning ways to “understand” the data collected in the previous two weeks and to develop insights that could lead to innovative solutions to the client’s problem (cf. Wasson 2000, 383). They distributed to the participants a handout that included a number of ready-­made frameworks (fig. 6). Jeffery projected a slide that showed the ready-­made frameworks and explained, “So the ‘understand’ phase is about connecting the dots. What we are trying to do is figure out, based on all of our conversations that we had with the target audience and the observations that we made, what are the interesting links that we saw.” He pointed at the frameworks that were projected on the wall. “We will use these frameworks and abstractions to start to pull out what these things are that we’re hearing on a larger scale and what they actually mean. Now,” he cautioned, “often in this phase I find people want-

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Figure 6. Ready-­made frameworks for data analysis.

ing to collect tons of information. They want to complicate this. It’s not necessary. When we’re going through this, using basic frameworks is going to give you amazing insights, and we don’t need something crazy with seventeen different lines and eight different compartments and a back door—it’s not necessary. And so this is what we are looking for: what is there that is something new? An insight is when you get something and you’re like, ‘You know what? I never would have guessed this. From the preconceived ideas, the assumptions that I’ve had, this is telling me a different story, and this is a story that I’m excited to tell back to the client.’ And an insight can look like a lot of things.” He paused and looked at the frameworks again. “Sometimes an insight is just a great framework where people just look and they are like, ‘Wow, that means something to me. I can connect with that. That’s unexpected. That’s interesting.’” While I listened to Jeffery’s explanation, I noticed an unresolved tension. On the one hand, Jeffery kept emphasizing that the point of “understanding” was to analyze the data and thereby come up with new assump-

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tions that would problematize preconceived ones. On the other hand, he recommended using ready-­made frameworks as forms of insights in and of themselves. When he cautioned the participants not to collect “tons of information” and to instead use “basic frameworks” that are “going to give you amazing insights,” he inadvertently pointed at the fact that the frameworks can help participants generate insights as fast as possible with little information because they have become conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like. In other words, the “unexpected” or new has been standardized and streamlined by means of the reified visual forms that valid insights are expected to have (cf. Riles 1998; Strathern 2006; Brenneis 2006).7 The arbitrary nature of these frameworks became a matter of debate when Cory asked Jeffery, “Why do we have to start from these frameworks? Perhaps something else would work better.” “I think that’s a great starting point,” Jeffery replied. “That’s why I presented those out. They can be a first set of clusters: ‘What are we seeing and learning based on these start headers?’ And those frameworks will probably change,” he reassured us. “You will have those initially and be like, ‘Alright, what are some interesting patterns that we can learn from?’ What we are actually doing is moving things around, finding insights, learning something new, and then moving things again. And it’s that constant evolution of the data that helps us get to some interesting places.” Jeffery suggested that the specific frameworks he presented to the participants were a good starting point and that through subsequent “evolution of the data,” other frameworks and patterns might ensue. He added, “I want you to play around with different types of structures and see what works. The purpose—and this is extremely important,” he emphasized, “is not to nail an insight from the onset. It’s not like to beat into all this information and be like—‘Oh my god, I have it!’ It’s going to take time where you will be like, ‘This is kind of interesting, not really, but kind of interesting; oh my god this is getting slightly more interesting, this is starting to make some progress, this is starting to become compelling!’” He simulated increased excitement, “and then when you make it to the end you’ll say: ‘Wow, this is something I’m really excited about!’ But allow all those steps,” he resumed his usual tone. “Don’t put the pressure on yourself to get it from the onset. Allow yourself to move slowly through these steps, and as you do it tonight I think you’ll end up getting at something really satisfying and really compelling.” However, no such gradual evolution of the data by means of their careful, stepwise analysis took place in subsequent stages of the session. The facilitators gave the three teams one hour to synthesize the data they had

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collected in the previous weeks and transferred to Post-­it notes. They instructed them to come up with meaningful insights about the data represented on the Post-­it notes and to draw their insights on whiteboards and large rectangular pieces of paper. Immediately at the beginning of the discussion among my team members, Jeannine, a team member, approached the whiteboard and with a marker drew a two-­by-­two matrix. She then said: “Ok, can we arrange the Post-­it notes on this framework?” After a minute, she added, “What if we do these two axes?” She then wrote four different values near the four endpoints of the matrix’s two axes, and we then experimented with different arrangements of the Post-­it notes on the matrix (see fig. 5). When I looked around me at this point, I could see that all the other teams used a two-­by-­two matrix on which they experimented with their Post-­it notes. Of the ready-­made frameworks Jeffery had shown us twenty minutes earlier, my team also experimented with precisely the same concentric circles framework, whereas another team also experimented with precisely the same Venn diagram framework (Wilf 2016, 743–45). Most important, these frameworks formed the basis for the final presentations to the client two weeks later. In other words, the teams did not alter the initial frameworks as they moved through the innovation process. Jeannine drew the two-­ by-­ two matrix before any discussion about whether it aligned with a meaningful structure that could be perceived in the data. She drew the matrix as a way of giving the data a structure that would appear to be meaningful. Indeed, the facilitators highlighted time and again the frameworks’ rhetorical power vis-­à-­vis clients. In an interview, David told me that the frameworks “are a crutch but at the same time I think—the two-­by-­two matrix is just so good!” he said with admiration. “Having those things in your back pocket, it’s like a language—they are mental models. So it’s a grammar of ideas, statements about reality, how you frame the debate. You made the playing field!” he said enthusiastically. “This is my favorite stuff, by the way. You made the playing field, like, personal, individual, local [different axes on a two-­by-­two matrix], and they [the client] go, ‘Ah, do we want to be here or here [on the matrix]?’ They are not actually questioning the framework because you got it right or because you got it right enough. You explained it in a way that made sense, and then what you allowed them to do is to have a dialogue where they can actually physicalize where they want their company strategy to be. That’s really amazing!” David attached great importance to the frameworks’ rhetorical impact on the client (Vangkilde 2013, 87–88). He argued that the frameworks can “define the playing field,” priming the client’s basic assumptions with such a persuasive power that the client’s representatives “are not actually questioning the framework”

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but accept it as a given. Although David argued that the client might accept a framework because it conveyed an accurate enough statement about reality, his overall approach suggested that these frameworks’ force might also emanate from the fact that they have become conventionally prestigious visual templates of what a valid insight should look like.8 Against this backdrop, it was easy for Jeannine to arrange the Post-­it notes, which appeared to be reflective of the market by virtue of the knowledge inscribed on them, on the two-­by-­two matrix and thus quickly produce a ritual insight, that is, a statement about reality that instantly appeared to be valid. Indeed, my team members found it so easy to produce ritual insights by means of the Post-­it notes and the visual frameworks that David, who observed us as we were working, felt compelled to intervene: “You are already forming hypotheses!” he scolded us. “Remember, this is only about capturing the data out there so you can start exploring, collating it together. So don’t try to move too far along in the process so quickly.” Latour has emphasized the crucial “advantage” of the fact that “the two-­ dimensional character of inscriptions allow them to merge with geometry,” for this makes “space on paper . . . continuous with three-­dimensional space” and hence “we can work on paper with rulers and numbers, but still manipulate three-­dimensional objects. . . . Better still, because of this optical consistency, everything, no matter where it comes from, can be converted into diagrams and numbers, and combinations of numbers and tables can be used which are still easier to handle than words or silhouettes” (Latour 1986, 22). Against this backdrop, the fact that the innovator can easily arrange Post-­it notes on ready-­made frameworks to produce ritual insights suggests that in addition to the cognitive advantages of the mastery of geometry and mathematics, an “anthropology of geometry and mathematics” (Latour 1986, 26) must also train its lens on the social prestige of geometric forms, numbers, and diagrams (Riles 1998; Strathern 2006; Brenneis 2006), which might result in the production of knowledge that is decoupled from the world to which it purports to refer. Post-­it notes can help the innovator convince a client to accept his insights and recommendations in another way. Because of their unique combination of mobility and immobility due to their weak adhesive properties, which gives them enhanced synoptic presentability, as well as the fact that they are held to be reflective of reality via the knowledge inscribed on them, the innovator can use Post-­it notes to diagram in real time on a two-­ dimensional space the reasoning process that led to his final insights and recommendations. The facilitators told the participants that they needed to learn to pre­sent the insights they “have already developed” and how those

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Figure 7. Dynamically diagramming the reasoning process that has led to the final insights via a “story arc” and Post-­it notes.

insights “relate to each other” in the form of a “story arc.” In practice sessions, a participant from each team narrated the reasoning process that had culminated in the final insights while other participants from his team attached Post-­it notes on a visual representation of a “story arc” in a way that aligned with and, indeed, diagramed the narrative in real time (see fig. 7). The purpose of this diagramming, which is a form of the ritual semiosis I explore in chapter 2, is to encourage the client to inhabit this reasoning process and to accept its conclusions. As Jeffery explained, “your product can be amazing and your insight can be amazing, but if you can’t convey that in a compelling way, it doesn’t matter.” He added, “What you are creating is a platform for them to make decisions off of. They are going to be thinking about ideas and thinking about concepts, and you want to be giving them a direction to go in. And it might be, ‘We learned this, we had these conversations; these are the things that we found, this is the micromarket that we think you should be targeting, and based on our analysis of the different products that the target audience was using outside of the client’s online platform, it seems these three areas were really of interest to them.’ That to me is a story arc that we are getting somewhere, and the client is

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like, ‘Ok, we need to incorporate that,’” he said as if he were the convinced client. “Giving the client a direction to go in” effectively means making the client inhabit—“incorporate”—the direction of the story arc that represents the innovator’s reasoning process and its resulting conclusions. The facilitators emphasized that a good story arc must have a narrative structure or, as Jeffery explained, “A beginning, middle, and an end. What is the start? How are we bringing the client in? What is the excitement? What is the core? What do we want to be telling them? And then normally there is ‘an ask’ at the end, right? This is what the client should be doing. That’s the recommendation,” or, as David added, the “denouement.” Accordingly, one of the key strategies that my team devised with David and Jeffery’s help was to show to the client in which quadrant on a two-­by-­ two matrix (which functioned as my team’s key framework) it was currently situated and in which quadrant it “would want” to be situated given its mission statement. In the fourth week, when my team members practiced their final presentation to the client, they debated, in Cory’s words, “if to say in what quadrant the client is now and in what quadrant they want to be.” Upon hearing this, Jeffery intervened: “Showing the movement is important, where they are now and where they want to be.” David added, “And then you could tell them how to resolve that tension.” A week later, during the final presentation to the client, Corry narrated the team’s research according to the specific “story arc” that my team had rehearsed in the previous week while Jeannine and Jonathan successively attached small rectangle Post-­it note look-­alike pieces of paper with tape on the back on the two-­by-­ two matrix. Each piece of paper had one of those short and succinct words or phrases the team members had “distilled” in the previous weeks. Significantly, one of these pieces of paper had the client’s logo printed on it, by means of which the desired “movement” of the client along the two-­by-­two matrix was diagrammed in real time. After the final presentations, when my team members withdrew to a corner of the room to discuss their experience, David came over to us. He was excited. He pointed to the presentation board where a few of the client’s representatives were facing our two-­by-­two matrix and having a discussion, and he said, “Hey guys, I want to point something out for you that is very interesting. Your amazing framework—they [the client’s representatives] have been standing around your framework and having a conversation around it for the past four minutes and saying, ‘Well, we want to be here but we need a component of this. We do this now but we don’t do this now, so how are they connected and’—so you created a framework for the conversation. That’s the power. They are using your framework to have a dia-

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logue about what they do want to be.” He took his smartphone out of his pocket and added, “I just took a minute of a video of that, of them having that conversation.” He held his phone and showed us the video. “So you guys really created a very simple framework that does frame the debate for them: ‘Where do we want to be?’” David was excited because he interpreted the reaction of the client’s representatives as an indication that my team’s presentation was rhetorically effective. Such rhetorical efficacy was the result of the fact that participants had learned how to take advantage of Post-­it notes’ enhanced synoptic presentability to dramatically arrange them in real time on conventionally prestigious visual templates of what a valid insight should look like. Latour has treated synoptic presentation of data either synchronically, as when he discusses the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who arrived at new insights because he had at his disposal different data that he could compare with one another, or in terms of “empty compartments” in “any classification scheme [that] define what is left for us to find” (Latour 1999, 51), that is, in terms of the diachronic unfolding of the research process itself. However, as Newfound’s workshop demonstrates, a classification scheme and any other visual framework that affords the synoptic presentation of data can also be used for performative and rhetorical effects, that is, for the production of knowledge that is self-­anchoring rather than anchored in an external reality. A person can take advantage of those “empty compartments” to ritually diagram in real time—and thus to naturalize and make one’s audience inhabit—the unfolding of his reasoning process and its conclusions (Miyazaki 2006, 215–16).9

“You Get What You Pay For”: The Post-­it Note Economy and Its Discontents Post-­it notes have become a key semiotic technology of ideation in business innovation sessions in large part because they enable the innovator more quickly to generate and naturalize insights according to post-­Fordist normative ideals that put a premium on instantaneous results. However, their ubiquity has not come without a price. This price is anchored in post-­ Fordism’s broader experiential contours and discontents. To begin, if workshop participants used the Post-­it note’s small dimensions to produce pragmatic ambiguity and to decouple data from the reality of the market under the guise of its reflection, they often became confused by the same pragmatic ambiguity and decoupling and, as a result, desired more clarity. Consider the following exchange that took place in the work-

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shop’s third week. David and my team members were discussing the information they had captured on the Post-­it notes that were posted on a glass wall. David looked at the Post-­it notes and said, “That’s a really interesting tension: tools versus dialogue. What is the tool they are looking for? There is no dialogue where the target audience congregates online?” Jonathan, standing next to David, responded, “Well, there are spaces, but they didn’t come up in our interviews. Conferences came up,” he pointed at a Post-­it note on which the word “conferences” was inscribed. “Facebook groups,” Cory said while pointing at a Post-­it note on which the word “Facebook” was inscribed. “Facebook,” he said again, pausing for a second, and then continued while pointing at a “dialogue” Post-­it note: “I hate ‘dialogue’— it doesn’t mean anything.” “I understand,” David responded. “Maybe you should isolate what kind of support they find on Facebook or in private. Like, I don’t understand—what’s good about Facebook? What are they getting there?” David asked. “So tools versus dialogue is really fascinating, a great metaphor, I know what they are by themselves, but we need to understand what they find there, why they go there. Why aren’t there conferences in the organization?” There was an awkward silence. Finally, Jonathan said, “I don’t feel I know enough to answer that.” Thus, after trying to represent the empirical reality in which they were interested by means of single words or phrases arranged in terms of catchy tensions on individual Post-­it notes, David and the team members realized they were not really sure what these words and phrases meant in the context of this empirical reality. Cory argued that “dialogue” “doesn’t mean anything,” and David argued that “Facebook” denoted very little information. Indeed, the fact that the participants came up with a “Facebook” Post-­it note even though Jeffery had explicitly used “Facebook” as an example of a meaningless Post-­it note earlier in the workshop was highly indicative of the pragmatic ambiguity that often results when innovators use Post-­it notes as a semiotic technology of ideation. In addition, although it was David who had earlier “distilled” the tension between tools and dialogue, he acknowledged that he was not sure what this tension and its terms meant in the context of the reality that was the subject of inquiry. David liked that tension because it “is fascinating, a great metaphor,” that is, more because of its rhetorical force than its referential content or empirical validity. In the following week, when David and Jeffery asked the participants to share what they liked and disliked about the previous week’s work, Samantha, a user-­centered designer in a fashion start-­up, replied with a metacommentary on the pragmatic ambiguity that pervaded so many of the terms that were used in the workshop: “I wish the term insight would be less

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vague. I feel that certain words could mean many things. Or the definition of deliverable could be very helpful.” The facilitators used the words insight and deliverable time and again to denote the results of the idea-­generation strategies that they conveyed to the participants. Samantha’s comment about the pragmatic ambiguity of key terms to these strategies suggested that pragmatic ambiguity was not only a tool that consultants deployed during the innovation process; it was also a condition that affected them. Her comment about the ambiguity of the term deliverable was highly significant for another reason. Deliverable has come to be identified with corporate jargon itself. Together with other words, it has found a place in lists of “the most annoying business slang,”10 “10 of the worst examples of management-­speak,”11 and “the worst workplace jargon.”12 These lists highlight the meaninglessness of such corporate jargon. Pragmatic ambiguity, which, to be sure, is part of any professional jargon, might be exacerbated in institutional contexts in which post-­Fordist normative ideals of time-­space compression and “distillation” are dominant and specifically in those post-­Fordist contexts in which innovators use the Post-­it note as the semiotic technology of choice. The pragmatic ambiguity made possible by the liminal status of the Post-­it note between mutability and immutability because of its small dimensions allowed participants to generate ideas for new products and services more quickly but also made them discontented and desirous of more clarity. Similarly, if participants used the Post-­it note’s weak adhesive properties and liminal status between mobility and immobility to arrange pseudodata synoptically on ready-­made graphic templates and thus to quickly produce ritual insights, they were often plagued by a sense of material precariousness and as a result desired more stability. Participants had to contend with the fact that Post-­it notes’ weak adhesive properties made them suddenly fall off the walls after they had used them only a few times. For example, in a session in the third week, each team had an hour to transfer their data to Post-­it notes and then to experiment with them. The facilitators told them to first post new Post-­it notes on the table, write on them, and then post them on the walls and experiment with them on the ready-­made frameworks. It soon turned out that because participants first posted the Post-­it notes on the table, they were unable to post some of them on the walls let alone experiment with them by moving them on the ready-­made frameworks. Post-­it notes soon started to fall from the walls. Seeing this, David told my team, “You need to stick new Post-­it notes. I will give you another set. Don’t let stickiness keep you from working!” When Jeffery approached another team that faced the same problem, Kate, a participant, told him with exasperation, “They [Post-­it notes] keep falling!” “This is why you have all these Post-­it

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notes on the floor?” Jeffery asked. “Yes,” Kate replied, “and the blue Post-­it notes are the worst!” “They might be from Staples,” Jeffery noted. The problem of Post-­it notes falling off the walls forced the participants to engage in different kinds of experimentation on the material qualities of the Post-­it notes—so that they would stick better—at the expense of experimenting with the Post-­it notes to generate insights. The facilitators and participants debated whether there was a specific technique of pulling a new Post-­it note from a stack of Post-­it notes such that the Post-­it note would stick better on the wall. Jeffery suggested there was such a technique: to grab a Post-­it note from the side and pull it sideways rather than to grab it from the bottom and pull it upwards. The participants experimented with this technique to no avail. Eventually, when nothing else worked, David and Jeffery prepared dozens of small pieces of scotch tape that participants attached to individual Post-­it notes to make them stick. As Harvey has argued, if post-­Fordism has put a high premium on “learning to play the volatility right” or, better yet, on “mastering or intervening actively in the production of volatility” (Harvey 1990, 286, 287), it has also resulted in “opposed sentiments and tendencies. . . . The greater the ephemerality, the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind of eternal truth that might lie therein” (292). Phenomena such as “religious revival,” “the search for authenticity and authority in politics,” “the revival of interest in basic institutions (such as the family and community), and the search for historical roots are all signs of a search for more secure moorings and longer-­lasting values in a shifting world” (ibid.). My team’s discussion of the nature of the Post-­it note as a double-­edged sword at the very end of the workshop’s final session reflected post-­Fordism’s duality. When Samantha said that she liked “the Post-­it notes because I like brainstorming and thinking in that way and writing stuff down and putting it up and then organizing them later,” Cory interjected, “They need better glue,” to which Amanda responded, “If you get the cheap ones, you get what you pay for. You can also get those notes that are all sticky, not just sticky on the top, so those obviously stick.” Amanda’s comment was an unintended metacommentary on post-­Fordism’s “liquidification” of the means of production in general, whether such liquidification entails the shift to using a “liquid,” that is, temporary, workforce or using a quintessentially “liquid” semiotic technology such as the Post-­it note.13 “You get what you pay for”: quickly generated insights with often tenuous relations to the market, increased ambiguity that seeps into business organizations themselves, and sensations of precariousness of different kinds—of workers and their work. Getting “those notes that are all sticky, not just sticky on the top,” as Amanda

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suggested, might be a solution for the discontent that such liquidification generates, but it is a solution that is bound to remain unrealized in an economy that is determined to find new ways to accelerate the turnover time of capital. That the participants’ somber reflections resulted from the Post-­it notes’ lack of stickiness and subsequent random rearrangement on the floor was ironic on multiple levels. To begin, the client’s mission to the participants, as Jeffery explained it to them at the beginning of the workshop, was “to create a more sticky online community for the target audience so that they stay and continue to post projects. The retention rate is 30 percent. The client wants it to be 50–60 percent. This is what the project is all about.” The participants tried to solve this problem of stickiness by means of an artifact that had its own problems of stickiness, as it were. More important, however, is, to reiterate, the fact that the invention of the Post-­it note has become a popular case study in the business management literature on successful innovation. Its invention as well as the way in which the company 3M afforded it have provided business management scholars and practitioners with an organizational model for how to generate innovative products and services. The Post-­it note has come to represent not only the kind of successful innovative “deliverable” that contemporary capitalism can offer but also the ideational means with which future innovative “deliverables” can be generated. And yet it is precisely by virtue of the Post-­it notes’ failure that the participants came to reflect on the shortcomings of contemporary capitalism in general, its institutional exemplars (such as Staples), and its specific “deliverables” (such as the Post-­it note). The Post-­it notes’ failure—itself because of the surplus of liquidification that they embody in their very materiality, liquidification that is supposed to be their promesse du bonheur—suddenly transformed them from celebrated means of creative ideation to banal artifacts randomly scattered on the floor. Their new and unwelcome random configuration no longer indexed capitalism’s capacity to generate a bright innovative future via monetizable serendipity. Rather, it lifted the veil on the chaos, noise, and entropy that often underlie capitalism’s promises to generate such a future and its attempts to fulfill these promises.

FIVE

Clutter Unpacking the Stuff of Business Innovation

Stuff in Unlikely Places During my fieldwork I was frequently surprised by the number and diversity of the material artifacts that formed part of the innovation process. Such artifacts included not only Post-­it notes and markers but also manuals, worksheets, booklets, card decks, and innovation kits, to name a few. Their prevalence points to a general phenomenon that begs for an explanation: although business innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary knowledge economy is widely associated with the ideals of free information flow, flexibility, and minimalism, ideals whose purpose is to foster cross-­ fertilization across departments and skills (Thrift 2006, 293; see also Eagle 2004; Lange 2016), in practice it is cluttered with different objects and practices that produce opacity, rigidness, and centers of gravity. Critics who have noticed and addressed this discrepancy have tended to see it as an inevitable dimension of office work. For example, in an article in the New Republic that critiques “the interconnected values of ‘frictionless’ dynamism, notional flattening of managerial hierarchies, and sociability that define contemporary professional work,” the authors argue that these values “are mirrored in the spaces and gadgets that allow us to function in this rootless, diffuse way . . . : open plans, glass walls, communal table-­desks, high ceilings.” They add that “across these diverse spaces, the two most consistent design principles are openness and a banishment of personal clutter” (Tokumitsu and Mol 2016). However, although “modern office minimalism wants to suppress stuff,” stuff such as “dry erase markers, cables, sticky notes . . . almost always manages to intrude” (ibid.). The authors seem to accept this recrudescence of stuff as an inevitable feature, as if contemporary knowledge-­based work functioned as communicating vessels with a fixed

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quota of clutter that, once eradicated from some dimensions of office work, must pervade others. Such commentaries fail to tease out the specific cultural logic that accounts not so much for the general phenomenon of the recrudescence of “stuff ” in the workspaces where innovation takes place—recrudescence that can be explained as the natural consequence of the fact that capitalism (and every social formation), when enacted in time and space, consists of practices that mobilize objects and human beings—as for the fact that specific material artifacts rather than others have become ubiquitous in such work environments. In other words, in calling this stuff “a jumble of unaesthetic supplies” (Tokumitsu and Mol 2016), such interpretations fail to see the culturally specific or overdetermined aesthetic that accounts for the persistence of specific “stuff ” in the contemporary knowledge-­based workspace. The preponderance of specific “stuff ” that goes against the grain of the ideals of free information flow, flexibility, and minimalism, which have come to be associated with post-­Fordist organizational creativity and business innovation, is actually the result of the fact that innovators use such “stuff ” to mediate and reify themselves as members of a professional group whose expertise embodies these very same ideals. Innovators thereby constitute themselves as organizationally creative both for themselves and for others. Their efforts to mediate their professional expertise in post-­Fordist legible forms of organizational creativity by means of specific material artifacts and practices give them the professional technical mystique they lack and their clients the sense that “innovation is now taking place.” The “clutter” that permeates the work of business innovation thus provides a unique vantage point from which it is possible to discern the ways in which business innovators understand, and want others to understand, their knowledge and skills and the ideals that underlie them. Their work of mediation might also explain why despite the widespread suspicion that “innovation” has lost its specificity and connection to the market, business organizations have continued to invest vast resources in buying innovation consultants’ services.

Professional Prestige and Technical Mystique To understand the function that “clutter” performs in the world of business innovation consultancies, it is first necessary to unpack the sociological category of professions. Professions are exclusive occupational groups whose tasks “are human problems amenable to expert service” (Abbott 1988,

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36). Such problems can emerge in different spheres of human activity such as health, accounting, or, for the sake of this book, organizational creativity. Scholars have theorized professionalization as a process in which manufacturers of services aspire to establish a market for their specialty and to control it in order to enhance their social and economic status (Larson 1977). They attempt to translate one form of scarce resources—knowledge and skills—into other forms of scarce resources—mainly economic resources. Professions have a cognitive basis (a body of rational knowledge and techniques that is transferrable via institutionalized training), a normative basis (service orientation and professional ethics that justify self-­ regulation), and an evaluative basis (the prestige won by professions in comparison with other occupations) (Larson 1977, x). In the modern West, the professional ethos is so prestigious that members of different occupations are often tempted to claim for themselves the professional cognitive basis in order to gain prestige even when they cannot yet secure the state’s institutional recognition and the regulatory autonomy that such recognition entails (Preda 2009, 148–53). This was the case of the business innovators I worked with. They claimed time and again that to innovate it is essential to master specific expert knowledge and skills that are rational, rule governed, and transferrable in the form of institutionalized training. Crucially, when members of an occupation claim for themselves the professional cognitive basis, they are often socially expected to provide evidence that they do, indeed, possess professional expert knowledge. One common way to address these expectations is to produce a “technical mystique” (Tuchman 1972, 676n16), that is, expert knowledge made visibly concrete by means of, for example, special equipment (such as machines, devices, and instruments), visible embodied skills, graphic artifacts (such as diagrams, x-­ray pictures, diplomas), and so forth. An occupation that lacks a technical mystique and other “persuasion devices” (Preda 2009, 152) can lose its professional prestige. For example, “since newsmen are not surrounded by a technical mystique, it looks as though almost anyone could do the newsman’s job. After all, almost everyone gossips” (Tuchman 1972, 676n16). Poets face a similar problem: It is true that strict standards of competence are applied by literary critics, but even here the criteria are amorphous. Writing is a sedentary activity; the poet grows no calluses, goes to no offices, punches no time clock, gains no diploma, earns no certificate of competence. There is no current universal measure of success or fitness; credentials are intangible, a passport without

Clutter / 127 date, country or occupation. Poetry is an undefined profession. It lacks both the institutional support and the popular appeal of science. (Wilson 1986, 68)

The innovation consultant who claims to master expert professional knowledge also lacks a technical mystique because his knowledge, which is supposed to boost organizational creativity, revolves around highly abstract notions associated with this form of creativity such as free information flow, flexibility, and minimalism. He faces the problem of how to mediate these notions and externalize his expertise in order to produce a technical mystique. If he is unsuccessful in doing so, laypersons might think that anyone can innovate. As I discuss in the introduction, this is precisely the problem that David, one of Newfound’s consultants, described to me with visible frustration: “Some people come to us and say: ‘I want a job in innovation.’ . . . But, in fact, you gotta have a minefield of knowledge and experience to innovate. . . . I’ve been doing this for seven years, and I’m an amateur. So you cannot just show up and do this.” Against this backdrop, the innovation workshops and sessions I attended were cluttered with specific “stuff ” in large part because the innovators I worked with used such “stuff ”—both objects and practices—to create for themselves a professional technical mystique and thus mediate their professional expertise both to the outside world and reflexively, that is, to themselves. However, as opposed to similar “observational boundaries” erected by other professionals to both enclose their domain of expertise and make it selectively accessible to the outside world and thus associated with specific meanings as a way of gaining legitimacy (Preda 2009), the forms of mediation I describe in this chapter were contradictory through and through. By means of specific “stuff,” the innovators I worked with objectified free information flow, made flexibility visibly concrete, and conventionally represented creativity as evidence that their professional practice and knowledge revolved around these key ideals of the contemporary knowledge-­based economy. Such “stuff ” thus undermined these ideals at the same time that it mediated them because it created centers of gravity, forms of opacity, and rigidness. This contradiction stems from the fact that every form of mediation depends on semiotic forms and “signifying practices that contain an irreducible material dimension” (Keane 2002, 84). The material dimension of semiotic forms and signifying practices—be they words, gestures, objects, or clothes—frequently undermines notions associated with immateriality— such as sincerity, immediacy, transparency, and creativity—whenever they are the object of mediation. Scholars have identified the tension that re-

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sults from attempts to mediate these and similar notions in different ethnographic contexts. Because semiotic forms are always already saturated with the weight of tradition, convention, history, and other people, their inescapable use in representational practices often raises self- and other-­imposed doubts about one’s autonomy and sincerity (Keane 2002), earnestness in prayer (Shoaps 2002), scientific objectivity (Bauman and Briggs 2003), authenticity (Trilling 1972; Taylor 1992), and creativity (Wilf 2012) in the form of suspicions about insincerity, lack of intentionality, plagiarism, and imitation, respectively. At the same time, this instability of representation does not mean that mediation necessarily distorts preexisting content. Rather, mediation “is the process by which the self recognizes itself by returning to itself, renewed and once removed. . . . Reflexive social entities (selves, societies, cultures) are fundamentally constituted (and not just reconstituted) through mediation,” although “this constitutive mediation also always produces a fiction of premediated existence” (Mazzarella 2004, 357). Members of an occupational group who claim to possess professional expert knowledge similarly belong to a reflexive social entity. By mediating such knowledge they constitute it and themselves as possessing it both for themselves and for others even if such mediation undermines that which it is supposed to mediate (e.g., expert knowledge that can boost organizational creativity). The innovators I worked with mediated and thereby constituted their professional expert knowledge and mystique in post-­Fordist legible forms of organizational creativity that turned on four dimensions: workspace, body of expert knowledge, thought processes, and self. Although reflexive mediation by means of “stuff ” was prevalent in both Brandnew’s and Newfound’s workshops, it took different forms in each according to each consultancy’s specific approach to and philosophy of innovation. For example, because design thinking, by means of brainstorming, adheres to popular ideologies of creativity that construe it as a quality that is unevenly distributed among individuals, Newfound’s consultants tended to focus on mediating the innovator’s thought processes and self as inner sources of organizational creativity together with the innovator’s workspace as an external site in which this creativity can be nurtured and manifest itself. In contrast, motivated by its approach to creative problem-­solving as a kind of engineering problem that can be managed by means of clear, rational algorithmic procedures, Brandnew downplayed these three dimensions in favor of mediating the innovator’s body of expert knowledge as a kind of formalized scientific knowledge that can reliably boost organizational creativity.1

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“Work Liquid”: Mediating the Innovator’s Organizationally Creative Workspace Newfound’s innovation workshops and sessions took place in the kind of shared workspace that has become popular in the business world, especially with small businesses and start-­up companies. A shared workspace offers a minimally divided wide open space with workstations. If it offers conference rooms and small meeting spaces, their walls are usually made of glass to maintain the open atmosphere. Infrastructure includes fast wireless internet, strategically located power outlets, ergonomic desk chairs, and nutritional and nurturing supplies—coffee stations, snacks, bean bags, a TV room, and sometimes a gym and showers. Small start-­ups, companies that rely on a shifting number of freelance workers, and individual freelancers can choose how often and to what extent to use the space. They can pay for using it every day or only once a week, for a single desk or an entire conference room. Shared workspaces thus provide small-­scale companies with the flexibility to quickly change their structure and operation according to shifting market conditions. Such flexibility is one factor that accounts for the exponential growth of shared workspaces in recent years. According to the New York Times, in 2013 there were “nearly 800 commercial co-­working facilities in the United States, up from a little more than 300 [in 2011], and about 40 in 2008” (Williams 2013). One start-­up founder told the Harvard Business Review that she chose the workspaces offered by Grind, a company that offers shared workspaces, because her company works “on projects on an ad hoc basis with people in Europe and Washington, and they required the flexibility of operating from a place suited to a highly variable daily head count” (Kreamer 2012). The founder of another company praised Grind’s “benefits of ultra-­flexibility and low overhead.” The shared workspace is thus anchored in the rise of post-­Fordist flexible accumulation. Its popularity “represents a cultural shift that is a corollary to (but extends beyond) the out-­sourcing and employee churn of a top-­down flexible labor force” (Kreamer 2012). Another reason for shared workspaces’ popularity is the fact that, according to their proponents, they make possible productive flow of information that can enhance organizational creativity. Because they are relatively open and attract people from different companies with different skill sets, shared workspaces foster “productively accidental collaboration,” “collaborative networks,” and “dynamic ecosystems” (Kreamer 2012; Williams 2013; Lange 2016). A designer working for NeueHouse, another company that

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offers shared workspaces, told the New York Times that “the design strategy is a typology that looks at accidental encounters, as much as organizational clarity or efficiency. . . . It’s an office designed for the serendipitous manner in which creative professionals work today” (Williams 2013). To encourage such serendipitous flow of information, NeueHouse’s main gallery space was designed as “a collection of spaces meant to bring people together” by means of “conversation nooks with coffee tables and leather sofas” (ibid.). Similarly, a member of Grind noted that “you get to interact whether you want to or not. There are lots of people with different backgrounds and disciplines and it keeps you up to speed and up to date” (Kreamer 2012).2 However, as I spent more time in such shared workspaces, I noticed that, as much as innovators inhabited them to experience and perhaps benefit from the possibility of free information flow and cross-­fertilization, they also used these spaces to mediate these ideals and, moreover, in ways that often undermined what these ideals stand for. One reason for this form of mediation and its unintended consequences is that, “as a form of self-­ understanding, the subject is likely to require some contrastive terms— those objects against which its distinctiveness can be defined” (Keane 2002, 66). These contrastive terms frequently pose a risk to the presumed purity of the subject. Proponents of the shared workspace often mediate it as a site of organizational creativity by implicitly, and often explicitly, contrasting it with the “old” office space. The Wall Street Journal has stated that “the total vacancy for a ‘creative’ space with open floor plans ideal for co-­working was 2.54% in San Francisco in July, and the asking rent ranged from $32 to $53 per square foot per year. Meanwhile, more ‘historical’ spaces with closed-­door offices that lack open space had a total vacancy of 10.55%, while the asking rent ranged from $21 to $36 per square foot per year” (Glazer 2011, emphasis added). The New York Times has similarly presented the current economy as “a supposed ideas economy where corner offices and in-­boxes feel like relics” (Williams 2013, emphasis added).3 I witnessed an extreme example of this tendency to mediate the shared workspace as a site of free information flow and flexibility by mediating past office spaces as sites of opacity and rigidness when I first entered the conference room in which Newfound’s innovation workshops and sessions took place. I saw in the middle of one of the conference room’s glass walls a glass enclave in which the designers of the room exhibited an “old” and “obsolete” office workstation as if it were a historical relic in a museum. The workstation included an old-­fashioned desk, chair, desk lamp, one of the first Mac computers (with a corded keyboard and a mouse, floppy disks,

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Figure 8. An “old” workstation exhibited in a “new” shared workspace.

and a screen that displayed a pixelated black and white image), dial phone, stapler, ruler, Rolodex, and a file cabinet heaped with files, papers, and pencils, to name but a few (see fig. 8). The designers displayed these objects as if someone were in the midst of using them at work. Crucially, they did not just exhibit this technological detritus inside the glass enclave as if it were some exotic stuffed specimen of an already extinct species. Rather, two of the enclave’s glass panels dissected those “old” technologies such that one could see into them even as they rested in their “natural,” midaction position (see fig. 9). One could see the inner mechanisms of the computer and the phone, the contents of the desk drawers, the material—wood, cloth, foam, metal, and plastic—of which the desk, desk chair, floppy disks, and the other objects were made. The designers thus made concrete, or iconized, the shared workspace’s celebrated openness and free information flow by displaying its power to make even the office of the past—that epitome of inflexibility, opacity, and information blockage—literally open and transparent. Ironically, however, such mediation made the shared workspace itself opaque, for the “installation” literally blocked information flow through the glass panels and created visual clutter at the very heart of what was supposed

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Figure 9. Iconizing the shared workspace’s openness and free information flow.

to be a site of organizational creativity defined by minimalism, openness, and free information flow. The designers used the conference room’s other glass walls, too, to mediate the innovator’s shared workspace as a site of free information flow, flexibility, and organizational creativity, albeit without relying too much on contrastive terms. They inscribed numerous short phrases and sentences— fifty-­three, to be exact—all over the walls. These phrases can be divided into two broad semantic clusters. The first cluster, which consisted of thirty phrases, did not focus on actual tasks but on establishing the communicational and organizational infrastructure that would make it possible to perform such tasks. Phrases in this cluster described business innovation as a form of expertise that is based in collaborative thinking, as in “Let’s do a deep dive on that,” “We’ll drill down on that later,” “Let’s concept about that later,” and “Let’s do a brain dump after lunch.” Such collaborative thinking is made possible by proper task allocation, as in “Who’s gonna do the heavy lifting?” “Who’s tasked with that?” “Who’s on point with the client?” and with establishing channels of communication between team members and making sure that information flows freely through these channels, as in “Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page,” “Want to make sure we’re all on

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the same bandwidth,” “We have to break down the silos.” The second cluster, which consisted of twenty-­three phrases, focused on task-­specific features and their results. Phrases in this cluster described the hoped-­for results of establishing the communicational infrastructure, free information flow, and collaborative thinking described in the first cluster as groundbreaking and innovative ideas that change paradigms. Such a form of business innovation aims at producing a “paradigm shift” and a “bleeding edge” via “blue-­ sky thinking” that pushes “the envelope.” Its results are innovative not only in theory but also in practice: they are “scalable,” “actionable,” capable of being “leveraged” and reaching a “critical mass.” Such mediation, too, ends up being contradictory through and through. In trying to mediate business innovation as a form of professional practice that can boost organizational creativity defined in terms of free information flow and flexibility by means of such phrases and sentences, the designers of the room cluttered and made opaque the room’s glass walls, the very built infrastructure whose purpose is to help realize these ideals and that is supposed to function as an easily recognizable icon of the organizational creativity with which business innovators want to be associated.

Flip Charts and Card Decks: Mediating the Innovator’s Organizationally Creative Expertise The innovators I worked with also created a technical mystique for themselves by producing textual artifacts that mediated their innovation strategies not only as a form of professional expertise that can boost organizational creativity but as a form of professional expertise that is itself organizationally creative. They distributed these textual artifacts to workshop participants at the end of each workshop. These textual artifacts differed in terms of their overall size, paper type, font size, the degree to which they incorporated diagrams, and how detailed they were. For example, on one end of the spectrum of the artifacts that Brandnew’s consultants distributed to workshop participants were five reprints of articles they had published in journals such as the Harvard Business Review and the Organization Development Journal. These articles conveyed the Method’s principles in great detail. Participants in the workshops and training sessions mostly ignored these artifacts. Less detailed artifacts included around fifteen, mostly single stand-­alone A4-­size pages on each of which Brandnew’s consultants outlined different principles of the Method in a condensed form—one sentence per principle in addition to a few accompanying diagrams. The pages had titles such as “Innovation Indicators,” “Innovation Manager Guide-

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lines,” “Innovation Coach Guidelines,” “Guidelines for Conducting an Innovation Mini-­Session,” “The Method,” “Workshop Checklist,” and “Rules of Thumb for Implementing the Method Tools.” Participants showed more interest in these pages. However, the textual artifacts that most participants made sure to take with them at the end of the workshops were seventeen small cards of high-­quality plastic material that were around 6 by 4.5 inches in size. Each of these cards conveyed a different principle of the Method in a very succinct and prescriptive way—by means of only a few words and a diagram—that was supposed to help the participants facilitate its procedural implementation in future innovation sessions after they returned to their home organizations. The smaller cards were the most prevalent and coveted kind of textual artifacts for two reasons. First, they appeared to encapsulate the Method in the form of a few clear and general definitions, algorithmic instructions for implementation, and examples. They thus had a law-­like professional quality that made them appear to transcend specific contexts and be flexibly applicable to numerous ones as opposed to the textual artifacts that encoded more complex and nuanced information that was context-­specific and that consequently seemed to be inflexible and rigid. In addition, the cards’ high-­quality material made it possible to easily use them in numerous innovation sessions without running the risk that they would wear down. The cards thus mediated and made visibly concrete the innovator’s expert knowledge as organizationally creative and flexible not simply by externalizing this knowledge but also by representing it as flexibly relevant to many contexts and in a specific material artefactual form that amounted to a kind of flexible infrastructure of innovation that the innovator can use time and again. Many innovation consulting firms have produced and distributed similar innovation method cards. For example, IDEO has disseminated a deck of fifty-­one method cards in both digital and hard copy formats. IDEO’s website shows visual representations of these cards that associate them, and the innovator’s expertise that is encoded on them, with the kind of creative flexibility, free information flow, and serendipity that are part and parcel of the post-­Fordist ideals of organizational creativity.4 One image shows a hand flashing the cards as if their shuffling and reshuffling held the key to the magic of innovation. Another image shows a group of people using the cards as if they were playing a card game whose emergent properties, by means of the serendipity the game affords, promise to unleash unexpected profits and value. However, in this case, too, innovators’ mediation of their body of ex-

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pert knowledge in legible forms of organizational creativity produces unintended consequences. The reason is a common dilemma that occupational groups encounter in their battle for professional legitimacy. On the one hand, members of an occupational group who aspire to gain professional legitimacy need to demonstrate that their expert knowledge is both rational and efficient (Habermas 1984, 175). Professional expertise can be branded for and recognized by potential consumers as rational when it is standardized and codified in print in the form of clear rules and procedures (Larson 1977, 40). Professionals also need to demonstrate convincingly that such codified expert knowledge can produce solutions to problems in an efficient and nonconvoluted way. An occupational group that fails to do so might find it difficult to gain professional legitimacy. In an interview, Dan, the business school instructor, told me a story that demonstrated the consequences of this failure. The story was about one of his collaborators, Chris, a business executive who had worked in a number of Fortune 500 companies. “Sometimes I bring Chris to my innovation class,” Dan began his story, “and he tells the students a story about a friend of his who commissioned the services of a famous innovation consulting firm after meeting a consultant from that firm. Chris first went to the offices of this firm and saw one of those creative spaces—weird clothes, games, unconventional design of space.” While describing the offices, Dan waved his hands with dismissal. “So Chris said to himself, ‘Wow, this must be good.’ Anyway, the company Chris worked for was one of the big ones [Dan names the company] and he convinced his bosses to pay one million dollars for this innovation consulting firm to do a project. So people from this firm came over to Chris’s company and they made people dance and jump and all these kinds of activities that are supposed to be creative,” Dan waved his hands with dismissal again. “And eventually when they examined the ideas they generated nothing was implemented. One million dollars went down the drain!” Dan exclaimed with amazement. “And then, after telling this story, Chris usually looks at the students in my class and says: ‘And that friend is me. It happened to me and I swore it would never happen to me again. I will never be fooled like this again,’” Dan impersonated Chris’s determined tone of voice. “And he says that from that moment on whenever an innovation consultant comes to him, Chris tells him: ‘Show me how you can innovate,’ and if the consultant responds with, ‘What? You need a workshop!’ Chris replies, ‘Show me now. If you can’t show me now then there’s no deal.’” Dan’s story demonstrates the loss of professional legitimacy that an occupational group risks incurring if it cannot prove that its expert knowledge

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can lead to a solution to a problem in a rational and efficient way. The innovation consulting firm that Chris’s company hired was famous for its fashionable but highly vague strategies for boosting organizational creativity, such as improvisation exercises, body movement techniques, and role-­ playing. These strategies failed to yield concrete results. After this costly failure, Chris decided to demand from innovation consultants that they clarify very succinctly how their innovation strategies can produce results rationally and effectively. Against this backdrop, many innovation consultancies have produced and distributed card-­like textual artifacts on which they represent their innovation strategies in the form of a few clear definitions and quasi-­scientific algorithmic procedures that stipulate the steps that an innovator should take to generate a solution to a specific problem. On the other hand, if members of a professional group represent their expert knowledge in the form of a small number of rules that can be easily learned and automatically applied by laypersons, they might fail to demonstrate the exclusivity of their skills. If the shift from diagnosis to treatment is too automatic, immediate, and easy to implement, an occupational group might undermine the status of its knowledge as expert knowledge and thus lose its professional legitimacy (Preda 2009, 148). Furthermore, in the specific case of business innovation, making the innovator’s expertise easily implementable by reducing it to a few clear rules might undermine the ideals of creative flexibility with which the innovator would like to be associated. In an interview, David told me a story that exemplified these consequences. The story revolves around a chief innovation officer whose company sent him to participate in a three-­day innovation workshop organized by IDEO. “A company wants to be more innovative,” David said, “so they tell someone, ‘You, you are going to help us bring innovation. You go and learn that and then get back!’” David laughed as he imitated the company’s executives. “The joke is that three days are not really enough time to learn that. Anyway,” he continued, “this guy—his company paid like fifty thousand dollars to send him to IDEO to do this three-­day personal workshop. And at the end he got a set of handouts and it was sort of like—he thought this was the deck that he had to play with, you know? It’s like playing cards with—here’s fifty-­two cards and here’s poker. And he was like, ‘Great, I understand all the cards and I know how to play poker.’ Now obviously there’s a difference between knowing the rules of poker and being a great poker player. He walked off with the rules of poker and having played a couple of times he thought he could teach someone else poker. He immediately tried to use these tools with a major client of his company, the company that sent him to IDEO!” As he said this, David shook his head in disbelief. “But when he was given

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these tools in this [IDEO] training, he wasn’t given the second step, which is like the training wheels experience, like the weaning off of this structure. And he also didn’t know there are other card games. ‘So you mean we can play gin? We can play solitaire? I didn’t know this was good for that too!’” David assumed a surprised tone of voice and then changed it to a scolding one: “And then I am like, ‘You know, there are other types of cards. Imagine being given ten more cards and we can all play different card games.’ He didn’t know there are other schools of thought around design thinking or ways of doing it. He just thought that the cards he was dealt were the entire world of card playing.” David’s story demonstrates the risks that innovators might incur if they mediate their expert knowledge by succinctly codifying it in easily transportable textual artifacts such as innovation method cards. Novice innovators might think that they can quickly apply the definitions and algorithmic procedures that the cards encode in a quasi-­automatic way that does not require practice, experience, and sensitivity to the emergent properties of the real-­time innovation session. The cards might also make it easier for business executives to think of business innovation as a body of knowledge that employees can quickly learn in a short workshop and then “bring back” to their organizational home. In addition, such a form of mediation might inadvertently transform the innovator’s expert knowledge into an inflexible and rigid one. Novice innovators might think that the cards encode the only valid innovation strategies that exist. David’s story should be understood against the backdrop of IDEO’s key institutional position in the business innovation world. Over the years, IDEO has won numerous design and innovation awards, thus establishing itself as the cutting edge in the field. More than a decade ago, a commentator argued that “The Palo Alto, California, company’s impact on the work of product innovation is akin to Tiger Woods’ success in professional golf and Microsoft’s clout in personal computing” (Fredman 2002, 52). IDEO’s iconic status has encouraged other innovation consulting firms to adopt its innovation strategies, key among which is design thinking. IDEO has disseminated its strategies via best-­selling books (Kelley and Kelley 2013; Kelley and Littman 2001, 2005), innovation tool kits available for purchase or freely distributed (e.g., IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit), publications in professional journals and trade magazines (Brown and Wyatt 2010; Fredman 2002), executive training workshops, online workshops, its involvement with Stanford’s school of design (the d.school), and, indeed, a deck of fifty-­one method cards that it has made available in both digital and hard copy formats.

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After he finished telling me the story, David added, “I certainly think that for some people the IDEO d.school industrial complex is the be-­all and end-­ all of innovation.” His use of the term “industrial complex” points to the significant institutional power that IDEO has secured for itself in the field of business innovation. David considered this power to be a problem in a field that is supposed to revolve around change, new ideas, and “disruption” of conventional ways of doing things. Ironically, the strongest evidence for IDEO’s institutional power is the fact that despite David’s criticism of IDEO, Newfound, his consultancy firm, explicitly traces its lineage to IDEO, relies on the innovation methods that IDEO popularized such as design thinking, and, most significantly, sells its own ideation method cards in both digital and hard copy formats. Thus, whatever reservations David had about IDEO’s institutionalized prestige and the potential of innovation card decks to transform business innovation into an inflexible and rigid kind of knowledge, his need to mediate the innovator’s expert knowledge in post-­Fordist legible forms of organizational creativity was too strong to resist, as was the temptation to imitate IDEO’s branded means of doing so.

Creative Cognition Naturally Pinned Down: Mediating the Innovator’s Organizationally Creative Thought Processes Some of the innovators I worked with also created a technical mystique for themselves by mediating their thought processes as organizationally creative. Here, too, Post-­it notes played a crucial role. In addition to affording the production of pragmatic ambiguity and ritual insights, Post-­it notes enable innovators visibly to externalize their thought processes in post-­Fordist legible forms of organizational creativity that entail free information flow, flexibility, and serendipity when they use them in brainstorming sessions. Brainstorming has become dominant in business circles. Key design and innovation consultancy firms have embraced it as well as Post-­it notes as the technology of choice for conducting brainstorming sessions (Nafus and Anderson 2009, 152). In a series of best-­selling publications, IDEO’s founders have posited brainstorming as “a religion at IDEO, one we practice nearly every day” (Kelley and Littman 2001, 55–56) and Post-­it notes as their primary means of conducting brainstorming sessions (59). As I argue in chapter 2, brainstorming draws from a highly influential Romantic ethos of creativity understood in terms of mental processes (hence, the “brain”) that are suffused with powerful sensations and emotions (hence, the “storm”) that spontaneously result in creative output. The Newfound innovators I worked with argued that Post-­it notes are the perfect tools for

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conducting brainstorming sessions because each Post-­it note can represent a mental building block—a component of the “brain”—and Post-­it notes can be shuffled and reshuffled as in a “storm” to unexpectedly yield creative insights.5 Their argument was thus informed by a culturally specific ethnotheory of creative cognition and a specific “graphic ideology” that stipulated how some material artifacts function in relation to such cognition.6 For example, when I asked David why Post-­it notes played such a key role in Newfound’s innovation sessions, he replied, “well, there are two things. One, it’s like the Planck length. Like, why is the primitivity of space and the charge of electrons what it is? We just live in that kind of a universe. For some reason, a sharpie and a Post-­it note can only capture one idea. And that’s really helpful. Being able to put one idea per Post-­it note allows you to turn an idea into a mobile artifact, which is the second thing—it helps with ideation: being able to collide ideas, being able to move ideas, have a spectrum of ideas, have clusters of ideas, pieces, chunks of information, breaking ideas into chunks of information—all this forces us to make atoms in the molecules and then suddenly make organisms.” David (who has an undergraduate degree in physics in addition to a graduate degree in design) thus naturalized the notion that Post-­it notes are the perfect technology for conducting brainstorming sessions. During Newfound’s innovation workshops and sessions, facilitators engaged in similar forms of naturalization. They referred to writing ideas on Post-­it notes as a “brain-­dump” and emphasized the need to “move the Post-­it notes around” in order to arrive at unexpected results (cf. Nafus and Anderson 2009, 152–53). Post-­it notes have thus become a visual emblem of the innovator’s creative thought processes because they provide the innovator with the means to mediate these processes visibly in culturally legible forms and thereby to signal both to potential and existing clients that a specific company that uses Post-­it notes is innovative and that “innovation is now taking place.” Indeed, Post-­it notes’ significant rhetorical power to signal that “innovation is now taking place” is so great that they can be found even in fictional depictions of innovation when no real innovation takes place. Consider the movie Ex Machina (2015). It depicts the efforts made by Nathan, a computer scientist and inventor, to develop Ava, a fully conscious android endowed with artificial intelligence, together with the help of Caleb, a young programmer who was chosen by Nathan to interact with Ava in a controlled environment and thus to test her artificial intelligence capabilities. The movie takes place in Nathan’s mansion, which, as he tells Caleb, “isn’t a house. It is a research facility. Buried in these walls is enough fiber-­optic cable to reach the moon and lasso it” (Ex Machina 2015, 00:​08:38–00:​08:50). Nathan’s

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project and the descriptions of the location in which it takes place situate the plot in the framework of high-­tech innovation. Nathan epitomizes the entrepreneur who has made his fortune with previous successful innovations and is now working on the holy grail of high-­tech innovation: the creation of a fully embodied artificially intelligent machine. In one of the movie’s first scenes, Nathan explains to Caleb his project and Caleb’s role in it (Ex Machina 2015, 00:​10:20–00:​11:17). He asks Caleb, “Do you know what the Turing test is?” Caleb replies with a yes and explains the idea behind the Turing test. He then asks Nathan excitedly, “Are you building an AI?” Nathan replies that he has already built one, “and over the next few days you [Caleb] are going to be the human component in the Turing test. . . . If that test is passed, you are dead center of the greatest scientific event in the history of man.” Caleb responds with awe: “If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods!” And yet, against the backdrop of all this buildup that inundates the viewer with different tropes of cutting-­edge technology and digital infrastructure suitable for the most futuristic kind of innovation, the scene that immediately follows that one begins with a wall covered with hundreds of Post-­it notes (Ex Machina 2015, 00:​11:29–00:​15:08). The camera scans the wall from right to left side until it reaches Nathan, who sits in front of three monitors that show Caleb and Ava having their first interaction. As Nathan watches the monitors, he takes notes while the viewer can see in the background the Post-­its-­covered wall. As Caleb’s session with Ava is about to end, Nathan stands up and approaches the wall. We then realize that he had all along been taking notes on a Post-­it note, for upon approaching the wall, he posts one and then looks at it. Consider, then, this discrepancy between, on the one hand, the numerous tropes of high-­tech innovation powered by invisible digital infrastructure (“buried in these walls is enough fiber-­optic cable to reach the moon and lasso it”) and enough invisible computational power to animate a fully embodied artificially intelligent machine and, on the other hand, the sight of a wall covered with hundreds of Post-­it notes. Nathan, who epitomizes cutting-­edge technological innovation, needs the assistance of these small rectangular pieces of paper with weak adhesive properties, this analog technology of almost obscenely simple, fuzzy, and messy features. He needs them because these pieces of paper enable him, or rather the movie’s director, to mediate and make visibly concrete Nathan’s creative thought processes in post-­Fordist legible forms of organizational creativity that entail free information flow, flexibility, and serendipity. The price, however, has been the piles of Post-­it notes that one can typically find on desks, glass

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walls, and the floor, which go against the ideological grain of the open and clutter-­free shared workspace as a locus of innovation.

“A Transmitter of Energy and Heat”: Mediating the Innovator’s Organizationally Creative Self Failure to contextualize in a broader cultural logic the clutter found in the shared workspace can easily lead to failure to identify other kinds of “stuff ” that form part of this clutter. For example, the New Republic article by Tokumitsu and Mol (2016) contrasts the contemporary creative workspace, with its open floor plan and absence of personal space, with the “individual offices within office buildings [that] allowed for personalization and personal intimacy” and with earlier types of workspaces such as the studiolo in Renaissance Europe, which enabled their occupiers to “develop a sense of distinct selfhood.” However, far from obliterating a sense of “distinct selfhood,” the fact that the shared workspace did not offer the innovators I worked with the opportunity to personalize closed spaces actually encouraged them to publicly hypostatize, objectify, and thereby constitute their selves in post-­Fordist legible forms of organizational creativity in real-­time communicative events that, to all intents and purposes, constituted a form of “clutter,” too. Many of them shared their thoughts, feelings, and the properties of their selves with their coworkers. They presented their selves as a communicational infrastructure that facilitates free information flow, flexibility, cross-­fertilization, and organizational creativity. In doing so, they, too, buttressed their professional and technical mystique.7 For example, in a short introductory session in the first meeting of one of Newfound’s workshops, the facilitators asked the participants to pre­sent themselves. Jennifer, a woman in her late thirties who was a freelance consultant, began by saying, “My name is Jennifer. I’m a consultant, mostly for educational organizations. In my consulting practice I like to think of myself as a conductor in every sense of the word. So, first, like a conductor you meet on the train who takes your tickets and navigates, I create a lot of maps for people, whether it’s resource mapping, stakeholder mapping, future mapping—I absolutely love maps. So I like the concept of navigating, of navigating through change. The second definition of the metaphor is like a conductor in an orchestra, right? I really enjoy helping people harmonize and work together. I really love collaboration, helping my clients, helping the teams work better together. The third sense is conductor, like a transmitter of energy and heat. I have a lot of energy and I like to start people

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up. So those are the ways I like to think of my consulting practice.” Jennifer presented herself as the locus of information flow, coordination, flexibility, and organizational change. Jonathan, a man in his early forties, also emphasized tropes of flow and change in the course of his self-­presentation. However, in contrast to the other participants, he highlighted their positive nature by contrasting them time and again with their opposite side, namely, the horror of stagnation of whatever kind, which, to some participants’ discomfort, he embodied because at the time of the workshop he was unemployed. “So, I’m currently not working,” he began with an anxious tone of voice and a half-­apologetic smile. After a brief silence, he continued: “I’m looking for a situation where a company is experiencing a whole lot of stagnation. So, I kind of consider myself an activist against stagnation within companies, and I’d love to kind of come in and help fight the fight and create change. I love change. And so I am looking at being in incubators, start-­ups, though my ideal would be to come to a more established, stagnating company and create disruption and shake things up.” The presentation of the innovator’s self as a locus of change, flexibility, movement, and flow as inevitably positive has thus become such a reified genre that it informed Jonathan’s self-­presentation through and through even though its result was to portray his own specific self negatively, that is, as a locus of stagnation in the form of unemployment. To reiterate, participants’ acts of self-­mediation focused on skills that emanated from the innovator’s self as an organizationally creative self in post-­Fordist terms. Participants characterized their selves as uniquely suitable for “determining the internal communication pathways between all the teams in the organization,” “helping people connect with one another,” “helping people create beautiful music by collaboration,” “creating a lot of change, disruption, and uncomfortableness in the organization,” and “making creative process possible.” The innovators I worked with understood their ability to function as flexible nodes and facilitators of communication, disruption, and change as inherently related to who they are. Their mediated selves thus formed a key dimension of their technical mystique. In addition to the innovator’s need to create a technical mystique, one reason for this heightened focus on the self as an “organizationally creative self ” might be that stable jobs, teams, and offices have become rarer in the contemporary knowledge-­based economy, whereas fluidity of tasks, teams, and roles has become the norm. These shifts are mirrored in the rise of the shared workspace. The built office environment of the past objectified clear organizational decision-­making structures in the form of, for example, the

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specific location of one’s office that symbolized its occupant’s place in the organization’s hierarchical structure—think of the coveted corner office on a skyscraper’s highest floor (Zunz 1992, 103–24). In contrast, the shared workspace symbolizes the high fluidity that characterizes work, tasks, and positions in the contemporary business world. In this kind of work environment, the innovator’s self might become increasingly important as a source of organizational action, coordination, moral authority, and creativity, and it can consequently become reified and fetishized in specific ways. Furthermore, inasmuch as today more forms of work can be performed remotely by knowledge workers who do not have to be in each other’s physical presence and can instead communicate with one another through emails and conference calls, workers might experience their selves as their main tangible and substantial work-­related entities. Such selves might consequently become the locus of heightened self-­reflection and exploration, in which case a professional mystique might constitute not only an outer-­ directed but also an inner-­directed process (i.e., a process in which the innovator constitutes his self as organizationally creative for himself and for others). These processes found expression in an online business innovation course organized by a major innovation consulting firm in the US, in which I enrolled. The course was saturated with participants’ self-­reflection and self-­exploration. The facilitators time and again encouraged the participants to reflect on different stages of the innovation process and either share their reflections with other participants or keep them to themselves. They explained this request by referring the participants to studies that argue, based on evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, that reflection increases perceived self-­efficacy (i.e., one’s confidence in one’s ability to execute a task and achieve a goal) and that this increased self-­efficacy results in better future outcomes. Participants’ reflections took the form of highly elaborate self-­exploration and analysis of their emotions, thought processes, dispositions, and inclinations. When asked to reflect on the ideation phase, participants made comments such as “I noticed that I had to suspend thinking through the complete formulation/articulation of an idea and listen to my ‘bodysense’ of an idea, as yet unformed, and distinctly bodily felt, something . . . vague and fuzzy, and allow a word-­image to emerge, capture that, and then go back afterwards to unwrap it.” Another participant wrote that “It was interesting to see how I limited myself . . . [in] the first exercise. Having watched the [instructional] videos that followed, it was almost as if I was given further ‘permission’ to be playful. . . . My mind seemed to open up and move away from the usual ‘A to B to C’ thinking. . . . The key challenge for me would be

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giving myself the mental permission to be fun and crazy with my ideas.” Each of these and similar comments received a number of replies in which other participants and the facilitators gave positive feedback and assured the writer that they, too, had the same difficulties: “I can really relate to what you’re saying about giving yourself permission. It’s not easy.” Such a heightened focus on the innovator’s self was not limited to the ideation stage, in which one might expect participants to reify the self because ideation frequently involves the imagination and so forth. Rather, it pervaded the prototyping stage, too, in which the innovator rapidly builds a rough physical model of his idea. Prototyping might be thought of as a more concrete, tangible, and external-­to-­the-­self stage, yet participants reflected on it, too, through the prism of their selves. A participant wrote, “I learned the power of imagination and the possibility to create something great out of no materials. I discovered myself being very happy during the last days because of the feeling that I created something in almost no time and that actually was a 3D model of my idea. . . . I learned that I can have fun prototyping with serious things.” Another participant revealed that “I find embarking on a prototyping exercise intimidating, but once I’m into it, it becomes fun and helps to inspire.” In a similar comment, a participant shared that “Getting started is difficult especially if you are a perfectionist. To balance time for prototyping and making sure your idea is implemented [well] enough to be understood is difficult.” The business innovators I worked with thus mediated the innovator’s self as a communication node that facilitated change, movement, information flow, serendipity, flexibility, and consequently organizational creativity, thereby reflexively constituting themselves both for themselves and for others as members of an occupational group whose professional expert knowledge is predicated on these ideals. However, in doing so, they transformed the self that was supposed to be merely a communication node into the focus of attention that traps information and energy rather than letting them flow. Their frequent reification of the organizationally creative self in numerous communicative events can be conceptualized as another form of “clutter” that clogs what is supposed to be a minimalist and austere new work environment.

Conclusion: Hype as Mediation If the shared workspace as a locus of innovation has become cluttered with specific “stuff ” that seems to undermine the normative ideals of the contemporary knowledge-­based economy, it is because innovators use this “stuff ”

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to mediate in a visibly concrete way their expert knowledge as knowledge that is suffused with these normative ideals, thereby creating a technical mystique for themselves. Such “stuff ” is neither accidentally present in the innovator’s workspace nor devoid of a specific aesthetic. Its rhetorical power to signal to clients (and to innovators) that “innovation is now taking place” emanates from its multimodal resonance with widespread post-­Fordist ideologies of organizational creativity. These forms of mediation transcend the specific spaces in which the innovation workshops and sessions I attended took place. They can also be detected in the most iconically innovative work environments. Consider a news feature that appeared in a number of newspapers and websites whose focus is Google’s headquarters in Victoria, London, and, in particular, a revamped engineering floor called L4. Enhanced with a number of colorful photos of the space, the feature reported that at stake is the design of “a highly creative” environment: Ideas are obviously a key part of working for Google, and there’s never a shortage of space to write them down—some of the walls in the corridors are made up of huge white boards. . . . Playing is never a distraction either, because it’s all free. There’s also a gym, sound-­proofed music room with drums and guitars and a games room with a pool table, video consoles and a giant Samsung TV. . . . [Google’s vice president of engineering adds,] “Contrary to accepted wisdom, fun offices don’t hurt. Our experience is that a comfortable, open and fun environment encourages creativity and openness. Open spaces make chance interactions more likely, and chance interactions often lead to the greatest ideas.” (Thornhill 2011)

The emphasis on “open spaces” as sites of “chance interactions” and free information flow is inseparable from the “stuff ” that clutters these spaces and whose role is to mediate these ideals even as it appears to undermine them. The markers and white walls on which employees can write their ideas down wherever and whenever they find themselves mediate the notion of creative immediation or instantaneous inspiration that is unpredictable, mercurial, and fleeting and that must be given expression at the moment it arises lest it gets lost. It is noteworthy that in the pictures, these white walls are shown covered with doodles of “a spaceship from Star Wars” and a kind of robot, visual clutter that mediates creative immediation and that in practice has nothing to do with actual innovative work. Other material artifacts mediate innovative work as the result of playful, serendipitous, and nonlinear information flow. They include video game consoles, play

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rooms, toys, and rooms for relaxation furnished with sofas and numerous “cushions” that “are all important at Google” in addition to “unconventional seating” made of angular shapes. The caption of one photo that shows a desk cluttered with different toys states that “programmers are encouraged to play” with them because play can increase programmers’ creativity.8 While visiting Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, I experienced the contradictory nature of these forms of mediation firsthand. At the entrance to the main building, I encountered a giant colorful tube slide, similar to the ones that can be found in theme parks, by means of which employees can slide from an upper floor to the one below it. However, employees barely used it. The real purpose of this slide—a visual clutter if there has ever been one—was to mediate the idea of information flow rather than to actually facilitate it. While we need not accept at face value the suggestion made in one photo caption that “L4 is a paradise for creative thinkers,” Google has been immensely successful in convincing investors, consumers, and employees that its spaces do form such a paradise and that it has managed to routinize creativity and innovation. The multimodal resonance between Google’s forms of mediation and widespread post-­Fordist ideologies of organizational creativity has been responsible for the fact that although much of the work that is actually carried out in Google’s iconically creative workspaces has had nothing to do with creative work, this decoupling has only partially undermined the hype of creativity that has surrounded Google for close to two decades.9 As I show in the next chapter, such a resonance has also been responsible for solidifying business innovation’s status as a bulletproof panacea for any entity in need of innovation, including one’s life and self, in the wider public.

SIX

“Life Design” The Omnivorous Logic of Business Innovation

A New Panacea on the Block Two years into my fieldwork, I learned that Newfound would offer a short workshop titled “design your life.” Each participant would learn to use design thinking tools to solve the problem of “what do you want to be when you grow up,” to “prototype, . . . scaffold, visualize and test multiple versions of the next 5–10 years of [his or her] life” and thus to “plan [his or her] future.” The workshop was one of a growing number of commodified strategies that emerged in the design and business worlds and that promise to help individuals achieve happiness by teaching them how to “innovate” their lives by means of the designer’s tools. For example, in 2009, the business, innovation, and design magazine Fast Company published a piece titled “Can Design Thinking Solve Your Problems and Make You Happier?” (Cannell 2009). It focused on a recently published book that promotes a strategy of using design thinking to improve one’s life. The piece argued that “basic design strategies can be adapted to everyday issues such as how to get along with colleagues, how to balance work and life, and how to ease gracefully into old age.” In 2011, the Guardian published a similar piece titled “This Column Will Change Your Life: Design Thinking” (Burkeman 2011). It discussed another trade book that promotes the use of design strategies to solve life’s problems. The author of the piece asked whether the designer’s mindset can “really [be] a recipe for happiness.” He claimed he was “pleasantly surprised” when reading the book and that “there’s something appealing about treating life as a design project. . . . Most lives are too messy to think in terms of a blank canvas. But thinking in terms of elegantly arranging interlocking items is practical, while leaving space for real creativity.” In 2016, the New York Times joined the trend with a piece titled “‘Design Thinking’ for a Better You” (Parker-­Pope

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2016). Its author argued that “design thinking can help everyone form the kind of lifelong habits that solve problems, achieve goals and help make our lives better.” She told the story of how she applied design thinking to her own life with the result being that “I’ve lost 25 pounds, reconnected with close friends and refocused my energy on specific goals and habits.” She cited Bernard Roth, a Stanford engineering professor and “a founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford” (and the author of another self-­help book), who argued that “we are all capable of reinvention” and that “the same type of thinking” that helped Stanford students better the lives of farmers in Myanmar “can be applied inward” to the self. This is just a cursory list of similar cases, all of which suggest that the use of design thinking—a key strategy of business innovation in the contemporary moment—to “design” and “innovate” one’s life has become a widespread phenomenon whose nature and consequences beg for clarification. Indeed, Stanford University is one of the key institutional sites that have naturalized the idea that one’s life can be “innovated” by means of design thinking. To begin, the university’s school of design (d.school), through its connection with IDEO, has played an important role in institutionalizing design thinking in the business innovation world. More important, for a number of years Stanford has offered a course titled “Designing Your Life,” which, according to Fast Company, has been one of the university’s most popular courses among its college students (O’Connell 2015). The course has become an important site in which principles and procedures of life design have been developed, tested, codified, and disseminated to a wide audience. As the New York Times reported, “after nine years of teaching their secrets to future Google product managers and start-­up wunderkinds,” the course’s developers, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, whom the article described as “Silicon Valley veterans,” decided to open “up the curriculum to everyone” (Kurutz 2016). They did so in the form of a trade book, published in September 2016, in which they explained their life-­design strategy (Burnett and Evans 2016). On the first day of its publication, the book was ranked number five on Amazon’s best-­seller list. A month after its publication it was ranked number forty on the same list. The book’s immediate institutional context, which includes Silicon Valley, Stanford, the d.school, and IDEO, coupled with its content and huge success (Kurutz 2016), point to the omnivorous propensity of Silicon Valley’s discourses and practices of innovation to quickly permeate spheres of social life outside of and highly different from the business world. In this chapter I provide an analysis of life design and its implications by taking Burnett and Evans’s book as an object of analysis coupled with an

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interview I conducted with Jane, the facilitator of Newfound’s life-­design workshop who modeled it on Burnett and Evans’s life-­design course. Based on this analysis, I suggest that the trend of approaching one’s life as an object of innovation and design is a logical extension of the rise of technological innovation as an all-­encompassing normative ideal and practice in the contemporary moment, one that is ironic through and through. The same modern-­Romantic notions of the self that provided innovation consultants with the cultural conditions of possibility for conceptualizing products as quasi persons (as in the case of Brandnew) and for developing design thinking strategies for innovating technologies (as in the case of Newfound) are now being transformed as a result of the fact that the self has become the focus of these innovation strategies as if it were just another technology in need of innovation. As an increasingly influential “metaphor we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003), “life design’s” approach to the self as a technology that can be innovated on demand is likely to have concrete implications for how individuals come to understand and reflexively manage their lives and selves. In what follows, I tease out these implications by focusing on the different discursive conditions of possibility for life design’s conceptual transformation of life and self into technologies that are amenable to innovation.

A Class-­Based Problematic Designing Your Life (Burnett and Evans 2016) is a book that targets a privileged socioeconomic group: elite college graduates and holders of graduate degrees who can afford to experiment with their career trajectories. The problem it intends to help members of this group solve is how to launch a career that will make them happy, be it their first, second, or third career. The book begins with a few examples of unhappy people followed by statistics that indicate that their forms of unhappiness are widespread. For example, “Janine,” a woman in her midthirties who had “jumped on the fast track early and had managed to stay there,” is “a graduate of a top college and a top law school, had joined a firm that did important and influential work, and was on her way to really ‘making it.’ College, law school, marriage, career . . . she was the picture of success and achievement.” And yet, some nights, after returning home from work, she would sit “out on the deck . . . and cry, . . . feeling as if there’s something missing, something that got lost along the way” (Burnett and Evans 2016, x–­xi). We then learn that “Janine is . . . not alone. In America, two-­thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent actually hate their work” (xi). Another example is

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“Donald,” a man who “had made his money, . . . worked for more than thirty years at the same job, . . . [whose] home was almost paid off, . . . [whose] children had all graduated from college, . . . [whose] retirement funds had been carefully invested,” who “had a solid career and a solid life,” and who nevertheless “for close to a decade” had been woken up in the middle of the night by a “question” that “stood with him in front of the bathroom mirror—‘Why the hell am I doing this?’”1 This example, too, is followed by statistics: “In the United States alone, more than thirty-­one million people between ages forty-­four and seventy want what is often called an ‘encore’ career—work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social impact” (xii). Each of these and similar stories is supposed to exemplify a specific “Dysfunctional Belief ” that is predominant in the wider public and is followed by a “Reframe” that represents a lesson the book can teach the reader. For example, Janine’s story exemplifies the dysfunctional belief that “if you are successful, you will be happy.” This belief should be reframed as “true happiness comes from designing a life that works for you” (Burnett and Evans 2016, xi). Donald’s story exemplifies the dysfunctional belief that “it’s too late.” It should be reframed as “it’s never too late to design a life you love” (xi–xii). The problematic the book addresses points to one among a number of dimensions that set life design apart from other forms of career counseling services that are currently prevalent in the US. For example, the target audience of the career counseling services that Ilana Gershon has studied is people who struggle to remain employed in a market environment that is populated by companies that care more about stock prices than their products and that therefore must show the market that they are capable of change in the form of reorganization and layoffs. “These kinds of shifts require . . . a workforce that can grow or, more commonly, shrink rapidly, as well as workers able to follow the company in whatever new direction it is supposed to go” (Gershon 2017, 228). Against this backdrop, life design’s target audience turns out to be entirely different. It consists of individuals who have stable high-­earning jobs. The problem they face is not how to find a job or remain employed but how to find a meaningful job, that is, a job that will give meaning and substance to their lives. This crucial difference results in another one. Gershon argues that the career counselors she worked with told their clients that “the combination of flexibility and predictability . . . will in fact lead to employability in the future” (Gershon 2017, 229). A job seeker’s flexibility should take the form of different work skills and experiences that she must cultivate as part of

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managing her “entrepreneurial self.” The form of predictability that will allow her to pre­sent herself “as a coherent and predictable self for potential business alliances” (226) should be her “authenticity,” that is, her self’s unchanging and unique qualities. Authenticity becomes a means to an end: finding a job (227). In contrast, in life design the self’s authenticity is the end for which a specific job is the means. The privileged group that life design targets consists mostly of individuals who already have (or can easily have) stable high-­earning jobs but whose jobs do not align with their “authentic” selves. Life design’s goal is to help these individuals “innovate” their lives so that their future jobs or careers will align with their authentic selves.

Promising a Technological Solution to Every Life Problem by Finding a Life Problem for Every Technological Solution Although the rarefied status of life design’s target audience becomes evident given the case studies with which Burnett and Evans provide the reader, they pepper the book with statements that make it seem as if most of the population shares the problem life design addresses and as if anyone can use the kind of solutions life design offers to solve this problem. For example, Burnett and Evans argue that “You can use design thinking to create a life that is meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling. It doesn’t matter who you are or were, what you do or did for a living, how young or how old you are” (Burnett and Evans 2016, xvi). They rarely acknowledge the fact that life might not always allow for such a playful experimentation and self-­transformation. When they do acknowledge this fact, they erase the complexity that underlies it by presenting the potential obstacles in a caricatured way: “Just grasping whatever might be in reach . . . [is] unlikely to result in long-­term satisfaction. If the kids are hungry, the bank is about to foreclose on your house, or you owe a guy named Louie a lot of money, then by all means take whatever job you can get. But when the wolf has backed off a bit, it’s time to wayfind to jobs you might actually want” (66). In addition to financial need, race and gender, too, do not exist in life design’s framework as factors that might make it difficult for some people to freely experiment with different future scenarios for their lives. This ahistorical approach finds its epitome at the first chapter’s very beginning when Burnett and Evans celebrate “a sign over the design studio at Stanford that says You Are Here.” This sign means that “it doesn’t matter where you come from. . . . Design thinking can help you build your way forward from wherever you are” (3). A photograph of the Stanford sign faces the chapter’s first page, and a visual representation of the sign appears on the book’s hard cover.

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Burnett and Evans naturalize their ahistorical promise of self-­innovation via design thinking by presenting every existing technology as an intentionally designed solution to a preexisting life problem. They introduce the reader to the idea of designing one’s life by asking her at the beginning of the book’s introduction to “look around” and observe the many objects that surround her: Everything that surrounds us was designed by someone. And every design started with a problem. The problem of not being able to listen to a lot of music without carrying around a suitcase of CDs is the reason why you can listen to three thousand songs on a one-­inch square object clipped to your shirt. It’s only because of a problem that your phone fits perfectly in the palm of your hand, or that your laptop gets five hours of battery life, or that your alarm clock plays the sound of chirping birds. (Burnett and Evans 2016, xiii)

The conclusion Burnett and Evans would like the reader to draw is that “design thinking will help you solve your own life design problems” (xv). This narrative, which is anchored in Silicon Valley’s techno-­futuristic belief in the power of technology to solve any kind of problem, grossly simplifies how products and technologies emerge. To begin, it assumes a too simplistic causal relationship between human needs and technologies, as if each existing technology was intentionally designed to address, as a solution, a specific human need, as a problem. Very rarely do technologies and products emerge in such a way. More frequently a technology or product configuration emerges as the result of numerous incremental and unrelated developments that give rise to new ideas for ways in which they can be put to lucrative use. For example, “not being able to listen to a lot of music without carrying around a suitcase of CDs” was not first defined as a problem after which designers sat together and brainstormed how to solve it. Rather, many actors incrementally developed the technologies that enable digitization and compression of music in tandem with ideas for different ways in which these technologies could be integrated into lucrative new products (Sterne 2012). To view every product as the intentionally designed end result of an attempt to solve a clear, preexisting basic human need rather than as the end point of a long and unpredictable chain of events is to grossly simplify the nature of technological development and product innovation (Narayanamurti and Odumosu 2016). In addition, the idea that successful products were intentionally designed as solutions to preexisting consumer needs and problems erases the ways in which manufacturers and marketers create the needs and problems to which they pre­sent their products as the

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solutions. Finally, by focusing on the successful products that are the result of design thinking, Burnett and Evans ignore the uncomfortable truth that design thinking has led to the design of many failed products that disappeared from the market without leaving a trace and that consequently there is no reason to believe that life design can result in more satisfying than unsatisfying “lives.” Rather than provide an accurate description of technological development, Burnett and Evans simplify it in order to naturalize the idea that design thinking can solve every imaginable life problem on demand, regardless of circumstances and contexts.

Porsches, Ferraris, and the MacBook Air: Life and Self as High-­End Technologies The distinguishing features of the intertwining of life design with the normative ideal of technological innovation become more apparent when Burnett and Evans articulate life design’s goals in detail. They argue that whereas “engineering is a good approach to solving a problem when you can get a great deal of data and you’re sure there is one best solution” (Burnett and Evans 2016, xiii), the problem of what to do with one’s life is an open-­ended question that has “no precedent to design toward” and “no fixed or predetermined outcome” (xiv). That open-­ended territory is design’s territory. They add that an “obvious example of a problem with no one right solution that designers work on” is “aesthetics, or the way things look”: For instance, there are a lot of high-­performance sports cars in the world, and they all evoke a sense of speed, but a Porsche doesn’t look anything like a Ferrari. Both are expertly engineered, both contain almost identical parts, but each has a completely different aesthetic appeal. . . . That’s why, in some ways, aesthetics is the ultimate design problem. [Similarly,] designing your life doesn’t involve a clear goal. . . . When you have a desired outcome (a truly portable laptop computer, a sexy-­looking sports car, or a well-­designed life) but no clear solution in sight, [that’s when you turn to design thinking] until you come up with something that works. You know it when you see it, whether it’s the harmonious lines of a Ferrari or the ultra-­portable MacBook Air. A great design comes together in a way that can’t be solved with equations and spreadsheets and data analysis. It has a look and feel all of its own— a beautiful aesthetic that speaks to you. Your well-­designed life will have a look and a feel all of its own as well, and design thinking will help you solve your own life design problems. . . . Design doesn’t just work for creating cool stuff like computers and Ferraris; it works in creating a cool life. . . . You can use

154 / Chapter Six the same thinking that created the most amazing technology, products, and spaces to design your career and your life. (Burnett and Evans 2016, xiv–­xvi)

This vignette exemplifies a number of life design’s key dimensions. First, to reiterate, authenticity and uniqueness are life design’s ends rather than means. Life design’s goal is to help the individual find a job that “speaks to you,” that is, feels authentic given the individual’s self and can help him realize and express his authentic self. Its goal is not to help the individual find a job by using his authenticity to convince a potential employer that he is reliable, predictable, and legible, as in the career counseling services that Ilana Gershon has studied. Second, if the key metaphor for the self in the case of Gershon’s interlocutors is one’s life and self as a business (Gershon 2017), in life design’s case it is life and self as high-­end technologies. The many “cool” consumer products that Burnett and Evans pre­sent as models for the kind of life that one can design for oneself by means of design thinking (Porsches, Ferraris, MacBook Air laptops, iPhones), are not only the high end, cream of the crop in their own niches (cars, laptops, and smartphones); they are also widely viewed as models of excellence for consumer products in other niches, too, technologically and aesthetically. The difference between the two key metaphors is intimately related to the previous one. The goal of remaining employable and employed aligns with the notion of the self as a business that must remain profitable and viable by being flexible and strategic. Aesthetics plays no necessary function in the metaphor of the self as a successful business. In contrast, the goal of realizing one’s authenticity by designing a life in which one’s job is a means to that end aligns with the design of high-­end consumer products and technologies because one of their distinguishing features is their unique aesthetics, and the notion of authenticity has historically been articulated in terms of, and suffused by, modern discourses and practices of art and aesthetics (Taylor 1992; Trilling 1972). It might be for this reason that some of the news features that discuss the rise of design thinking as a tool for “innovating” one’s life are found in the New York Times’s “Fashion and Style” (Kurutz 2016) and the Guardian’s “Life and Style” (Burkeman 2011) sections. Life design is primarily a lifestyle phenomenon that newspaper editors feel they can easily lump together with phenomena such as a new recipe for kale salad, a new fitness regime, and the latest trend in haute couture—that is, phenomena whose goal is to help individuals transform their selves, bodies, and lives into aesthetic objects. Life design’s choice of rarefied lifestyle consumer products and technologies as models for what one’s life could and ought to look like is thus another manifesta-

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tion of its rarefied class-­based problematic and solutions to this problematic. Indeed, compare Burnett and Evans’s choice of high-­end products and technologies such as a Porsche, a Ferrari, and a MacBook Air laptop with the fact that the career counselors Gerhson has worked with use the example of Coca-­Cola to explain to their clients how they should brand themselves, a choice that is motivated by the fact that Coca-­Cola connotes predictability (Gershon 2017, 231–34). Third, Burnett and Evans pre­sent the uniqueness, open-­endedness, and capacity for development of the individual’s life and self as a subset or epiphenomenon of the category of commodities. It is as if the potential of commodities to develop and be unique were antecedent to the self’s potential to evolve and as if that ontological priority qualified commodities to function as entities after which the self could and should be modeled: “Your well-­designed life will have a look and a feel all of its own as well” (Burnett and Evans 2016, xv, emphasis added). The ontological priority that Burnett and Evans give commodities and technologies is the logical extension of the new form of commodity fetishism I discuss in chapter 3: commodities are now not only viewed as quasi persons with a potential for creative development and transformation, they also provide the model for how a person could and should be “designed.” This is ironic given the fact that it was because of modern-­Romantic notions of the self that innovators could approach commodities as quasi persons having a creative potential for development to begin with.

Dashboards and Gauges: What Reflexivity Means for the Self as Technology Burnett and Evans solidify the conceptual transformation of life and self into designable technologies when they specify life design’s successive stages. First, they argue that “taking stock of our situation—by taking our own inventory and making an assessment . . . [is] a way to get an articulated characterization of where we are and answer the age-­old question: ‘How’s it going?’”2 They recommend breaking “life down into some discrete areas— health, work, play, and love” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 14). They provide the reader with a way to assess her life according to the four dimensions: A way to take stock of your current situation . . . is to focus on what we call the health/work/play/love dashboard. Think of this like the gauges on your car’s dashboard. Gauges tell you something about the state of your car: Do you have enough gas to complete your journey? Is there oil in the engine

156 / Chapter Six to help it run smoothly? Is it running hot and about to blow? Similarly, the HWPL [health/work/play/love] dashboard will tell you something about the four things that provide energy and focus for your journey and keep your life running smoothly. (Burnett and Evans 2016, 16–17)

Burnett and Evans provide a diagram of a car’s dashboard that consists of indicators for health, work, play, and love. Each indicator is divided into four discrete units running from “0” to “full” so that the reader can assess whether each of the four dimensions of her life is empty, quarter full, half full, three-­quarters full, or full. Burnett and Evans argue that “a look at this diagram can sometimes warn us that something is not right. Like an emergency light on your car’s dashboard, the diagram may serve as an indicator that it’s time to pull over and figure out what’s wrong” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 18). This form of self-­assessment can help the reader “get a feel for the areas in [her] life in need of some design or innovation” (26). Burnett and Evans provide the example of “Fred,” an entrepreneur who “felt good about his love gauge” (19) but “noticed that he had almost no entries in the health and play categories” (18). His entrepreneurial work had led him to neglect his health, “which was a red light on his dashboard” (19). Fred consequently made some changes such as hiring a personal trainer and working out three times a week. The idea that one can assess the current state of one’s life by means of a diagram of a car’s dashboard and that one can take care of one’s life as if one were servicing a car raises a number of issues. First, it provides another indication of the ways in which Silicon Valley’s norms and practices naturalize the conceptual transformation of life and self into technologies that can be innovated. Second, it points to the ways in which this conceptual transformation radically simplifies life and self. The suggestion to break one’s “existing situation” into only four clear-­cut dimensions that can be visually represented in the form of a car’s dashboard simplifies what such a situation and well-­being might be. A third issue relates to the function that the gauges, dashboards, and similar visual representational devices are supposed to perform in life design, namely, to help individuals take control of their lives. Jane, the facilitator of Newfound’s life-­design workshop, clarified these functions when we met for lunch at Stanford on a sunny September day. “The gauges and other tools we apply, like using a two-­by-­two framework to map the kind of roles you’ve had or to map your energy in some activity or using a timeline to draw different elements of your life—yes, I think that all of them are oversimplifications,” Jane acknowledged, “but you need to start somewhere, and

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so if it’s thinking about Work, Love, Play and Health instead of ‘think about the elements of your life’—that is much easier for us as human beings to conceptualize and to design from. So I think it’s more about having a place to get something on paper, to physicalize it so that it is not intimidating or paralyzing by being in your head. These are just ways of conceptualizing something so that it gets out of your head.” Jane argued that the different visual representational devices that are used in life design simply help the individual put on paper preexisting thought processes that are “in [the individual’s] head.” In so arguing, she ignored the possibility that the visual representational devices might determine the content that the individual would seek “in his head” and that they might end up structuring, potentially in erroneous ways, how the individual comes to understand his or her life, for example, as a kind of serviceable car.

“We Have an Hour and a Half to Design Your Life”: The Well-­Designed Life as a Fast Deliverable In practice, the function of life design’s visual representational devices is to streamline and speed up the process of “designing” one’s life by simplifying it as an object of “innovation.” They thereby transform the well-­designed life into a fast deliverable that aligns with the contemporary production norms of business innovation. Norms of speed and instantaneity suffuse life design in general. For example, in 2014 the (significantly titled) magazine Fast Company returned to the topic of life design with a “2 minute read” titled “Why You Should Apply Design Thinking to Your Life” (O’Connell 2014). It discussed workshops whose goal was to help participants “design the life [they] love.” The author attended one of the workshops, which its facilitator opened by telling the participants, “We have an hour and a half to design your life.” Burnett and Evans emphasize the importance of quick life-­design processes throughout their book. One example is their instructions for how to generate one’s “compass,” that is, understanding “what is your quest” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 29). The way to build one’s compass is to compose a “workview” and a “lifeview.” A “workview” consists of answers to questions such as “What is work for? Why do you do it? What makes good work good?” A “lifeview” consists of answers to questions such as “What gives life meaning? What makes your life worthwhile or valuable? How does your life relate to others in your family, your community, and the world? What do money, fame, and personal accomplishment have to do with a satisfying life? How important are experiences, growth, and fulfillment in your life?” (31). The

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time and effort Burnett and Evans instruct the reader to invest in answering these questions are in inverse proportion to the questions’ weight: “Write a short reflection about your Workview. We’re not looking for a term paper here . . . but we do want you really to write this down. . . . This should take about thirty minutes. Try to shoot for 250 words—less than a page of typed writing” (34). They give the same instructions for how to compose one’s “lifeview.” The short time frame and little space they allocate to figuring out one’s “compass” speed up the process of designing one’s life and self. Some of the ideation techniques Burnett and Evans recommend individuals use to generate ideas for their future life trajectories are also informed by the norms of fast production. One technique is “mind mapping,” a free-­association ideation strategy that consists of three steps. The first step is to choose a topic, typically a general concept or topic to which the individual feels affinity. The second step is to take this concept or topic, write it down at the center of a page, and then write down around it “five or six things related to that idea” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 72). These things are “the first words that come to mind.” One should then “repeat this process with the words in the second ring. Draw three or four lines from each word, and free-­associate new words related to these prompts. . . . Repeat this process until you have at least three or four rings of word associations” (ibid.). Burnett and Evans note that “this whole process of creating layers and word associations [takes] three to five minutes; you want to give yourself a time limit so you do this fast and bypass your inner censor” (ibid). When I asked Jane to clarify life design’s fast production norms, she argued that speed is one of the design process’s advantages: “I often say that design research is the antithesis of academic research. I am not saying that either one is not valid in any way, but academic research takes too long to change things, and our world is too fast. And design research is about getting rapid feedback.” Design’s “rapid feedback” stems from what Jane called its “bias for action,” which is related to one of life design’s key goals, namely, “behavioral change.” Jane explained: “The idea is I’d rather test something, try something, than beat it to death. Embedded in a lot of what we do is behavior change, reframing dysfunctional beliefs. It’s practicing how to free yourself to have ideas in the moment and not carry them around with you like baggage. If you start as a conflicted person, if you start as an indecisive, hyperanalytical person, then there is the chance that with some of these tools and tactics you’ll actually be able to let go and see less analytically and more in the moment about the kind of decisions you need to make.” Using visual representational devices such as a diagram of a car’s dashboard and gauges under tight time constraints is meant to precipitate this behavioral

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change by simplifying the life that is the object of “innovation” and encouraging the individual to be less analytical and hesitant about experimenting with and changing it.3 However, there is no reason to believe that change at this level of behavior (i.e., in the form of “trying things out”) could eradicate the kind of angst that life design sets out to solve. In a vignette I quoted in the previous section, Jane mentioned the two-­by-­two framework as one of the key visual representational devices that she uses to accelerate the life-­design process. As I discuss in chapter 4, the facilitators of Newfound’s innovation workshops used the same two-­by-­two framework to speed up and streamline the production of insights. Eventually they became frustrated by the pragmatic ambiguity that they yielded as a resource vis-­à-­vis their clients by means of this framework. Such confusion is an outcome that an individual who tries to quickly “innovate” his life by means of design thinking is likely to experience, too, but doubly so, for in life design the individual is both be the “innovator” and the “client.” The simple features of the visual representational devices ensure that the well-­designed life remains a fast deliverable even when these devices form part of activities that stretch over a few weeks. One such activity is the “good time journal exercise,” in which the individual documents her primary activities throughout the day and how engaged and energized by these activities she is. Burnett and Evans provide the reader with a worksheet that consists of a series of two short lines on which the individual can describe each activity followed by visual representations of “a gauge” for “engagement” and “a gauge” for “energy” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 50–51). They provide an example of a completed worksheet with an activity such as “working out 2 miles today,” an “engagement gauge” showing six-­tenths, and an “energy gauge” showing nine-­tenths (53). They also instruct the reader to reflect on this “activity log” and to notice “trends, insights, surprises—anything that is a clue to what does and doesn’t work for you” (51). Although they “recommend doing [the] activity log for at least three weeks” (ibid.), the bare-­bones visual representational devices that accompany these exercises mean that any individual who uses them will have to transform any complexity that he may notice in the course of this longitudinal form of reflection into highly simplified and quickly generated information.

The Well-­Designed Life as a Balanced and Coherent Life One of the key consequences of the conceptual transformation of life and self into high-­end technologies is the rearticulation of the good life, or what

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kind of life one should strive to lead and what kind of self should constitute its axis. In the first chapter, after explaining how to construct a “dashboard” that consists of the four dimensions of “health/work/play/love,” Burnett and Evans instruct the reader to “look for some expression of balance and proportionality in your dashboard—very important for design—without imagining that there is some perfect symmetry or balance between all the areas in your life” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 26). Noticing imbalance at this stage of the design process, in which one assesses his current situation, can provide “a feel for the areas in [one’s] life in need of some design or innovation” (ibid). Later in the life-­design process, Burnett and Evans articulate a related, though different, notion, namely, “coherence.” In the chapter in which they instruct the reader to create a workview and a lifeview they also state that “our goal for your life is rather simple: coherency. A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: who you are, what you believe, what you are doing” (32). They add that “by having your Workview and your Lifeview in harmony with each other, you increase your own clarity and ability to live a consciously coherent, meaningful life—one in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do are aligned” (38). They give an example of an incoherent life: “If in your Lifeview you believe in leaving the planet a better place for the next generation, and you work for a giant corporation that is polluting the planet (but for a really great salary), there is going to be a lack of coherency between what you believe and what you do—and as a result a lot of disappointment and discontent” (33). A number of unacknowledged assumptions inform these principles. First, the idea that one can design a life in which “who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together” (Burnett and Evans 2016, xxx) implies that each of these three dimensions is itself coherent, that is, organized around one principle or two or more aligned principles rather than conflicting principles. Consider Burnett and Evans’s example of an incoherent life in which a person’s lifeview is “you believe in leaving the planet a better place for the next generation [and you work] for a giant corporation that is polluting the planet (but for a really great salary)” (33). An individual’s “lifeview” is rarely so simply structured. More often it consists of different, potentially conflicting ideas. One can believe that one should leave the planet a better place for the next generation, that human beings evolved to eat meat, that factory farming is the best way to provide reasonably priced meat for many people, and, finally, that one ought to provide one’s children with the best quality of life in the present even if it means that

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one has to work for a big corporation that pollutes the planet, and so forth, all at the same time. Second, by assuming that proportionality and coherence define the good life, Burnett and Evans fail to consider the possibility that individuals might experience tension, imbalance, and lack of coherence between some of the dimensions that constitute their lives as productive and meaningful because of the challenges they create. The idea that a modicum of tension and incoherence is one of the defining features of modern life has been a cornerstone of sociological and anthropological thought (Trilling 1972). Key figures such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim defined modernity precisely in terms of the gradual erosion of the kind of internally coherent and meaningful social and cultural systems that presumably defined premodern life. Burnett and Evans’s unacknowledged assumptions about what the well-­ designed life should look like are probably the result of the fact that they conceptualize life and self not as high-­end technologies in general but mainly as Apple’s high-­end technologies and products in particular. They use Apple’s MacBook Air, iPad, iPod, and iPhone time and again to explain what good design looks like. They also emphasize in the book and in the many news features that focus on their course and book that Evans “product-­managed the first mouse and early laser-­printing projects at Apple” (Burnett and Evans 2016, xvii) and that Burnett worked for “seven years at Apple, designing award-­winning laptops” (ibid.; see also O’Connell 2015; Kurutz 2016). In Silicon Valley at large, the design that is associated with Apple’s products has come to define what innovative and successful industrial design ought to look like. It is indicative, then, that one of the key principles of this design is “simplicity” (Isaacson 2012). Some of the intellectual movements that influenced Steve Jobs’s notion of design include Japanese Zen Buddhism’s “stark, minimalist aesthetics”; the architect Joseph Eichler’s “clean design” of homes; and “the clean and functional approach of the Bauhaus movement,” where “less is more.” Jobs’s mantra was “let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Furthermore, “the iPod, and later the iPhone and iPad, were triumphs of Jobs’ original insight in the early 1980s that design simplicity was best accomplished by tightly wedding hardware and software” as in the “first version of the iPod,” in which “everything was tied together seamlessly: the Macintosh hardware, the Macintosh operating system, the iTunes software, the iTunes Store and the iPod hardware and software” (Isaacson 2012). Apple’s products thus epitomize the idea that great design is defined by simplicity, minimalism, balance, and proportionality as well as the integration, coherence, and unity of parts. The same principles

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underlie what Burnett and Evans consider to be the architecture of “a well-­ designed life”: a minimalist, balanced entity defined by the coherent integration of its equally proportional and coherent dimensions or parts. Life design thus enforces a very specific vision of “great design” on lives and selves without giving any reason to believe that they can and should exhibit such a design.4 This primacy of design has been one of Apple’s core organizational principles, too: At most other companies, the requirements specified by the engineers tend to circumscribe what the industrial designers can do when it comes to the outward appearance of the product. For Jobs, that process tended to work the other way. In the early days of Apple, Jobs approved the shape and outward appearance of the case of the Apple III and the original Macintosh, and then told the engineers to make their board and components fit. [After Jobs’ return to Apple in 1997,] design once again dictated the engineering, not just vice versa. (Isaacson 2012)

The fact that Burnett and Evans enforce a very technologically specific notion of what life and self should look like is highly ironic. At one point in the book, they argue that “there are lots of powerful voices in the world, and lots of powerful voices in our heads, all telling us what to do or who to be. And because there are many models for how life is supposed to be lived, we all run the risk . . . of accidentally using someone else’s compass and living someone else’s life. The best way to avoid this is to articulate clearly our own Workview and Lifeview, so we can build our own unique compass” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 32). On the surface, their advice resonates with Romantic notions of expressive individualism that stipulate that each individual ought to listen to and follow his unique inner nature.5 However, Burnett and Evans continue with the following statement: “Our goal for your life is rather simple: coherency. A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: who you are, what you believe, what you are doing” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 32). Thus, after advising the reader to be authentic, Burnett and Evans ask him or her to follow the technologically specific recipe for what an authentic life ought to look like, which they pre­sent in their book.

The Self’s Complexity in Space Rather than in Time In the world of life design, each individual possesses multiple, simultaneously existing, and fully formed potentials to lead different lives and to

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have different jobs or careers. Thus, one of the book’s chapters, titled “Design Your Lives,” opens with the following: “You are legion. Each of us is many. This life you are living is one of many lives you will live. . . . The plain and simple truth is that you will live many different lives in this lifetime. If the life you are currently living feels a bit off, don’t worry; life design gives you endless mulligans. You can do it over at any point, at any time. ‘Correction shots’ are always allowed” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 87). Burnett and Evans add that “we all contain enough energy and talents and interests to live many different types of lives, all of which could be authentic and interesting and productive” (88). Elsewhere they argue that “there are many lives you could live happily and productively . . . and there are lots of different paths you could take to live each of those productive, amazingly different lives” (67). Burnett and Evans provide no theory that could explain the individual’s potential to lead different lives or that could account for her changing of careers. They only argue that throughout her life, the individual will alternate between different jobs and careers according to her already-­existing “talents.”6 This idea, too, is the natural result of the conceptual transformation of life and self into a technology or product. If a technology or product can be designed in many different ways, then life and self can be designed in many different ways too: “When you think like a designer, you know how to ideate . . . to come up with lots of options for lots of possible futures” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 66). When I asked Jane whether life design fails to explain and take into account the self ’s complexity as a developmental entity, she replied, “Take psychoanalysis. In that word there is analysis. And as a very analytical person, I often get caught in my own thoughts. Design thinking says the opposite: ‘Don’t think about it so much. Try something and see how both you and someone else reacts to it. Put that in front of them. Put it in front of yourself. Actually attempt to sit through a bloody procedure to know if you want to be a surgeon or not before you commit to med school.’ Those little experiments that you can launch, to see how you react, in some ways I think they are allowing for the self’s complexity. I don’t think it’s in any way counter to the notion of the self’s complexity.” Jane paused for a second and then, as if she were speaking to participants in her workshop, said, “We want to take care of your complexity. We’re saying: ‘Actually, human beings are so complex that they can live hundreds upon hundreds of lives, so to put pressure on yourself to live the best one and to think about it forever is not the great kind of pressure that’s good for your overall well-­being. Why don’t you try something and accept the fact that you could be many many people. Under

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that operating assumption, let’s try something.’” Life design does not focus on the self as a developmental entity that is the subject of vicissitudes and complications. Instead, it focuses on the numerous lives that the self can inhabit at any given point in time and between which it can alternate as if it were an electric current that ran on a switch board and as if those lives were discrete units. Rather than approaching the self ’s complexity as predominantly diachronic (the self defined by its unforeseen course of longitudinal development), life design approaches it as predominantly synchronic (the self as capable of inhabiting numerous potential lives at any given moment). At stake is the self’s complexity in space rather than in time.

Prototyping Lives Ideas about how to generate the best design for a product or technology also naturalize the notion that the individual possesses multiple, simultaneously existing, and fully formed potentials to lead different meaningful lives. Burnett and Evans instruct the reader “to imagine and write up three different versions of the next five years of your life,” which they call “Odyssey Plans” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 90). One version “is centered on what you’ve already got in mind—either your current life expanded forward or that hot idea you’ve been nursing for some time” (93–4). The second version is “that thing you’d do if [version one] were suddenly gone” (94). The third version is “the thing you’d do or the life you’d live if money or image were no object” (ibid.). They describe a number of criteria according to which the reader should assess each of these alternative futures: the available resources one has to pursue a potential future, one’s excitement about a potential future, one’s confidence in one’s ability to realize it, and the degree to which a potential future coheres with one’s workview and lifeview. The purpose of this exercise is to spark “some future versions of you that you’d like to explore,” and to generate “questions that need answers” (119). Crucially, in contrast to the Method, where an idea for a new product remains an object of the imagination that organization members can discuss and mentally visualize in the conference room, in life design the individual is asked to prototype his ideas for different possible future lives: “A prototype is not a thought experiment; it must involve a physical experience in the world” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 113). Burnett and Evans explain that “‘building is thinking’ is a phrase you will often hear around the Design Program at Stanford. . . . If you ask people what they are doing, they will tell you that they are building prototypes. They might be prototyping new product ideas, new consumer experiences, or new services. At Stanford, we believe

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anything can be prototyped, from a physical object to public policy” (111). In design thinking, prototyping is meant to help designers experience the products they are designing as if they were their intended users and thus “build empathy” for them (113) Accordingly, prototyping in life design is meant to help the individual “build empathy” for herself by allowing her to experience the possible future lives she is designing for herself: Good prototypes isolate one aspect of a problem and design an experience that allows you to “try out” some version of a potentially interesting future. Prototypes help you visualize alternatives in a very experiential way. That allows you to imagine your future as if you are already living it. Creating new experiences through prototyping will give you an opportunity to understand what a new career path might feel like, even if only for an hour or a day. (Burnett and Evans 2016, 112)

Because in design thinking a prototype is a rough physical model of an idea, in life-­design prototypes of possible future lives are rough “experiences” that can be as short as “an hour” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 112), although they can extend to “spending a day shadowing a professional you’d like to be” or to “a one-­week unpaid exploratory project that you create, or a three-­month internship” (118). This simplicity of prototyped possible future lives has two implications. First, if prototyping possible future lives means inhabiting those lives in the real world, even for a very short time, then the idea that “each of us is many” is operationalized and thereby turned into a reality. The fact that such an experience may be superficial does not matter in life design’s framework. Such a rough prototype “allows you to imagine your future as if you are already living it” (112). Second, Burnett and Evans cite research that has confirmed “the value of conceiving multiple prototypes in parallel. . . . If your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. Designers have known this all along—you don’t want to start with just one idea, or you’re likely to get stuck with it” (91). Because a prototyped possible future life can be a very rough and low-­cost “encounter with a possible future version of us” (118), the possibility of simultaneously testing prototypes of different possible future versions of “us” becomes feasible. This, in turn, also naturalizes the idea that “each of us is many” (87).7 The idea of prototyping possible future lives is a natural consequence of the conceptual transformation of life and self into designable technologies. It radically simplifies the relationship between the “product” that is

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prototyped—a potential future life—and its “user”—the individual who is supposed to inhabit it. A prototyped new soap affects its potential user in a much simpler way than a prototyped future life. To be sure, there is value in assessing a potential course of action by testing it in real life. Burnett and Evans argue that “prototype experiences allow us to learn through a direct encounter with a possible future version of us” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 118). They add that the “dysfunctional belief ” that “if I comprehensively research the best data for all aspects of my plan, I’ll be fine” should be replaced with the “reframe” that “I should build prototypes to explore questions about my alternatives” (111). Their argument resonates with well-­ established anthropological research on the differences between abstract plans and situated actions. Abstract plans are limited as a strategy of action in a dynamic and shifting world compared with an embodied and experiential approach (Suchman 2006; Wilf 2010). However, the same line of research has demonstrated that the embodied and nonrepresentational foundations of our knowledge turn out to be endlessly generative and productive of new complexities when we unpack them representationally. Against this backdrop, although it is possible to generate helpful data about a user’s interaction with a new product by prototyping it (Suchman, Trigg, and Blomberg 2002), there is no reason to believe that a rough “encounter with a possible future version of us” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 118) will yield clear ideas about the future course one should take. Such “life prototypes” might equally generate additional questions and dilemmas with no clear resolution in sight. These complications came to the fore when I asked Jane whether it was problematic to assume that prototyping a possible future life would yield clear insights that could help the individual make decisions given the fact that most life situations elicit mixed reactions, vague sensations, and contradictory thoughts. Pondering my question for a few seconds, she responded, “Here is where our prototyping has a slightly different bent on getting an emotional reaction, on seeing how people are with respect to a specific situation, because a prototype is not meant to target all those emotions at once. A prototype is meant to get a reaction from one of those. So a good prototype is asking a directly testable question to one of those things. And that’s, I think, when it’s effective. It’s like, ‘do I want the button to be red or yellow?’ Right? If I am presented with a red or yellow button, I might know which one I want. But if I am presented with all the colors, [I won’t know]. So it’s being specific enough to get that feedback.” “But would it not be hard to get that specificity in life design?” I challenged her. “Let’s take the ‘bloody situation’ you mentioned earlier.” I brought up her earlier example

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of a person who wants to figure out whether she should go to med school and Jane’s advice to that person to prototype the experience of being in a “bloody situation” such as an operation. “I can be disgusted by the blood in the operating room but thrilled by the prospect of ‘fixing’ a person. So what should I make of that?” “But there is a lot of good information there,” Jane replied, “and that is a prototype that will tell you something. So you’d be like, ‘Interesting, so it sounds like I don’t want to be a surgeon. Maybe I want to be a nurse. Maybe I want to assist a surgeon.’” “But it’s not the same!” I insisted. “I want to ‘fix’ that person from the inside!” Jane paused again for a few seconds and said, “So my design challenge to you would be like, ‘How might you get to fix a person with experiencing limited blood?’” This exchange highlights three points. First, Jane explained the efficacy of prototyping possible future lives by using the example of prototyping a button. Her explanation reveals the rhetorical power and persistence of the conceptual transformation of life and self into designable technologies. Earlier in the interview, when I asked Jane whether the idea of designing life and self did not simplify them as if they were products, she responded by saying that “designing a product and designing your life, which has so many stakeholders and has so many wrong turns and right turns and contextual differences—they are hugely different.” Despite her acknowledgment, Jane later spoke about life as if it were a technology such as a button. Her slippage becomes almost inevitable in the context of self-­help strategies that are based in Silicon Valley, where technological innovation is a key dimension of the good life and where life and self are approached as entities that can be “innovated” just like any other entity. Second, Jane explained that prototyping possible future lives can be useful in the same way that prototyping a button with only two color options could be useful if one wanted to find out which color might be the best option. Her comparison of life to a button with only two color options points to the radical simplification of life and self that results from their conceptual transformation into designable technologies. Finally, Jane’s comments point to the difference between prototyping a button and prototyping a future life. When I suggested that prototyping a possible future life might merely reveal further ambivalence, she responded that in that case such ambivalence would represent another “design challenge” that could be solved by means of additional prototypes. Thus, whereas prototyping a button might quickly yield clear insights, prototyping a potential future life would more likely raise more questions than answers, which would necessitate further prototypes that would raise more questions, and so forth ad infinitum.

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Life design’s proponents do not acknowledge these complications. As a result, the idea of prototyping possible future lives remains one of life design’s most powerful dimensions because it lays the foundation for life design’s promise of endless self-­innovation within easy reach.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Designed Life Burnett and Evans pre­sent additional visual representational devices. The role of such devices is to help the reader pitch her potential future lives to her “Life Design Team.” True to the model of design thinking, Burnett and Evans claim that “every great design was made great because there was a design team that brought that project, product, or building to life. Designers believe in radical collaboration because true genius is a collaborative process” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 199). They add that “co-­creation is an integral aspect of a design point of view, and it’s a key reason that design thinking works” (200). To design one’s life, the individual must build a “Life Design Team” (103) that consists of between three to six members. Team members should be able to “ask good questions but not offer critiques or unwanted advice.” They should “receive, reflect, and amplify” (104). The collaborative nature of life design means that the individual must be able to pre­sent information about her present life and possible future lives to her “life design team” in a way that aligns with the fast pace of the design process. Burnett and Evans recommend using the same visual representational devices that designers use to pitch ideas for new product designs to their colleagues. By means of such pitching devices, the individual can represent her life—both present and possible—in terms of a few bits of highly ambiguous information that is packaged in a catchy way, akin to pitching a concept to clients and investors. For example, Burnett and Evans instruct the reader to represent each of the “three different versions of the next five years of your life” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 90) in the form of “a visual/graphic timeline,” “a title for each option in the form of a six-­word headline describing the essence of this alternative,” “questions that this alternative is asking—preferably two or three,” and “a dashboard where you can gauge resources . . . likability . . . confidence . . . [and] coherence” (96). They provide a visual template that the individual can use to represent each alternative life (97). They then instruct the reader to narrate the “three versions of you” to her “Life Design Team” to receive feedback (103–5). The visual representations and their narration later form the basis for “brainstorming prototype experiences” with one’s

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“Life Design Team” (119), that is, for coming up with ideas for how to prototype the potential future lives, a process that should take between “twenty minutes [and] an hour” (120). The presentation of self in everyday designed life, to riff on Erving Goffman’s seminal analysis of routines and strategies of self-­presentation in everyday social interactions (Goffman 1959), thus comes to resemble concept development in marketing and advertising. The individual radically simplifies his life and self and pitches them by means of catchy visual drawings, dashboards and gauges, scant verbal information, and a “six-­word title” that resembles a tagline or a marketing slogan (Burnett and Evans 2016, 105).8 Such reductive simplification of life and self finds its epitome when Burnett and Evans tell the reader that if she does not want or is unable to form a “Life Design Team,” “video yourself presenting your Odyssey Plans and watch and listen to yourself as though you weren’t the author; then see what you have to say to yourself and jot down your ideas” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 104). Thus, life design simplifies the individual and abstracts her from complexity to such a degree that it grants her the kind of detached objectivity vis-­à-­vis herself as an object of innovation, which the Method denies the innovator when the object of innovation is a product of which she was the developer. Remember that Brandnew’s consultants argue that an individual who is responsible for a product cannot be the facilitator of an innovation process whose focus is this product because the individual is likely to be too emotionally attached to the product and therefore unlikely to properly go through the process of deforming or changing it. In contrast, because life design literally transforms the self into a caricature by means of simple visual representational devices, the idea that the individual can pitch her potential future lives to herself to generate valuable feedback becomes plausible.

“Those Good Old Gut Feelings”: Problems of Responsibility for a Well-­Designed Life Burnett and Evans argue that for individuals to successfully use the visual representational devices, they must undergo “emotional training,” that is, cultivate the skills that will allow them to “discern” and track their feelings and sensations vis-­à-­vis different daily experiences and prototyped possible future lives and make decisions based on those feelings and sensations (Burnett and Evans 2016, 165–67). They argue that the best way to “educate and mature your access to and awareness of your emotional/intuitive/spiri-

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tual ways of knowing” is to follow “the most commonly affirmed path to such maturity [which, for centuries] has been that of personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or Tai Chi, and so on” (168).9 The idea of self-­discernment invites a comparison with self-­tracking technologies. In her analysis of wearable self-­tracking technologies as a kind of neoliberal technologies of the self, Natasha Dow-­Schüll argues that “to self-­track is to heavily value one’s choices and the need to be responsible for them while, at the same time, relieving oneself of responsibility by delegating it to external technology” (Dow-­Schüll 2016, 328). Wearable self-­ tracking technologies “at once exemplify and short-­circuit cultural ideals for individual responsibility” (324). On the one hand, life design exemplifies the same tension. Burnett and Evans argue that it is the individual’s responsibility to cultivate her emotional discernment and decision-­ making skills, but they also delegate decision-­making to a quasi-­independent technology, namely, one’s nonrepresentational brain structure or “emotional intelligence” to which the individual can have access but over which she has no control. Summarizing Dan Goleman’s popularization of the notion of “emotional intelligence,” Burnett and Evans argue Where do good choices come from, and how do we know when we know? . . . It turns out that the part of the brain that is working to help us make our best choices is in the basal ganglia. It’s part of the ancient base brain, and as such does not have connections to our verbal centers, so it does not communicate in words. It communicates in feelings and via connections to the intestines— those good old gut feelings. The memories that inform this choice-­guiding function in our brains Goleman refers to as the ‘wisdom of the emotions’; by this he means the collected experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for us in life, and what we draw upon in evaluating a decision. Our own wisdom is then made available to us emotionally (as feelings) and intestinally (as a bodily, gut response). Therefore, in order to make a good decision, we need access to our feelings and gut reactions to the alternatives. . . . It is very important to have good information available—to do lots of homework and take lots of notes and make spreadsheets and comparisons and talk to experts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But once that work is done—led by the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which runs the executive functions of coding, listing, and categorizing—we need access to that wisdom center where our well-­informed emotional knowing can help us discern the better choices for us. (Burnett and Evans 2016, 166–67)

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Burnett and Evans describe a bifurcation between, on the one hand, mediated, abstract, and representational reasoning associated with modern forms of rationality such as experts and spreadsheets and, on the other hand, intuitive, nonrepresentational, and embodied reasoning associated with primordial levels of development—the “basal ganglia” and so forth. They advise the individual to remain in touch with the latter form of reasoning. By arguing that “good choices” originate in the autonomous regions of one’s body and mind to which one has access but over which one has no control, Burnett and Evans, too, to all intents and purposes, delegate responsibility for decision-­making about one’s future to a technology that is quasi-­external to the reasoning subject. On the other hand, developers of wearable self-­tracking technologies hope one day “to outsource the labor of self-­regulation to personal sensor technology” (Dow-­Schüll 2016, 329). In this future scenario, the user of wearable tracking technologies “will not only trust her suite of devices and software to remotely track her but also to keep her on track, interrupting the flow of her experience to prompt her—when an algorithmic analysis of her own real-­time data deems it necessary—to eat, drink, or rest” (330). In contrast, in life design, “gut feelings” already function as a direction-­giving technology. They can tell the individual which life from a given set of potential lives is the right one for her. All the individual needs to do is learn to be sensitive to those gut feelings. Hidden in this strategy is the assumption that gut feelings are infallible, that they are always right, and that they “speak” with one voice. When I asked Jane whether it would be possible for those feelings to be internally conflicted, she responded, “If you were my student I would be telling you: ‘You think you don’t know but you know.’ Once you cross all the options off your list—let’s say you do it arbitrarily, and the options are equivalent to the cacophony of voices inside of you, to your emotions that are saying ‘go here, do that, marry that dude not this one, be with your parents,’” Jane laughed, “all these things that we can be emotional about. When you put those down and you cross out a few and you’re trying to come to a decision, the idea is that when you cross off the wrong one you will know.” Jane paused, looked at me with hesitation, and then added: “But your question makes me think of a question that I’ve been wondering about—like, we’re saying trusting your emotions is like trusting your guts. And I’d say, what if I’ve had inflammatory or irritable bowel syndrome, so can I trust my gut? So there is the mind/body connection that can be disrupted. So do I have the same knowledgeable gut in my emotional decisions that everyone else does? I don’t know. I think there are tons of questions. I think the decision-­making

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aspect is probably the trickiest thing in life design.” Jane’s comments suggest that blackboxing decision-­making by delegating it to an organ of the body such as the “guts” can easily create problems of responsibility for making the right decisions because it is easy to imagine the malfunction of such an organ. Life design thus both relieves individuals by telling them that they already possess an infallible decision-­making technology and burdens them with lingering doubts about whether their “technology” functions properly or not. Jane’s description of life design’s “decision-­making aspect” as “probably the trickiest,” meaning the most unsatisfactory aspect, points to the fact that such blackboxing is a poor substitute for a proper theory of the role of emotions. Furthermore, because life design places the “external technology” inside individuals’ physical bodies, individuals can easily feel that their failure to lead happy lives is the result of some defect in their nature or emotional constitution and is thus their responsibility rather than the responsibility of a manufacturer of an external technology that is inaccurate or that breaks down, as in the case of wearable self-­tracking technologies. Similarly, because it is individuals’ responsibility to “educate and mature [their] access to and awareness of [their] emotional/intuitive/spiritual ways of knowing” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 168), individuals can easily attribute their unhappiness to their failure to train their emotional sensors. All this is to say that because in life design individuals do not wear an external self-­tracking technology but are supposed to train themselves to function as their own tracking technology—a situation in which the self tracks itself by means of itself, as it were—the result is a closed loop that does not allow individuals to assign responsibility for their unhappiness to anything but to their own selves (cf. Wilf 2011, 478–79). Life design thus aligns with the contours of the current neoliberal moment in which individuals are asked to assume responsibility for an ever growing number of dimensions of their lives that hitherto were the responsibility of social institutions such as the state, the family, the community, and the church.

Conclusion: Life-­Design as Psychotherapy for a Posthuman Age One way to assess life design’s wider implications for cultural notions of life and self is to analyze it against the backdrop of the rise of psychotherapy in US culture. One reason for the immense popularity of the therapeutic narrative in the US is that popularizers of psychoanalytic theory made it compatible with a number of core dimensions of US culture (Illouz 2008,

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157–61). Freudian psychoanalysis was deeply pessimistic in its view of the degree to which human beings could achieve happiness because of the highly complicated dynamics that characterize the relationship between the human psyche and culture, which makes some form of neurosis the rule rather than the exception. Freud conceptualized the psyche as deterministic, structured by conflicting instincts, molded by events in one’s early childhood, and expressed in highly convoluted and ambiguous symbolic codes and physical symptoms that the individual could not decipher by herself. At best, psychoanalysis could ameliorate individuals’ suffering whose risk of recrudescence never entirely disappeared. Against the backdrop of this pessimistic outlook on the self, popularizers of Freudian psychoanalysis in the US transformed it so that it would align with the American ethos of self-­help. They shifted the therapeutic focus from the internally conflicted unconscious to the ego as an organ of adaptation to, harmony with, and mastery of the world. They framed the psyche as plastic, open ended, and ever capable of improvement, perfection, and self-­actualization in line with potentialities unique to the self that the individual can realize by means of self-­analysis, resilience, and volition. They approached the individual as inherently healthy and potent and defined psychotherapy’s role as that of helping the individual realize his potential. Life design clearly aligns with some of the contours of psychotherapeutic culture in the US. It embraces an optimistic view of the self’s inherently good and relatively uncomplicated nature and its never-­ending capacity for self-­realization according to potentialities inherent to it by means of self-­ analysis and self-­agency. At the same time, life design’s conceptual transformation of life and self into high-­end technologies that are amenable to innovation by means of design methods points to a number of significant shifts in the notion of the self that have to do with its radical simplification into a caricature-­like entity. (1) Life design does not recognize historical contexts such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, and family history as factors that can affect one’s life trajectory—the point of departure is the present moment in which one takes inventory of one’s situation and from which one begins the design process. (2) While life design acknowledges the problem of unhappiness due to lack of self-­realization, it nevertheless begins with a view of reality that consists of numerous successful design solutions to every conceivable life problem. (3) Life design is presented as a strategy that can help every individual mold himself into an entity that is akin to the best technological products in their niches, such as a Ferrari or a MacBook Air. (4) Life design is structured by a rapid production process whose logical end result is the possibility of a “one hour and a half ” redesign

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of one’s life. (5) Life design portrays the self as an entity that consists of very few and simply organized dimensions that can be accurately self-­reflexively assessed and transformed by means of simple visual representational devices such as dashboards and gauges. (6) Life design emphasizes a technologically specific architecture of the self that consists of balance, proportionality and coherence following the aesthetic principles that inform the design of Apple’s products. (7) Life design portrays the individual’s possible futures lives as simultaneously existing, already fully formed potentials between which the individual can switch at any given moment. (8) Life design approaches the self’s possible future lives as entities that can be represented by means of a tagline, simple doodles, and a few sentences, as if they were ideas for new products pitched to clients and investors. (9) Finally, life design portrays emotions as univocal and infallible sensors that can provide individuals with reliable guidance about the possible future lives that might fit them. To reiterate, these shifts emanate from the conceptual transformation of life and self into high-­end technologies that are amenable to innovation by means of design methods. This conceptual transformation is anchored in Silicon Valley’s ideology of technological innovation as the key to the good life. Life design is thus a therapeutic innovation method for a posthuman age in which mind and consciousness are increasingly understood in terms of technology in general and computerized information in particular (Hayles 1999). Perhaps the best indication for the relevance of this cultural context was a poster I saw at Stanford’s d.school in November 2016. The poster described a student project that was developed in a course, titled “Perspectives in Assistive Technology,” that was offered in the School of Engineering, the same school in which Burnett and Evans have been offering their “Designing Your Life” course. The poster was affixed to a wall next to a poster that announced the future dates of Burnett and Evans’s “Designing Your Life” course. The two posters mirrored each other both in design and in content. Whereas the course title “Perspectives in Assistive Technology” was written in small letters at the bottom of the poster, the title of the student project, “Designing Your Afterlife,” was written in big letters at its top, thus mirroring the “Designing Your Life” title of Burnett and Evans’s course. The description of the “student project aim” was this: Explore ways to preserve one’s essence after death. In the technology extreme, this might manifest itself in an interactive system that responds to queries, retells stories, relates experiences, shares expertise, and expresses humor. The

“Life Design” / 175 pre-­dead user would be able to create and program his-­her eternal computer-­ based persona before her-­his demise.

This description resonates with techno-­futuristic visions indigenous to Silicon Valley that focus on securing immortality by technological means. At stake are efforts to transcend the perishable biological body by translating mind into computerized information and “downloading” it to information-­ processing machines on which this mind-­turned-­into-­information could continue to exist (Kurzweil 2000). As Katherine Hayles has argued, the radical simplification of life and self in the form of their conceptual transformation into substanceless information has been a condition of possibility for such futuristic dreams (Hayles 1999). When I showed Jane a photograph of the “Designing Your Afterlife” poster that clearly referenced the poster announcing the future dates of Burnett and Evans’s “Designing Your Life” course, she immediately replied with a decisive tone, “It’s bullshit and I think someone is making fun of the ‘Designing Your Life’ class, and I would be curious as to who is doing it.” “But the poster shows the specific dates and times in which the course will be offered, no? It even has a course number. It looks pretty official and legit to me,” I responded. “I know, we gotta look—I gotta look at the Stanford courses.” Jane was clearly uncomfortable with what she perceived to be a joke at the expense of Burnett and Evans’s course. I insisted: “But you can see it’s in the School of Engineering according to the course number.” “Yeah, but they could have made up that course number.” Jane did not give up. After a few seconds of closely examining the picture of the poster, she said, “So my serious reaction would be—OK, great, and what I would normally say to that is that we in life design and design thinking design human experiences so whatever they are, they are about human interaction. I always say that the d.school in many ways is the antidote to technology. I am not saying technology is not good, but the d.school is a place that’s hugely reliant on people being present with one another. And so this kind of work to me does not just leap into the world of technology right away.” Jane’s reaction to the poster revealed the ways in which metaphorical slippage can remain outside the scope of one’s awareness. Discourses and practices of technology design have always already suffused design thinking and consequently also the d.school’s curriculum, Burnett and Evans’s “Designing Your Life” course, and Jane’s workshop. The description of the student project did not signify design thinking’s sudden “leap into the world of technology,” for design thinking has always already been entangled with technology, as Burnett and Evans’s book demonstrates time and again. The

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idea behind the “Designing Your Afterlife” project is simply a logical extension of the same cultural framework that structures the “Designing Your Life” course. Both are anchored in the norms and practices of business innovation, which themselves are anchored in the broader cultural matrix of Silicon Valley from which they are disseminated to the wider public. At the center of this cultural matrix is the view of technology and its continued innovation as core dimensions of the good life, human and posthuman alike. If the promise of “innovation on demand” gave rise to the promise of “new lives on demand,” it is simply because life design is a manifestation of the omnivorous propensity of norms and practices of business innovation to permeate a growing number of social spheres outside the business world and to gradually shape those spheres in this world’s image.

CONCLUSION

Institutional Myths of Innovation

It is possible to synthesize a number of theoretical points about business innovation based on the previous chapters. First, far from having to depend on serendipity, trial-­and-­error experimentation, and chance, innovation can be routinized in the form of systematic, rule-­governed strategies. The consultants I worked with developed innovation strategies with highly productive features such as rule-­governed imagination and systematic abduction. They developed a metalevel kind of knowledge that resonates with findings from cognitive psychology (e.g., “cognitive fixedness”) and evolutionary theories (e.g., skeuomorphs). Their strategies reflect capitalism’s future-­producing and future-­oriented focus and challenge prevalent ideas about imagination, scientific discovery, and cultural evolution, which scholars have tended to view as loosely guided phenomena. Second, the productive potential of routinized business innovation strategies notwithstanding, the fact that they are anchored in two very specific macrosociological landscapes directly affects the degree to which innovation consultants can realize this potential. One landscape opposes a professional ethos and a modern-­Romantic creative ethos. Although it allows consultants to associate their practice with the highly prestigious modern-­ Romantic notion of creativity, it also creates the challenge of how to convince potential clients that they have managed to develop rule-­governed strategies that tame, harness, and routinize human creativity as a mercurial and unreliable faculty. The second landscape is a post-­Fordist economic and organizational environment that prizes instantaneous results and that consequently pressures consultants to speed up and streamline the innovation process. Third, the tensions that result from efforts to routinize innovation in

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the context of these two macrosociological landscapes can be transformed into valuable resources. The innovators I worked with responded to the challenges posed by the first marcosociological landscape by radically simplifying the human elements of the innovation process, which include the consumer and the innovator, and investing the nonhuman elements of the innovation process, mainly the product that is the object of innovation, with human creativity. In this way they both maintained the prospect of creative development and unexpected breakthrough ideas and made this prospect appear to be amenable to scientific-­like algorithmic prediction because of the overall nonreactive nature of products. They responded to the challenges posed by the second marcosociological landscape by using Post-­it notes and ready-­made visual templates to produce and mobilize a space of pragmatic ambiguity that can accommodate conflicting meanings and cultural vectors. This allowed them to decouple the innovation process from the market reality under the guise of its reflection and thus quickly produce insights. In both cases, however, innovators erased the complexity and contingency of consumer needs, capitalism’s role in producing them, and the multilevel relationship that exists between such needs and products. Fourth, macrosociological landscapes not only shape the social life of routinized innovation strategies when they are enacted in practice but also transform them into performative, self-­reflexive, and self-­anchoring communicative devices whose role is to mediate the notion of their success. Business innovation consists of different practices and material artifacts that mediate the post-­Fordist normative ideals of speed, instantaneity, free information flow, and organizational creativity, and thus the notion that “innovation is now taking place.” Such mediation is directed both at innovators and their clients. The performative power of such acts of mediation is responsible both for business innovation’s contemporary status as a bulletproof panacea, despite its frequent decoupling from the market to which it purports to refer, and for the widespread lingering suspicion that it has become a reified and underspecified field of practice. Finally, although routinized innovation strategies emerge in specific contexts, one of their distinguishing features is that they represent a metalevel kind of knowledge, that is, general principles and rules that transcend specific contexts. This metalevel aspect encourages their application in any context that is felt to be in need of change and innovation. However, because the strategies retain features of the specific contexts in which they were first synthesized and developed, their application in new contexts might transform the cultural entities found in those new contexts. Thus, business innovation’s contemporary status as a bulletproof set of principles that can be

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used for innovating any entity has led to its migration to spheres outside of the business world such as that of self-­help and to the idea that life and self can be “innovated” just like any entity. Because business innovation strategies emerged in the context of technological innovation, their migration to the sphere of self-­help has resulted in the conceptual transformation of life and self into quasi technologies. This conceptual transformation radically simplifies the social and historical determinants of individuals’ lives and selves and has the potential to affect the ways in which individuals come to understand and reflexively manage them, namely, as technologies. Taken together, the multilevel nature of these theoretical points—­ spanning microlevel practices, mesolevel institutions, and macrolevel cultural landscapes—points to the ways in which the potentialities and contradictions of routinized business innovation are not only intertwined but also function as conditions of possibility for one another. This coconstitution accounts for the simultaneous ubiquity and ambiguity of routinized business innovation.

Institutional Myths of Innovation The powerful decoupling of the work of innovation consultants from the market to which their expertise purports to refer raises the question of why business executives continue to seek innovation consultants’ advice. Against the backdrop of the widespread suspicion that innovation has become a buzzword that has lost its specificity and connection to the production of concrete valuable “deliverables,” why do they continue to invest vast resources in buying and implementing innovation consultants’ recommendations? One way to answer this question is to draw inspiration from the sociological analysis of formal-­rational organizational structures. Drawing on Weber’s analysis of social action and its institutional manifestations, sociologists traditionally assumed that rational organizational structures (such as different kinds of “best practices”) become widespread because they provide organizations the means for attaining specific goals efficiently. In the past three decades, however, sociologists have raised the possibility that modern organizations might be receptive to institutional myths of rationality. Such myths are organizational norms and practices that have become associated with rationality and efficiency and that organizations adopt because of this association, although in practice they might not help them achieve their goals in a rational and efficient way (Meyer and Rowan 1977). This “New Institutionalism” paradigm has emphasized the impact of be-

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liefs, ideologies, and widespread expectations on organizations’ functioning and structure in addition to, and often regardless of, any “objective” considerations of efficiency (Scott 1991). It highlighted an alternative Weberian explanation for the rise and spread of formal-­rational organizational structures, namely, the legitimacy of such structures in the modern postindustrial world. Sociologists have divided the phenomenon of “institutional isomorphism,” or the spread of a limited number of organizational structures and practices across many organizations, into three types (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Coercive isomorphism results from “cultural expectations in the society within which organizations function” (150) or when a powerful entity such as the state or a regulatory body enforces specific rules and regulations on numerous organizations. In mimetic isomorphism, organizations that operate under the same conditions of uncertainty, where “organizational technologies are poorly understood, when goals are ambiguous, or when the environment creates symbolic uncertainty” (151), imitate one another’s “best practices” in an attempt to reduce and cope with that uncertainty. Finally, normative isomorphism results from the dissemination of a limited set of organizational norms and practices across many organizations as a result of processes such as professional socialization and professional networks “that span organizations and across which new models diffuse rapidly” (152). Against this theoretical backdrop, I suggest that the contemporary business world is receptive to institutional myths of innovation, that is, increasingly standardized organizational structures that have become associated with innovation and the enhancement of organizational creativity, which organizations adopt not necessarily because of the actual productivity effects of these structures but because of their mythical promise to deliver such effects.1 Innovation and organizational creativity are excellent candidates for becoming the focus of institutional myths and institutional isomorphism. First and foremost, business innovation provides a fertile ground for mimetic isomorphism in that it is suffused with uncertainty (Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002, 189). Indeed, it is a classic business environment where “organizational technologies are poorly understood, . . . goals are ambiguous, [and] the environment creates symbolic uncertainty” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, 151). To begin, the goals of product innovation are highly ambiguous by definition because they concern the generation of the as of yet unknown. In addition, the success of new products depends on their reception by consumers whose shifting and multiply determined tastes and desires create symbolic uncertainty. Finally, the organizational technolo-

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gies that might help companies achieve those ambiguous goals are poorly understood. The innovation consultants I worked with acknowledged that business innovation is defined by the kind of uncertainty of both ends and means that can encourage mimetic isomorphism. In my interview with David, he commented, “This is the challenge of innovation: innovation is not just the idea. Innovation is also the execution. And there are so many steps between ‘let’s do this’ and until it’s actually in the market, and even then it’s never certain. My favorite example is Airbus versus Boeing—I read about it over the weekend. They had the same data! But airbus said, ‘You know what? We’ll make the pipe fatter despite all the environmental factors.’ And Boeing said, ‘You know what? We’ll make the pipe thinner and faster and we’ll work with the current infrastructure.’ It seems now obvious that Boeing’s decision was the smarter choice, but in ten years it may make better sense to make bigger, fatter planes. That’s the problem with innovation—it’s always in hindsight.”2 After discussing other topics, David returned to the topic of uncertainty: “There was another item in the Sunday Times business section,” he said. “One CEO brought her team together to pick apart successes because she’s like, ‘Look, if we don’t know why something we did was successful, then we’re not doing well.’ So they did this initiative: Why did a successful product work? Not just patting ourselves on the back because we flipped a coin and it went well but really trying to understand what made it work. I think many times there’s a lot of factors involved, and we don’t actually know why it worked,” he acknowledged. “So that’s really obviously frustrating. And certainly as a designer working in the industry, at the time when a company asks you to justify your decisions and you do your interviews and you have your beliefs about the direction the market is going, it’s still very hard to make your airtight argument for why do one thing over another. Sometimes you just think it will be awesome. But is it worth the extra five cents it will cost? Like, I don’t know! Like, that’s really tough!” Furthermore, such a highly complex and ambiguous business and organizational environment provides a fertile ground for political struggles within the organization. These struggles further complicate the innovation process and increase the uncertainty of its outcomes. If goals and the means to achieve them are ambiguous and poorly understood, then different stakeholders within the organization can make strategic use of innovation consultants to further their own political goals. David added, “You know, I was working in a solid, upper-­mid-­tier design firm. We weren’t IDEO but we were respected. And I think sometimes a company would hire us and two other—I know for a fact—they would hire us and like two other firms to

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look at what the possible futures were. Maybe it was a thing between three VPs, and each one was using our work as a political fodder for where the division should go. So it’s like you, me, and another guy have all paid for different design firms, and we go to our boss and he’s like, ‘Hmm, I see this, I like the first one, and this thing in the second one,’ you know? And they steal whatever they want from each idea and it’s never clear why.” A business environment that is suffused with such a high level of uncertainty can easily lead to mimetic isomorphism, where organizations imitate each other’s “best practices” of innovation, including the use of innovation consultants. Organizations do so not necessarily because of any clear evidence that consultants can help them become innovative but because other organizations that face the same uncertainty use them. In chapter 5 I discuss a story that Dan frequently tells to his students. The story focuses on Chris, a business executive who hired the services of an innovation consultancy that relied on fashionable but highly vague methods of boosting employees’ creativity, such as improvisational exercises, body movement techniques, and role-­playing. Despite their dubious efficacy, such innovation strategies have not disappeared from the market. Against the backdrop of the uncertainty that suffuses business innovation and the absence of better technologies to address it, they have instead become institutionalized and an object of imitation among organizations. David gave me a similar example that revolves around the highly fashionable notion of “needs-­finding”: “Companies often bring us on to just provide energy, like an infusion of energy and knowledge. So, for example, we’re going to do a workshop with a major consumer packaged goods company, their entire toothbrush division. Just fifty people, all together. We’ve done it in the past: you take the entire sales team and teach them about needs-­finding. There’s no direct application, but the person who brings us on knows that somebody who focuses on needs versus solutions is going to be better at customer service and customer satisfaction.” David’s last sentence described mimetic isomorphism: many organizations adopt the same practices not because there is any “direct application” or provable value in doing so but because such practices have become prevalent, institutionalized, and taken for granted: people just “know” that they can add value. Although mimetic isomorphism may be the most powerful engine behind the continued visibility of innovation consultancies despite prevalent doubts about their efficacy, coercive and normative forms of isomorphism may be significant, too. Coercive isomorphism turns, in part, on “cultural expectations in the society within which organizations function” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, 150). Contemporary cultural expectations among in-

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vestors and the wider public similarly force many business organizations to show evidence that they are taking steps to become and remain innovative. Normative isomorphism turns on the rapid diffusion of a limited set of organizational norms and practices across organizations as a result of processes such as professional socialization and professional networks. The norms and practices of business innovation are similarly diffused through socialization in business schools, the mobility of employees across organizations, and other forms of knowledge transfer in tightly knit business ecosystems such as Silicon Valley. David’s acknowledgment of the uncertain reality in which business executives must operate and the kind of strategies they must adopt to cope with that uncertainty suggests that innovation consultants are neither cynical when they disseminate their expertise in training sessions and workshops nor do they believe that their expertise is bound to lead to groundbreaking results. Rather, they believe in the potential of their expertise to generate such results, but they are also aware of the immense complexity of the innovation process as a whole, which may prevent them from realizing that potential.

NIMBI? When I presented some of my arguments in anthropological colloquia, I was often surprised by the fact that my audience members, who were willing to take phenomena such as fetishism, ritual practices, and the investment of objects with agency seriously when such phenomena took place in nonmodern and/or non-­Western ethnographic contexts, had a hard time doing so when such phenomena took place in Manhattan’s business circles. They wanted to expose the dubious truth value of innovation strategies and the ill-­meaning cynicism of the consultants who developed them rather than to tease out routinized business innovation’s cultural logic. I interpreted their stance as an outcome of the general suspicion toward the business world in the aftermath of the Great Recession as well as of the fact that innovation consultants do not appear to be the classic “suffering subjects” toward whom anthropologists readily adopt, often equally uncritically so, a tolerant and nonjudgmental stance. In addition to closing avenues of research on business innovation as a significant phenomenon in the contemporary historical moment, their stance revealed a blind spot with respect to anthropological knowledge production itself. In the conclusion of this book, I will explore this bind spot by drawing parallels between, on the one hand, some of the arguments I made about

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knowledge production in business innovation and, on the other hand, knowledge production in anthropology. Such a comparison is important for two reasons. First, for anthropological critiques of forms of knowledge production outside of anthropology to have some value, they must be complemented by a critique of anthropological knowledge production itself. Second, there are ample reasons to believe that some of the processes I have highlighted in this book can be identified in the field of anthropology, too, partly as a result of the cultural prestige that business innovation now enjoys and that is responsible for its migration to spheres outside of the business world such as academia in general and anthropology in particular. Take, for example, innovators’ use of Post-­it notes to gradually decontextualize their ethnographic data and thereby transform them into pseudodata that they can shuffle, reshuffle, and arrange on conventionally prestigious visual templates of what a valid insight should look like and thus quickly produce rhetorically powerful ritual insights. Against this backdrop, consider this description of a little known aspect of Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s work in a book that describes him as “The Father of Modern Anthropology”: When Lévi-­Strauss first turned his attention to the analysis of myth in the 1950s, he envisaged a machine—a “special device”—consisting of a series of upright boards two meters long and one and a half meters high on which cards containing mythic elements could be “pigeon-­holed and moved at will.” As the analysis moved into three dimensions, the cards would need to be perforated and fed through IBM equipment. . . . By the mid-­1960s, thoughts of wooden boards, pigeonholes and computing cards had given way to something far more delicate and conceptual: a mobile of wire and thin strips of paper, looping and bending back on themselves. Lévi-­Strauss would hang the mobiles from the ceiling in his office, and they turned gently as he worked though the logical possibilities they represented. On paper, the mobiles translated into notionally three-­dimensional graphs of myth clusters. (Wilcken 2010, 276–77)

Replace those “cards containing mythic elements” with Post-­it notes and the result becomes eerily similar to the innovation practices that the innovators I worked with developed and used. Indeed, if David, one of Newfound’s consultants, described Post-­it notes as “atoms in the molecules [that] then [through reshuffling] suddenly make organisms,” Lévi-­Strauss “likened mythic elements to atoms, molecules, crystals and fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. . . . He also spoke of making notes on cards and then dealing them out at random in the hope of finding unexpected correlations”

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(Wilcken 2010, 297). Concomitantly, some of the results of Lévi-­Strauss’s strategies of instant knowledge production were notoriously plagued by decontextualization and a decoupling from the ethnographic contexts to which they purported to refer (Leach 1970, 97–103), not unlike the decontextualization and decoupling from the market that the innovation consultants I worked with produced as a result of their use of somewhat similar ideation methods. Similarly, against the backdrop of the fact that my interlocutors in the field of business innovation used conventionally prestigious templates of what a valid insight should look like, such as a two-­by-­two matrix, consider recent iterations of two-­by-­two matrixes and similar “fourfold logic” boxes in anthropology (Fischer 2014, 332, 348), which are perhaps not accidentally related to the work of one of Lévi-­Strauss’s students, Philippe Descola. In a recent and much celebrated book, Descola has synthesized humanity’s modes of relationality to nature and represented them on a fourfold logic box (Descola 2013, 233). The power of such templates resides not only in their conventional association with “solid reasoning” but also in their being able to suddenly transform what appears to be a cacophony of data into what is felt to be an aesthetically pleasing patterned order within which each datum is meaningfully related to other data. The primacy of aesthetics in anthropological analysis goes much deeper than the use of fourfold logic boxes. The innovators I worked with used ready-­made visual templates to quickly generate the aesthetically grounded confirmation that a certain arrangement of Post-­it notes on a template was effective and true and that it conferred coherent meaning to what on the surface appeared to be cacophonous data. Key anthropologists have long applied aesthetic feeling as a mechanism for quickly determining the “authenticity” or “inauthenticity” of cultural phenomena and, indeed, of cultures as a whole. They defined genuine cultures as entities that are characterized by “the sort of integration one finds in a Bach fugue” (Geertz 1973, 145), and they determined that the felt lack of such integration indicated the existence of a cacophonic and impure mix of elements from different cultures (Wilf 2013b, 723–27). Anthropologists such as Boas, Kroeber, Benedict, Mead, Geertz, Bateson, Gell, and Bourdieu drew heavily on the notion of artistic style to theorize culture as a coherently integrated entity whose parts stand in a meaningful relation to one another and that evokes in the anthropologist the kind of aesthetic feeling and immediate recognition that one experiences vis-­à-­vis a work of high art. Thus, in anthropology, too, aesthetics has for long functioned as an instantaneous arbiter of the validity of insights. One of the dimensions that might seem to separate business innovation

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and anthropological knowledge production is the higher level of decontextualization that characterizes business innovation as a result of the shorter time devoted in it to data collection and analysis—a process whose end results are often short chunks of catchy information and unverifiable insights. However, even in this respect the difference might be murkier. Although anthropologists rely on extensive fieldwork, the fact that they religiously deny access to their field notes is, to all intents and purposes, also conducive to a form of decontextualization that hinders verification of their conclusions by their colleagues. Because they embed relatively few ethnographic vignettes in the published form of their conclusions, their colleagues often must instead focus on internal inconsistencies or inadequacies in the use of theory in the process of evaluating those conclusions. Citations in anthropology provide another example for broken indexical chains that might facilitate the fast production of conclusions whose evolution is not easily traceable and whose soundness is not easily assessable (Gershon 2016). Consider, first, the Aristotelian unmoved mover, as it were, that is, the scholar who rarely cites others but is frequently cited by them, thus indexically establishing an autochthonous status in a field of knowledge that masks the knowledge context on which this scholar relies. Further down the (indexical) food chain are scholars who cite one another, thereby creating an indexical loop that is self-­anchoring (Fischer 2014, 333; Marcus 2012, 428). There is also the pragmatically ambiguous general citation, for example, to a book without a specific page, usually preceded by the topical sound bite in vogue.3 These citation practices are widely prevalent in anthropological writing. In assessing anthropological knowledge production in light of this book’s analysis of business innovation, perhaps the most important factor to consider are recent calls for ethnographic experimentation with design methods as an alternative model of anthropological training and work (Rabinow et al. 2008): “The design studio could be a place in which students could be taught—could experience—how to anthropologize” (Rees 2008, 113), how “to let the field or the particular story or theme that is emerging take over the design. The challenge is to become part of a foreign milieu, to submit to the outside, to get drowned in and carried away by it, while staying alert to the gradual emergence of a theme to which chance encounters, fugitive events, anecdotal observations give rise” (116).4 A number of institutional sites of anthropological research have been established in the model of the design studio in the wake of these calls.5 In one of these sites, The Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine, recent experiments in ethnographic conceptualizations have embraced design thinking

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and incorporated Post-­it notes as their foundational technology (Marcus 2012; Marcus and Murphy 2011, 2012).6 In a direct critique of these calls to model anthropology after design, Lucy Suchman has argued that “considered recently as a model for anthropology’s future (Rabinow et al. 2008), . . . design and innovation are [instead] best positioned as problematic objects for an anthropology of the contemporary. . . . We need less a reinvented anthropology as (or for) design than a critical anthropology of design” that would lead to insights regarding “the limits of design” (Suchman 2011, 3). Against the backdrop of the fact that the recent calls for ethnographic experimentation with design methods are motivated by the idea that design epitomizes “the primacy of inquiry and data over theory” (Rees 2008, 116), the arguments I make in this book, which point to design as a context in which the fast production of ritual insights can easily take place, seem to validate Suchman’s cautionary tone. Indeed, my analysis points to the conventional templates at the heart of design methods themselves. Such templates are not different from the “well-­established theories and/or tacit norms of what fieldwork ‘is,’ of what a published monograph should look like” (Rees 2008, 116), which the experimentation with design methods in anthropological training and practice is supposed to problematize. The calls for anthropologists to experiment with design methods could thus easily push anthropologists to embrace the norms and practices of business innovation in the form of the rapid production of “deliverables” qua publications via the decontextualization of ethnographic data (Cefkin 2009, 18). At the same time, if the calls for “designs for an anthropology of the contemporary” are calls for experimentation and “trials of concept and value” (Marcus 2012, 442), I take them to be, first and foremost, a form of anthropological self-­critique in which reflexivity of method is a key dimension. Clarifying “the limits of design” (Suchman 2011), then, can be integral to experimentation with ethnographic form that is informed by design. Accordingly, I follow the conviction that if anthropology has become, and must remain, a self-­critical project (Wilf 2018), “a reinvented anthropology as (or for) design” and “a critical anthropology of design” (Suchman 2011, 3) can be productively combined. In this book I lay bare what a critical anthropology of innovation, design, and knowledge production in the contemporary post-­Fordist moment might look like and what its theoretical implications might be. As norms and practices of business innovation gain more cultural prestige and consequently migrate to and inform a growing number of spheres outside of the

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business world such as academia, such a critique would not only become more urgent but would also make sure that the knowledge social scientists produce and the ways in which they organize themselves to produce it do not become one of business innovation’s many fashionable subsets, offshoots, and spin-­offs.7

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

See chapter 1 as well as studies by Wilf (2013d, 719–21; 2014b, 398–401; 2017) for a review of this and additional strands of research. Throughout, the names of the institutions and people studied are pseudonyms. Broadly, design thinking entails (1) the use of ethnographers to gather information about the needs of users in relation to specific products, services, and problems; (2) the use of brainstorming to transform this information into ideas for innovative solutions; and (3) the use of rapid prototyping of such solutions to test their value and feasibility (Brown and Wyatt 2010). The school’s ranking is based on the Financial Times “Global MBA Ranking 2015” (http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-­mba-­ranking-­2015). I first came in contact with Brandnew in 2012 during a preliminary study of business innovation in Israel, where Brandnew has a strong presence. Its explicit rejection of design thinking coupled with design thinking’s popularity have encouraged me to search for consultancies that specialize in it. I consequently contacted Newfound. My previous research on the institutionalization of creativity in academic jazz programs (Wilf 2014a) and on efforts to develop art-­producing computerized algorithms (Wilf 2013a, 2013b, 2013c) has attracted the interest of my interlocutors in the field of business innovation, who themselves are focused on developing strategies to routinize creativity, and has facilitated my entrance into this field. For a semiotic analysis of emergence in jazz and in other improvisation-­based art forms, see the work of Keith Sawyer (1996, 2003), who has also drawn on this analysis to develop business strategies for enhancing organizational creativity (Sawyer 2007, 2013). See my (Wilf 2013a) study for a discussion of creativity in jazz and its relation to contingency and uncertainty. The notion of an “aesthetic of imperfection” was developed by jazz scholar Ted Gioia (1988) who has written at length about the importance of errors and retrospective sense-­making in jazz improvisation. In addition to these considerations, the incorporation of jazz into the business world by organizational theorists was politically motivated, as well as consequential, in that it facilitated new forms of work-­related uncertainty and allowed these theorists

190 / Notes to Pages 32–53 to portray themselves as “cool” and subversive but at the price of presenting a distorted image of jazz culture (Wilf 2015c, 39–45). CHAPTER ONE

1.

See pp. 93–94 for an analysis of the algorithmic recipe for generating ideas for new products based on this template. 2. See my (Wilf 2013b) article for an analysis of the use of structured contingency as a cultural resource for resolving problems of creative intentionality in different ethnographic settings. 3. Cultural anthropologists have similarly undertheorized creativity (individual and cultural alike) by emphasizing the loosely guided and often unconscious production of novelties, which they often glossed as “improvisation” or “emergence” (Wilf 2013d, 719–21; 2014b, 398–400; 2017). Although linguistic and semiotic anthropologists have developed more rigorous theories of improvisation and emergence as semiotic processes, these theories have tended to focus on the nonroutinized and emergently creative nature of communicative events (Wilf 2014b, 400–401). A few of the contributors to this strand of research, such as Keith Sawyer (1996, 2003), have attempted to build on their expertise to develop routinized strategies of enhancing organizational creativity (Sawyer 2007, 2013). 4. The high level of generality that characterizes strategies of routinized business innovation also sets them apart from academic art programs, in which it is possible to find institutionalized structures for cultivating creative agency. Such structures are typically designed to achieve their results in the context of specific art forms and their highly specific modalities and components rather than across art forms. If they do transcend contexts of creative practice, they are not reflexively used to generate new structures for cultivating creative agency (Wilf 2014a, chaps. 4, 5, 7, 8, and the bibliography therein; Chumley 2016). 5. As I explain in chapter 2, Brandnew’s consultants explicitly reject brainstorming as an ideation technique. 6. Indeed, note that the trope of the “swirl” that Hannerz has used to denote the kind of cultural productivity found in urban settings is reminiscent of brainstorming via the trope of the “storm” and that both tropes denote natural phenomena that are quintessentially chaotic in mathematical terms. 7. In part, this is due to the fact that in altering the functional relationships between specific components in an existing product, service, or process, the Method affects the affordances of these, and of the other, components—that is, how they can be utilized by potential users—because the affordances of different components are in a tight relationship with and are partly determined by each other. The result is a new configuration of affordances and constraints that can give rise to ideas for innovative products, services, or processes (cf. Gibson 2014, 119; Becker 2008, 32; Moeran 2013, 35–36; Wilf 2015b, 686). 8. A number of scholars have noted these descriptions’ great detail and methodical character (Marx 1978, 325; Redfield 2000, 7; Watt 1997, 156) 9. See, for example, New and Improved (http://www.newandimproved.com/ ). 10. The facilitators dismissed the turn to external resources as “deus ex machina” solutions.

Notes to Pages 58–85 / 191 CHAPTER TWO

1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Of course, organizations’ “actual day-­to-­day activities” do not necessarily align with this professional ethos (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 341). The predominance of the Romantic script about creative agency in the modern Western popular imagination does not mean that people are necessarily aware of its specific intellectual history. Rather, what are salient for them are the values and schemas of action that are associated with this script (and that are contrasted with those values and schemas associated with a professional ethos), which communicative events such as Brandnew’s workshop periodically reproduce and reify. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eEG5LVXdKo. Indeed, inasmuch as the workshop took place in a windowless conference hall during three intensive days, the participants literally inhabited a kind of “bounded microcosm of ritual social-­spacetime” that potentially contributed to solidifying the ritual efficacy of the discursive processes that took place in it. Linguistic anthropologists call such suggested transformations that have the potential to create new realities “indexical entailment or creativity” (Silverstein 1976; Wilf 2015a, S22). This principle is unpacked in chapter 1. It is significant that Tom presented the two founding fathers as “two students who were studying in a very interesting program—a joint program for aeronautical engineering and marketing.” This “very interesting” combination of topics epitomizes Brandnew’s promise to provide its clients with principles of innovation that are profitable because they are scientifically rigorous. I intentionally do not disclose the solution because it was related to an actual project in which Jill was involved in the corporation for which she worked. CHAPTER THREE

1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

For an explanation of design thinking, see p. 189, note 3. This notion of potentiality is thus akin to a style, understood as a generative principle in a specific domain (e.g., Picasso’s style), to be distinguished from this style’s instantiations in this domain (e.g., Picasso’s paintings) (Wilf 2013a, 2013b). Compare this approach with technical analysis in finance, which “is grounded in the thesis that observing price movements and detecting their regularities do not need any additional data: future movements can be inferred by studying past regularities” (Preda 2009, 147). This thesis is based in a decontextualized notion of individuals’ “minds” as the foundation of “the market” (168–69), which, as this chapter will make clear, is not unlike the decontextualized notion of the consumer that plays a key role in the Method. In this sense, Goldenberg and Mazursky have not entirely discarded the Kantian notion of unchanging forms. Their Kantian bent is revealed when they argue that “by looking at these regularities [in the history of the evolution of products] a posteriori we can construct a priori skeletons for future ideas which consist of their main parameters” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 40). See Kant’s discussion of the notions of a priori and a posteriori in the introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1999). See the study by Akrich, Callon, and Latour (2002, 200) for a critique of the notion of a stable “customer” that the innovator needs to tap into in order to innovate successfully. Such “naturalistic” emphases find further expression in Goldenberg and Mazursky’s

192 / Notes to Pages 87–97

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

assumption that “we can . . . assume that [a] new need is a ‘sufficiently important need,’ conforming to the intuitive understanding of a consumer as one who never ‘forgets’ a significant need and determining an absence of depletion (irreversibility of transformation)” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 18). They also provide a few examples for the existence of the “creativity templates” in nature. They note that the hermit crab’s use of empty shells as its shelter is an example of the “replacement template” (104), which “creates a link between a resource . . . existing in the environment and a role that requires fulfillment” (99), and that the chameleon’s ability to change its color based on its immediate surroundings provides “a striking example” for the “attribute dependency template,” in which a new dependency is established between two hitherto independent variables (63). As Mary Douglas has argued, one of the common strategies institutions use to legitimize themselves is to establish an analogy between their core principles and nature (Douglas 1986). See my (Wilf 2014b, 403–6) article for a review of anthropological studies of the social basis of value production in the spheres of art, creativity, and commodities. The ad campaign was for the brand Wallis, a clothing retailer. See http://www.too cool2betrue.com/most-­remarkable-­ads-­campaign-­dressed-­to-­kill/. Of course, a “perception of innovativeness” is not only likely to change over time but is also likely to be highly different in different groups of people depending on culture, age, gender, and other socioeconomic factors. In their book, Goldenberg and Mazursky revert to industry-­specific awards to assess the creativity of ad campaigns. They mention the Cannes contest award (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 154, 158) and the Clio award (156). Note the way in which Goldenberg and Mazursky naturalize needs here, too, by representing them as entities that organically and “spontaneously” emerge from the consumer. On the same page they articulate this independent emergence of needs as “a spontaneous change in the consumer’s awareness to his or her problems and preferences,” which makes him or her “aware of a formerly unrecognized need” (Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002, 17). An emblematic example from the highly relevant field of Silicon Valley techno-­ futurism can be found in Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil 2000). Kurzweil makes ample use of the trope of exponential acceleration in the pace of technological evolution that is just about to take place. He argues that “as with any phenomenon of exponential growth, the increases are so slow at first as to be virtually unnoticeable,” save, of course, for the perceptive few such as himself (29). See the example of Domino’s Pizza and the drinking glass in chapter 1, p. 32. In the same way that Goldenberg and Mazursky portray the innovator as someone who does not generate consumer needs but rather discovers independently existing consumer needs at their latent stage by means of the Method, “in Western biomedicine, emphasis is frequently placed on the idea that phenomena understood as part of nature—genes, cells, organs, bodies—contain ‘potential,’ a hidden force residing inside the gene, cell, etc., awaiting the right technological intervention in order to be realized. In such contexts researchers often seem to describe themselves as simply ‘discovering’ or ‘realizing’ a natural potential without recognizing the role of human action or choice” (Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013, S6–­S7). Goldenberg and Mazursky do not address this problem. They only emphasize the competitive edge that companies that use the Method can gain over companies that rely only on market research. Gabriella also argued that because each company represents a distinct configuration

Notes to Pages 104–111 / 193 of products, strategies, and organizational structures, it will inevitably come up with unique results by using the Method even if it competes with other companies in the same market niche who might also use the Method. She thus reverted to the trope of individual uniqueness again but at the level of organizations rather than humans. CHAPTER FOUR

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

These emphases find expression even when the Post-­it note is specifically at stake. See Hull (2003, 310) for a discussion of the use of Post-­it notes in the corrupt handling of files in an Islamabad bureaucracy and Pellegram (1997) for a discussion of the material qualities of the Post-­it note (and of other bureaucratic paraphernalia) in relation to the unacknowledged and “latent” dimension of office work. My emphasis on Post-­it notes’ ritual function sets it apart from the few studies of documents in organizational contexts that are oriented to the production of new cultural entities. These studies have tended to emphasize and accept at face value the idea that documents in such contexts are valued because they make it possible for organization members to collaborate with each other. For example, Murphy analyzes architectural drawings as “practical . . . tools . . . [that] afford change and reconfiguration by many observers and users” in the collaborative process of architectural design in studios (Murphy 2005, 142n6; see also Murphy 2015, 128–71), and Nafus and Anderson take a similar stance in their analysis of project rooms (and the material artifacts used in them) in corporate ethnographic research as “boundary objects,” that is, places of “heterogeneity and instability of knowledge practices,” or places that enable “people who have different levels of engagement and different disciplinary commitments [to] dip in and out of a research effort” (Nafus and Anderson 2009, 139). Compare Waal Malefyt’s (2009, 207) study for a discussion of abstraction in the case of the “fast” collection of data rather than their “fast” analysis. At the same time, one should not overestimate the depth of context that a person-­ board affords. Inasmuch as a person-­board allocates a small rectangle for each category of information, it allows the innovator to represent scant information whose value resides less in its faithful correspondence to a concrete individual and more in its ability to evoke an ideal typical consumer by means of fairly abstract bits of information. Compare Moore’s description of the production of “brand personality” in a branding consulting firm in terms of “a number of specific human characteristics [such as] age, sex, appearance, hobbies, tastes, and emblematic possessions,” which are expressed in the form of “abstract nouns” that are visually represented via “mood boards,” that is, “collages of images drawn from image banks and existing advertisements, and tacked onto foam boards” (Moore 2003, 342–343). Latour has acknowledged the risk of pragmatic ambiguity by pointing out that “there are always many interpretations possible” to any simplified visual representation. However, by replying that this risk is the reason for which “so much energy and time is devoted by scientists to corner [a dissenter who offers a different interpretation] and surround him with ever more dramatic visual effects . . . [such as] a new collection, . . . new labelling, . . . new redrawing” (Latour 1986, 18), he has begged the question of the simplicity that is presumably afforded by the graphic representation of nature. His reply simply shifts complexity from nature to the collections of its graphic representations. What reduces complexity is not the graphic artifacts themselves but the interactions between the scientists who use them. These interactions regiment and narrow the scope of meaning of artifacts as indexical signs that point

194 / Notes to Pages 111–122 to potentially infinite objects. The rigorous analysis of the emergent, real-­time communicative events that regiment the meaning of inscriptions in scientific work has been one of the least developed and least satisfying dimensions of Latour’s work, increasingly so given the fact that human actors have been increasingly absent in actor-­ network theory (Fischer 2014, 350). Of course, communicative events can themselves be highly unpredictable and pragmatically ambiguous (Knorr-­Cetina 1981, 14). Indeed, even ritual contexts that are characterized by a dense web of crisscrossing signs that are indexically iconic of one another often fail to achieve their intended meaning because semiotic processes are inherently unstable (Keane 1997). 6. This ambiguity is thus different from the ambiguity that is the default reality of social life against the backdrop of which order becomes the real-­time achievement of communicative events in general and of business meetings in particular (Schwartzman 1989, 13–45; Garfinkel 1967). 7. The popularity of these frameworks as well as of the use of Post-­it notes in business innovation are the result of the institutionalized prestige of the iconic Silicon Valley innovation consulting firm IDEO. IDEO has disseminated the same visual frameworks and recommended the use of Post-­it notes in its different publications (e.g., Human Centered Design Toolkit, 101). I discuss IDEO in more detail in chapter 5. 8. Of course, diagrams have been used to create professional authority and legitimacy in other professional fields. For example, Alex Preda has described the production of “financial charts, or minute diagrams of variations in price and volume” as a key step in the production of investors’ professional legitimacy (Preda 2009, 147). However, as opposed to such diagrams that are “nowadays produced in real time” based on the analysis of real-­time data and that are “geometrically” processed by investors “to highlight patterns of price movements” (ibid.), my interlocutors arrive with ready-­ made diagrams and reified representations of geometrical processing, as it were, on which they arrange their data after the fact. Whereas in the former case it is the technology that generates data on market processes and trends, which is invested with “authority” (151), in the latter case the source of authority is the reified and ready-­ made visual forms on which data are arranged. 9. This form of presentation of data problematizes Alex Preda’s suggestion, based on Schutz, that the visual articulations of the temporal structure of action “as action to other actors . . . can manifest themselves as working action or performed action” where “working action is visualized as a continuous flow of data” in the present tense whereas “performed action is articulated in closed visual arrangements” that refer to the past (Preda 2009, 119). The distinguishing feature of the form of real-­time ritual diagramming performed by my interlocutors (and, by implication, of any ritual) is that it combines working action and performed action, that is, it enacts in the present past processes and thereby invests them with persuasive power. 10. http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fgdi45gkll/deliverable-­n-­2/. 11. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/25/top-­10-­worst-­management-­speak. 12. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-­leadership/wp/2014/03/26/the-­worst -­workplace-­jargon/. 13. A major British agency specializing in “temporary or ‘agency’ social work contracts” is called “Liquid Personnel,” no less! See http://www.liquidpersonnel.com/agency -­social-­work.cms.asp.

Notes to Pages 128–141 / 195 CHAPTER FIVE

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

Of course, by deemphasizing these three dimensions, Brandnew’s consultants conveyed a specific message, too. As I note in the introduction, Brandnew’s “no-­ nonsense” approach to innovation found expression in the fact that its workshops took place in dull, often windowless hotel conference rooms. Similarly, its consultants argued that anyone can innovate as long as they follow the Method. Thus, their choice of location as well as not to dwell on the innovator’s unique self or thought processes conveyed or mediated a very specific image of the innovator as a quasi engineer. See Saval’s (2014) study for the history of the shared workspace. Inside one of Grind’s New York locations it is impossible to miss the company’s motto, “work liquid,” written on one of the main nonglass walls in big, orange, lowercase letters. This phrase directly emanates from the post-­Fordist ideals of a flexible workforce and free information flow as conditions of possibility for innovative knowledge production. Another of Grind’s mottos, “work space for free-­range humans” (Williams 2013), associates the flexibility afforded by the shared workspace with freedom and a healthy lifestyle probably via the notion of eggs produced by free-­range chicken. The implicit contrast that underlies these mottos and slogans became explicit when one of Grind’s founders described the people who choose to work in the company’s locations as “free radicals,” or people who “choose when and how they do what they do, on their own terms. They don’t want job security, they want career fluidity” (Kreamer 2012). He thereby not only reframed the job insecurity that is part and parcel of the post-­Fordist economy as a form of expressive individualism and an aesthetic or authentic choice made by employees but also suggested that past office workers were trapped in their cubicles in the same way that factory chickens are trapped in their tiny cells. These workers opted for “job security” at the expense of self-­exploration and self-­realization. https://www.ideo.com/post/method-­cards. In Peircean semiotic terms, Post-­it notes are indexically iconic of brainstorming— itself synonymous today with innovation—because of their specific material artefactual features that make them figurationally equivalent to the process of brainstorming as it is diagrammatically imagined to take place in “one’s head” (small mental building blocks being shuffled and reshuffled, consciously or not, until a creative insight is serendipitously generated). A graphic ideology consists of “conventions for the interpretation of graphic forms, views about how artifacts are or ought to be produced and circulated, and more general conceptions regarding the ontology and authority of graphic artifacts” (Hull 2008, 505). It is a subcategory of a semiotic ideology, that is, “a reflection upon, and an attempt to organize, people’s experiences of the materiality of semiotic form” in general, which might include “not only language but also music, visual imagery, food, architecture, gesture, and anything else that enters into actual semiotic practice” (Keane 2007, 21). At stake is not so much the increased focus on the employee’s self—a trend that, as I argue in the introduction, predates the contemporary dominance of business innovation and that can be traced back to Elton Mayo’s industrial psychological research in the first half of the twentieth century (Scott 2003, 62). Rather, what is noteworthy is the specific content, intensity, and self-­reflexivity of the contemporary focus on the innovator’s self.

196 / Notes to Pages 146–165 8. 9.

See my (Wilf 2013c, 144–45) article for an analysis of this corporate environment as a form of “charismatic education.” Google is effectively a twenty-­first-­century version of a Madison Avenue advertising company with the crucial difference that its employees do not even create the ads that might justify a hype of creativity. They are in charge of the much more mundane and unexciting work of developing and endlessly tweaking the computerized algorithms that provide the platform for the strategic placement of online ads that other companies create. In 2012, for example, even before the recent surge in mobile and video advertising in which Google has played a key role, the company’s total advertising business already contributed “95 percent of its overall . . . revenue” (Peterson 2013). CHAPTER SIX

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

See my (Wilf 2011, 467) article for an analysis of an identical “mirror moment” that appeared in an article in the New York Times and that suggests that at stake is a cultural trope. This stage brings to mind the Method’s first stage, namely, “taking inventory” of the existing situation of the product or service that one wants to innovate. See chapter 1. See the article by Irani (2015) for an analysis of the culturally specific value of entrepreneurship and design’s “bias for action” in middle-­class politics in India. Life design’s oxymoronic and unsettling nature comes to the fore against the backdrop of Jobs’s description of Apple’s aesthetic. Jobs programmatically outlined the contours of this aesthetic in 1983: “What we’re going to do is make the products high-­ tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-­tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics” (quoted in Isaacson 2012). To get a feel for life design’s unsettling implications, simply replace “the products” with “selves” in the first sentence. Compare Burnett and Evans’s advice with the one that the president of Berklee College of Music gave to students during the college’s 2006 commencement: “There are a lot of different talents here [among the students]. . . . You’re going to hear people who can really do things you’d like to do some day, and you’re going to want to imitate that. But ultimately you[‘ve] got to come back to who you are, what you were put on earth to do, what you were meant to do as a musician, as a human being. . . . You’ve got something to say that’s unique and special” (Wilf 2014a, 60). Thus, ironically, the self appears in Burnett and Evans’s book as a less developmentally complex entity than the product as it appears in Goldenberg and Mazursky’s book, in which they attempt to provide a theory—however insufficient it is—that might account for the product’s capacity to “evolve” into new products. Of course, these are low-­cost experiments only for life design’s privileged target audience. Indeed, it is this privileged position that allows Burnett and Evans to argue that in the same way that failure of prototypes is inevitable in design thinking in general and is a condition of possibility for its success, it is inevitable and necessary in life design, too: “When you [are designing your life], you are going to experience failure. In fact, you are going to ‘fail by design’ more with this approach than with any other” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 182). Failure will emanate from “prototypes and engagements that don’t attain their goals” (183). However, because those prototypes “were designed so you could learn some things, . . . you can’t fail; you can only be making

Notes to Pages 169–186 / 197

8.

9.

progress and learning from the different kinds of experiences that failure and success both have to offer” (ibid.). The same individuals who, because of their privileged socioeconomic background and upbringing, can comfortably experiment with their lives as if they were displaying disinterested appreciation of modern art’s formal experimentations (cf. Bourdieu 1980) will also be the ones who can accept with equanimity the failure of life design’s experiments. Similarly, when discussing the ideation technique of “mind mapping,” Burnett and Evans instruct the reader to “look at the outer ring of one of your maps and pick three disparate items that catch your eye,” then “combine those three items into a possible job description that would be fun and interesting to you and would be helpful to someone else” (Burnett and Evans 2016, 83–84). The reader should then “name [her] role and draw a napkin sketch of it (a quick visual drawing of what it is)” (84). Burnett and Evans give an example of a “napkin sketch” on which “Grant,” one of the book’s case studies, drew “himself leading a Pirate Surf Camp for children” (ibid.), thus representing an idea for a possible future life that resulted from the mind-­mapping exercise. The sketch consists of a pirate, three kids with a surfboard, a pirate flag, a sea, a beach, and the inscription “Pirate Camp.” Burnett and Evans’s emphasis on spiritual and emotional training has its roots in the countercultural currents that have informed many Silicon Valley trends and movements (Turner 2006, 2009). This emphasis might seem to suggest that life design does not embrace the fast production of deliverables under the post-­Fordist conditions of capitalist production, for this kind of emotional training can take months or even years to complete. However, Burnett and Evans do not instruct the reader to first develop her emotional maturity by means of different spiritual exercises before embarking on her “life-­design” journey. Rather, they first instruct the reader to take stock of her existing situation, build a compass, and generate possible future life scenarios. They discuss the task of choosing between those options by means of emotional tools whose cultivation might take years only then, toward the end of the book. The order in which they discuss the stages of life design reflects their propensity to highlight those stages that consist of fast processes and quick results and to downplay stages that entail slowly evolving processes and insights. CONCLUSION

1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

This explanation does not rule out the possibility that some of these organizational structures might also have the potential to achieve their intended goals. Compare the article by Akrich, Callon, and Latour (2002, 201) concerning the prevalence of retrospective sense-­making that normalizes and erases the contingency that pervades the innovation process. See the study by Marcus (2012, 429) apropos the fate of the “reflexive turn,” which has become a buzzword devoid of clear meaning but pregnant with ritual functions in anthropological writing. The recent focus on the conceptual similarities and potential cross-­fertilization between anthropology and design has found expression in a number of publications on design anthropology (e.g., Gunn, Otto, and Smith 2013; Smith et al. 2016). See, for example, the University of California Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design initiative, which “builds on the respective accomplishments of ethnography incubators at six campuses (San Diego, Irvine, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Cruz) to establish a UC-­wide interdisciplinary hub for innovative ethnographic

198 / Notes to Pages 187–188

6.

7.

theory and methodology” (http://sed.ucsd.edu/coled/ ). As the tropes “incubators,” “hubs,” and “innovative” make clear, the norms and practices of business innovation inform this initiative through and through. One dimension of design thinking and post-­Fordist business innovation that is unlikely to take hold in anthropology in the near future is the conformist compliance with the hype of creative collaboration and horizontal information flow, which is closely monitored and with which failure to comply is quickly sanctioned. Anthropology, with its quasi-­misanthropic figure of the lone anthropologist who conducts fieldwork apart from her peers and who rarely if ever shares her field notes with them, does not offer an immediate parallel to this dimension. This, of course, does not erase the fact that a growing contingent of anthropologists are today forced to adapt to post-­Fordist precarious working conditions by learning to transform themselves into flexible subjects as part of a post-­Fordist “liquid workforce” as if they were the very same Post-­it notes that are used in design thinking and post-­Fordist business innovation. Like the Post-­it notes, they can be shuffled, reshuffled, and eventually disposed of by university administrators according to shifting market conditions (Brondo and Bennett 2012). For an analysis of the unintended consequences of academic institutions’ imitation of organizational structures developed in the business world and meant to boost innovation, see a recent analysis of “the effects of academic incubators on university innovation” (Kolympiris and Klein 2017).

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INDEX

Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations. abduction, 14–15, 45−49, 177 Academy of Management, 23 accidents, 28−34, 38−43, 46, 53 actor-network theory, 193−94n5 advertising, 75, 86−88, 94, 192n10, 196n9 aesthetics, 185 Airbus, 181 Akrich, Madeleine, 197n2 Anderson, Douglas R., 46 Anderson, Ken, 193n2 anthropology, knowledge production in, 183−87, 197−98nn3−6 Apollo 13 (film), 50−51, 52 Apple, 59, 161−62, 196n4 architecture, 33, 45, 161 Aristotle, 82−83, 186 artifacts of innovation practice: aesthetic of, 125; clutter and, 124−25, 140−41, 144−46; diagrams and, 113, 115−16, 118, 194n8; distributed at workshops, 133− 34, 136−37; graphic ideology and, 139, 195n6; life design and, 155−57, 158−59, 160, 168−69, 174; method cards and, 134, 136−38; office design and, 124; old office spaces and, 130−32, 131−32, 141, 142−43; pragmatic ambiguity and, 178; reasoning and, 185; reflexive mediation and, 128; self-tracking technologies and, 170−71; technical mystique and, 126, 133. See also Post-it notes artificial intelligence, 140 Barrett, Frank, 24−25 Bateson, Gregory, 185

Benedict, Ruth, 185 Berklee College of Music, 196n5 Bernbach, William, 75 Boas, Franz, 34, 185 Boeing, 181 Bourdieu, Pierre, 185 Brahe, Tycho, 119 brainstorming: vs. Brandnew’s Method, 55, 56−57, 57−58, 62−64, 85−86, 190n5; design thinking and, 10, 11, 128, 189n3; diagrams of, 55, 56−57, 62−63; origins of, 58; popularity of, 138; Post-it notes and, 102−3, 122, 138−39, 195n5; proto­ typing life designs and, 168−69; skepticism about, 85−86; storm trope and, 190n6; unintended functions of, 86 branding, 80, 193n4 Brandnew (fieldwork site): author’s first encounter with, 189n5; brainstorming rejected by, 190n5; breaking cognitive fixedness and, 37; clientele of, 11; conservative approach to creativity and, 88; creation of hypothetical service and, 39−43; design thinking rejected by, 101, 189n5; founding of, 10, 191n7; origins of, 65−67; products as quasi persons and, 149; proprietary innovation strategies and, 11, 14−16; services of, 10−11; structured contingency and, 32−33. See also Brandnew’s Method; Brandnew’s workshops Brandnew’s Method: accidents in, 28−34, 38−39; alternative functions for existing objects and, 66; artifacts of innovation

212 / Index Brandnew’s Method (continued) practice and, 133−34; associations in innovators’ brains and, 96−97; vs. brainstorming, 55, 56−57, 57−58, 62−64, 85−86; bricolage and, 49−54; clear algorithmic strategy and, 84, 86, 87, 90, 93−94, 95−96, 99, 128; closed-world principle and, 50−51, 53, 66; commodity fetishism and, 99−100; competitive advantage and, 94−96, 192nn15−16; creativity templates and, 91; cultural specificity of, 82; as decontextualized, 104, 191n3 (chap. 3); design thinking and, 77−78; diagram of, 57, 62−63; discovery of consumer needs and, 192n14; erasure of consumers and, 81, 84−85, 89−90, 100; evolution of products forms and, 82, 84, 91; existing products’ form and, 39−40, 47−48, 53, 87–88, 91, 196n2; external resources and, 190n10; functional relationships among products’ components and, 190n7; function follows form and, 45, 46, 97−98; human vs. product agency in, 78−81, 83−84, 96, 99, 103, 155; iconoclastic nature of, 45; innovators’ creativity in, 97−99, 192−93n16; key roles in, 69−75; moral lesson of, 69, 70, 73; objectification of consumers and, 100; personification of products and, 100; potentiality and, 92, 93−94; professional ethos and creative ethos and, 58, 68−69, 70−71, 73−76, 191nn1−2 (chap. 2); published articles about, 133; radical productivity and, 45, 46; reverse engineering and, 88, 90; the right questions and, 48−49; roles in, 169; Romantic idealism and, 79−81, 100; rule-governed imagination and, 42, 43−46, 48, 75−76, 100; scientific rigor of, 191n7; stages of, 39−42, 44, 97−99, 196n2; systematic abduction and, 45−49; undermining fixedness and, 48, 68; unmet consumer needs and, 16, 49, 76, 95; vestigial features and, 37; virtual situation and, 27, 97−98; visualization of new products and, 164. See also Brandnew (fieldwork site); Brandnew’s work‑ shops Brandnew’s workshops: artifacts in, 128, 133−34; long-term results of, 73−75; rituals and, 57, 60−61; semiotic strate-

gies in, 63−64; setting of, 191n4 (chap. 2), 195n1. See also Brandnew (fieldwork site); Brandnew’s Method bricolage, 49−54 Brin, Sergey, 12 Burnett, Bill, 148−49, 174−76. See also Designing Your Life (Burnett and Evans) Callon, Michel, 197n2 capitalism: artifacts in work environments and, 125; commodity fetishism and, 9, 99−100, 155; creation of consumer needs and, 178; future-oriented practice and, 8−10, 92−93, 177, 192n12; turnover time of capital and, 4, 103, 123 Center for Ethnography (University of California, Irvine), 186−87 Chibnik, Michael, 36 Christensen, Clayton, 19−20 chronotopic alignment, 67 Coca-Cola, 80, 155 commodity fetishism, 9, 99−100, 155 competition, 94−95, 96 consumer needs: alterity and, 100; awareness of, 94−95; consumers’ perception of innovativeness and, 86−87, 89−90, 192n9; creation of, 152−53, 178; decontextualization of consumers and, 191n3 (chap. 3); design thinking and, 78, 106; discovery of, 192n14; evolution of existing products and, 76, 78, 83−85; future, 81, 91; importance of, 191−92n6; latent, 90−94; naturalization of, 86, 191−92n6, 192n11; needs-finding and, 182; objectification of consumers and, 94, 99−100; post-Fordism and, 10; propagating awareness of, 90−91, 93; purification of, 84; stable customers and, 191n5 (chap. 3); technology and, 152; unrec­ ognized needs and, 86 co-working. See shared workspaces creative arts: academic art programs and, 190n4; computerized production of, 189n5; improvisation-based, 189n6; lack of technical mystique and, 126−27; organizational structures and, 14, 19, 22, 25. See also creativity creativity: in advertising, 86−87, 192n10; Brandnew’s conservative approach to, 88; cognition and, 88; competitive advantage and, 96−97; creative revolution

Index / 213 in advertising and, 75; creativity templates and, 79, 82−84, 86, 89−91, 94, 96, 98, 191−92n6; culturally specific notions of, 99−100; deep structures and, 75, 83−84, 86−87, 89−90; dimensions of, 128, 195n1; displacement of, 76, 79−81, 83, 100; human vs. product agency in, 79−81, 83, 155; imitating existing products’ form and, 87−88, 89−90; vs. imitative imagination, 27; institutionalization of, 189n5; institutional myths and isomorphism and, 180; measurement of, 86−87, 94, 192n10; monetizable, 88; poetic structure and, 57, 58, 60; postFordist ideals of, 134, 138, 140−42, 145, 146; product as locus of, 82, 83−84, 99; professional ethos and creative ethos and, 6, 15−16, 177; purification of, 100; reverse engineering and, 88; Romantic idealism and, 6, 15−16, 18, 27, 79−81, 97−100, 155, 177, 191n2; routinized, 146, 189n5, 190n3; in science, 46; shared workspaces and, 129, 141; skepticism about, 74; technical mystique and, 126−27, 133; unconventional workspaces and, 145−46; as undertheorized, 190n3. See also creative arts cultural evolution, 35−37, 43, 177. See also evolution Dan (business school professor): on cost of innovation consulting, 135; demystifying creativity and, 96−97; on development of consumer needs, 77−78; Ivory soap story and, 31; on market research, 95; on reverse engineering, 86−87, 88−89 David (Newfound consultant): on client expectations, 104; on expertise of innovation consultants, 4, 7, 136−37, 181, 183; founding of Newfound and, 1; on frameworks for data analysis, 115−16, 118−19; on IDEO, 138; on jobs in innovation, 2, 3, 127; mimetic isomorphism and, 182; Post-it notes and, 105−9, 120, 121−22, 139, 184 Descola, Philippe, 185 Designing Your Life (Burnett and Evans): ahistorical approach of, 151−53; balance and coherence and, 160−62; dashboard analogy and, 155−56, 159, 160, 168−69;

dysfunctional beliefs and reframes in, 150; emotional training and, 169−71, 172, 197n9; four dimensions of life and, 155−57, 160; gut feelings and, 170−71; ideation techniques and, 158; “Life Design Team” and, 168−69; mind mapping and, 197n8; multiple potential lives and, 162−63; open-endedness of life design and, 153−54, 155; privileged audience for, 149−51, 196−97n7; prototypes for new lives and, 164−66, 168−69; self’s complexity and, 196n6; speed of life design and, 157−58; stages of life design and, 155; technological view of the good life and, 161−62; workview and lifeview and, 157−58, 160 design thinking: anthropology and, 186− 87, 197−98nn4−6; Apple and, 161−62; awareness of consumer needs and, 94; bias for action and, 196n3; brainstorming and, 10, 11, 128; Brandnew and, 77− 78, 101, 189n5; collaboration and, 168; components of, 189n3; conformist compliance and, 198n6; empathizing with consumers and, 100; failure of prototypes in, 196−97n7; form follows function and, 45; ideation and, 163; IDEO and, 137−38; institutionalization of, 148; interaction with consumers and, 106; latent consumer needs and, 91; life design and, 18, 147−50, 152−53, 154, 159; Newfound and, 101, 138, 149, 189n5; Post-it notes and, 103; prototyping and, 167; Stanford University Institute of Design (d.school) and, 10, 137−38, 148, 151; technology design and, 175; unmet consumer needs and, 78 Domino’s Pizza, 32 Douglas, Mary, 191−92n6 Dow-Schüll, Natasha, 170 Dumit, Joseph, 8−9 Durkheim, Emile, 161 Eichler, Joseph, 161 Evans, Dave, 148−49, 174−76. See also Designing Your Life (Burnett and Evans) evolution: brainstorming’s survival and, 86; cultural, 35−37, 43, 177; deep structure of, 83−84; of forms, 82−83; historical emergence of, 82−83; objectification of consumers and, 100; potentiality and,

214 / Index evolution (continued) 91−92; of products, 84, 91, 196n6; randomness of, 83−84 Ex Machina (film), 139−40 fixedness: abduction and, 47−48; arrangement of temporal components and, 42; cognitive psychology and, 177; of innovation facilitators, 54; as obstacle to innovation, 30; of the owner in innovation exercises, 70−73; path of least resistance and, 67−68; principles from nature and, 45, 69; strategies for breaking, 32, 37, 39, 45, 53, 68 Fordism, 103. See also post-Fordism frameworks for data analysis: fast data collection and analysis and, 193n3; Newfound’s, 112−16, 113, 118−19, 159; popularity of, 194n7; professional authority and, 194n8; rhetorical efficacy and, 115−16 Frank, Thomas, 75 Freud, Sigmund, 173 future orientation, 8−9, 81, 91, 152 Gabriella (Brandnew consultant): on accidents, 31; on associations in innovators’ brains, 96−97; on fixedness, 30, 70−71; on institutionalization of innovation, 53; on the Method’s counterintuitiveness, 67−69; the Method’s iconoclastic nature and, 44−45; organizational uniqueness and, 192−93n16; roles in innovation and, 72−73; on virtual situation moments, 98 Gates, Bill, 59−60, 74 Geertz, Clifford, 185 Gell, Alfred, 185 Gershon, Ilana, 150−51, 154, 155 Gioia, Ted, 189n8 Goffman, Erving, 71, 169 Goldenberg, Jacob: assessment of creativity and, 192n10; on brainstorming, 85−86; on competitive advantage, 94−95; creativity templates and, 89, 91, 94, 191−92n6; on discovery of consumer needs, 192n14; on evolution of products, 82, 84−85, 196n6; on the forecasting matrix, 93−94; human creativity and, 97; Kantian forms and, 191n4 (chap. 3); on latent consumer needs, 90−91, 93; on

market research, 192n15; naturalization of consumer needs and, 192n11; personification of products and, 78−81, 100 Goleman, Dan, 170 Google, 12, 145−46, 148, 196n9 Great Recession, 183 Grind, 129, 195n3 Guiana Space Center, 52 Hannerz, Ulf, 32−33, 38, 42, 190n6 Harvey, David, 103, 122 Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. See Stanford University Institute of Design (d.school) Hayles, Katherine, 175 Hull, Matthew, 193n1 ideation: in the innovation process, 12−13; life design and, 158; mind mapping and, 197n8; Post-it notes and, 102, 105, 119−20, 123; self-reflection and, 143−44 IDEO: influence of, 10; method cards and, 134, 136−38; Newfound vs., 181; Post-it notes and, 194n7; Stanford University Institute of Design (d.school) and, 148 imagination, rule-governed, 43−45, 48, 54, 75, 177 improvisation, 189n8, 190n3 innovation: academic incubators and, 198n6; ambiguity of, 179, 180−81; anthropological theories of, 5, 34−38; artifacts in organizational knowledge and, 104−5, 193n2; business schools and, 11, 77, 95, 135, 183; as buzzword, 1−3, 179; calls for action in, 92; coconstitution of products and consumers and, 9−10; computer-­ generated, 94; conformist compliance and, 198n6; consumers’ perception of, 86−87, 89−90; contingency and, 197n2; contradictions in, 7−8, 17, 27; decontextualization and, 186; as decoupled from market, 17, 90, 178, 179, 185; definitions of, 19−20; disruptive, 51; erasure of consumers and, 6−7, 16, 81, 84−85, 89−90, 100; forecasting matrix and, 93−94; historical context of, 14; human vs. product agency in, 78−81, 84, 103; idea generation and, 12−13; imitating existing products’ form and, 87−88; imminent crisis and, 51; innovator’s dilemma and, 19−20; innovator’s self and, 141−44, 149,

Index / 215 195n1, 195n7; institutionalization of, 53; institutional myths and isomorphism of, 179−83; jargon and, 120−21, 132−33; knowledge production in, 184−85; language of, 132−33; latent consumer needs and, 90−91; life design and, 148; metalevel aspects of, 178; monetization and, 7, 19; narcissistic relationship with objects and, 100; “now taking place,” 7, 17, 125, 139, 178; as panacea, 146, 178; Post-it notes as model of and means for, 102; professional ethos and creative ethos and, 6, 15−16, 57−64, 68−71, 74−76, 177; routinized, 5−8, 12, 15, 17−18, 27, 34, 36, 38, 49−50, 52−53, 60, 62−63, 90, 94, 146, 177−79, 190n4; self-, 18, 178; self-­ reflexivity of, 7, 14, 18, 53, 89−90, 178; sociological context of, 14, 15−16; spinoffs of, 187−88; stable customers and, 191n5 (chap. 3); stages of, 143−44; systematic, 55, 56−57, 62−63; trial and error and, 31, 36, 53, 177; ubiquity of, 179, 182−83. See also innovation consultants innovation consultants: failed workshops and, 135−37; history of organizational theory and, 20−23; institutional isomorphism and, 182−83; investment in, 3, 125, 135, 179; professional status of, 127; sale of services of, 60; selection of, 181−82; technical mystique and, 127, 145; uncertain value of services of, 182− 83. See also Brandnew (fieldwork site); innovation; Newfound (fieldwork site) Irani, Lilly, 196n3 Ivory soap, 31 Jane (life design facilitator): on “Designing Your Afterlife” poster, 175; on functions of representational devices, 156−57, 158−59; on gut-level decision making, 171−72; on life design’s fast production norms, 158−59; on prototyping a future life, 166−67; role of with Newfound, 149; on the self ’s complexity, 163−64 jazz: advice to music students and, 196n5; aesthetic of imperfection and, 189n8; definition of, 24; emergence in, 189n6; institutionalization of creativity and, 189n5; jazz band as virtual domain and, 26−27; organizational theory and, 14, 18−19, 22−27, 189−90n9

Jeffery (Newfound consultant): frameworks and, 112−15, 118−19; person-boards and, 109; Post-it notes and, 106, 109, 120−23; story arcs and, 117−18 Jobs, Steve, 59−60, 74, 161−62, 196n4 Kant, Immanuel, 82−83, 191n4 (chap. 3) Kroeber, Alfred L., 185 Kurzweil, Ray, 192n12 Latour, Bruno: bricolage and, 52; on graphic artifacts, 193−94n5; on immutable mobiles, 105−6, 112; on pragmatic ambiguity, 193−94n5; on retrospective sense-making, 197n2; on synoptic presentation of data, 119; on two vs. three dimensions, 116 Lepore, Jill, 51 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 31, 52, 184−85 life design: aesthetics and, 154, 161−62; authenticity and, 151, 154; balance and coherence of life and, 159−62; career counseling and, 150−51, 154, 155; commodity fetishism and, 155; dashboard analogy and, 155−57, 158−59, 160, 168− 69, 174; design thinking and, 18, 147−50, 152−53, 159; failure of prototypes in, 196−97n7; fast deliverables and, 157−59, 173−74, 176, 197n9; four dimensions of life and, 155−57, 160; gut feelings and, 170−72, 174; life design team and, 168−69; multiple potential lives and, 162−64; Newfound workshop and, 147, 156−57, 158−59, 163−64, 166−67; open-­ endedness of, 153−54; as oxymoronic, 196n4; privileged audience for, 149−51, 155, 196−97n7; prototypes for new lives and, 164−69; as psychotherapy, 172−76; responsibility for, 169−72; self as a business and, 154; self as a product and, 167, 169, 174; self as quasi technology and, 155−56, 159, 163, 165, 167, 169, 173−75, 178−79; self-presentation and, 168−69, 174; self’s complexity and, 163−64, 196n6; self-tracking technologies and, 170−72; shifts in notion of the self and, 173−75; spiritual exercises and, 197n9; stages of, 155; Stanford University Institute of Design (d.school) and, 148, 151; technology and, 151−57, 161−62, 167, 173−76, 196n4

216 / Index linguistic anthropology, 104−5, 191n5 (chap. 2) Liquid Personnel, 194n13 macrosociological landscapes, 15, 57−58, 61−62, 68, 177−78 Malinowski, Bronisław, 67 Marcus, George E., 197n3 market research, 82, 84, 91, 94−95, 192n15 Marx, Karl, 9, 99, 161 Mayo, Elton, 21, 195n7 Mazursky, David: assessment of creativity and, 192n10; on brainstorming, 85−86; on competitive advantage, 94−95; creativity templates and, 89, 91, 94, 191−92n6; on discovery of consumer needs, 192n14; on evolution of products, 82, 84−85, 196n6; on the forecasting matrix, 93−94; human creativity and, 97; Kantian forms and, 191n4 (chap. 3); on latent consumer needs, 90−91, 93; on market research, 192n15; naturalization of consumer needs and, 192n11; personification of products and, 78−81, 100 Mead, George Herbert, 82, 97 Mead, Margaret, 34, 185 mediation: of expert knowledge, 134, 137, 138; hype as, 144−46; of information flow, 124−25, 127, 130−33, 134, 138, 140−42, 143, 145−46, 195n3; of organizational creativity, 128, 134−35; of post-Fordist ideals, 178; premediated existence and, 128; of professional expertise, 124−25, 128, 134−35; of the self, 141−42, 144; semiotics and, 127−28; shared workspaces and, 130, 132−33; of thought processes, 139−40; unintended consequences of, 130, 131−32, 133, 137, 140−41 modernity, definitions of, 161 Mol, Joeri, 141 Moore, Robert E., 193n4 Murphy, Keith M., 193n2 myths, morality and, 67 Nafus, Dawn, 193n2 narratives, 62, 117−18 Nelson, Richard, 36 neoliberalism, 170, 172 NeueHouse, 129−30

Newfound (fieldwork site): author’s first encounter with, 189n5; clientele of, 11; decontextualization and, 16−17, 184−85; design thinking and, 10, 11, 101, 138, 149; founding of, 10; IDEO vs., 181; jobs in innovation and, 1−2; origins of, 138. See also Newfound’s workshops Newfound’s workshops: artifacts in, 128; frameworks for data analysis and, 112− 16, 113, 118−19, 159; insights and deliverables and, 120−21; life design and, 147, 156−59, 163−64, 166−67, 171−72; mediating organizational creativity and, 128, 139−40; participants’ self-presentation in, 141−42; person-boards in, 109, 110−11, 193n4; Post-it notes and, 105, 106−13, 115−23, 138−39; pragmatic ambiguity in, 107, 110−11, 119−21, 194n6; ritual insights and, 112−14, 117−19, 121, 184; setting of, 110, 111, 117, 129, 130−32, 131−32; story arc in, 116−18, 117 New Institutionalism, 179−80 organizational theory: formal-rational structures and, 179; history of, 14, 20− 23; imagination in, 43−44; institutional isomorphism and, 180; jazz and, 14, 18−19, 22−27, 189−90n9; myths of rationality and, 179−80; New Institutional­ ism and, 179−80; productive contingency and, 33 origin myths, 65−68 Orr, Julian, 38 Osborn, Alex, 58 Page, Larry, 12 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 45−49, 195n5 Pellegram, Andrea, 193n1 post-Fordism: artifacts in the innovation process and, 125; conformist compliance and, 198n6; distillation and, 121; flexible accumulation and, 4−5, 129, 141; flexible workforce and, 195n3; instantaneity and, 16, 103, 111, 119, 177−78, 197n9; job insecurity and, 195n3; knowledge production and, 103−5; labor force and, 4, 5, 198n6; liquidification of means of production and, 122−23, 194n13; managing volatility and, 122; organizational creativity and, 128, 134, 138, 140−42, 145−46; Post-it notes and,

Index / 217 103−5, 111, 119, 140; semiotics and, 103−5; shared workspaces and, 129; time-space compression and, 121; turnover time of capital and, 4, 103, 122; unmet consumer needs and, 10 Post-it notes: in anthropology, 187; brainstorming and, 122, 138−39, 195n5; as bureaucratic paraphernalia, 193n1; coherence and, 185; decontextualization/recontextualization and, 105, 107, 109−11, 119−20, 184−85; distillation of ideas and, 107−9, 110, 118, 120; in Ex Machina (film), 139−40; IDEO and, 194n7; as immutable mobiles, 106, 112; as insufficiently sticky, 121−23; invention of, 30−31, 102, 123; as key technology of ideation, 119−20; knowledge production and, 184−85; mobility and, 105−6, 111−12, 116, 121, 123; as model of and means for innovation, 102, 123; in Newfound’s workshops, 105−13, 115−23, 138−39; post-Fordism and, 104−5, 111, 119, 140, 198n6; pragmatic ambiguity and, 105, 107, 110−11, 119−21, 138, 178; pseudodata and, 16−17, 111, 121, 184; ritual insights and, 17, 112, 116, 121, 138, 184, 193n2; as semiotic technology, 122; speed and instantaneity and, 103−4; story arc and, 116–19; ubiquity of, 102−3, 119 potential: of accidents, 38−39; anthropo­ logical studies of, 91–92, 192n14; benefits of a strange form, 97; business alliances, 151; change of creativity templates, 89; consumer needs, 90−94; consumers, 70, 98−99, 135, 139, 190n7; creative, 9, 16, 18, 22, 69, 80, 155; for different lives, 162−69; employers, 154; evolution into innovative products, 76, 79−81, 100, 103; individual, 173−74; to innovate, 19, 32; of innovation consultants’ expertise, 183; natural, 192n14; profit, 72; for radical productivity, 14− 15, 43, 45; role-relations, 61; of routinized business innovation, 8, 177, 179; style and, 88, 191n2 (chap. 3); success, 95; uncertainty, 26−27, 51 Preda, Alex, 194nn8−9 prediction: exponential growth and, 93; of latent consumer needs, 90−91, 94 problem solving: accidents and, 42−43;

in Apollo 13 (film), 50; Brandnew’s approach to, 65−68; bricolage as, 52; creative, 58, 128; emergent nature of, 38; expertise and, 125−26, 135−36; improvisatory, 53; life design and, 147−48, 149−50, 151−55, 173; Post-it notes and, 121−23; prototypes and, 165; psychological study of, 10−11; structured contingency and, 190n2; systematic, 59; ­unmet consumer needs and, 192n11 products: emergence of, 152−53; evolu‑ tion of, 196n6; life and the self as, 167, 169, 174; personification of, 9, 16, 79− 80, 94, 99−100, 149, 155, 178; proto‑ types of, 164−67; sociable robots and, 100 professions, 125−27, 133, 135−36, 138, 141−42 psychotherapy, 172−76 Redfield, Peter, 52 religion and culture, 8−9 risk: of absence of competitive edge, 96; creativity and, 25; culture of risk taking and, 8; life design and, 162; of loss of professional legitimacy, 135, 137; of pragmatic ambiguity, 110, 193−94n5; to purity of the subject, 130; of suffering, 173; uncertainty and, 26 ritual: Brandnew’s workshops and, 57, 60− 61; denotational and referential content of, 61; diagrammatic figuration in, 61−64, 116−18; distinguishing features of, 60−62; recruitment to role-relations and, 61−62; reflexive turn and, 197n3; ritual insights and, 112−14, 117−19, 121, 138, 184, 187; working action and performed action and, 194n9 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 51, 52 Romantic idealism: Brandnew’s Method and, 79−81, 100; creativity and, 6, 15−16, 18, 27, 79−81, 97−100, 155, 177, 191n2; evolution of product forms and, 82; ­expressive individualism and, 162; innovator’s responsibility and, 97−98 Roth, Bernard, 148 Rudnyckyj, Daromir, 8 Sawyer, Keith, 189n6, 190n3 Schumpeter, Joseph, 19 semiotic forms, materiality of, 127−28

218 / Index semiotics: graphic artifacts and ideology and, 104−6, 193−94n5, 194n6; improvisation-based art forms and, 189n6; mediation and, 127−28; post-Fordism and, 103−5; Post-it notes and, 105−6, 111−12, 119−22, 195n5; ritual and, 117−18; theories of improvisation and, 190n3 serendipity: monetizable, 123; nonlinear information flow and, 145; office design and, 130; post-Fordist ideals of creativity and, 134, 138, 140, 144; Post-it notes and, 102, 195n5; vs. routinization, 177; in scientific discovery, 37; urban life and, 33 shared workspaces: accidental collaboration and, 129−30; clutter and, 144−45; contemporary knowledge-based economy and, 142−43; design of space for, 130; distinct selfhood of workers and, 141, 143; features of, 129, 132−33; growth in, 129; as locus of innovation, 144; mediation and, 130, 132−33; Newfound and, 11, 101, 129; vs. old-style office spaces, 130−32, 131−32, 141, 142−43, 195n3; technical mystique and, 141 Simmel, Georg, 33 Stanford University Institute of Design (d.school): IDEO and, 148; influence of, 10, 137−38; life design and, 148, 151, 164−65, 174−76 Sturm und Drang movement, 58 Suchman, Lucy, 38, 187 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, 8

161−62, 167, 170−76, 178, 196n4; Post-it notes and, 119−20, 122; self-tracking technologies and, 170−71; technical mystique and, 126−27, 133, 138, 141−42, 145 3M, 31, 102, 123 Thrift, Nigel, 38 Tokumitsu, Miya, 141 Tom (Brandnew consultant): on brainstorming, 63−64; on Brandnew’s Method, 31, 38−39, 42−45, 50−51, 65−71, 98, 191n7; on obstacles to innovation, 30; on perception of innovativeness, 89; workshop instructions of, 28−29, 39−41, 66−67, 72, 87−88 Turkle, Sherry, 100

Taussig, Karen-Sue, 91−92 Taylor, Frederick, 19, 20−21 techno-futurism, 92, 152, 175, 192n12 technology: consumer needs and, 152; design thinking and, 175; the good life and, 161−62; life design and, 151−57,

Waal Malefyt, Timothy de, 193n3 Weber, Max, 161, 179−80 Weick, Karl, 22 White, Leslie, 35 Winter, Sidney, 36

uncertainty: imminent crisis and, 51; institutional isomorphism and, 181, 182; jazz metaphor and, 23−27; organizational politics and, 181; organizational theory and, 14, 21−23; possible vs. potential, 26−27; Post-it notes and, 105; reasons for, 180; structured contingency and, 32−33; about value of innovation consulting, 182−83; virtual domain and, 26−27 University of California Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design, 197−98n5 Urciuoli, Bonnie, 109 vestigial features (skeuomorphs), 37