Roundabout

Inspirations, Inc.

By KATHARINE WHITEHORN THE history of invention is full of homely little anecdotes about Watt watching the kettle boil, Newton struck on the head by a falling apple and Einstein brooding over his non-parallel fire- tongs. One had always assumed that these were merely a told-to-the- children way of making the great men seem

cosily like ourselves; it may be, however, that

these inspirations are not only true but impor- tant. At any rate, a bunch of American thinkers is so convinced that it is, that they have not only investigated it at some length but set out to synthetise it for industrial purposes. The result is called Synectics.

Synectics is a process. It is not a new method of inventing things; but simply a way of setting the scene so that inventions can be force-reared as pigs are force-reared for bacon. But what is interesting about it is the angle it emphasises: not the precise concentration, the detailed, pains- taking attention to the job in hand that one associates (perhaps wrongly) with technical development, but its exact opposite. The people who invented Synectics studied the creative process in artists and musicians, scientists and technologists and painters; and came to the con- clusion that what most often produces results is the unpredictable imaginative jump, the moment when the creator seems to go off the rails altogether but thereby arrives at the goal. They therefore conclude that one must stimulate the imaginative and the irrelevant, that one must put, as it were, an egg-mixer in a man's mind so that his ideas are insanely juxtaposed; so that he sees familiar things as if he had never seen them before and unfamiliar things as if he knows them of old. Then and only then does an impulse which is basically :esthetic direct him by feelings of pleasure and excitement to the solution which is most elegant.

To speed things up they favour invention in groups; and much of the book in which all this is described (called, how did you guess, Synectics,

by William J. J. Gordon) consists of transcripts of Sy nectics sessions. Half a dozen men, chosen

because they know their knowledge lies in different fields, toss an idea around, stand it on its head, let their imaginations roam away to various things it reminds them of, try out absurd possibilities like what might happen if a natural law was suspended—just in the hope that all this talking will give one of them an idea. To invent a new can-opener, they consider not cans but half a dozen different meanings of the word `open.' One man makes a break-through towards a kind of paint that will stick to difficult surfaces by imagining himself as the piece of paint saying

`Help! Help! I'm falling.' They inadvertently invent a clean glue-extruding machine when free

association makes one of them remember one he saw in his childhood from a hay-cart: the perfectly operating anal sphincter of a carthorse. Another helps invent a roof that is black in summer to repel heat and white in winter to attract it, by letting his mind drift by accident towards the black-to-white changes of a flounder on the ocean bottom. The images

usually have to be natural to be fertile: as the

book says, 'One says "Damn this car it's as stubborn as a mule!" but never "damn this air- plane it's as stubborn as an auto."' There is something priceless about the idea of half a dozen grown men tossing associations around as if they were lying on so many psychoanalysts' couches; but obviously there is no necessary reason why man should not try to harness any natural force, even the power of his own irrelevance.

Though it is hoped that the method could be used for pure science or for social affairs, the most sensible outlet for it is industrial, and it is in industry that it is so far being tried out. The great advantage of this is that it is possible for everyone to see whether they are getting any- where or not : either the thing works or doesn't. The original Synectics group at Harvard has sent out several groups into big companies, choosing the new Synectors from the company itself. The people who are picked are, first, people with more than one major interest: biologists who write poetry, engineers who are interested in physiology; and they are supposed to be people not too set in their technological ways. They arc trained off and on for a year before they start.

The training consists partly of getting to know each other: they work at household things together to try to synthetise the matey group spirit normally brought on only by the rigours of mining or camping or war. And they are made to read: apparently 90 per cent. of these hand- picked thinkers only read technical journals and magazines, and have few metaphors to deploy.

One can easily imagine this idea, like others, becoming hideously stereotyped. At the moment the people who join the Synectic groups do so for a few years only, on the grounds that after this their metaphors grow stale, their sense of extraordinary juxtapositions less keen. But if the Synectors ever became a really influential group in a big corporation it is hard to see anybody leaving it unless prised out with a crowbar. Again, they are supposed to be free of company status symbols: no new desks, no carpets and everybody encouraged to come to work in over- alls: one can just imagine that being built up into sloppiness de rigeur, like the faded uni- forms of Battle of Britain pilots. And one can only too easily imagine people faking origi- nality for selection tests as they now fake con- formity. Even as it is, the description of a prospective candidate `meeting the Synectors for a cook-out' and being observed while he shows his willingness and ability to hew wood and

draw water (they always make sure there is not enough wood, so that he can show his character by fetching some) suggests all the horror of the old Foreign Office selection weekend. The book talks of Synectors as if they were a sort of science-fiction guardian race; however, since those who developed Synectics also had the fore- sight to patent it, they can hardly be blamed for playing up its perfections.

In spite of its sinister and ludicrous possibili- ties, the idea is all the same attractive. It IS agreeable that there may be some sort of anti- organisation man set up: that the grey-suited conformists with corporation wives and a psy- chologically tested mediocrity are in at least some danger of being superseded by something more lively. Its recognition of the importance of language and metaphor is exciting: it might entail the recognition by science and industry of the importance of the arts side as a whole. So far it seems clear that the arts men cannot be included in the sessions because their ignorance of scientific ideas is too complete; but that, too, might go if there seemed a good incentive. I am all for anything that either makes the science side read a book, or gives the arts side a glimpse of the intense upper-air excitement of scientific discovery.

In the meantime, it may produce a few good paints and bottle-openers. America wants inventions, without having the physical neces- sities which generally provoke them. In an affluent society, Synectics may well be the mother of invention.