10.7312 Iyen19884

T HINK BIGGER
ALSO BY SHEENA IYENGAR
The Art of Choosing

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2023 Sheena Iyengar

All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Iyengar, Sheena, author.
Title: Think bigger : how to innovate / Sheena Iyengar.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022032389 (print) | LCCN 2022032390 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231198844 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231552837 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Problem solving. | Creative thinking.
Classification: LCC BF449 .I94 2023 (print) | LCC BF449 (ebook) |
DDC 153.4/3—dc23/eng/20220726
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032389
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032390
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and

durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Noah Arlow

Cover image: Shutterstock
This book is dedicated to Ishaan.
CONTENTS
Preface ix
PA R T ON E
1 What Is Think Bigger? 3

2 The Creative Brain 35
PA R T T WO
3 Step 1: Choose the Problem 65

What problem do you want to solve?
4 Step 2: Break Down the Problem 90
What are the subproblems that make up your problem?
5 Step 3: Compare Wants 108
What are the motivations and preferences of relevant decision-makers?
6 Step 4: Search In and Out of the Box 130
What solutions have been tried to date?
7 Step 5: Choice Map 163
Imagine and reimagine new combinations of tactics.
8 Step 6: The Third Eye 191
Do others see what you see?
Acknowledgments 211
Bibliography 215
Index 229
PREFACE
W hat do you do when you have a problem and there is no

known solution? Think Bigger shows you, step-by-step, how
to create meaningful choices for whatever complex problem you face.
My earlier book, The Art of Choosing (2010), summarizes years of
research on one key question: How do we get the most from choice?
There I describe the various dilemmas we face for different kinds of
choices and what we can do to become better at finding and picking
the best from the bunch. But sometimes we face a bigger problem:
there are no choices to pick from. We have to create new choices;
not choose among those we already know.
Growing up blind, I faced this bigger problem again and again.
Could I learn to cook? Would I ever be able to travel the world on
my own? Could I become a scientist? Could I perform on stage?
Today, I know the answers to these questions is “yes,” and I know
the “how” behind them. That knowledge comes from my per-
sonal struggles but also from a treasure trove of new research on
problem-solving. The result is this book: a method for creating new
choices to solve complex problems of all kinds. I call the method
Think Bigger.
I set about this task in a formal way some ten years ago, when
I became director of the Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia
PREFACE
Business School. I noticed that our many courses on entrepre-

neurship taught students how to implement a new idea—but not
how to get that idea in the first place. Not all new ideas are equal,
just like not all choices are equal. I found that the field of innova-
tion offered methods to get new ideas, but these dated from more
than half a century ago. They failed to take into account the recent
breakthrough in neuroscience called Learning+Memory. It lets us
actually see how imagination works in the human mind.
This book guides you through the Think Bigger method in detail.
The first part provides the theory, and the second part explains the six
steps that make up the nuts and bolts of the method. A companion vol-
ume, The Think Bigger Workbook, offers even more practical detail. An
Appendix lists the many people who helped develop, test, and improve
the Think Bigger method over the past few years at Columbia.
I began to teach Think Bigger to my business students as a formal
course. Their ideas for innovation were so intriguing that I thought
practitioners might want to hear them—so I invited experts from
various fields such as medicine, finance, and retail to listen to the
ideas my students created. Again and again, these seasoned pro-
fessionals used the same word to describe how my students were
thinking about problems and solutions: empowering.
That's when the lightbulb turned on. I realized that Think Bigger
had value beyond the classroom. All kinds of people want new ways
to think about generating solutions to the complex problems that
they face. Whatever your politics or station in life, I think we can all
agree that our world badly needs more innovation.
There are many success stories of those who have learned to
apply Think Bigger to innovation problems of all kinds, in all fields
of human endeavor—even in their personal lives. In this book,
I will show you how to deliberately form creative ideas—and most
importantly, how anyone can be creative once they understand the
roadmap to creative problem-solving. By the end, I hope to help
release us from the outdated paradigms that have kept the concept
of creativity reserved for the transcendent few and open it to the
many.
x
PART ONE
1
WHAT IS THINK BIGGER?
SHE IS A BIG IDEA
I live in Manhattan, a small island rich in its unique capacity to cap-

ture our imagination—the creative part of ourselves that we often
lose sight of in our frenzy of activity. Of course, this is part and
parcel of being a New Yorker. We are in it, the very thick of it, where
so much seems possible if we can keep ourselves from spinning out
of control. To live like this without losing your way, you have to
develop resilience and find moments of quiet equanimity.
For me, those grounding moments come in the early mornings,
when it’s chilly even in summer. I like to go out on bike rides while
the world is still in its waking hour—when the relative quiet of the
streets is peaceful and the cold city air still bites. When I ride, it’s
in tandem with a friend. With so many dizzying options to choose
from, I prefer riding a familiar route along the Hudson River and
down toward the tip of the groggy island, aiming to arrive at our
usual destination just before sunrise.
No matter how often we make this journey—a kind of pilgrimage—
I find myself in awe of what awaits us. I’m blind, so the experi-
ence unfolds in my mind, guided by my nonvisual senses and the
descriptions I’ve read and heard.
PART ONE
Figure 1.1 The Statue of Liberty with the Manhattan skyline in the background.
As the air shifts and warms, the first rays of sunlight cast a pink
glow before us. This evolves into other colors as the beams of light
reach across the harbor, dappling the water, then brightening the
edges of the buildings on the opposite shore. Despite the brilliant
show of light, my attention is fixed on a tall figure with a firm,
inscrutable face. To call her beautiful would be reductive. Her aura
seems as ethereal and far-reaching as the sunlight that has caught
up to my gaze and slowly illuminates her from base, to body, to
crown. Ah, the crown! As the light reaches its seven points in halo,
each bursts outward with a sharp glow. They look like white-hot
ingots piercing through the heavy morning haze. Only, they don’t
give off any residue but light. After a while, her glimmering crown
ignites upward, finally reaching the raised right arm that bears her
lighted torch—which marks the end of our morning journey.
4
You might think that New Yorkers would grow weary of the Statue
of Liberty (see figure 1.1), and I’m sure many do. But I continue to
draw much strength and calm from Our Lady of the Harbor. When
I visited her as a child on annual school trips, I was already losing
my sight. Perhaps I never saw her with my own eyes. Or if I did, she
was a giant blur—and even up close, an amalgam of smaller blurs
that I could not make coherent. Still, I was impressed by just how
big she was—151 feet tall, on a 154-foot pedestal, and weighing 204
tons. I remember feeling her immense height through my feet, as
I trudged my way up the seemingly endless winding staircase, step
by step, to the crown.
Inside the sculpture, I wondered where she came from—and
thankfully, we learned that too. A French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste
Bartholdi, created her as a gift of thanks from his country to the
United States for serving as a model of democracy to the world. It
took nine years to build. I wondered if during the building, he ever
thought that one day, close to five million people would visit her
every year, including special delegations of dignitaries from around
the globe? She has become, by far, the most famous sculpture in the
history of the world. And for me, a child of immigrant parents, an
outsized symbol of all things that hold promise. To this day, tears fill
my eyes when I hear Emma Lazarus’s famous poem inscribed at the
sculpture’s base, where Lady Liberty speaks these words: Give me
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .
Over the years, the nature of my interest—and faith—in Lady
Liberty has changed but not diminished. I’ve come to appreciate
other aspects of her greatness and better understand the stuff she’s
made of. For instance, we all know that she is one of the foremost
icons of America. And we know that she is also an important global
symbol of tolerance, freedom, and possibility. She is somehow
both stern and compassionate, with a significance that can be both
shared and personal, multiple and singular.
So much has been said and written about her as an inspiration,
but rarely do we talk about the inspiration of her own creation. How
is such a remarkable object thought? How might a child marveling at
the Statue of Liberty learn to create something both like and unlike
5
PART ONE
her—inspired by similarly notable objects but also unique? In other

words, how exactly do we get our best ideas? And once we have an
idea, how do we know if we should pursue it?
That’s what this book is about: the pieces that come together to
create our “big ideas.”
Modern science—in particular, neuroscience and cognitive
science—is revealing to us how creative ideas develop in the human
mind. We’re learning to reconstruct what happened in the mind
of Bartholdi, the sculptor, and in the minds of other great innova-
tors throughout history. Here I present this new knowledge to you
as a six-step method called Think Bigger. Think Bigger will enable
you to do what Bartholdi did: generate, identify, and cultivate your
best ideas. It will enable you to do this in your own way, depending
on your own circumstances, and in your own time. At every step,
I draw on the relevant science and on many instructive examples
to explain my rationale and show you how to put this knowledge
into practice.
THE STORY OF AN IDEA
The idea of the Statue of Liberty begins with Bartholdi himself. He

was born in 1834 at Colmar, France, near the German border. His
father died when he was two, and his mother was left to raise him
and his brother by herself. Upon seeing Frederic’s blossoming tal-
ent in art, she moved the family to Paris to give him a chance to
make his living as an artist.
In Paris, the industrious Bartholdi toiled as an apprentice at vari-
ous trades, which included stints working under the painter Ary
Scheffer and the architect Jean-François Soitoux. It didn’t take long
for his hard work to pay off. In 1853, at just eighteen years old, Bar-
tholdi’s collection of sculptures was featured in the Salon de Paris.
Two years later, the Salon again called on Bartholdi, sending him
to Egypt, along with a delegation of artists, to study the country’s
ancient art. When Bartholdi arrived, what struck him most was the
scale of these ancient works. He marveled at the massive statues
6
that guarded the royal tombs and became instantly transfixed at

the behemoths that loomed before him at seemingly every turn. In
that moment of reverie, a dream formed in his head: he wanted to
create his own colossus.
His chance came in 1867, when the builders of the Suez Canal
invited sculptors to design a lighthouse for the Canal’s entrance.
They meant it to serve both as a working lighthouse and as a tourist
attraction for this new gateway to Asia. Bartholdi proposed a giant
woman in swirling robes holding a torch to guide the way to the
world beyond the canal. He called her “Egypt Carrying the Light to
Asia.” In the end, the builders rejected all the artistic submissions
and put up an ordinary lighthouse instead. When he returned to
Paris, Bartholdi found another use for his sketch. His dear friend,
Edouard de Laboulaye, was a member of the French national assem-
bly, the president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, and would
later be a Life Senator. Laboulaye saw the American Revolution
and Civil War as triumphs of democracy that could inspire other
nations, especially his own. He proposed a statue, paid for by the
French people, as a gift to America to embody that inspiration. And
he asked Bartholdi to design it.
From there, the two friends set out to raise the required money.
The cost for this massive undertaking was $250,000—around
$5.5 million today. They traveled across France, urging everyone
to donate what they could. By the end, nearly 160,000 French citi-
zens did—poor, rich, farmers, maids, business owners, and other
artists alike. For Laboulaye, this democratic source of funds was
fundamental to the whole idea and fully embodied the spirit of the
future project.
In 1871, Laboulaye and Bartholdi went to America to choose and
prepare the site. Bedloe’s Island was quickly determined to be the
perfect place for Bartholdi to realize his vision, as it was the central
focus of the landscape upon entering New York Harbor. Bartholdi
declared that the island would be the “gateway to America.” It was
the perfect place to display Liberty to the world.
Once the site was established, the two friends carried on raising
money across the United States. As an attraction, Bartholdi took
7
PART ONE
Lady Liberty’s arm on the fundraising tour, where spectators could

climb a ladder up the arm, to the torch, for the price of fifty cents.
They eventually set the arm up in Madison Square Garden in Man-
hattan, where it stood for six years. All told, some 250,000 people
made the climb.
On October 28, 1886, twenty years after her inception, Bartholdi
unveiled the Statue of Liberty to the world, and to history. Our
iconic symbol of freedom was born.
Thus marks the end of the story as the history books tell it. And
it’s truly an inspirational story. We love such stories, where we can
imagine ourselves as the hero like Bartholdi, who sets out on a
quest, overcomes countless obstacles, and achieves a long sought-
after dream in the end. It makes us wonder if one day we too could
do something great.
Now, that’s all well and good. But let me ask you a different
question—and I want you to really think about this before answering—
how would you start?
See, these heroic stories have two key elements: creative genius
and ceaseless effort. You can imagine the ceaseless effort part: you
work hard to make your dreams come true. But what about the first
part: the creative idea? Can you pick any dream, and then just work
hard to make it come true? Of course not. You must choose your
dream carefully. But how? What makes for a good idea? And how
exactly do you get one?
Unfortunately, the traditional tales of heroic achievement skip
that part. The process of generating the idea itself has remained a
little black box, opaque and impossible to open. That is, except if
you’re a creative genius. Then the box just opens, like magic. For
the rest of us, that’s no help at all. If we’re not one of those lucky
few, there’s nothing we can do. At least that’s what we’ve always
been told.
Well, I am here to show you that what we’ve always been told is
wrong. There is no magic key. Anyone can open that black box of
creativity—you just need to understand a few simple things about
the mind, the process, and the people who have helped Think Bigger
come into being. If you want to understand how this innovation on
8
innovation can help set you on a path to unlocking your creative

potential and generate big ideas, I invite you to join me. Over the
next eight chapters, I’ll show you how.
OPENING THE BLACK BOX
I want you to imagine a fantasy animal. No, not a dragon, phoenix,

or unicorn—it should be something entirely new. Pick up a piece of
paper and pen, and then draw your creation.
Now, look at your drawing. What do you see? Does it have eyes?
Does it have arms, wings, or legs? What about a tail?
Having done this exercise thousands of times, with all kinds of
people from schoolchildren to Fortune 500 executives, I can predict
that your creature has at least one familiar element. Even when we
try to imagine the unthinkable, we don’t produce something radi-
cally alien. Whenever we create, we consciously and unconsciously
draw upon what we already know. The elements are not new. The
combination is new.
From the figures we draw to the sentences we speak to the solu-
tions we create to solve our everyday problems, we’re constantly
innovating as humans. We learn from our experiences and our
observations of the world around us, break it up into pieces, and
use that knowledge to generate new ideas. Good, good, and good!
That’s exactly what Bartholdi did when he imagined his colossus.
He never told us how he got his idea, and it’s very possible that he
himself wasn’t even conscious of what he was doing. But modern
science tells us how the mind creates new ideas, and that lets us
see the elements that Bartholdi brought together to make his new
combination.
So let’s answer the question “How did Bartholdi get his idea?”
Remember Bartholdi’s first inspiration: the colossal tomb sculp-
tures of ancient Egypt (see figure 1.2).
Then the call for a Suez Canal lighthouse led him to draw a colos-
sus in that form, with a torch as the light (see figure 1.3). As we see
below, already he is close to his idea for Lady Liberty.
9
Figure 1.2 The greater temple of the Abu Simbel in Egypt shows statues of
Ramesses II, the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, who is known
for his successful military campaigns and monuments. The temple is located on the
Nile’s western bank, south of Cairo. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 1.3 Bartholdi’s “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia,” watercolor (1869).
Wikimedia Commons.
Bartholdi then switches hands for the torch and bends the other
arm to hold a key object. We find those elements in La Verité, a
painting by Jules Lefebvre from the time Bartholdi made his Liberty
design (see figure 1.4).
Now, what of the crown, with the seven points that form a halo
around Lady Liberty’s head? That Bartholdi finds in his pocket, on
the back of a five franc silver coin (see figure 1.5). It’s the seal of
the French Second Republic, which overthrew the last French king
in 1848. The figure is a version of the Roman goddess Libertas.
Last but not least, the face—what can we make of that inscru-
table, regal visage? Well, it’s the very face Bartholdi’s eyes gazed
upon when he first came into the world. Many commentators have
noticed the uncanny resemblance between the face of Bartholdi’s
mother (see figure 1.6) and that of Lady Liberty—and how he
stayed close to his mother throughout his life. When asked if his
Figure 1.4 La Vérité by Jules Lefebvre, oil on canvas (1870). Wikimedia Commons.
11
Figure 1.5 Obverse (left) side of the great seal, adopted in 1848; 174 years ago. The
headdress of the Liberty featured on the obverse side is similar to that of the Statue
of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World), which would be offered by the French
people to the U.S. people forty years later. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 1.6 A portrait of Charlotte Bartholdi.

Courtesy of Granger Academic.
mother’s face was the inspiration for Lady Liberty’s, Bartholdi did
not deny it.
Now we can answer how Bartholdi got the idea for the Statue of
Liberty. She is the size and form of the colossal statues guarding
the Egyptian tombs. She has the role and siting of the Suez light-
house. She has the posture of La Verité. She has the crown, name,
and symbolism of Libertas. And she has the face of his mother.
See figure 1.7.
We might want to believe that artistic endeavors are different
from other everyday acts of creation. Painting a masterpiece is not
at all like drawing up your grocery list for the week or solving a
mathematical equation. Artists are greater than us—they must have
some magical ability to think of ideas unbounded by the past or
present. Everything they create is completely new. Right? Well, your
favorite masterpiece might feel entirely new. It might even give you
a new perspective on life. But there remains an elusive, undeniably
familiar feeling in each artistic creation we admire.
Consider the work of the most famous artist of the twentieth
century, Pablo Picasso. Known today as one of the most prolific
artists ever, Picasso is estimated to have produced fifty thousand
pieces of art. His distinct style of using bold, distorted figures also
helped make modern art the main event rather than a sideshow.
Where did he get this distinctive style? The popular answer is sim-
ple: Picasso was a genius. It came out of his head like magic. But in
reality, like Bartholdi, Picasso put together previous elements.
Take a look at these two self-portraits (see figures 1.8 and 1.9).
Notice the difference: the painting on the right, from 1907, looks
like it was made by an entirely different artist than the one on the
left. The one on the right is the style that made Picasso famous. The
one on the left is not. In those six intervening years, what caused
this change?
Well, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, artists had a prob-
lem. They made their living by painting portraits and landscapes
realistic enough that the rich, and not-so-rich, bought them to hang
in their homes. The camera was invented around 1825, and over the
next decades, photographs became better, cheaper, and faster—and
13
A B
C
D
E F
Figure 1.7a-f A comparison showing the progression of Bartholdi’s inspirations for

Lady Liberty, compared to the statue itself.
Figure 1.9 Picasso’s Autoportrait Expressionist

painting dated from his “African Period” (1907).
Figure 1.8 Picasso’s Autoportrait Expression- Oil on canvas.
ist painting from his “Blue Period” (1901). Oil on © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights
canvas. Society (ARS), New York
© 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
people began to buy them instead of paintings. Toward the end of

the century, a new style solved the problem: Impressionism. At first
glance, an Impressionist painting looks like a photograph. But as
you get closer, you begin to see the scene dissolve into separate
brushstrokes meant to give a particular impression that the painter
wants to convey. Stylistically, it was something the camera could
not do.
Look back at those two portraits. Picasso’s self-portrait in 1901
is not exactly Impressionism, but the 1907 self-portrait has such
great distortion that you would have to stand very far away to think
it’s a photograph.
15
PART ONE
Picasso came of age as a painter when Impressionism was already

a mainstream style. A few painters broke away in small ways—like
Georges Seurat, who broke the separate brushstrokes into even
smaller “points,” and Vincent Van Gogh, who swirled the separate
brushstrokes into hypnotic waves of color. But it was Henri Matisse
who first broke completely with the whole idea of small units of
paint like brushstrokes and points. He used big patches of color—
he called them “volumes”—in scenes that showed recognizable fig-
ures that were very distorted in color and shape. Technically, the
breakthrough was to use semiabstract volumes of color.
Matisse’s first great painting in this new style was The Joy of Life.
In the spring of 1906, it appeared in an independent Paris exhibi-
tion. It drew big crowds and became the talk of the Paris art world.
Picasso had never met Matisse, but they both knew Gertrude Stein.
She became famous for her modernist writing and as the host of a
salon in her Paris apartment that drew many modern painters—
and also writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
Ezra Pound.
Picasso went to see The Joy of Life and then asked Stein to intro-
duce him to Matisse. She took Matisse to visit Picasso’s studio. The
two painters met a second time at Stein’s, and that’s when Picasso
found his style.
During this fateful meeting, Matisse brought along an African
sculpture. It was a Vili mask from Congo. Paris art shops had just
started importing art from France’s African colonies and those in
the avant-garde were always on the lookout for such cultural influ-
ences. When Picasso later asked Matisse to dinner, he brought
along the sculpture. There before him in the Paris café were the
two inspirations that Picasso would bring together to make his own
new style.
That night he went to his studio and started painting. And that
painting is still one of the most famous paintings of modern art: Les
Desmoiselles d’Avignon. In it we can clearly see Picasso’s two inspira-
tions (see figure 1.10).
Picasso never admitted his debt to Matisse. He reveled in the
mystique of the singular creative genius. Matisse, on the other
16
A
B C
Figure 1.10 (a) Henri Matisse’s The Joy of Life. © 2022 Succession H. Matisse / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York. (b) Henri Matisse bought this sculpted figurine cre-
ated by the Vili people of the Congo—it had a huge impact on him and on his friend
Pablo Picasso (Credit: Archives Matisse, Paris). (c) Pablo Picasso’s 1907 painting,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the first Cubist painting of the legendary art movement.
© 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
PART ONE
hand, proudly cited his sources. For The Joy of Life, he especially
drew from The Bathers by Cézanne and Persian miniatures from
medieval Iran (see figure 1.11).
Now that we understand how these three great artists (Bartholdi,
Picasso, and Matisse) got their ideas, it might seem that all they did
was take what they saw and combine it in new ways. Could it really
be that simple? First, let me be clear: this in no way takes away from
their talent or achievements. It just explains how they did what they
did, without the magical thinking that has always been attached to
the “singular creative genius.” Like all successful innovators, they
A B
Figure 1.11 (a) Paul Cézanne’s 1905 painting titled The Bathers. Philadelphia
Museum of Art: Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1937, W1937-1-1. Wikimedia
Commons. (b) Adam honored by angels on a Persian miniature portrait. Wikimedia
Commons. (c) Henri Matisse’s The Joy of Life.
© 2022 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
18
were essentially “strategic copiers.” By this, I mean they learned

from examples of success, extracted the parts that worked well,
imagined new ways of using those pieces, and combined them to
create something new and meaningful.
Innovation is nothing more, and nothing less, than a new com-
bination of old ideas. Yet we know from personal experience that
all ideas are not equal. Often, people go through a draining cycle of
generating idea after idea only to find that the best idea is some-
thing banal. It’s why we can admire the genius behind artistic mas-
terpieces. Even as we break down their big ideas and lay out the
individual elements to see how they combined them, the whole of
their creations are more meaningful than the mere sum of the indi-
vidual parts. This is the signature of every successful innovation—
whether it’s your grandma’s famous apple pie, the Apple phone in
your pocket, or a great work of art.
The French scientist and mathematician Henri Poincaré
explained how to generate good ideas in his 1913 book, The Founda-
tions of Science: “Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of
useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations
which are in infinite minority. . . . To invent is to discern, to choose.”
We’re all capable of generating an infinite number of creative
combinations—let’s call them “choices.” Creating a new choice
that’s valuable calls for great discernment. You must pick apart the
choices you’ve identified and the routes you could take to make
your idea real, and that’s no easy task. Of the multitudes of pieces
you could combine, and the infinite ways you could combine those
pieces, it’s the creator’s discernment that decides which of the myr-
iad combinations to keep.
The common definition of an innovation is “something new and
useful.” By definition, every combination is new. That’s the easy
part. The hard part is to identify a high-quality combination that’s
useful as well. So, how do we create the most useful combinations
(which, as Poincaré notes, are in the infinite minority)? That’s the
question this book will answer.
We can now refine our definition of innovation: a novel, useful
combination of old ideas that come together to solve a complex problem.
19
PART ONE
This definition echoes an older statement by the economist

Joseph Schumpeter, known today as the founder of entrepreneurial
studies and the source of the idea of “creative destruction.” For
Schumpeter, the role of innovation is “to produce means to com-
bine the things and forces within our reach.”
In Think Bigger, I focus on innovations that respond to a stated
problem. It might seem that some innovations come out of the
blue, but the reality is that even those innovators saw how their
innovation solved a particular problem. If it did not solve a prob-
lem, it wasn’t a “useful combination,” in Poincaré’s terms. So the
keen innovator would pass it by. You only take action on innova-
tions that solve a problem.
In Think Bigger, you first identify and define a problem you
want to solve. This is true even for artistic innovations. Bartholdi’s
problem was how to symbolize freedom and democracy through
sculpture, and Picasso’s was how to find a unique style beyond
Impressionism that the public likes.
If you talk to artists as they work, they will tell you how they
solve a series of problems to make their creation. Or in the case of
Picasso, they just might not tell you all of the ways in which they
go about it.
Above all, Think Bigger provides a way for a single individual—
you—to get a better idea. You can do each step as a group as well
but always in the same sequence: first each person alone, then put
together a team result.
We will see that most other innovation methods rely on the
team, rather than the individual, for the actual idea. That is, they
skip over the question of how creative ideas form in the human
mind and simply say that putting ideas together from many people
makes the idea creative. As we see from Lady Liberty—and all other
real examples of innovation—that’s not how it works in the real
world. Yes, Bartholdi needed other people at each stage, both as
sources for inspiration and to help implement them. But the most
important creative steps happened in his own mind. Many hands
make light work, but they don’t make the light work. That is, a team
is made for work, not for thinking.
20
So, if a team does Think Bigger together, each person will have
better ideas, and the sum total will be better too. If a team does not
follow Think Bigger, each person will have fewer creative ideas, and
the sum total will be less creative.
Throughout the method, there will be moments where I unravel
the process of innovation like I did for Picasso, Matisse, and Bar-
tholdi, as if it was a conscious method on the innovator’s part. In
reality, if you asked Bartholdi how he got his idea, he might not
be able to answer. Those few moments of inspiration are fleet-
ing, and he spent much more mental effort on implementing his
idea than on pondering how he got it in the first place. Picasso,
on the other hand, was a wily competitor who knew exactly what
he was doing.
In Think Bigger, we stay conscious of each mental step because
that’s the only way to repeat the steps for other ideas in the future.
We unlock the black box and make the problem-solving exercise
accessible for all and repeatable. Think Bigger empowers anyone,
anywhere, to solve a problem—whether it’s personal, professional,
or universal. Being deliberative allows us to speed up the process
of searching for and finding a solution rather than just waiting for
an idea to spontaneously arise. By providing more people with the
Think Bigger tools, I believe we will also have a better chance at
helping us—individually and collectively—create the solutions for
the greatest problems we face in the world today.
Think Bigger offers you a set of tools and skills to solve any
kind of complex problem, and then solve the next one too. Con-
sider a birdhouse. If I give you a complete set of tools, instruc-
tions, and pieces to build a birdhouse, then guide you through
the process, what you build might not be the greatest birdhouse
ever. It will have flaws in the structure and nicks in the wood.
But you won’t only have that birdhouse; you will know how to
build another birdhouse—one possibly better than the last. Think
Bigger teaches you how to innovate. And like any other skill, you
get better the more you do it. The first time you use this method,
you won’t have a perfect result. A novice only becomes a master
through practice.
21
PART ONE
THINK BIGGER IN ACTION
Before I walk through the six steps of Thinking Bigger, I want to

show you two well-known innovations that have become an inte-
gral part of modern life. Just as we did when we told the story of
how Bartholdi and Picasso made their masterpieces, we will once
again take two innovations and deconstruct them to better under-
stand the thought process that created these products. Before,
I showed you the pieces that the innovators combined. Now I will
explain the series of steps that brought the pieces together. These
steps match our Think Bigger method.
Let’s begin with a problem that everyone faced in hot seasons
or hot climes in the days before air conditioning. Imagine it’s a hot
summer’s day in 1840 Philadelphia. You find yourself sweltering as
the sun steadily beats down on your head. You contemplate what
might cool you down and ponder a treat that’s cold, sweet, icy, and
creamy. Thinking back to an article you read, you imagine tasting
the ice cream George Washington once paid two hundred dollars
for in the summer of 1790. Then you remember reading about the
creamed strawberry ice delicacies that Dolley Madison made for
James Madison’s second inaugural banquet at the White House.
What about that advertisement you saw for Joseph Corre’s Parlor
advertising ice cream at the price of eleven pence per glass? Too bad
that was 3 percent of your yearly income as a housekeeper!
Today, we take for granted the ice cream truck that zooms down
the street, blasting a repetitive tune that tempts us to buy a cone
for a pittance compared to our yearly income. We stock our freezers
with tubs of ice cream from the grocery store for birthday celebra-
tions or to prepare for the summer. And don’t forget that ice cream
is the best antidote for a broken heart. Ice cream has become a
household staple—even for vegans. It’s affordable for many of us.
But it wasn’t always that way. If you lived in the 1840s, the high
price of ice, the intense labor, and the time it took to produce made
ice cream nearly impossible to enjoy unless you were wealthy. So
how did ice cream become so ubiquitous? And who do we have to
thank for making ice cream accessible for everyone, everywhere?
22
That would be Nancy Johnson. She was in her fifties, a volunteer

for the American Missionary Association, the wife of a professor,
chemist, and physicist, and the mother of two.
Johnson saw that making ice cream was actually very time-
consuming, physical work, and it was also very expensive. So she
set out to find a way to make the process less labor-intensive and
less expensive by reducing the necessary products—like ice—while
preserving the final product for longer. It seemed like a waste to
spend nearly half the day making ice cream only to have it melt in
an hour.
Johnson found several problems that needed to be solved. Let’s
present her main problem as a question: How can I make ice cream
more accessible for everyone? In order to make this broad ques-
tion more solvable, we break the main question into four smaller
questions:
1. How do I make the outer container smaller so it uses less ice?

2. How do I make the ice cream colder faster and preserve it?
3. How do I create a method of mixing the cream that is less
labor-intensive?
4. How do I make ice cream smoother and creamier?
How did Johnson solve the first subproblem? Ice was expensive:
$2.13 a pound, or $68 in today’s money. In those days, you kept ice in
large containers like bathtubs and took the ice out as you needed it.
Butter churns used tall wooden buckets, but that would take too much
ice. Johnson used a simple wooden bucket instead (see figure 1.12).
That held the ice and the rock salt to slow the melting. Of course,
wooden buckets weren’t new. They were invented about four hundred
years before Johnson’s time and were in common use during the nine-
teenth century, and they were cheap and easy to handle. And they cer-
tainly helped solve the first part of her problem: use less ice.
How did she solve next the second subproblem? Well, since
freezers did not yet exist, this was going to be tricky. She started by
searching for the ways other foods and beverages were kept cold.
That led her to pewter. By the Middle Ages, long before Johnson’s
23
PART ONE
Figure 1.12 Wooden water pail, typically used for wells. Wikimedia Commons.
time, certain inns used pewter for mugs to keep beer and ale cold
(see figure 1.13). More recently, pewter bathtubs kept water warm.
Before Johnson, when you made ice cream by hand, you used a
ceramic bowl that you kept carrying back to the tub of ice to make
it cold again. She replaced the ceramic with pewter and set it in her
wooden bucket with a layer of ice packed around it. This kept the
mixture cold and cut lots of time.
And pewter was cheap. It was a simple mixture of scrap metal,
such as tin, copper, bismuth, antimony, and even leftover silver.
So Johnson replaced the bathtub of ice with a wooden bucket that
held a single layer of ice and replaced the ceramic bowl that went
inside with a pewter one. Then cover it with a pewter lid, and your
ice cream stays cold for hours.
Now for Johnson’s third subproblem. Stirring a mixture of
cream, sugar, and other flavorings for hours on end was a grueling
task. It led to stiff arms, injured backs, and pulled shoulders. Paus-
ing often to rest just made the production time even longer. Was
there a simpler way to continuously mix the ingredients without
using so much arm power?
24
Figure 1.13 Pewter mug dating from 1219, used to keep ales cool.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
To remedy this, Johnson added a hand crank—an invention

that went back to first-century China. From there, it spread to the
Roman Empire and on to the rest of Europe. The Eastern Mediter-
ranean even implemented hand cranks to grind spices and coffee
(see figure 1.14). In this application, the hand crank dramatically
cut the time and effort it took to stir the ice cream.
Now for the last subproblem: lumps and crystals. One of the
most frustrating parts about making ice cream by hand was that
after all that effort and expense, the cream often separated and
formed big icy lumps or smaller icy crystals. A butter churn would
force a wooden disc with holes in it down through the barrel
(see figure 1.15). The holes prevented the lumps and crystals, but
Johnson needed to scrape the colder ice cream off the sides or else
it would freeze. So she fixed spatulas (see figure 1.16) onto the
crank to scrape them through the mixture. Spatulas for greasy food
also had holes to let the grease drip out—like the butter churn disc.
All in all, Nancy Johnson combined four simple things to solve
the overall problem: the wooden bucket, pewter bowl, hand crank,
25
Figure 1.14 An antique herb/spice grinder featuring a metal hand crank and a
drawer to the base that collects the processed herb or spice. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 1.15 Plunger butter churn. Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 1.16 Wooden spatula with holes, used for cooking.

Illustration by Emmaline Ellsworth.
and her “dasher” paddles. In 1843, she filed U.S. patent number
US3254A (see figure 1.17). The Library of Congress identifies her
simple invention as a “disruptive technology” that made it possible
for everyone to make high-quality ice cream without electricity.
Johnson then sold her patent to William Young, a wholesaler of
kitchen equipment who mass-marketed the device as the Johnson
Patent Ice-Cream Freezer. Manufacturing ice cream soon became
a nationwide industry when a Pennsylvania milk dealer, Jacob Fus-
sell, opened the world’s first wholesale ice-cream factory in 1851.
Steam power later automated the churning process, and mechanical
refrigeration aided ice cream’s storage and transport. By the 1870s,
electric power and motors, packing machines, and new freezing
methods sped up ice-cream production tenfold. Each iteration of
the ice-cream maker used Johnson’s device as the base mechanism.
Notice the structure of this innovation process. It starts with
defining the problem in a specific and concrete way. Then you break
Figure 1.17 Nancy Johnson’s final patented product from the U.S. Patent Office, 1843.
27
PART ONE
it down into essential parts. Next, you search for solutions that
already exist to identify ways the different parts of the problem can
be solved. You then combine the pieces in a new way that makes
them all work together in harmony.
Let me give you one more familiar example that shows the basics
of the Think Bigger method. Once again, it starts with a problem to
solve. In 1899, when Henry Ford founded his own car company, a
motor vehicle cost from $850 to $2,000—well beyond the average
person’s means. Ford saw a problem worth solving: How could he
make the car affordable for the average person?
Like Johnson, Ford broke his problem down:
1. How do I reduce the cost of labor?

2. How do I reduce production time?
3. How do I reduce the cost of materials?
Let’s start with labor. The previous century’s Industrial Rev-

olution brought in the assembly line, where products are lined
up on the factory floor and specialized workers move along the
line to put in standard parts. In 1906, Oldsmobile was the first to
apply that concept to automobile production. Ford imitated that
process, but he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to use fewer workers
to make more cars—or the same number of workers to produce
cars faster. Note how this blends into the second subproblem: to
reduce production time.
The answer to these pieces of the puzzle came from outside the
auto industry. William “Pa” Klann, Ford’s chief engineer, visited
the Swift slaughterhouse in the Chicago stockyards with Ford’s
problem breakdown in mind. He saw how the animal moved on
an overhead line from station to station, where workers stood still
and took off different parts in the butchering process. It was a mov-
ing disassembly line. Do it the other way—for cars—and you have a
moving assembly line.
When Ford reconfigured his factory from a stationary assembly
line to a moving line, the result was dramatic. The time it took to
build a car fell from 12.5 hours to 90 minutes.
28
That left the third subproblem: reducing the cost of materials.

Ford noted that paint was one of the most expensive items he used.
And the available resin-based oil paint took more than a month to
dry. In the 1920s, chemists developed a new kind of paint—nitro-
cellulose black lacquer—that dried in less than a week and cost
half as much as oil paint. Once applied and rubbed down, the black
lacquer paint gave a unique shine to the cars, similar to the gloss
on Japanese art and woodwork, hence the process being dubbed,
“japanning.” By 1927, Ford began japanning all his cars—a change
that inspired his famous quote, “The customer can get the Model T
painted in any color he wants, so long as it’s black.”
We can now see how Ford made the car more affordable. He
broke the problem down into parts and found previous solutions
for each subproblem: the Oldsmobile assembly line, the moving
tracks in a slaughterhouse, and japanning. It was a new combina-
tion of previous elements.
Before his innovation, in 1908, Ford sold 6,389 Model Ts at $850
each. Starting in 1915, he sold 472,350 at $350 each. In 1925, the
figures were two million sold at a price of $250 per car. By that
time, with incremental improvements, each car took only thirty-
three minutes to build.
Other industries adopted Ford’s assembly line, drastically reduc-
ing costs and production times for countless products across the
globe. But note how Ford innovated: every ingredient in his equa-
tion already existed. Ford identified useful existing solutions for
each of his subproblems by searching within—and outside—his
own industry. By combining these solutions, Ford created a big idea.
Notice how Ford searched far and wide. He learned a new tac-
tic to reduce his cost of labor from an entirely different industry;
meatpacking. By searching among existing methods, he found one
that reduced the cost of materials to build cars. This element is
relatively low tech—a moving chain. Too often, people think that
innovation equals new and more complicated technology. Even
when there is a new technology, it typically solves only one narrow
problem. It’s up to other innovators to make new combinations to
apply that technology to new problems. For example, before Henry
29
PART ONE
Ford, Karl Benz found a new use for the internal combustion engine
that Etienne Lenoir invented: the motorcar. Figuring out how to
use a new technology to solve new problems calls for creative
combination—not more technology.
You have probably been told at some time to “think outside
the box.” But has anyone ever told you how to do it? Successful
innovators, like Johnson and Ford, looked for solutions to pieces
of their puzzle in two places: within their own industry and then
beyond it. That’s thinking “inside” and “outside” the box. You need
both. Think Bigger recreates what Johnson and Ford did in six clear
steps—and after learning these steps, you will understand how to
most effectively take what you know, search for what you don’t
know, and implement the findings into something actionable. The
result is a new and exciting way to solve your biggest problems.
THE THINK BIGGER ROAD MAP
Now that I’ve walked you through the essential characteristics of

innovation, you’re ready for the Think Bigger Road Map: your guide
to our six steps. I will lay out the steps in sequence, but keep in
mind that innovation is never completely linear. You will likely go
back and forth between each step. In every step forward, you will
also look back. Everything stays “in draft,” subject to revision, until
you find your solution.
Figure 1.18 is our road map. For now, don’t worry about the
details within each part. Just note the progression from step to step.
Step 1: Choose the Problem
The start of Think Bigger is choosing the right problem and under-
standing it well. This takes time and good judgment. The problem
must be hard enough that no one has figured it out before but not
so ambitious that the solution remains a fantasy. For example, no
one has invented a pill that cures every disease on earth and costs
only one dollar. Don’t be the first to try. There are multiple ways
30
Figure 1.18 The Think Bigger Road Map.
PART ONE
to define any problem. Your task is to choose from among them

the one for which you can generate meaningful solutions. You
must choose a worthwhile problem to solve, and that is no easy
feat. Some problems are too big to solve with the current state of
human knowledge, some are too small to make it worth the effort,
and some don’t provoke in you enough desire to persist in finding
a solution. Step 1 of Think Bigger helps you solve this very first
problem: how to choose the right problem to solve.
Step 2: Break It Down
Any major problem is made up of multiple, smaller problems. To

crack the big problem, identify and solve the smaller problems.
Make a long list of subproblems and then pare it down. You end up
with five to seven key subproblems, because that’s about as much
complexity as the human mind can handle at one time.
Step 3: Compare Wants
You now have your problem and its breakdown. Before you start
the search for the elements of a solution, you need to step back
and understand the big picture. In this step, you will identify three
groups and what they want from a solution. These groups are you,
the target of your solution, and third parties who matter for putting
the solution into action. You list the wants from all three, com-
pare them, and then use that analysis to help select from among the
multiple solutions you create. Your “Big Picture” Score will serve as
your selection criteria.
Step 4: Search In and Out of the Box
Each industry, branch of science, or area of expertise has its own

ideas and methods that narrow its thinking. It’s common to hear
that complex problems need multidisciplinary solutions. But when
they try to work together, their ideas and methods clash. Think
Bigger solves the problem. Ford didn’t need an expert at meat
32
processing to join his team: he took just one element, the mov-
ing line, as part of his own solution. Think Bigger doesn’t try to
merge disciplines or negotiate across them. It’s non-disciplinary
rather than interdisciplinary. Ask yourself if anyone, anywhere, at
any time, has solved one of your subproblems? If yes, how? Make
a list of these solutions. Like Ford and Johnson, you collect what
works from multiple and disparate sources and even eras—recall
that butter churning and japanning were both very old crafts.
Step 5: Choice Map
Innovators tend to highlight the one solution they put into action.
But the reality is that they tried out different combinations, at least
in their minds, before arriving at the best one. They tend to forget
those previous permutations. Think Bigger brings them to the fore.
You keep moving and turning the pieces around until—eureka!—
the whole emerges. In this step, you will lay out all the pieces of
the puzzle, combine and recombine, until they click into place.
I will give you techniques to create and use multiple combinations
that are both useful and novel, and then use your Big Picture Score
to pick out the one that best fits the multiple wants you need to
balance.
Step 6: The Third Eye
You now have an idea that feels like a flash of insight. But what is it,
exactly? How does it differ from what’s already out there? How will
others see it? In this final step, you take what you have been working
on primarily by yourself—in your own bubble—and go outside to
find out what others “see.” What you'll find is they don’t see it with
their two eyes but with their third one. The third eye is a real phe-
nomenon of working memory where an image forms in their mind.
You’re not asking for their feedback or judgment about the quality
of your idea. Rather, you want to know what they see in your idea
to help you see it better yourself. In so doing, you further develop
your idea and determine if it’s something you truly want to pursue.
33
PART ONE
THE INNOVATOR WITHIN
At this point you might ask yourself, “Can I do it?”

That is, do you have the mental ability to follow in the footsteps
of Bartholdi, Picasso, Johnson, and Ford? Before you read this chap-
ter, perhaps your answer was “no.” But now I hope you see that the
answer is a resounding “yes.” Each step of Think Bigger is completely
within your grasp. Altogether, the six steps lead you to a big idea.
There is no guarantee, of course, that Think Bigger always works.
You can’t solve every problem in the world. But Think Bigger shows
you how to try. Once you see the process broken down—and under-
stand how even the greatest innovators came up with their new
ideas—I’m certain you will feel confident that you can do it too.
34
2
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
THE APPLE OF INSIGHT
You might know this story:

In the summer of 1665, Isaac Newton was a student at Cam-
bridge University. When the Great Plague of London spread to
Cambridge, the town emptied out to the countryside and Newton
fled to his family’s farm seventy miles north in Grantham. On the
farm, he whiled away the time under a gnarled apple tree. That is,
until one fateful day, when a ripe apple dropped from the branches
above and hit him on the head.
Eureka!
The apple fell to earth—not sideways, not up—because the earth
pulled it down. And if the earth pulled this apple, the earth must
pull on everything else, including distant objects like the sun and
moon. Objects pull on each other! That’s how the planets, the moon,
Earth, and the sun stay in orbit! In this moment, in his mind’s eye,
Newton saw the law of gravity writ large. The insight came to him
all at once, like magic, and science has never been the same since.
That is one version of the story.
Here’s another.
Isaac Newton attended Grantham School before enrolling at
Cambridge at the age of nineteen. In both places, he studied the
PART ONE
latest mathematics and the works of the scientists who came

before him, especially Archimedes, Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes,
and Kepler. In his fifth year at Cambridge, the plague drove him
out. And during that period of retreat at his family farm, he made
his first big breakthrough. The Biographia Britannica of 1760 quotes
Newton himself on his method of discovery:
In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximat-

ing Series and the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Binomial into
such a series. The same year in May I found the method of tangents of
Gregory and Slusius. . . . And the [following] year I began to think of
gravity extending to the orb of the Moon, and having found out how
to estimate the force with which [a] globe revolving within a sphere
presses the surface of the sphere, from Kepler’s Rule of the periodi-
cal times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their
distances from the centers of their orbs I deduced that the forces
which keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the
squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve:
and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her orb
with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them
answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and
1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and
minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since.
You might not understand all the references and reasoning

behind this passage—I know I don’t. But the method is clear. Here
we see a scientist piecing together a solution to the problem of
gravity, element by element. In this brief passage alone, he cites
two contemporaries: Gregory and Slusius (plus Kepler of the pre-
ceding generation). Elsewhere, he credits other scientists too. In a
letter to Edmund Halley, namesake of the famous comet, he writes,
“Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting the Sun as its center &
depending on matter must be reciprocally in a duplicate ratio of the
distance from the center.”
Piece by piece, Newton assembled his universal law of gravita-
tion: every particle in existence attracts every other particle with a
36
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between

their centers and directly proportional to the product of their
masses. He published this law in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia
Mathematica in 1687—more than twenty years after the plague. In
that great work, and in other letters and writing, Newton cites the
many distinguished scientists he drew from. In a letter to Robert
Hooke, he makes this general statement about his method: “If I
have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.”
Upon examination, we find that this quote isn’t even entirely
original: five hundred years earlier, John of Salisbury wrote, “Ber-
nard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarves perched on
the shoulders of giants.”
But what about the apple?
The sole source of the apple story is a memoir of Newton’s life
by William Stukeley, published in 1752, twenty-five years after
Newton died. Stukeley was a much younger friend of Newton who
admired him greatly.
After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, &
drank tea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself.
amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation,
as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. “why
should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,”
thought he to himself: occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in
a contemplative mood: “why should it not go sideways, or upwards?
but constantly to the earth’s centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the
earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum
of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths
center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall per-
pendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it
must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the
earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.
What exactly struck Newton under the apple tree? It wasn’t an

apple. And it wasn’t the existence of gravity. For centuries, scien-
tists knew that objects attract each other from their centers. The
37
PART ONE
idea of a “center of gravity” goes all the way back to Archimedes,

born in 287 BC. Newton did not discover gravity: he discovered
the precise mathematical formula that explained it. And he did so
not under the apple tree but in methodically addressing the prob-
lem over the two decades after that incident, by standing on the
shoulders of giants—especially Galileo and Kepler, who worked on
exactly the same problem.
If working out the formula for gravity wasn’t a new problem,
what made Newton succeed? Well, he was doggedly committed
to solving that one problem among the hundreds of other prob-
lems that science faced in the middle of the 1600s. For reasons
we’ll explore much more deeply in later chapters, it’s important
to understand that passion is a key element for effective, creative
problem-solving. So yes, let’s remember Newton under the apple
tree. Not for solving the problem of gravity, but for finding a worth-
while problem he very much wanted to solve.
History is filled with special people who had these special moments
of insight. Remember the story of the Buddha, who sat under the
Bodhi tree and attained enlightenment? What about the story of
Archimedes crying, “Eureka!” as he sat in his tub observing the
occurrence of volume? And what about Steve Jobs, whose idea for
the Apple I, the first personal computer, came to him as he sat in
his garage with a typewriter wired to a television screen? Do you
know the backstory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a
Dream” speech? It came about because a woman shouted from the
crowd, “Tell us about your dream!” Or maybe you know Joan of
Arc heard voices that told her to lead the French army to defeat the
English, who had already conquered half the country?
We love these stories. They remind us of the magic that we, as
humans, can be capable of. In one moment, we might see what
nobody else does—and in that realization, we’re able to change
what others see and do forever. Every time we hear these stories,
we’re reminded of how powerful any one individual can be. And yet,
we still find ourselves wondering if these flashes of insight are truly
38
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
random and just out of our reach, meant only for special people in
special places at special times.
In Think Bigger, we offer a method that leads you through the
same steps as Isaac Newton and all the other innovators through
time. But can you really do it? Or is there something different
about these people that makes them more creative than you?
SPECIAL PEOPLE
I want you to take two creativity tests. Here’s the first one:
It’s easier for me to remember people by . . .

A. their name
B. their face
When you listen to a new song you are more interested in the . . .
A. lyrics
B. melody or rhythm
When you fold your hands, which thumb is on top?
A. right
B. left
Cross your legs. Which leg is on top?
A. right
B. left
If you answered mostly As, you are a “creative type,” or more right-
brained. If you chose mostly Bs, you are an “analytical type,” or
more left-brained.
Here’s the second test. Look at each statement below and mark
if they apply to you or not:
• You’re better with faces than names.

• People have described you as “perceptive.”
• If someone’s mad at you, you can tell without them having to say a
word.
39
PART ONE
• When planning a party you think about the big picture rather than
smaller details.
• You’re not a big planner; you prefer to be spontaneous.
• You’ve been called out for daydreaming.
• You are easily distracted.
• You’re daydreaming or getting distracted right now.
• You admire a whole artwork first then focus on smaller details.
• You’ve dabbled in art, just because you were curious.
• If someone’s arguing, you’re more likely to believe them if they get
emotional.
• You tend to get emotional about things yourself.
• You’re not afraid of taking risks.
• You tend to trust your gut instinct over anything else.
• You work best if there’s music or TV on in the background.
• Procrastinating is a skill you’re extremely familiar with.
• You’re more of a visual learner and tend to remember details if you can
see them.
• If you had the chance to live in a fantasy world instead of reality, you
would.
• You relate more to fictional characters than people in real life.
• You tend to doodle whenever you’re taking notes.
• You get restless easily.
• You aren’t afraid of what others might think of you.
RESULTS:
If you marked more than ten items from this list—congrats!
You’re more right-brained and creative than left-brained and logical.
Now let me ask, does this kind of test make sense to you?
I certainly hope not. Unfortunately, these tests are extremely pop-
ular. They are all over the internet. When I look up the phrase, “Right
Brain-Left Brain Quiz” on Google, I get nearly sixty million search
results. On BuzzFeed alone, if you enter “Right Brain,” “Left Brain,”
or “Creative Type,” hundreds of thousands of tests will populate on
your screen, including the two quizzes you just did for me now.
The idea that some people are creative and some are not is a very
old one. This thinking took on a scientific angle in the 1860s, when
40
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
the neurologists Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke noticed that people
with damage to a particular area on the left side of the brain had
speech and language problems. This led to the split-brain theory,
which postulated that the left and right sides of the brain do differ-
ent tasks. In 1981, Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his work
affirming the split brain, demonstrating that some brain diseases
were best treated by severing the connection between the two sides.
With this insight, Sperry performed further experiments to bet-
ter understand the nature of the split mind. In tests, he showed his
subjects two different objects: one was observed using their left eye
only and one using their right eye only. When asked to explain what
they saw, all participants drew what they saw with their left eye but
described what they saw with their right eye. Sperry concluded that
there are “two modes of thinking”: the verbal (left-side brain),
which recognizes and analyzes words, and the nonverbal (right-side
brain), which recognizes shapes, patterns, colors, and emotions.
Sperry’s findings went on to inspire an array of tools claiming to
help individuals become more right- or left-brained. For example,
Betty Edwards wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which
uses drawing techniques to help you be more creative. Dr. Ken Gib-
son created a series of quizzes and exercises for people to sharpen
their left brain and become more analytical.
We love identifying ourselves as creative right-brain types or
analytical left-brain types because we believe that typecasting our-
selves gives us insight into our character. Knowing what “type” we
are makes us feel as if we can better understand who we get along
with, where we work best, and what kinds of jobs we’re more likely
to be good at. But recent experiments are beginning to show us
something else: there is no left brain or right brain—at least when
it comes to thinking.
Since Sperry’s Nobel Prize, the field of neuroscience has made
huge leaps forward. One major breakthrough came from Seiji
Ogawa, who figured out in the early 1990s how to use MRIs to
show the brain at work. See, your left and right brain are exactly
the same physically. Left and right, however, do matter for physical
movements: your left brain controls your right hand and leg, and
41
PART ONE
your right brain controls your left hand and leg. Except for your
eyes: right controls right, and left controls left. That alone explains
Sperry’s results about the right and left hand and the right and left
eye. But more conclusive still are MRIs that show people thinking.
There is no creative or analytical portion of the brain, nor is there
any mental activity that’s solely creative or analytical. Whether
you’re working on a math problem, painting, science experiment,
or writing a song, you’re constantly using all of your brain. There is
no mental difference between the left and right hemispheres.
Here’s a more recent experiment that showed the whole brain
at work.
In 2006, neuroscientists tracked brain images of adults, chil-
dren learning algebra, and mathematically advanced children as
they solved three problems: a basic arithmetic problem, an algebra
problem with three levels of difficulty, and a geometry problem.
The images showed that as they worked, each person’s neural sys-
tem lit up like a Christmas tree—on both the right and left sides
of the brain (figure 2.1). As participants explained how they went
Figure 2.1 An fMRI image of the brain with both the left side and right side lit up at
resting and active states, showing how the brain constantly uses both sides.
Nielsen et al, “An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with
Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” PLOS One,
August 14, 2013.
42
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
about solving the math problems, they used just as much creativity
as they did analysis. It’s impossible to disentangle the two when
problem-solving.
But some people do seem to be more creative than others. If
the difference in their right brain doesn’t explain it, what does? Are
people susceptible to depression, like Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath,
more likely to be creative? Or are happy people, like Tom Hanks,
more likely to be creative? In studies, only one associated personal-
ity traits seems to emerge across the spectrum of creative people:
they’re curious. And that’s something you can control. The same
is true for persistence, which helps you actually accomplish tasks,
including creative ones. That too is within your control.
In Think Bigger, that’s all you need to start: be curious and per-
sistent. We give you all the other tools, at each step, to guide you in
your creative task. With practice, these steps become a habit, and
so you develop a creative mindset that will help you solve problems
of all kinds into the future.
BRAINSTORMING
Think back to the last time you had a really creative idea. Where
were you? What were you doing? If you’re anything like the thou-
sands of people I’ve asked over the last decade—from high school
students to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies—then
odds are you didn’t say, “During a brainstorming session.” Over the
years, only a handful of individuals have told me a brainstorming
session is where they came up with their best ideas.
Around the world, all kinds of people and organizations set out
to solve creative problems by brainstorming. As a formal technique,
brainstorming dates from 1938, when advertising giant BBDO pro-
moted their top vice president, Alex Osborn, to save the company
after it had lost a large number of clients during the Great Depres-
sion. To attract new clients, Osborn decided that he should bring
his whole team together to come up with the best ideas for advertis-
ing campaigns. Brainstorming, or “thinking up” as Osborn originally
43
PART ONE
called it, became their most-used method for ideation—and it

took the world by storm: Osborn and BBDO pumped out advertis-
ing campaigns to encourage U.S. armament during WWII and for
high-octane clients such as General Electric, Chrysler, American
Tobacco, BF Goodrich, and DuPont. As the method gained trac-
tion, Osborn renamed it “brainstorming” because the act itself was
a “brain-storm”—a sudden neurological explosion from individu-
als in a group setting. And so came the pervasive gathering of col-
leagues saying, “Let’s brainstorm a solution.” Whenever we need an
idea fast, we brainstorm.
Why did Osborn invent brainstorming? Here was his problem: in
company-wide meetings, junior staff rarely spoke. Senior manage-
ment dominated the conversation. His solution was to hold weekly
“group-thinking” sessions that gave everyone an equal chance to
speak. He ran the meeting and made sure to ask the junior staff for
their thoughts.
There are many variations on the basic theme of brainstorming.
This is a list of rules from IDEO (https://www.ideo.com/), a famous
creative company that offers a brainstorming service to clients:
1. Go for quantity.
2. Encourage wild ideas.
3. Defer judgment.
4. Build on the ideas of others.
5. Stay focused on the topic.
These are the rules Osborn came up with in 1938. From banks to
advisory firms, tech companies to manufacturers, public relations
agencies to media companies, nonprofits and government agen-
cies, brainstorming dominates creative thinking today. But let’s ask
an obvious question: Is brainstorming really creative? It certainly
solved Osborn’s original problem: how to get everyone to speak.
And if you were to pick a problem and practice these rules in any
social setting, it would certainly involve others in an interesting
conversation. It can be fun to brainstorm. But, does it actually gen-
erate great ideas?
44
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
Let’s analyze the five rules of brainstorming.

First, brainstorming is a numbers game: Rule 1: The more oysters
you crack open, the greater your chance of finding a pearl. Rules 2
and 3 serve the first rule, to make sure that all ideas see the light
of day. As for Rule 4, it sounds promising. But if you take the first
three rules seriously, you might have a hundred ideas to build on. If
I say, “Let’s make our product glow red in moonlight and green in
sunlight,” and you say, “Let’s make it transparent,” what do we do?
Then someone else says, “Make it reflect the color of the sky.” And
that’s only three ideas. When we mix in the dozens of other ideas,
we have what I call “idea diarrhea.”
Last but not least, Rule 5, which, in my opinion, is a straitjacket.
You might have experienced this in your own work, where you real-
ize you’re solving the wrong problem and you shift your focus to
something else. That means finding the problem is part of the cre-
ative process—you don’t assume you have the right problem and
then go on to brainstorm solutions.
In fact, the evidence is unambiguous—brainstorming does not
work! In a seminal study on brainstorming from 1987, social psy-
chologists Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe collected ideas
from participants gathered in groups of four in a traditional brain-
storming session. They then took the ideas of four individuals who
worked separately and collected their ideas into one list. Research-
ers went on to compare the output from both groups and found
that participants who generated ideas alone produced significantly
more than individuals who worked in traditional group sessions:
Those who ideated alone produced twice as many unique ideas as
those who worked in a brainstorming group.
Increasingly, scientists have seen the creation of bias embed-
ded in the group brainstorming process—and the outsized impact
this has on creativity. Our biases are informed by group feedback.
And we have come to understand just how stifling group dynamics
can be on an individual’s creativity. Individuals tend to self-censor
in a variety of ways: they omit data, anchor on whatever idea was
presented first or most recently, choose what’s most convenient,
and so on. This process tends to compound over time and create
45
PART ONE
groupthink, which discourages creativity and individual responsibil-

ity. Consequently, academics and practitioners alike have become
disenchanted with the act of brainstorming as a formal method of
idea generation.
As we proceed through Think Bigger, it will become abundantly
clear why this process is far more creative than brainstorming.
What brainstorming really does is draw from the direct experience
of people in the room; in other words, information sharing and
surfacing. If I tell you, “Quick, throw out an idea!” you will draw
on what you already know. If the people in the room have lots of
experience—and diverse experience—brainstorming is very effi-
cient for solving ordinary problems. That’s because the sum total of
the experience in the room probably has all the solutions you need.
But note that Henry Ford did not ask his engineers to brainstorm.
He asked them to search the world for ideas to use—that’s how Pa
Klann found the moving meatpacking line.
Think about it this way: if five people brainstorm as a group, they
draw on the knowledge of only five people. We’ll call that “in-the-
box” thinking. In Think Bigger, we ask you to draw on the knowl-
edge of all humanity throughout recorded history, invest in hearing
the ideas of others, and expand your knowledge beyond your com-
fort zone. We will refer to that as “out-of-the-box” thinking. Where
brainstorming confines, Think Bigger expands. Which seems more
creative to you?
Brainstorming today goes by many different names. The most
popular is Design Thinking. There we find three major steps: cus-
tomer anthropology, brainstorming, and product prototyping.
Think Bigger has nothing to say about the first and last aspects—
customer anthropology and prototyping are fine. Think Bigger
replaces the middle step: brainstorming. There are countless other
methods like Design Thinking that embed brainstorming at their
core—especially forms of research, analysis, and implementation.
For all of them, Think Bigger has nothing to say about those other
steps. But when it comes time to get your creative ideas, that’s
when you need Think Bigger.
46
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
CREATIVE SPACE
Does your physical environment play a role in your creativity? Was

there something special about say, Newton’s apple tree? I won-
dered, so I looked it up. The tree still exists (figure 2.2)!
This is the very tree that Newton sat under 350 years ago. Is
there something special about this particular apple tree? It doesn’t
seem very inspirational to me. It looks quite ordinary. And the sur-
rounding lawn, buildings, and other trees look ordinary too.
Now, take a look at the photos in figure 2.3. As you might guess,
these are Google’s offices. Many companies around the world imi-
tate this style to help their employees be more creative.
Does it work? Alas, we have no evidence that it does. We might
ask the Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “Where did you
get your idea?” For Google itself really is a great innovation. Ini-
tially, we know they got specific elements of their idea inside the
dull graduate school cubicles at Stanford University, then in a hum-
drum garage where they set up their first office. As far as we can tell,
Figure 2.2 The tree at Sir Isaac Newton’s home in Grantham, England.
Courtesy of the BBC.
47
PART ONE
A B
C
D
Figure 2.3a-d Scenes from Google offices.

Courtesy of Business Insider and Wikimedia
Commons.
the unimpressive physical spaces they occupied in those formative

moments had nothing to do with the quality of their idea.
We find the same thing for Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Micro-
soft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and just about any innovator
you can name—it’s often the garage. Even our favorite mystery
writer, Agatha Christie, had her aha moment for Murder on the Ori-
ent Express in a place as unremarkable as the bathtub. There are
48
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
countless examples of ordinary places where people came up with

creative ideas. Google actually states that putting people in “non-
ordinary” settings stimulates the right side of the brain. But we now
know that’s a myth. If you work in a room with red polka dots on
the wall, it doesn’t open your mind to new possibilities. It puts red
polka dots into your memory. Your next idea will anchor on the red
polka dots.
The most creative wall is blank. It allows your mind to wander
freely, looking for connections. It’s lack of stimulation that you
want, which lets your brain do its work without distraction.
The best real-world test for this comes from Bell Laboratories. A
mecca of twentieth-century innovation, the company had two New
Jersey sites: Murray Hill and Holmdel. The Murray Hill site was
an old, factory-like building from 1941 that placed function over
beauty with its utilitarian space, narrow halls, plywood offices, and
movable, clunky furnishings. It cost three million dollars to fit out.
The Holmdel site looked like a spaceship with a futuristic facade
made of 6,800 panes of glass, a reflecting pool, an atrium with 3,600
plants, and a water tower shaped like a transistor. It cost thirty-
seven million dollars—more than twelve times Murray Hill.
Which site was more creative? Frumpy old Murray Hill pro-
duced the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, and at least three
Nobel Prizes. Sleek, shiny Holmdel gave us the push-button tele-
phone, touch-tone dialing, the fax machine, voice mail, the cell
phone, microwaves, and at least one Nobel Prize–winning scientist.
Together these two headquarters produced the first communica-
tions satellite, digital cell networks, and fiber optic cable.
They were both creative! And it had nothing to do with their
respective designs.
We can say two things about creative space: first, no distractions.
You need a place to think on your own. Second, you need a way to
run into others in a casual way, like around the coffee pot, water
cooler, or break lounge. That’s it. Green plants might make you
more cheerful, which is good—and dark, dingy spaces might make
you feel low, which is bad. But creativity is not about what goes on
around you. It’s about what goes on in your head. If you have ever
49
PART ONE
been to a slaughterhouse, it’s a grisly, bloody scene. But there, Pa

Klann had a great idea.
MIND WANDERING
Let’s go back to the question we asked earlier: when you think back
to the last time you had a really creative idea, where were you and
what were you doing? The most common responses to this ques-
tion are standing in the shower, driving in the car, exercising, clean-
ing at home, or chopping vegetables for dinner. It seems many of
the answers to our hard questions and tricky problems come to
us miraculously, without any effort, when we aren’t even trying to
work them out. All we have to do is let our mind wander—which is
no trivial thing. We actually spend about four hours a day like that.
That’s a quarter of our waking lives.
Your mind also wanders at key moments during tasks that call
for more attention. When you do a math problem, part of it’s easy
enough and your mind doesn’t wander. It marches right along.
Then you hit a snag. You pause. Hmm . . . Your mind wanders.
Ah! Got it. You see an answer to that problem-within-a-problem.
Then your brain marches along again. Mind-wandering gives you
the creative parts of your solution, even when you’re focused on
your task.
Mind-wandering is a part of being human—it’s what we do
naturally and it has a variety of psychological benefits for us. But
rather than thinking of mind-wandering and daydreaming as magic-
makers, we must think of them as supplements to the real labor
that’s done when we put our brains to work to come up with our
best ideas. Agatha Christie did not just take a lot of baths to conjure
up her detective stories—she worked hard at her desk, hour after
hour, on the craft of writing and storytelling. This built a founda-
tion from which the “magic” of mind-wandering could potentially
be valuable and available.
There is plenty of research that shows you’re more likely to
have your most valuable aha moments while working. Through
50
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
the lens of Learning+Memory, we see that our best ideas come to

us when we’re on task. While it might feel good to have that feel-
ing as you stand in the shower or sit by the beach, those moments
are not as insightful as we first think. Despite feeling more impor-
tant and creative at the time, when ideators look back at ideas
that came as aha moments, they tend to view them as less creative
and less important than those that didn’t. Why is this? For mind-
wandering to lead to an aha moment, you need to have enough
on the shelves of your memory to make up the pieces of your
new idea. It seems the aha moment serves us best when we use it
as the spark that keeps us inspired when we inevitably hit road-
blocks during ideation.
As we look into the history of the aha moment and try to pin
it down in a practical sense, we might find some benefit in know-
ing that it’s in our DNA. That’s right—chimpanzees can have aha
moments too. Meet Sultan, a chimpanzee from sunny Tenerife
in the Canary Islands. As part of a research experiment, German
scientist Wolfgang Köhler locked Sultan in a big wire cage with a
ripe banana on the ground outside, just beyond his reach. On the
ground inside the cage was a short bamboo stick. On the ground
outside the cage, closer than the banana, was a longer bamboo pole.
Sultan stared at the banana. Then he picked up the short stick and
poked it through the wall of the cage to pull the banana toward him.
But the stick wasn’t long enough to reach.
Next, Sultan ripped off a loose piece of wire from the cage. He
straightened it out and stuck it through the cage wall. Once more,
it was too short to reach the banana.
Seemingly dejected, he plopped down on the ground. Stared at
the banana. Looked around the cage. Then, he spotted the longer
bamboo pole outside. He looked back and forth between the pole
and the shorter stick and suddenly jumped into action. He quickly
picked up the short stick and poked it through the cage wall to reach
the longer pole. He pulled the pole toward him until he could reach
it. Then he took the long pole and stuck it through the cage wall to
reach the banana at long last. In victory, Sultan slid the banana back
toward the cage until he could grab it. Success!
51
PART ONE
The story of Sultan dates from 1914. It’s the first recorded
instance of a scientist observing an aha moment as it happens—and
depending on your perspective, it might appear that Isaac Newton
and a Canary Island chimpanzee had essentially the same experi-
ence. Köhler certainly thought he saw something quite significant in
Sultan, and he went on to conduct the experiment with many other
chimpanzees. He notes that each time, after seemingly giving up,
the chimp “gazes about him.” In the course of these tests, there are
always some long pauses during which the animals scrutinize the
whole visible area. Then comes the moment that Köhler calls Ein-
sicht, or “insight” in English. It’s as if a lightbulb flashed in Sultan’s
head. The solution came in an instant, and Sultan sprang into action.
Köhler was one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, where “a
thing cannot be understood by the study of its constituent parts
but only by the study of it as a totality.” In Think Bigger, we look
from multiple perspectives: a totality can be understood by know-
ing its constituent parts. Similarly, by looking at the big picture, we
can understand different pieces from alternate perspectives. Sultan
has to have the pieces of the puzzle in his mind. Otherwise, the aha
moment will never come.
I showed you earlier how modern neuroscience overturned the
idea of a left-analytical and right-creative brain. The new model
of the brain is called Learning+Memory. It fills out the picture of
what actually happens in our minds as the pieces come together.
Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on this
model. He explains, “Memory is the glue that binds our mental life
together. . . . We are who we are in large part because of what we
learn and what we remember . . . The human memory system forms
abstract internal representations that arise from previous exposure
to similar images or experiences.”
Neuroscience shows that all thinking is an act of memory in
some form. That includes imagination, creativity, innovation, and
other variations of “new” thoughts. That means the components of
the thought are not new. Only the combination is new.
Let’s do a test to see if we can do what Sultan did—put together
the components we need to solve a problem.
52
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
Tell me: Is this correct?

28
+ 32
60
I imagine you said “yes.” Very good. I bet you got it fast.
Now try this one: Is it correct?
κ η’
+ λ β’
ξ’
I’m guessing your brain just froze. You have no idea if it’s right or
wrong. If you happen to be a scholar of ancient Greek, you’ll realize
this equation as the same as the previous one: 28 + 32 = 60. The first
answer came to you from your memory. There are eight symbols:
six numbers, a plus sign, and the underline. They were already on
the shelves of your brain. And you have done similar calculations
countless times. The knowledge, symbols, and indicated procedure
are all stored in your memory. They quickly come together and you
see the answer.
In the second equation, five of those symbols are probably not
in your memory, so when you automatically search for them, you
come up empty—except those of you who know ancient Greek.
You might think the first equation is purely logical, just a math-
ematical formula. It’s not at all creative. But if that were so, you
would get the second one right as well. No, there is always a cre-
ative task of recombining from memory to match the problem at
hand. You had a creative solution to a logical problem. Pure logic
is impossible. The content of a logical problem comes together
through creative combination.
Here’s another creative exercise. Take a few moments to come
up with a totally new word that rhymes with “airplane.”
Did you do it?
Here’s what I came up with:
stairpane carmain artain tropain
53
PART ONE
My guess is that your answers look similar in the following way:

they are made up of letter clusters already familiar to you. Stair,
pane, car, main, art, pain, plus the second half of mountain and the
first half of tropical—these are already in my memory. Just like the
math problem above, your mind pulls the discrete pieces from the
shelves of your mind to combine them in a different way. The only
difference between the math problem and the language problem is
the content—numbers versus letters. The method is the same.
Through Learning+Memory, we’re constantly retrieving memo-
ries and making connections. Even when we see something new, we
recognize certain parts of it. So we “see” both with our eyes and our
brain. We can only see a dog if we already know what a dog looks
like. If not, we just see a blob of color and shape. This was one of
the earliest discoveries that came from modern psychology. In the
late nineteenth century, Hermann von Helmholtz showed that per-
ception includes rapid guessing and hypothesis testing in the brain:
“Is that a dog? Yes, it’s a dog!” This happens so fast you don’t even
feel it. But if it’s dark out, or the dog is far away, or if it’s a strange
kind of dog you have never seen, it takes longer, and you can actu-
ally experience the processing happen.
Kandel describes what happens in our minds when we’re in a
room and the lights go off. Our brain retains, as an act of memory,
what we saw in the room. It’s an extreme case of fill-in-the-blanks.
The distant dog is a medium example. But even when you see the
obvious dog, you guess what else you know about dogs—for exam-
ple, to judge whether this one is friendly or not.
In mind-wandering, we do the same: we fill in the blanks with
what our memory expects. In the words of psychologist Richard
Gregory, “Our brains create much of what we see by adding what
“ought” to be there. We only realize that the brain is guessing when
it guesses wrongly.”
We now see that creative combination for innovation is along
the same continuum as everyday thinking. They are both acts of
imagination based on memory. The human brain is the earth’s
greatest warehouse. The Library of Alexandria of ancient Greece
once held a copy of everything ever written in the Western world,
54
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
or so the legend goes. Your little old brain holds a lot more than
that—and it adds more every day. From the moment you’re born,
your mind absorbs information, breaks it down, and stores it on
shelves of memory. Later, when we need to think, our brains pull
together memories from different shelves to form new thoughts. All
thinking, logical and creative, comes from memory.
When we look back on Sultan the chimp, we realize he was able to
figure out how to retrieve the banana because of his memory. He had
to see the pieces first—the long and short sticks—before he could
use them for a solution. And this gives us a clue to the quality of our
ideas. They’re only as good as the pieces we put together. If you’re
stuck on a problem, you’re probably missing a piece of the puzzle. It’s
not on the shelves of your brain. Go out into the world and find it.
Now that we know how the brain works to make new combinations,
we can see that creativity is within our grasp. It’s no longer a mystery.
Anyone can learn how to be creative and how to apply creativity to any
problem. Still, it’s important to understand that just because anyone
can learn how to be creative, that doesn’t mean generating big ideas is
easy. It’s not. Creative thinking is truly accessible to all, as long as we
learn how to effectively structure the creative process and stick to the
structure we put in place. It’s work. And with some effort, I’ll show
you how to be creative while maximizing your chances at a big idea.
WORKING IN TEAMS
Are you more creative if you work alone or in a group? Decades

of research shows that we’re more creative when we start the ide-
ation process first by ourselves. After having thought about an idea
alone, we can enter a group setting. In thinking individually first,
and then sharing with a group, we can avoid falling into the collec-
tion of biases that lead to groupthink.
Reflect on what we’ve learned so far about the way our brains
form thoughts and ideas: our brains naturally collect the pieces
from our memory shelves that already exist, leaving out the bits
we need to search for. That’s why it’s important for you to first
55
PART ONE
identify and pull together the nodes of information relevant to the

problem that you personally have. Only then can you move back
into a group setting, where the main point of the group work lies
in what you gain from others. Your fellow group members will act
as a reminder of the missing information nodes that exist in your
brain that you may have forgotten—or give you access to informa-
tion missing from your current inventory.
Throughout the Think Bigger six-step method, at every step, I
always want you to complete the step alone first. Then, if you’re
working in a group, share the information you learned and your
ideas with the whole team. If you’re working in a group setting, a
general rule we follow in the Think Bigger method is to never work
with more than five people per group. Teams larger than that are
likely to lose individual performance as members get lost in the
mix or silenced, which is what we want to avoid as we learn to
Think Bigger.
THE LINK BETWEEN FREEDOM AND CONSTRAINT
I can still vividly remember the first experiment I ever conducted.

I was in the first months of my PhD program at Stanford Univer-
sity and decided to set up a room at one of the most famous and
highly rated preschools in the country: the Bing Nursery School.
In a small classroom, with a single window and a table at its center,
I placed toys all around. I wanted to see how motivated the children
I invited would be to spend the time required to build a full Lego
set. At the time, many studies spoke on the importance of giving
people choice to motivate them. So I placed a Lego set, with its
bright blocks in primary colors, as the star of the show—dead cen-
ter on the table, surrounded by the other toys.
As these three- and four-year-olds entered the room, they would
look at the Lego set on the table, smile, and examine the other
toys around them. After a few minutes, they would sit down by the
table, and rather than pick up any Lego bricks or other toys, they
would stare out the window. I couldn’t understand why. Was there
56
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
something wrong with the Lego set? Did they not want to play with
any toys? These children simply waited for me to dismiss them
from the room to go back to their regular classes. At first, I thought
the toys I chose weren’t interesting enough. So I checked out many
different toy stores in the area with the hope of finding something
these children would like. But over and over, as the Bing Nursery
School children came into my room, piled up with all kinds of toys
and trinkets, they would sit quietly in their chairs and stare out the
window.
It was strange to me that in the condition in which the chil-
dren were supposed to be the most responsive, with a multitude of
options surrounding them, the opposite was happening. Despite all
the options around them, they continued to simply look out the win-
dow. Upon observing this behavior, I decided to get rid of all the
other toys and keep one primary game in the room: the Lego set.
Now, when the children came into the room, they would go to
the lone table at the center of the room, stare at the box of Lego sit-
ting on its surface, and then begin to build with the blocks. Often,
when their time was up, I would have to interrupt their keen focus
to send them back to class. Suddenly, it seemed like they were
intrinsically motivated—and not because they had a lot of choices
to make. Rather, it was because they had only one.
It’s important to remember that at the time, scientific consen-
sus spoke of the importance of giving people choice to motivate
them—and the prevailing wisdom was, the more, the merrier. But
what I observed was the opposite. I wondered why. Fast forward a
few years after my failed experiment at the Bing Nursery School to
when I began my doctoral dissertation. As I was thinking through
past experiments, I began to ask myself the question more seriously:
“What was actually going on there? Is it possible that some part
of what I was seeing was something scientists hadn’t yet thought
about?” I wondered, are people motivated by unlimited choice? Or,
do they need constraints? In particular, do they need limits? Thus,
the Jam Study was born.
Near Stanford University, there was an upscale grocery store
offering people seemingly endless choices. The typical fare included
57
PART ONE
hundreds of types of mustard, mayonnaises, and vinegars, nearly

hundreds of seasonal fruits and vegetables—and how could I forget
the countless varieties of olive oil? The list goes on. It felt like a won-
derland of options. So I set up two tables just inside the entrance:
one had six kinds of jam, and the other had twenty-four. Surely the
table with more options would lead to higher sales. Right?
Sixty percent of people who entered the store stopped at the
table with twenty-four. Forty percent stopped at the table with
six. So far, so good. But what happened next changed the trajec-
tory of our collective understanding of choice. I noticed that of
the people who encountered 24 jams, only three percent went on
to buy a jar of jam—whereas, of the people who encountered six,
30 percent of them bought a jar of jam. In other words, the result
was exactly the opposite of what I—and the consensus of my field
to that point—predicted.
Since the Jam Study was published in the year 2000, there have
been over nine hundred follow-up studies that have gone on to
show the negative consequences of offering people more and
more choices. For instance, don’t give people too many choices
for investment, or they won’t choose any—the same is true about
health plan options. And the more you look for that perfect soul-
mate, the more options you see, and the worse they get. Even when
you give people creative tasks, like writing an essay or creating a
piece of art, the more choices they get, the worse they do.
Is there an optimal number of choices then? A choice of six jams
must be better than a choice of two. But twenty-four is too many.
What about twelve? Or fifteen? As it turns out, the psychologist
George Miller has done important research toward showing us the
right number. He found that people were able to keep seven items
in mind as they made a choice—plus or minus two. More than that
and the result is cognitive overload, where people tend to get con-
fused and make a bad choice—or as with the jams, no choice at all.
Inventors, artists, and musicians, the people we deem most cre-
ative, have long known the value of putting constraints on choice.
They work within forms and structures, many of which they break
only to establish new boundaries. If choice is indeed something we
58
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
make, as we make art and make music, then surely we can look
to those creative disciplines for guidance. The great jazz musician
Wynton Marsalis once said, “You need to have some restrictions in
jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that’s not jazz.
Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise, it might sound like
noise.” And jazz is the “freest” of all musical forms!
Thus, the Think Bigger method inherently balances these two
competing and seemingly opposing forces. The desire for you to
feel free is met but in a cognitively doable way. That’s why I give
you the structure of a Choice Map and limit the materials within
it. Without the constraints Think Bigger provides you with, your
ideas end up as “noise.” The method offers a deliberate, tactical
way of thinking that balances your need for freedom of thought
and expression with guiding structure. Formally, we embody these
limits in three specific tools that help you build your new idea. Let’s
end this chapter with an overview of the three tools of Think Bigger.
THREE CREATIVE TOOLS
Typically, when we need an idea—and not just any idea, but a really
good one—we collect as many as possible. We might brainstorm
endlessly or use crowdsourcing to generate myriad ideas. The rule
of thumb is that for every 10,000 ideas, there is at least one good one.
With that logic, you ought to just keep collecting as many as you
can. There is bound to be a unicorn somewhere in the mix.
And, how do you pick the unicorn? We assume that it will be easy
to spot because it’s self-evident and, when it’s not, everyone can
simply vote for their favorite idea and we’ll just pick based on the
consensus. Anyone or any organization who has tried this method
knows that, at best, this approach yields mixed success.
Think Bigger is the opposite. The three tools I introduce you to
assume that you, the creator, are interested in quality over quantity.
If you use the Think Bigger method, then every idea you gener-
ate will be, by definition, both useful and novel because those two
criteria are embedded in the structure of the method. You will still
59
PART ONE
have options to choose from—but rather than quantity, we go for

quality. And in the Think Bigger method, we do not assume that
the best of the pile will naturally rise to the top. Rather, we have a
deliberate method to choose the best solution.
And now, the three tools.
The first tool is called the Choice Map. It serves as your personal
library for that one problem, where you store all the elements as
you build your idea. You will note from the road map in chapter 1
(see Figure 1.18) that the Choice Map is the tool you will use to
generate multiple solutions to your chosen problem. You have your
problem at the top of the Choice Map, you’ve broken the main prob-
lem up into a manageable set of subproblems—typically around
five. For each subproblem, you then collect unique tactics that
address each subproblem. Once you have a completed Choice Map,
for example a 5 × 5 grid, you now have all the materials needed to
create multiple solutions that solve your problem. For every solu-
tion you create, you pick one tactic per subproblem and combine
them in different ways, thus ensuring that every solution is useful
and nonredundant from the prior solutions. For example, take our
standard 5 × 5 Choice Map—if you were to combine every possible
set of five tactics, you have 3,125 potential new ideas. Thus, the
Choice Map enables you to create multiple novel, useful solutions
for your problem. The Choice Map gives you the opportunity to
find an optimal solution. Steps 1, 2, and 4 guide you through the
process of creating your Choice Map while Step 5 shows you how
to Choice Map so you can generate myriad ideas.
In Think Bigger, you will use Choice Mapping for idea genera-
tion. This is my alternative to brainstorming.
The second tool, the Big Picture Score, is what you use for your
selection criteria. The Big Picture Score considers all the different
wants associated with the problem. How does this solution need
to feel to the people who matter: the creators, the potential users,
and—let’s not forget—potential allies or competitors. With the Big
Picture Score in hand, you will be able to compare and contrast the
various ideas you generated. You can then identify your potential
unicorn(s).
60
THE CREATIVE BRAIN
In Think Bigger, we think about what we want our solution to

feel like before we start generating ideas because our “wants” give
focus during both the ideation process and the selection process.
Thus, in Step 3 I will guide you through how to create the “Big
Picture.”
The third tool is the Third Eye Test. You might think that once
you “see” the new idea in your mind’s eye—the aha moment—
you’re done. But what you see is a fantasy. A creation of your mind.
But, will others see it too? In this step, we have three unique kinds
of feedback that we collect in order to learn if our idea is working
the way we want it to and for deciding if it is worth taking to the
next step. This tool comes last, as the sixth and final step. It is the
last step before implementation.
Now we move to Part II and start our Six Step journey.
61
PART TWO
3
STEP 1: CHOOSE THE PROBLEM
E instein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d

spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five min-
utes thinking about solutions.”
It is here Think Bigger begins. You might have picked up this
book with a problem in mind. Or maybe you have many problems
and you don’t know which to choose. The first step in Think Bigger
aims to help you in either case: choose a problem you want to solve
and can solve.
In Think Bigger, you learn not to take your problems as self-
evident. And like Einstein, you write and rewrite, frame and reframe
your problem from myriad perspectives in order to discover the
problem that is most meaningful and feasible to solve. It is the step
we often spend the least amount of time on, even though it is the
step we should spend the most amount of time on. If you find the
right problem to solve, you set yourself up for success.
HOW DO YOU SAVE THE WORLD?
I write this book in the midst of the worst epidemic the world has
seen since the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed an estimated fifty
million people. As of July 2022, COVID-19 has killed an estimated
PART TWO
6.4 million people worldwide. We are still in the thick of it, so the
full measure of devastation is yet to be known.
As a professor at a prestigious university brimming with smart
and inquisitive minds, I often hear students say noble things like
“I want to save the world.” COVID provided a stark occasion to do
exactly that. But with such an enormous problem, with so many
complications, where do you start? Thankfully, enough brave inno-
vators stepped up to show us the way. In each case, they found a
smaller problem to solve in their domain: either to help contain the
disease or repair much of the damage it causes. One by one, innova-
tion by innovation, they helped save the world.
Let’s meet one of those innovators. Stacey Boland, a project
engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was working
on a satellite mission to track different types of air pollution and
correlate that data with human health on the ground. Then COVID-
19 grounded the world and her office shut down. She went home.
From there, she stayed in touch with her team, and for weeks, they
wondered what was going to happen. Finally, they decided enough
was enough—instead of contemplating what could be, they decided
to ask what they could do given the circumstances. They were engi-
neers. They were used to solving complex problems. Was there
something they could do?
The team’s two leaders, David Van Buren and Roger Gibbs, held
daily WebEx meetings asking the group, “Is there anything any of us
could do to help?” They would read the headlines and make a list:
• Can we solve the problem of the mask shortage?

• Can we fix disrupted supply chains?
• Can we create a contraption that stops people from touching their
faces?
• Can we create an alternative hand sanitizer to help the shortage?
These were all important problems and they all needed to be

solved—but the JPL team knew that in order to be successful, they
had to choose a problem in which they were experts and had access
to the right resources. Time was of the essence. They decided the
66
right thing to do was focus only on problems they knew they could
solve. So, every day, the JPL team went on WebEx and revised their
standing list. With no more information than you or me, they sim-
ply asked, given their expertise, what problem could they solve?
Then came the news of the ventilator shortage. Due to a lack of
ventilators and disrupted medical supply chains, COVID patients
in the ICU who likely could survive if they had a ventilator were
at risk of dying in large numbers. Van Buren realized the JPL team
had incredible engineering talent and, despite not having medi-
cal expertise, they could do something about the ventilator short-
age. They were space engineers, after all—they build machines for
unmanned missions that have to work. Despite having no experi-
ence with human life support machines, Van Buren decided this
was something they could help with and recruited a team of engi-
neers who wanted to help—Stacey Boland among them.
The team spoke twice daily so they could focus on their solvable
and meaningful problem: How can we create a ventilator that will
help alleviate the ventilator shortage? During and after these meet-
ings, Stacey wondered which parts of ventilators were necessary
in saving the lives of COVID patients. The ventilators being used
by hospitals had a large number of functions and were thus very
complicated machines. Out of all these functions, what did doctors
need that applied just to COVID? Could they make a useful ventila-
tor with fewer parts? Could they make it more portable? Could they
simplify it so even the average person could operate a ventilator? By
interviewing experts in the medical field, Stacey and her team real-
ized that in most COVID cases, the functions in a fully equipped
ventilator simply weren’t necessary.
The team continued to examine their initial problem, in hopes
they’d develop a question that was more specific: How do we make
a ventilator that treats COVID patients, feels user-friendly to doc-
tors, and avoids disrupted supply chains?
Immediately, they began to build the blueprint for an easy-
to-use ventilator, with Stacey writing its manual to define how it
needed to work before being designed—all remotely via WebEx.
The manual was so easy to understand that it didn’t matter what
67
PART TWO
language you spoke—the diagram made it clear which piece was

meant for what purpose.
There is a famous piece of NASA folklore from the Apollo 13
mission that all its engineers know well. In space, the main systems
shut down and the crew had to improvise a solution with just the
equipment on board the spacecraft. Stacey and the JPL team took
up the same spirit: to use only parts they already knew how to get
in the disrupted COVID supply chains.
The JPL team’s ventilator, dubbed VITAL, used only parts that
could be obtained through the team’s existing commercial and
manufacturing channels. Working with NASA, under management
by Caltech, they received license agreements to work with twenty-
eight global partners (out of the ninety-six proposals received) to
ensure regular ventilators could be manufactured when and where
they were needed in the world. The prototype for the VITAL was
the size of a briefcase, weighed around ten pounds, and used only
four hundred parts—compared with the 2,500–2,800 pieces that
made up a regular ventilator.
Upon sending the prototype to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York
City, a COVID hot spot during the start of the pandemic, they
received a remarkable response from the medical staff: the VITAL
ventilator not only performed well, but it both felt and looked like
it belonged in a hospital. It could be used anywhere at any time
due to its small, portable size. The instructions were clear and the
device was simple in its build—with half the buttons and knobs of
a regular ventilator. Where most ventilators only allow respiratory
therapists to use them on patients, the VITAL ventilator was simple
and functional enough that the FDA approved its emergency use for
all trained healthcare professionals. Look at the two images depict-
ing a regular ventilator compared with the JPL ventilator:
In only thirty-seven days, Boland and her team went through all the
steps of Think Bigger. The first key step was finding the right prob-
lem to solve. Note how they narrowed the problem in steps: from
“COVID” to “ventilator,” and then to a “certain kind of ventilator.”
They found a problem both ambitious enough to matter yet realistic
enough to be within their grasp. That’s how you change the world.
68
Figure 3.1 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Team with their iteration of a ventilator for COVID-19
patients. NASA.
Figure 3.2 A standard ventilator. Wikimedia Commons.

PART TWO
PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS
Let’s hear from Einstein again: “One must develop an instinct for
what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”
This advice is simple but profound. You want to stretch yourself
as far as you can but no further. Otherwise, you will fail. And you
find that level of difficulty not by some analytical formula but by
“instinct”—that is, you feel your way to it. The VITAL team did
that. And that’s what we do in Step 1 of Think Bigger.
Here I give you the tools to help you find a problem you care
about and then define it in a way that helps you search for unusual
solutions that can make your big idea a reality. As you embark on
this journey, you will work on exercises that help you state and
restate your problem the same way the Jet Lab team did—to arrive
at a problem you find meaningful and solvable.
You state your problem as the first element of your Choice Map
(see table 3.1). To begin, your problem is just a draft. That means
it can change, and probably will, as you work your way through the
other five steps of Think Bigger.
Writing down your problem is key. The Center for the Interdis-
ciplinary Study of Language and Literacy tells us that writing forces
us to focus, plan, and organize our thoughts. Writing is a creative
act—you actually create your thoughts as you write them down. If
you have more than one thought, write them all down. Then study
what you wrote. You want to find the version of your problem that
best reflects what you actually think.
table 3.1
Think Bigger Choice Map
Main Problem:
Subproblem 1 X X X X X
70
If you have a problem you know you want to solve, I want you
to take out a piece of paper and write it down in less than three
sentences. Remember this is just a draft.
In some cases, you might want to solve a problem that mat-
ters to you. In other instances, you might be stuck solving a
problem for others. No matter the circumstance, take a few min-
utes to write the problem down and do your best to phrase it
using words that spark meaning in you. The more you are able
to articulate your problem using words that transcend their own
meaning, the more equipped you will be to stay inspired in the
next steps and the more likely you will be to create more mean-
ingful solutions.
It might also be possible that you have many problems spinning
around in your head that you know are useful to solve—these prob-
lems might come up as you watch the news, during certain parts of
your morning routine, or at work. The list of problems will grow
very long as you look at each aspect of your life and you can’t solve
them all. You have to choose a meaningful problem to solve for. To
do so, complete the following thought exercises.
Take out a piece of paper and write down your answers to the
following prompts. For each prompt, try to jot down five to seven
items. Work on this exercise throughout the week, during different
times of the day.
1. Identify the problems you deal with every day that you wish you could
solve. Don’t limit yourself to what’s possible—go beyond and write
down everything you can think of. Then, every day, at the end of the day,
reflect on these problems that were so annoying to you that you want to
solve them the most. Which problems continue to come up? If you have
a redundant or repetitive problem, that redundancy might become the
reason to choose to solve it.
2. Think about the topics that interest you or the ones you would like to
learn more about. Often, in our daily lives, we get so caught up with
work and errands that we forget we have the potential to learn. Every
day I want you to jot down the things that interest you most. These
interests could reveal the problem you’re most passionate about, or
71
PART TWO
they could become something you learn more about in the process of
problem-solving.
3. Find the things you care about most in your daily life. When we
notice what we care about—our meals, our pets, reading a good book
at the end of the day—we automatically begin to look for ways to
make those moments better. Make note of when you feel that deep
sense of purpose because it’s within those moments we find what
matters to us most.
Look through your full list of answers. If you see certain prob-
lems that arise more than once, zero in on them. If your identified
problem, interest, or purpose seems too broad, consider the smaller
problems within that problem. For instance, if your interest lies in
recreation, maybe you don’t see enough opportunities for adults to
partake in organized sports. If you focus on the arts, you might feel
that more people should be exposed to classical music. If you’re
professionally interested in managing an organization, maybe you
notice your work team could use some help on a project. In your
lists, you will begin to see your motivations surface. When you nar-
row them down enough, you will begin to see the formation of a
problem that you can and want to solve.
Once you have thought all this through and have identified a
problem you believe you want to work on, write down a descrip-
tion of it in a few sentences. This is an important step in identifying
your problem, since putting the words in your head onto a physical
piece of paper helps you better understand the problem you want
to solve for, and why. Writing it down will help you concretize your
thinking and become more precise about the problem you’re inter-
ested in solving.
In my Think Bigger course, my MBA and Engineering students
have used Think Bigger to challenge themselves to address prob-
lems of all kinds. Some try to take on problems that lead to the
creation of a product, like a skin cream made of all-natural prod-
ucts that preserves well or an unobtrusive type of scaffolding that
blends in with surrounding buildings. Other students take on social
causes, like making composting accessible to all neighborhoods in
72
the city or closing the education gap among first-generation immi-

grants. Yet other students take on problems related to cutting-edge
technology, like creating a better cybersecurity platform for small
businesses or creating an app that connect students taking the
same trains home so they can travel safely together in New York.
You might ask at this point, “Why a problem? Can’t innovation
just happen by itself, without a problem to solve? Stating a problem
puts constraints on our thinking. Shouldn’t we think freely, without
constraints? The wildest ideas are the most creative. Reach for the
stars. Dream the impossible dream. Right?”
Wrong.
There is a long list of creations that inventors devised without
trying to solve a problem. And they fail. Nobody wants them. The
invention might work. But remember our definition of innovation:
something new and useful. If nobody wants to use it, then it’s not
an innovation. And “problem” simply means that someone wants
something but has a hard time getting it. It does not have to be
life-or-death, like a COVID ventilator. Nancy Johnson solved the
problem of cheaper ice cream. I am glad she did.
Your initial list of problems serves another function too: it
reminds you that there are lots of problems worth solving. So if
your problem statement changes through the steps of Think Big-
ger, it doesn’t mean your previous statement was wrong. You’re
just changing direction to solve a different problem. Each change
refines your own understanding of what’s possible and what you
truly want to solve.
THE WRONG PROBLEM
Paul Nutt, a professor at Ohio State University, studied the busi-

ness decisions of 358 companies over twenty years. He found that
half of the decisions failed because they aimed to solve the wrong
problem. A common mistake was imposing a solution, such as “How
should we take advantage of this new technology.” You use technol-
ogy to solve a problem—so you have to know what that problem is.
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PART TWO
This error is easy to make. So often, problems seem self-evident.

Let’s not waste time on that. Time is of the essence—let’s speed
ahead to solutions.
Think of the last time you were placed in a large group—let’s
say, in a conference room with six other colleagues—and told to
solve a problem in your company. Did you and your colleagues ask
one another if you were on the same page? It is more than likely
you were quick to assume the colleague who you grab lunch with
everyday identified the same problem you did, and the same could
be said for the manager leading your group meeting—they believe
everyone is thinking about the same problem they are. After all, you
work for the same company, you’re colleagues who see each other
every day, you know the pitfalls of your business, so you must all be
on the same page. So, you jump straight into it—a quick meeting to
solve this problem your boss wants you to solve will give you thirty
minutes back in your day. You start spitting out solutions and it
feels great! You’re getting somewhere! That is, until, your manager
scratches their head, takes a step back, looks at the mess on the
white board and says, “What is it we’re trying to do here?” There is
far less consensus and far more complexity to the problem than you
all originally thought. And, realistically, there is no way for every-
one to be on the same page—you all bring with you a diversity of
perspectives and opinions, so how could you arrive with the same,
specific problem in your mind?
This phenomenon was observed in a study by Thomas Wedell-
Wedellsborg, where 106 top executives reported that half the time,
they only realized what the real problem was after wasting lots of
time and energy trying to solve what they thought was the problem.
Nutt and Wedell-Wedellsborg draw the same conclusion: people
tend to neglect the step of problem definition and rush right into
solutions. Usually to their detriment.
This method of assuming everyone understands the same prob-
lem works out fine for simple problems, or personal ones. But for
complex problems, failing to identify the right problem at the right
level results in confusion, wasted effort, and bad outputs. If you
74
want to find the right solutions, the way to begin in a group set-
ting is to go around the room and ask each person to individually
describe what he or she sees as the problem. That way, everyone
can first understand the ways in which the problem is defined and
framed. Right from the start, you begin to see the myriad complexi-
ties attached to your problem and can work to create one collective
problem definition that everyone can solve for.
One source of error in the process of problem definition is the
human tendency to think we know more than we actually do. The
psychologists Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman refer to this as the
“knowledge illusion effect,” in which we overestimate our expertise
and underestimate the complexity of things. If you were to ask your
friend how a toilet flushes, they might say, “Well, yes, all you do is
push the handle down and the tank is drained to release the pres-
sure and flush the water out.” Or if you were to ask a colleague if
they understand how a microwave oven works, most will reply, “Of
course.” But, if you were to ask them to draw a diagram and explain
exactly how either of these examples works in their entirety, I can
say with a high degree of certainty that none of them could do it.
The knowledge illusion effect’s usefulness extends far beyond
our understanding of simple objects. This concept can be directly
applied to how we think about almost everything—snowflakes,
microwave ovens, economic policies, and global warming. If you
consider the presence of this effect in regard to a team setting,
where many individuals suffering from it are setting out to solve
a problem together, it’s a wonder any problems get solved at all.
That’s why it’s so important to understand our biases before iden-
tifying a problem. If we don’t, the chance that we solve the correct
problem at hand is reduced.
In Think Bigger, we devote a full step to identifying a problem
that’s large enough to matter but small enough to be solved. It
should also be a problem that everyone involved understands and
wants to solve. This step is crucial and takes time, effort, revision,
and reflection to appropriately make a determination of the prob-
lem before you move on to solving it.
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PART TWO
STEP ANALYSIS
Once you pick out the problem from your longer list that you want
to set out to solve, rewrite it as a question of “how.”
For example, let’s say you want to grow your business by 10
percent this year. Rewrite that as “How do I grow my business?”
That’s what you need to figure out, whether it’s 9 percent or 11
percent, this year or next. Once you get your solution, you will
have an idea of what is possible and when. At that point you can
say, “By implementing my solution, I see how to grow my business
by 15 percent over nine months.” This kind of detail comes in your
implementation plan. It’s not part of solving the problem of how
to get there.
Our phrasing is also open-ended enough to permit many pos-
sible answers. A common mistake is to embed a single answer in
the question. For example, “How do I create a mobile application
to reduce food waste?” This assumes that the answer is a mobile
app. We rephrase that to say, “How do I reduce food waste?” Even
among my Think Bigger students, an average of 51 percent jump
to the idea that an app should be their solution—and while it very
well might be part of their inevitable solution, the app doesn’t nec-
essarily solve the problem they identified. A mobile app might not
even end up part of any solution, so you shouldn’t anchor on a
mobile app.
Closed questions reduce your chances of being creative by sug-
gesting there is a single “correct” solution to your problem. Open
questions give you more choices for creative solutions. This is true
even as you narrow your question. Remember that the VITAL team
chose a narrow problem within the massive COVID problem: ven-
tilators. But they did not say, “How do we adapt NASA technology
to make a ventilator?” They left the solution open. And the solution
did not use any NASA technology. It used simple parts they located
through NASA’s vast network of suppliers.
Once you’ve decided on your open-ended “how” question, we
test whether it’s too broad or narrow. Think of an upside-down pyr-
amid. Up top, at the widest level, you have a huge problem. At the
76
bottom, at the narrowest level, you have a tiny problem. In between

are different gradations. You move up or down the pyramid, making
your problem wider or narrower, until you find the right level.
We call this Step Analysis. Step up to widen your problem.
Step down to narrow it. Step up and your solution makes a bigger
impact, but it’s harder to solve. Step down and your solution makes
a smaller impact, but it’s easier to solve. Your motivation works
both ways: you want to make a bigger impact, but if the problem
is impossible to solve, it saps your desire to work on it. Move up
and down the steps until you find a level where your motivation is
greatest. That’s the problem you want to solve. We call this your
personal sweet spot.
Take a look at the blank Step Analysis chart (see table 3.2). Put
your draft problem question in the middle tier. Then restate your
problem, up and down, until you arrive at your personal sweet spot.
If you’re in a group, do this first as individuals. Then pool your
charts to arrive at a single one for the group. You will find that
people step up and down to very different problems.
For example, let’s say your question is “How do we reduce world
hunger?” One person might step down to “How do we reduce hun-
ger in poor countries?” Someone else might step down to “How do
we reduce hunger among poor people in rich countries?” You can
see right away that these details matter. These two different ques-
tions send you on the hunt for very different solutions.
Tables 3.3 and 3.4 provide two examples of step analysis. You
can see how each step up or down represents a crucial decision in
defining your problem.
table 3.2
Blank Step Analysis Chart
Step Up:
Step Up:
Draft Problem:
Step Down:
Step Down:
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PART TWO
table 3.3
Step Analysis (Example 1)
Step Up: Reduce all harm to the environment
Step Up: Reduce all pollution
Draft Problem: Reduce plastic pollution
Step Down: Reduce single-use plastic bags
Step Down: Reduce single-use plastic bags in my neighborhood
table 3.4
Step Analysis (Example 2)
Step Up: Replace all nonbiodegradable materials
Step Up: Replace plastic with biodegradable materials
Draft Problem: Reduce plastic pollution
Step Down: Reduce plastic pollution in my country
Step Down: Reduce plastic pollution in my city
In the process of stepping up or stepping down your problem,

you might find that you want to frame the problem in a completely
different way. That is an important lesson to learn because it gives
you the opportunity to explore and examine the different ways you
can address your problem, until you find one that is just right.
If you skip this step and press on with your first problem state-
ment, you’re in for some nasty surprises down the line. In a group,
such surprises can lead to conflict or gridlock. So don’t be afraid to
have a full and honest discussion up front, where each member of
the group can talk about their Step Analysis and explain the ratio-
nale behind it. The group needs to find a sweet spot that keeps
everyone motivated, interested, and eager to solve the problem.
Once you arrive at your sweet spot, do a final check. Ask yourself
these two questions:
1. Can I feasibly solve this problem?

2. Am I motivated to solve this problem?
If the answer is yes, you are ready to proceed.
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SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
If you want to Think Bigger, first think small. This might sound
backward, but it’s informed by my decades of personal experience
in this space. In general, I find that people start too high on their
Step Analysis. Sometimes they do start too low, out of fear they
won’t be able to solve something very ambitious. But the key to
scaling in Think Bigger is to first solve a problem. From there you
will be able to see better how wide your impact can be.
The VITAL team went from very high—the COVID crisis—to very
low—a single-use ventilator simple enough to use that you don’t
need a specialist to run it. Once they had their solution, it turned
out to be so cheap and easy to both make and use that it took off
as a global phenomenon. They could not have predicted the future
potential of their innovation before they built the VITAL ventilator.
Let’s take a really big problem: the elimination of segregation
and racism in the United States. Dr. Martin Luther King once said,
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but
by the content of their character.” Here, he imagined a world where
race no longer mattered. This was a lofty dream that King did not
achieve. What he did achieve was leading a movement that forced
Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made racial
discrimination illegal. Now, that is a remarkable achievement.
How did he do it? Well, Dr. King started small: the Montgomery
bus boycott. Inspired by Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent disobe-
dience in India, the Black residents of the city—most famously Rosa
Parks—boycotted the segregated bus system and went to jail for
it. It worked, and that inspired the Southern Christian Leadership
Council to do it again and again across the south. That led to the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating committee where thousands of
college and then high school students got arrested for sitting in at
white lunch counters and other segregated venues. The result was a
mass movement. And that’s how a quarter of a million people were
there on the day of Dr. King’s great speech—the largest gathering
in the history of the United States up to that time.
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PART TWO
Now, in contrast, consider a seemingly mundane problem: How

do I make watching movies at home more convenient? Reed Hast-
ings set out to answer that question. He faced this issue directly
when he had to pay forty dollars for returning a movie late to Block-
buster (the movie was Apollo 13). On the drive to Blockbuster he
passed a gym and realized that nobody pays a late fee for gyms.
Gyms require a monthly fee. And with this fee, you’re allowed to go
as many times as you want. Why not do the same for videos?
Hastings had just sold his software company, so he had time and
money to work on the problem. Online commerce was coming—
Amazon was already big—so he wondered if he could cut costs
by skipping physical stores. Why not use the mail instead? Keep
in mind the technology of the day. This was just when the DVD
appeared to rival videotape. So, Hastings bought a DVD and mailed
it to himself. It came through fully intact. Like Henry Ford, Hast-
ings drew on a new technology, not simply because it was there but
because he could see the piece of his problem it solved—delivering
movies safely to people’s homes.
And so was born the Netflix empire, which eventually com-
manded an $82.5 million IPO and at last count, was valuated at more
than $84.82 billion. Netflix is a top contender to Hollywood. As of
2022, eight movies created by Netflix Studios have received Oscar
nominations. The important thing here is not in Netflix’s success—
even their success is not consistent. The important thing to note is
the methodical way in which Hastings approached problem-solving
in structured steps. In the end, Netflix’s success did not come from
its income or subscriber base, but rather, from Hastings’ ability
to revolutionize its domain (video rentals), break into something
new (streaming), and dominate the market (for a time). Only after
solving the smaller late-fee problem did he move on to solve a big-
ger problem: how to make watching movies at home cheaper and
easier for everyone? Hastings would never even have dreamed of
that bigger problem if he had not solved the smaller one first.
The message here is not to lower your sights. Dr. King never gave
up his dream of a nation where race didn’t matter. But he found a way
to make progress toward that goal by solving smaller problems first.
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THE PASSION TEST
You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a

wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate
enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.
— ST E V E J O B S
It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must

abandon itself to its master passion.
— R E B E CC A W E ST
Think Bigger helps you fulfill a passion you might not have even
known you had. We don’t think very much about our passions.
We’re busy with the myriad tasks of life and work. The truth is,
you have many possible passions. Not just one. And not just the
first one you think of. If you asked Stacey Boland before COVID
hit, “Would you like to build a ventilator?” she would probably tell
you she is busy on her satellite project. But if she took the time to
think about it, and she stepped back from her current endeavors,
the answer might be “yes”—even before COVID. She was an engi-
neer, after all. And it was a very interesting and worthy puzzle.
It’s impossible to foresee all the twists and turns your life will
take. So you can’t know for sure what you will be passionate about
at some future moment in time.
In response to this basic human truth, I’ve created my own Pas-
sion Test for this first step of Think Bigger. It helps you answer the
question, “Is this a problem that I am willing to dedicate significant
time to thinking about in the short-term?”
Once you have the problem you want to solve, practice describ-
ing it in three to five minutes. Say it out loud again and again until
it’s fixed in your memory. Then take it on the road: tell it to twenty-
five people. These might be friends, family, coworkers, or even
strangers you meet for some other reason. Describe your problem.
Then ask if they have ever thought about it—and who might want
most to see it solved.
After describing it to twenty-five different people, you will know
what you feel about the problem. I call this Idea-Working. Did it
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excite you each time? Or did it become tedious to repeat it? Per-
haps after this process, you might feel even more excited to solve
it. People might even say things that lead you to change the prob-
lem statement. That’s fine. Is the final statement still something
you very much want to solve? You might want to go back to Step
Analysis, up or down, to find a problem that motivates you more
or seems more feasible to solve. Do this Passion Test—if even a
shorter version—whenever you modify your problem statement in
the rest of the Think Bigger steps. If you discover after doing the
Passion Test that you’re bored, then move on. You should find a
problem to pursue that's more tailored to your wants and interests.
Here is another tip, this time from Stacey Boland herself. She
reported that the JPL team repeated their problem out loud every
day, like a mantra. It kept them motivated and focused and united
them as a team. Each person felt privileged to be in on the action—
to have the chance to make an impact on the wider world.
This Passion Test is an adaptation of a passion exercise that was
created by my PhD student, Carl Blaine Horton, who is also a co-
author on the Think Bigger Workbook. We wanted to find a way to
help the students taking the Think Bigger course learn whether the
problem they were about to spend an entire semester solving was
something they could be passionate about. We knew from our own
experience that simply asking the question, “Do you feel passionate
about this problem?” was not enough. Passions ebb and flow.
Instead, what we decided to do is create what our students have
labeled “one of the most fun days at Columbia Business School.”
We call it “The Innovation Marketplace.” On this day, approxi-
mately one hundred MBA and Engineering students come into the
classroom with a problem they are interested in finding a solution
for. Over the course of two hours, they get into groups of three—
no more and no less—and pitch their idea for less than a minute.
They explain the problem they want to solve and why it feels impor-
tant to them. In limiting the number of people they present to per
rotating group, over the course of two hours, they present their
problem anywhere from twenty times at minimum to forty times at
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maximum. Imagine pitching your problem repeatedly in a two-hour

period—you get bored or energized.
Each session starts the same. We have them fill out a survey that
asks several questions:
What is the problem you want to solve? Write it down.

On a scale of 1-7, one being not at all passionate and seven being very pas-
sionate, how passionate do you feel about your problem?
Then, they are off to the races! As my students pitch their ideas to

one another, the room hums like a beehive in the middle of Spring.
When the pitching session comes to an end, we have them fill
out a follow-up survey and ask:
On a scale of 1-7, one being not at all passionate and seven being very pas-
sionate, how passionate do you feel about your problem?
Throughout the session, how often did you revise your pitch? (In Think
Bigger, this question means that they either stepped up or stepped
down their problem.)
What is the problem you want to solve? Write down your new problem
definition.
By having students write down the problem they came in with

and then writing the problem they leave the room with, they are
more likely to see how much their problem changed over the course
of the two hours. On top of that, we use Natural Language Process-
ing to analyze their responses to record linguistic changes made to
the problem so we can better record their revisions. You can view
the linguistic analysis in figure 3.3.
You might think that if you’re truly passionate about some-
thing, you’ll stick to your guns. The content of your idea shouldn’t
be shifting, right? Actually, I believe it is the opposite. If you are
actively thinking about the problem, then you should be open to
different ways of framing and reframing it. It is only through fram-
ing and reframing that you learn what the problem of interest is
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PART TWO
Figure 3.3 Passion Test data comparison.
and whether you are motivated to spend the mental and emotional
energy it takes to make something more meaningful.
Now, think back to the structure of the Marketplace I explained.
It seems like a basic Idea-Working session, right? Well, here is a lit-
tle twist I like to throw in that raises the stakes: every single person
in the room must choose three people to “invest” in. Using paper
printed in three different colors to represent different monetary
amounts, we create our own currency. A pink slip means you receive
a $300 investment, an orange slip means you receive $500, and a
green slip means you receive a $1,000 investment. Students are not
allowed to invest in their own problem, they can only invest in the
problems they hear. At the end of the class, we look at the numbers
and see who wins—or, who received the most investments.
I have been doing this for many years now and it is always my
students’ favorite day. They rave about how much they learned,
how exciting it was, and how it helped them meet new people.
I even get the self-proclaimed introverts to say they had an amaz-
ing time! And, over the course of several years, I have accumulated
some interesting insights. Here is what I learned:
84
1. Nearly 20 percent of my students report that they had a decrease in pas-

sion for their idea after pitching it to their fellow MBAs and Engineering
peers for two hours nonstop.
2. 35 percent of my students change the way they pitch their problem over
the course of Idea-Working.
3. Students who reported an increase in passion after the passion exer-
cise and revised their pitch received four times the amount of peer
investments than the average participant. While the average participant
received around $1,150 in peer investment, those who reported “more
passion” and “revised their pitch” received $4,882.
I have often thought that a variation of the Innovation Mar-

ketplace would be an ingenious tool for any CEO to improve
corporate innovation. Every company has problems, problems,
problems. But, which one should you solve for? Which ones would
get the greatest commitment from within your organization?
Every year, it is a standard practice to have the Partners and Exec-
utive level members gather for an annual retreat. Imagine if the
retreat were to start with the simple but profound exercise to help
the future of the company. The CEO asks, “Can you write down
a problem confronting our organization that, if we were to solve
it, would make a significant difference for the bottom line? Tell
me what the problem is and why it matters.” Like the students in
the Marketplace, have individuals pitch their problems in rotat-
ing groups of three. They too must invest in the problems that
they believe have a meaningful impact on the future of the orga-
nization. Imagine what leadership could learn about the problems
in their organizations, at all levels, from such a simple exercise!
What are the problems that bubble up to the top? What are the
problems that are phrased similarly? What are the problems worth
solving? What problems would make a significant difference to a
company’s bottom-line?
The Innovation Marketplace is both revealing and exciting. It
surfaces the problems we find meaningful and tests us repeatedly,
until we find a problem that is worth solving.
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PART TWO
A CHANCE TO SAVE THE WORLD?
We all know the stories of heroism that emerged during the pan-
demic, whether they were the stories of frontline workers, grocery
store clerks, or the scientists who developed the vaccines. The
heroic tale of the COVID-19 vaccines and their efficacy rates can be
told by the stories of the scientists who discovered them—Katalin
Karikó of BioNTech, Dr. Drew Weissman at the University of Penn-
sylvania, Dr. Philip Dormitzer of Pfizer, and Hamilton Bennett of
Moderna. But they all start with one piece of the puzzle.
The story begins in 2018, when Pfizer started working with a
small German biotechnology company called BioNTech, founded
by Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci. What made BioNTech unique was
its founder’s ability to recognize the value of Katalin Karikó and
Drew Weissman’s breakthrough research on the use of mRNA tech-
nology. Despite being used for experiments in cancer treatment and
Zika virus protection, mRNA technology had yet to reach its full
potential. The partnership with Pfizer enabled the small team of
scientists to start developing an mRNA-based flu vaccine, rather
than the less effective antigen-based vaccine, to respond to the
adaptive ability of the flu virus. It seemed like a far-off dream, until
December 2019 when China reported the outbreak of a mysterious
respiratory illness in Wuhan.
The world watched as SARS coronavirus-2, dubbed COVID-19,
began to spread across the globe—at first, in a slow, steady pace,
then all at once. By January 2020, the China Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) posted the sequence of COVID-19 in the GISAID
database, a virus sequence sharing platform. Only two months
later, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic as the disease was found
to be highly transmissible between asymptomatic and symptom-
atic individuals alike. Time was of the essence, and it became clear
that creating a traditional vaccine, with viral antigens, would take
too long. Health officials announced that a vaccine would need to
be developed rapidly, fast-tracked in a huge clinical trial, autho-
rized for quick-use, massively scaled up, and distributed around
the world.
86
Uğur and Özlem realized this could be BioNTech’s once-in-a-

lifetime chance to save the world. The two founders contacted Dr.
Philip Dormitzer, then the vice president and chief scientific officer
for viral vaccines at Pfizer, suggesting they shift the BioNTech-Pfizer
collaboration from working on a vaccine for the flu to a vaccine
for COVID-19. With Dr. Dormitzer’s approval, the scientists at
BioNTech used the viral sequence of COVID-19 to test the real
power of mRNA technology and create a new vaccine.
The scientists at BioNTech and Pfizer, whose original problem
draft was, “How do we make an mRNA vaccine that works in the
lab?” (as had been done with Zika virus) scrambled to identify the
new problem they were confronted with. They now had to ask,
“How can we save the world with a full-scale, industrial vaccine
response that delivers billions of doses of an mRNA vaccine proven
to be safe and effective in a diverse group of people?” It might have
been a long shot, but Pfizer and BioNTech knew mRNA was the
technology they needed to find a quick solution.
Dr. Dormitzer told me on a phone interview, “We weren’t even
sure if the mRNA technology would work to its full potential. We
were expecting a 60 percent efficacy rate, similar to that of the flu
vaccine. It was a gamble but well worth the risk. We needed stay-
ing power from our scientists and trial participants to ensure cer-
tainty.” He concluded, “When vaccines fail, it may not be because
they don’t work—it’s often because they are halted, shut down, or
funding is cut. We couldn’t risk failure at this time.”
The scientists at Pfizer and BioNTech found that they could
use mRNA instructions from SARS-CoV-2 to build a unique
protein-based antigen—not viral—for the vaccine. Pfizer’s CEO
Albert Bourla gave Dr. Dormitzer and the team at Pfizer unlim-
ited resources to ensure the vaccine was produced as quickly and
efficiently as possible. Not long after Bourla announced his sup-
port, the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Orga-
nization, the Center for Disease Control, and the United States
government came together to initiate Operation Warp Speed with
the incentive—and $18 billion U.S. dollars of funding—to find a
solution fast.
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PART TWO
Though Pfizer funded the vaccine development solely with

money from its investors, the collaboration organized and encour-
aged by the U.S. government with Operation Warp Speed was sub-
stantive. Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s story came to represent more than
just finding a simple solution; it came to represent a rare moment
in time where people across industries—governments, large orga-
nizations, and countries—could unite for the good of the world.
About halfway through 2020, scientists at Pfizer realized they
could begin testing the vaccine prototypes. As they proceeded, their
initial problem had to be broken down into smaller problems that
could be delegated out to different team members. These subprob-
lems included:
• How do we choose the right antigen and type of RNA for the vaccine?
• How do we test the safety and efficacy of this vaccine in record time?
• How do we scale up the manufacturing of a type of vaccine that had
only been produced in pilot batches for small clinical trials previously
to a level that could immunize the world population?
• How do we distribute a vaccine that must remain between −90 °C and
−60 °C (or −130 °F and −76 °F) for most of its shelf life?
To ensure the needs for the vaccine were being met, Dormitzer
gathered leadership across all departments to meet every morning
and night, daily, to repeat the problem they were solving and its
subsequent pieces. It was in these meetings, day in and day out,
that Dr. Dormitzer said the most ideas came about. And it was
because of those meetings, where everyone shared their ideas and
feedback, that the vaccine was able to be made in 248 days with a
95 percent efficacy rate—much more than the originally anticipated
60 percent efficacy rate.
Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine will go down in history as one of the
greatest innovations of the twenty-first century. By any definition,
it is a success. You might say that their success was inevitable. After
all, they had unlimited resources and human capital dedicated to
the creation of the vaccine. But let’s not forget how many problems
that we are willing to commit resources to, that remain without
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an applicable solution. In the end, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19

mRNA vaccine reminds us that when we define a problem in a way
all parties involved in the solution can understand, we are more
likely to create solutions that work.
No matter who you are, or what problem you are solving—
whether it’s big or small—the first step to solving your problem is
defining it so the purpose is clear to you and others. It is only as you
keep asking this question, repeatedly through the process, that you
discover the particular parts of how to think about and talk about
the problem you are solving.
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4
STEP 2: BREAK DOWN THE PROBLEM
T ake a look at your main problem in the Choice Map and then
your subproblems. Examine them closely. You may discover
that the real problem you want to solve is not the one at the top of
your Choice Map but one of its subproblems. Too often, we start
off the process by picking a problem that’s too big or too vague.
It’s only as you break the problem down that you start to see the
specific problem that you want to solve.
RULES OF THE GAME
In 1891, James Naismith was a physical education instructor at

Springfield College, Massachusetts. He was thirty-one years old.
For three months of the year, his students played outside: football,
baseball, lacrosse, rugby, and soccer. But in the long, dark winter,
they grew bored, restless, and rowdy cooped up in the gym. Nai-
smith’s boss, Luther Gulick, gave Naismith the task of solving the
problem with something new for the students to do.
Together, they broke down the problem, knowing that they
needed the activity to solve four subproblems:
1. It has to fit in an indoor room, not on a vast field outdoors.

2. It needs the speed, effort, skill, and complexity of a field sport, to keep
the students in shape physically and mentally and prevent boredom.
3. It can’t be rough: the players will fall down on a hard floor, not soft
earth.
4. It has to be a team activity that involves lots of students at once in the
confined space.
Naismith then drew various elements from existing field sports

to make a new team game. Lacrosse and soccer both use a round
ball the team passes to each other in order to put the ball in a goal—
but you can’t touch the ball with your hands. Rugby and football
have passing too, and you use your hands. In soccer, you can’t push
or hit opponents—if you do, their team gets a free shot.
Naismith had most of the puzzle: a team game where players
pass the ball with their hands, can’t push or hit each other, get a free
shot when they do, and put the ball through a goal. But what goal?
In rugby and football, the goal is a line. In a small room, that’s too
easy. Soccer and lacrosse have a big net. That’s better, but the goal
is still too big. Should he just shrink the net?
The last piece of the puzzle came from an informal game Nai-
smith played as a child: duck on a rock. Each team puts a big
stone—the duck—up on a boulder. The two teams throw stones
at each other’s duck to knock it off the boulder. In the gymnasium,
Naismith nailed up a peach basket to serve as the duck and used a
soccer ball for the throwing stone (figure 4.1).
Thus was born the game of basketball.
In this chapter, you will take this approach to your own newly
defined problem. You will break it down into subproblems, just
as Naismith did, within the overarching goal of solving the larger
problem. You will learn why it’s important to break a problem
down, what happens when you don’t, and how this is more than
mere analysis—it’s a creative process in and of itself.
One final note. We can’t be sure whether Naismith knew of the
history of other ball sports or if he borrowed from them. But the
ancient “Mesoamerican ballgame” offers a striking similarity to
modern basketball: a vertical hoop set high on a wall that you throw
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PART TWO
Figure 4.1 James Naismith with a basket and ball. Wikimedia Commons.
a ball through. Perhaps Naismith knew about it. Perhaps he didn’t.

Or perhaps this Mesoamerican sport managed to influence other
games that in turn, centuries later, influenced Naismith. Either
way, the point remains the same—the elements of creative break-
throughs don’t change.
BUILD YOUR CHOICE MAP
Remember George Miller, who found that people could only han-
dle five to nine items at once in their minds? Naismith came in
just under that, at four subproblems. I try to avoid problem break-
downs that go beyond five. This is not a hard and fast rule. But in
my experience, it works. With too many subproblems, it’s just too
overwhelming to understand them all at once and see an idea that
solves them.
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table 4.1
Think Bigger Choice Map
Main Problem:
Now that you have your draft problem at the top of the map (see
table 4.1), it’s time to fill in the subproblems. Remember that the
Choice Map is not a form to fill in, like a job or loan application.
It’s a map of an unknown and shifting terrain within your mind. As
you make discoveries and take new turns, you record your chang-
ing path. Your choices appear on the map and direct your journey
toward further choices, until you reach your destination.
What is a subproblem? To put it simply, it’s a piece of the larger
puzzle. When you solve each piece, they come together to solve the
main problem. Later in Think Bigger, for each subproblem, you will
fill in the cells of that row with examples where someone has solved
it to some degree, sometime, in some domain. Think of Bartholdi
and the Egyptian tomb sculptures, or Newton and Kepler’s rule.
The cells fill with the elements that make up your eventual solu-
tion. The subproblems guide your search for those elements.
It may be tempting to hurry through the problem breakdown
or to assume that the subproblems are obvious. As with defining
the overall problem, that’s a big mistake. The more thoughtful and
deliberate you are at this point, the better your results will be. Don’t
rush. Take the time to think: more, deeper . . . and bigger.
BREAKDOWN VS. ANALYSIS
Breaking down a problem is not a new idea. You will find lots of
ways to do it. Barbara Minto, a McKinsey consultant, who cited
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PART TWO
Aristotle as her inspiration, came up with the popular MECE con-

cept: break a problem into pieces that are mutually exclusive (ME)
and comprehensively exhaustive (CE). Engineers use root cause
analysis to find the symptoms of a problem. Porter’s five forces help
you break down a company’s strategy to find its competitive advan-
tage. SWOT breaks down a situation into four categories: strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Marketers break a problem
down into the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. There
are countless versions of problem breakdown to choose from.
Why do we choose subproblems?
Because the other methods come at an earlier stage. They are really
about problem “finding.” They analyze the situation to help you iden-
tify a problem to solve. In Think Bigger, you already identified the
problem. Now you break it down. It’s fine to use all those other meth-
ods before you do Step 1 of Think Bigger. But once you identify your
problem, those other methods don’t set up your search for examples.
Look at the Choice Map: How would you use those methods to fill it in?
To show you what I mean, let’s examine root cause analysis in
action. This example comes from a standard Wikipedia article:
A machine stops because it overloaded and the fuse blew. We ask why it
overloaded. The answer: a bearing wasn’t oiled enough.
Why? The answer: the automatic lubricator pumps too little oil.
Why? The answer: the pump has a worn shaft.
Why? The answer: metal scrap gets into the pump and erodes the shaft.
Root cause: metal scrap. Fixing this will prevent the whole sequence of
problems. Compare this with an incomplete cause analysis that leads
to the replacement of the fuse, the bearing, or the oil pump, eventually
resulting in a recurrence of the problem.
That’s nice and clear, right? But the Wikipedia example continues:
The real root cause could actually be a design issue if there is no filter
to prevent the metal scrap getting into the system. Or if it has a filter
that was blocked due to lack of routine inspection, then the real root
cause is a maintenance issue.
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As it turns out, the metal scrap is not the root cause after all!
We have to go back even further to see how the scrap got into the
pump.
The Wikipedia example goes on: If the pump has no filter, or
there is a lack of expert maintenance, again we ask, why? And so
on. We go back and back and back, through a series of deeper and
deeper causes. Ultimately, we might get to the actual design of the
pump or labor issues that affect the scheduling, staffing, and train-
ing of maintenance staff. Is there any end? How far back do we go?
The writer of this example stopped at the oil pump, which pres-
ents a problem that can be solved by improving filter maintenance
or, if there is no filter, by adding one. Great! These are legitimate
solutions. But they were not a result of the root cause analysis. The
solution did not come from the analysis but from the experience of
the engineer who knew that the filter problem was easy enough to
address, so there was no need to go beyond it.
Root cause analysis assumes the root cause of your problem is
smaller, or more solvable, than it actually is—which is why it works
best when assessing simple, self-contained systems like machines.
In reality, you can’t always tackle “root problems”; they often have
multiple causes that are too large or unsolvable. Root cause analysis
is fine for the technical, mechanical problems that have a manage-
able root to trace back to. Root cause analysis can’t tackle prob-
lems like “I don’t make enough money as a waiter.” The root cause
might be “I am not working enough shifts,” which in turn might be
caused by not having enough extra time to work another shift. An
alternate cause for this problem might be that customers aren’t tip-
ping enough because of an economic downturn or a social system
that undervalues labor. This root cause analysis makes the problem
bigger, not smaller, and leads to causes you can’t reasonably solve.
Similarly, MECE sounds completely sensible. But in complex
problems, the parts are interrelated, not mutually exclusive. We
saw from that simple root cause example that you can peel back
any problem to deeper and deeper levels—so your list is never com-
prehensively exhaustive. Even if the waiter includes the national
economy in MECE, that’s not enough because the world economy
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Price/unit
Revenue
# Units sold
Profit Fixed
cost/unit
Cost/unit
Cost Variable
cost/unit
# Units sold
Figure 4.2 A typical MECE breakdown.
affects the national economy. Our list grows and grows, far beyond
our ability to have an effect on all the items.
Figure 4.2 provides an example of a typical MECE.
This makes perfect sense—but it’s not a problem breakdown. It
describes a situation, not a problem. And it’s a mathematical formula:
do all the math and the results equal “profit”? This is a way to find
a problem, not break it down. As you fill in these numbers, let’s say
you find that your price/unit is much higher than your competitors.
Now you’ve found a problem! Good. Time to Think Bigger. Put that
problem up top on the Choice Map. Break it down into subproblems.
Do the same with all of these methods of situation analysis. If they
help you identify a problem to work on, that’s fine. But once you find
your problem, don’t skip Step 1 of Think Bigger. From our earlier
look at Design Thinking, you might recall the three phases: Analysis,
Idea, and Implementation. Design Thinking is fine for the first and
last step. Use Think Bigger for the Idea. The various methods we note
here are mostly for the Analysis phase. After that, use Think Bigger.
AN IDEA THAT NEEDS A BREAKDOWN
Stories of success in business, especially outsized success, are often

told like bad fairy tales: once upon a time, the entrepreneur woke
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up with a brilliant, fully formed idea for revolutionizing an indus-

try. He began working hard to implement it, and soon enough he
succeeded! By now, we know that’s not how fairy tales work, and
that’s not how innovation works either. Yet we keep repeating these
stories. Perhaps there is something romantic about the lone genius
who can change the world overnight with a single idea. But the real-
ity of such innovations coming into being are always much more
mundane. As we’ve seen from our prior case studies of some of his-
tory’s biggest ideas, there is always a less remarkable structure in
place that has helped create the conditions for innovation to flour-
ish. Remember: the problem and the process of understanding it
are central. In Think Bigger, we develop innovative ideas by defin-
ing problems and looking for opportunities within those problems.
Here is a better story.
In 1994, Jeff Bezos, a hedge fund analyst with a computer sci-
ence background and an interest in technology, started to see
business potential in a new, rapidly expanding network called the
internet. Here’s the first problem he considered: How can I make
money through the internet? He spent several months coming up
with ideas and testing their feasibility. First, he thought of a free,
electronic message service supported by ads (much like the plat-
form Yahoo would eventually create). Then, he wondered if it
might be possible to use the internet for trading stocks (similar to
what E-Trade would later do). Still, he wasn’t convinced enough to
take on the risk of starting a business around either.
Eventually, there was one idea above the rest that stuck with
him—the concept of using the internet to sell products directly to
consumers.
THE ART OF THE BREAKDOWN
The question Bezos had to address was how he could establish a

central marketplace online and become the intermediary between a
wide variety of businesses and their customers. He had an ambitious
vision, which is key when choosing an innovation problem. And he
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served it well by breaking the problem down before attempting to

scale up.
A major subproblem was that customers would have to be con-
vinced online commerce was safe, convenient, reliable, and inex-
pensive. What could Bezos sell to help put them at ease? He made
a list of twenty possible product categories that included clothes,
music, software, office supplies . . . and books. Then he used the
following criteria to evaluate their suitability:
1. Was it nonperishable? Could it be sent safely through the mail?

2. Was it consistent? That is, did it remain the same no matter who was
selling it?
3. Was it inexpensive enough to be profitable? Could it be purchased
cheaply and delivered at low cost?
Books easily met these criteria. Even better, there were already
two distributors who stored all the books from every major pub-
lisher that he could easily access. Brick-and-mortar bookstores
could keep only a few thousand titles in stock, which limited selec-
tion. By dealing directly with the two distributors, Bezos could
offer customers any book in print. It seemed like an amazing idea—
unique and innovative! However, Bezos wasn’t the first to think of
this. Several bookstores were already selling online—but that was
only part of the fact-finding equation. When Bezos recognized this,
he zeroed in to scrutinize their websites and put them to the test:
he purchased a $6.04 copy of Cyberdreams by Isaac Asimov from a
bookstore in Palo Alto, California, to study its process. Not only
did the book take weeks to arrive in Seattle, it was badly damaged
by the end of the journey. Aside from the wretched condition of his
book, Bezos must have been thrilled—he had just identified a new
need: a new subproblem!
Another subproblem he identified was where to locate the busi-
ness. One of the two major book distributors was based in Oregon,
so it made sense to set up shop on the West Coast. Bezos consid-
ered California, but tax laws made it unappealing. Washington, on
the other hand, had no income tax. And his parents lived there. If
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he moved home, he could work out of his parents’ garage and be

close to the mother lode of books in Oregon. By late 1994, Bezos
had made his decision. He left his job in New York and drove to
Seattle with his wife. He registered a URL that November, and a few
months later he launched Amazon.com. When a customer ordered
a book, Bezos bought it from his Oregon distributor at the usual
wholesale rate of 50 percent off list price. It arrived in Seattle via
UPS a day or two later, and then Bezos repackaged the book and
shipped it to the customer, netting a small profit.
It took a number of years for Amazon to scale this system for
other products and become “The Everything Store” we know today.
But Bezos had set his company up for success with an approach
to innovation that underscores several of the principles central to
Think Bigger. First, he took on something ambitious: developing
e-commerce. Second, he found a problem that could be stepped up
or down in complexity. Third, by studying what other companies
had tried, and noting how and why they failed, he was able to define
a problem that he could solve. Fourth, he combined ideas from
various fields—computer science, finance, and sales—to develop
a new model.
In hindsight, the breakdown of a problem might seem obvious.
Working backward from the solution, you see the various parts of
the problem it solved. But it’s actually quite challenging to do up
front without this benefit—the proof of this being that there were
not tons of Amazon.coms popping up at the same time. Regardless
of the difficulty, as innovators like Naismith and Bezos show, the
pursuit can wind up being very much worth the effort.
When people jump from problem to solution without pausing
to break the problem down, what they gain in speed they tend to
lose in quality. No two people will break down the same problem
in the exact same way—breakdowns are an act of ideation them-
selves, and they indicate the components you believe to be key to
solving that problem. Sometimes, even banal problems we face in
our everyday lives are far more complex than we think at first. It’s
clear that the exercise of problem breakdown takes time, thought,
and more research than you might realize.
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INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE DOMAIN
Here is an example of problem breakdown. I’ve struggled with this

problem all my adult life: How do we make it easier for blind people to
plan vacations?
You probably have little experience with this problem. If we
set out to brainstorm, that’s a big constraint because for that we
draw on your personal knowledge. For Think Bigger, it does not
matter. The solution will come from outside your own experience.
That is why you don’t need to be an expert to generate a useful,
novel solution. You do need to understand how to break down the
problem.
Here is a list of subproblems to the main problem my students
came up with in class:
• How do you use hotel and travel websites?

• How do you find hotels that can and will accommodate you?
• How do you assess whether or not the hotel rooms are blind-friendly?
• How do you research your options when most sources are visual?
• Where can you read blind-friendly reviews?
• How can you assess whether a location is safe?
• How do you check whether or not hotels and other locations are
ADA-compliant?
• How do you navigate crowded airports?
• How do you read a boarding pass?
• How do you get a convenient seat on the plane?
• How do you get a sense of what a place is like?
• Are there certain places that appeal more to the nonvisual senses?
• If you get lost, how would you find your way?
• How do you find a guide?
• How do you find other blind people and blind-friendly locations?
• How do you find the most walkable areas?
• How do you navigate unfamiliar crosswalks and other potential hazards?
• How do you read signs and instructions?
• Does Braille use different alphabets?
• Are local buses, trains or taxis blind-friendly?
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• Package trips make planning easier, but do they include blind-friendly

activities?
• Do you need more time than the sighted for planning, travel, and
activities?
• If you’re traveling with a service animal, will it be allowed?
• If you use a cane, what problems might that bring?
• How do you find or negotiate a good price?
• How can you feel confident about your choices?
The longer this first list, the better. Don’t leave anything out,
even if it might seem mostly irrelevant. Later on you will have a
chance to delete items from the list. Once your questions repeat
or become trivial, that’s when you stop. Now go back over the list
to group similar questions and cut the least important. Then put
the list aside. Just think about it. From memory, which questions
strike you as most compelling? Go over the list again. Group and
cut again. Think again. Repeat.
You want to end up with our magic number: no more than five
major subproblems. My students ended up with these:
• How can a blind person navigate a new area that’s not blind-friendly?
• How do you ensure the hotel and activities are blind-friendly?
• How do you make the vacation safe?
• How do you make the vacation affordable?
• How can you know if the general location is blind-friendly?
This is a very good start. Let’s pause and think back to other
forms of problem breakdown. This list is certainly not MECE: the
items are not mutually exclusive, and the whole list is not com-
prehensively exhaustive. And there is no root cause on the list.
I already know the root cause: I’m blind! There is no SWOT, no four
Ps, or a match to any other template for breakdown. Each Think
Bigger breakdown will look completely different depending on the
problem itself and the judgment of whoever does the breakdown.
With our short list in hand, we next determine whether answer-
ing these questions would solve enough of the problem. My rule of
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thumb is that to feel comfortable and know when to stop, I must

determine: if I were to solve for all these subproblems at once, then
the solution would be a significant improvement from what currently
exists. The result should be able to make something seemingly impos-
sible feel possible. If the problem is a product, then the new one you
ideate should feel significantly better than any product already in the
marketplace. For this we talk to experts. These are people who do
have experience in the field. But we don’t ask them to brainstorm
solutions: we ask them to comment on our problem breakdown.
Experts can explain why the problem exists, how others have
tried to solve it, and what ideas, activities, and tools already exist
to address the problem. For our questions, we want to find profes-
sionals in education, advocacy, and policy-making for blind people.
A quick internet search leads us to the National Federation for the
Blind and the American Council of the Blind. These are the two
largest American advocacy organizations for blind people. Those
sites alone confirm most of the problems on our list. As for exist-
ing help to blind people, we learn which American cities are ADA-
compliant in which aspects, and we find museums, parks, and other
public places with special services, such as audio tours for blind
people. We probe further and find new technologies like Envision
Smart Glasses that read menus and signs.
Use the internet to also search for individual experts, who are
often the staff of blind-oriented organizations. Email or call them.
They are often glad to talk about the subproblems on your list.
Remember, you’re not asking them a favor. You’re just sitting at
their feet and appreciating their wisdom. Experts are usually flat-
tered and willing to give their time. After all, they are passionate
about their field.
When you speak with experts, do it one-to-one. You want a vari-
ety of perspectives. No doubt there will be areas of consensus, but
avoid situations that may encourage groupthink. Also, keep in mind
that an expert has deep knowledge of certain aspects of the prob-
lem, but their expertise also limits their understanding. By talk-
ing to them individually, you can more easily spot their biases and
underlying assumptions.
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Then talk to users: in this case, blind people. Triangulate between

the experts and users. That is, say to the experts, “This blind person
mentioned this,” and say to the user, “This expert mentioned that.”
Keep going until you feel you understand the problem deeply, from
many different angles.
I am a user, so let me give you some thoughts about these
subproblems.
There are group vacations for the blind, but these have two flaws:
they force you into a group that’s not of your choosing, and for
fear of liability, the organizers keep to the safest places and activi-
ties. You don’t get anywhere near the same feeling of freedom as a
sighted person does on vacation. Apps like Aira and Be My Eyes let
you strike out on your own, but they don’t work well enough for
me to recommend them to other blind people. Museum and other
audio tours are much better. Many are tailored for the blind, and
many guides are skilled at working with blind visitors.
In my experience, the biggest subproblem is something I
rarely hear experts mention: many hotels and cruises don’t allow
a blind person to book a solo trip. As soon as you mention you’re
blind, they throw up obstacles. Again, they fear liability. So I
tend to stay at boutique hotels where I can speak directly to the
owner or manager before I get there. I ask for a room with easy
access to the elevator or the beach. Smaller hotels tend to be
better at service in general, so I can hire a staff member to take
me around the area, or even swim with me in the ocean. That
also allows me to meet more local people and have an experi-
ence that comes closer to what sighted people typically enjoy.
For these reasons, if you know someone blind, I highly recom-
mend Sardinia.
When you talk to users, aim for the same kind of detail I just
told you for myself. You want to know their actual experience, and
what they think and feel about it. Begin with the basics: “Do you go
on vacations?” or “What’s easiest and what’s most difficult about
planning and taking trips?” Let their replies lead you to further
questions—and let their responses lead you to further questions.
As with the experts, don’t ask for solutions. They will mention good
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examples as they talk—the way I did regarding small hotels and

Sardinia.
It’s also important to think widely about who the users are. Here
is a comment on this from a student in my class:
The subproblem exercise was really interesting, as it highlighted

how even after going through step up/step down, problems can
still be too broad. In addition, the categorization aspect allowed
us to, at a rudimentary level, identify potential users. Naturally, a
lot of the subproblem categories were oriented around the impact
of the problem on a specific user (in my group’s case—doctors,
patients, government, hospital administrators). The exercise
builds a great framework for user interviews and allows us to get
a better understanding of how to collect more information about
our problem.
In our blind traveler case, hotel managers might be users. Have

they had blind guests? And if so, what happened? And what do they
think about what happened? Same goes for tour operators, travel
agents, even taxi drivers. Look at each subproblem to see who par-
ticipates in that activity beyond the blind people themselves.
Remember that users, like experts, are bound by what they know.
I can tell you exactly what problems I face when I travel, and what
I think and feel about them. But that’s all. Some of that will over-
lap with what other blind people say, but each user’s experience is
specific to their own situation and desires. It’s impossible to ask all
users and get a complete picture of the problem. Keep going until
you only hear repetition. When you stop getting new information,
you’re done.
Now it’s time to step outside. Interviewing and observing your
target users are well-known parts of market research. Your aim is
“consumer insight.” This insight is valuable, because it will help
you dissect the components of the problem—some of which may
not readily occur to you. So, I want you to make learning from your
users a part of your problem breakdown research. You must avoid
confusing consumer insight with solution generation; too often
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we think that all we must do is learn from our customers what’s

wrong and the solution to the problem will become apparent. If it
is a small problem, like product design—for example, the handle
on a teacup doesn’t have the right grip—then, consumer research
might be enough. But for any complex problem, your users will be
ill-equipped to help you with the solution.
Although consumer insight is certainly useful for understand-
ing the problem, it is not useful for generating solutions. Think of
Henry Ford and the problem he was trying to solve. If Ford had
asked his target users in 1907 what they wanted to help their long
and inefficient commutes, they would have said they wanted a
faster horse and buggy.
Experts and users are inside the problem. Everyone else is out-
side it. People without direct experience in the field will have open
minds about it. Experience gives you depth but limits your breadth.
Outsiders have less depth but more breadth. They don’t let their
knowledge limit their thinking.
Ask them the same questions as insiders. They might respond
with silly or far-fetched ideas, but often they give a view that users
and experts never thought of. Once again, don’t ask for solutions
or advice. Immerse them in the field as best you can and ask them
for their thoughts. For example, if you could not see, what would
be the best way to get around in a place that usually requires a car?
How would you navigate a new city? Where would you visit? What
experiences would you seek? If a friend or family member could not
see, what would you do to help them enjoy their vacation?
In my own case, I’ve learned a lot from outsiders. A documentary
filmmaker in Hong Kong thought it might be interesting to show a
blind person the smells and textures of fish, like shark fins, used in
Chinese soups. A Sardinian wanted me to experience how he made
sheep’s milk cheese, and he took me to smell a berry plant only
found in Sardinia. A harp player on the streets of Paris took my
hand so I could feel the instrument’s shape and strings and then his
own hands as he played.
Since outsiders are less emotionally invested in the problem
you’re trying to solve, they tend to have a more open mind. I
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personally find that some of my favorite experiences traveling have

come about when I connect with outsiders. In the process, I’ve had
incredible experiences and made new friends. Above all, I learned
that outsiders are very helpful for rethinking a problem from many
different angles.
IS THIS A CREATIVITY PROBLEM?
You now have your problem and a set of subproblems. Many times,
we start off thinking the problem we’re attempting to solve is too
complex and there is no known solution, or no known options—
solving it requires creativity. Don’t be surprised if the very process
of defining and breaking down your problem allows you to see a
solution that already exists for your problem. Your breakdown
helped you see it! If that is the case, the first two Steps of Think
Bigger is the process by which you can find the choices that you
previously did not see. You can stop here and choose a solution.
However, many times, your problem remains complex and there
are no known solutions for it. Your problem, its breakdown, and
the initial ideas you have should not be confused with solutions.
At this step, you must be careful not to trick yourself into thinking
there is a solution to your problem if there actually is none. Don’t
settle for a half-baked solution to speed up the Think Bigger pro-
cess! Breaking down a problem can be inspiring and can spark in
you lots of ideas—but right now, you should take your ideas just as
that: sparks! An idea is different from a known solution. You should
only stop at this point if you really do have a known solution, that
works. If you continue, collect your breakdown and ideas and let
me tell you what to do with them.
WHEN DO YOU STOP?
Studying your problem, talking to insiders and outsiders, and

rethinking your breakdown will spark ideas for solutions. That’s
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inevitable. But don’t let these sparks distract you—or worse, lead
you to skip ahead in our Think Bigger steps. It’s too early to jump to
conclusions. Instead, write down the solutions that come to you in
one place. I call it a “sparking lot,” where you park your sparks for
later. They might prove useful, or not, when it comes time to put
together a solution to your problem. Until then, write them down
and move on.
Revision is a key part of the process here. Meaning, don’t just
accept your first breakdown. Revise the list at least once. Keep
revising until you find that your study and interviews no longer
give you further ideas. At that point, here is a way to check if your
breakdown is good enough to move on to our next step. I call it the
Eighty Percent Test: If I solve all these subproblems, have I solved
at least 80 percent of my overall problem?
Of course, there is no mathematical way to do this. It’s a judg-
ment call. Ford did something similar when he stopped at that
short list of major changes required to make a cheaper car. After
that, he went on to make minor improvements year after year. But
for his main innovation, the short list was enough. The same was
true for Naismith with basketball. He made a short list of innova-
tions. For years after, he, and then many others, continued to make
small improvements that helped evolve basketball into the game as
we know it today.
At this point, found a problem you want to solve. You’ve broken
down that problem into a handful of meaningful subparts. You have
a fairly good idea of what we know and don’t know about what has
and hasn’t worked in the past. It might feel to you, at this point,
that you’re ready to start ideating. But before you rush into gen-
erating solutions, I am asking you to take a step back and pause.
There is one more very important question you must answer before
solution generating begins: Why do you want to solve this problem?
And, if you were to find the ideal solution to this problem, how do
you want the solution to feel?
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5
STEP 3: COMPARE WANTS
W hat do you really want? Why are you solving this problem?
What do you want to get out of this?
Now that you have the problem you’re trying to solve and its
breakdown, I want you to pause and think about your deepest wants.
In this step, you will use your feelings as an aid to help formulate
your choosing criteria. This step helps you see the “Big Picture” so
that your ideation process is aligned with the most desirable out-
come that will ultimately solve your problem.
Unlike other methods for innovation, in Think Bigger we look
at and identify the wants of at least three different stakeholders—
you, the creator; the target; and third parties (competitors and
allies). As you identify these wants, you write them down to fill a
list that we refer to as the Big Picture (see figure 5.1). Later, you
will run through that list to weight each want and create the Big
Picture Score. This Big Picture Score will help you in three ways:
1. You will more easily refine your problem breakdown.

2. It serves as the selection criteria when you choose among the multiple
ideas from your Choice Map (Step 5).
3. It explains the “why?” behind your idea when you start collecting feed-
back from others in Step 6.
Figure 5.1 Big Picture score.
WHAT DOES BILL GATES WANT?
You probably know the story of Bill Gates, one of the most success-
ful innovators in history. But like our microwave question earlier,
do you really know the story?
Perhaps the story you know follows the common fairytale struc-
ture we have seen before: an entrepreneur has a brilliant vision,
works hard to make it come true, and achieves outstanding success.
You might think this seems like the opposite of Think Bigger. And
you would be right—it is. That version of the story actually is a fai-
rytale. The real story is very much a case of Think Bigger.
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As we go through the Bill Gates example, I want you to pay spe-

cial attention to the question of want. At each point we ask: What
does Bill Gates want? This might seem especially odd, as Bill Gates is
famous for his analytical abilities. Computer software calls for careful
logic. What do emotions have to do with it? To make good analytical
decisions, you must discard your feelings and think logically. Right?
Not even close. Desire colors every decision you make, whatever
the situation, whoever you are. And that's true even for our most
prolific innovators, including Bill Gates.
The real story begins in Seattle, where Gates grew up. He joined
the high school computer club and made friends with Paul Allen, who
was two years older. There they learned to program BASIC, a simple
language invented by two Dartmouth professors to teach computing.
Thankfully, their school was fortunate enough to have the latest mini-
computer, a DEC PDP, and the club learned how to program BASIC on it.
After high school, Allen went to college for two years then dropped
out to program small computers for Honeywell in Boston. Gates went
close by to Harvard, so the two stayed in communication. In late 1974,
Intel released a more powerful chip, the 8080, that the whole com-
puter world recognized as a huge leap forward. Gates and Allen got a
copy of the manual and figured out how to put BASIC on it. But they
couldn't get the chip itself: Intel only sold it to computer companies.
In January of the next year, Allen was walking across Harvard
Square to visit Gates when he saw the latest copy of Popular Elec-
tronics on a newsstand (see figure 5.2). The cover article showed
the Altair—a cheap new computer with the 8080 chip in it.
Allen bought a copy and rushed to find Gates. The article said
that the Altair was built for the 8080 chip but came without soft-
ware. The maker of the Altair, MITS, invited programmers to write
BASIC software to run it. The race was on. MITS later reported they
got fifty calls from programmers who said they were working on it.
That included Allen and Gates.
Guess who won the race?
So was born Micro-Soft—later “Microsoft.” That was the name
of the company that Allen and Gates formed to supply the Altair
software. Once they got the contract, Allen quit his job and Gates
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Figure 5.2 An advertisement for the Altair 8800 computer in Popular Electronics,
1975. Wikimedia Commons.
famously took a leave of absence from Harvard. They moved to

Albuquerque, New Mexico, where MITS was based.
Let’s see what Bill Gates was thinking at the time. In his book,
The Road Ahead, he tells us this:
When Paul Allen and I saw that picture of the first Altair computer,
we could only guess at the wealth of applications it would inspire.
We knew applications would be developed, but we didn’t know what
they would be. Some were predictable—for example, programs that
would let a PC function as a terminal for a mainframe computer—
but the most important applications, such as the VisiCalc spread-
sheets, were unexpected.
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Now we know that Microsoft succeeded by enabling PCs to run

a variety of applications and function independently. However, that
was not what Gates envisioned, at least not while he was working
on the Altair. He thought he had written software for a terminal that
would communicate with a mainframe computer. That was typical
for the time: the whole industry saw PCs that way, and there were
also thousands of hobbyists tinkering with this technology who had
the same idea.
Gates wanted everyone to buy an Altair because that meant they
would be buying his software too. The hobbyists had other plans.
They liked the Altair’s user-friendly software, but they didn’t want
to be tied to a single make or model. Instead, they pirated Microsoft
BASIC and copied it onto different computers, making it possible for
users to transfer applications from machine to machine. This reduced
the appeal of the Altair, which meant lower sales for MITS and less
money in Gates’s pocket. Gates was outraged. He wrote a now infa-
mous letter to the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group in
Menlo Park, California, that published an influential newsletter.
“Most of you steal your software,” he said, going on to threaten
that those whose names he learned might “lose in the end.” Pirates
were ruining the computer industry, Gates charged, by depriving
professionals (like him) of funding that was needed to improve
software and, by extension, the industry.
The pirates ignored him and Gates gave up, offering to sell the
software to MITS for $6,500, but MITS declined. The sales were so
bad, they couldn’t afford it.
In March 1976, a year after the Altair launch, MITS held the first
annual World Altair Computer Convention in Albuquerque. As a
last hurrah, Gates showed up. Right away he noticed that users
brought other machines too. They all had his version of BASIC on
them, which allowed them to swap programs and files because all
the computers used the same language.
At first, Gates hated this. Hence his letter. But then he realized
something staggering: he had a monopoly. All small computers
were using his software. That wasn’t bad for Microsoft. It was the
opportunity of a lifetime.
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This is when Gates famously quit college. Then, he broke his

Altair contract and again wrote to the leading computer newsletter.
In this letter, he apologized for the first one, thanked the users for
adopting his software, and promised them more to come. Then he
struck deals with all the leading computer makers to write a version
of BASIC for them that worked on different hardware. As new pro-
grams appeared, like VisiCalc and WordPerfect (and soon count-
less others), he simply integrated them into his operating system
to make them compatible across machines.
That’s the real story of Bill Gates, the famous visionary. But what
was his vision, exactly? He wasn’t the first to realize computers
would get smaller and more powerful. Gordon Moore gets credit
for that, as “Moore’s law” was presented in an article that came
out in 1965—when Gates was just ten years old. Similarly, Gates
did not create the first small computer—Allen’s job at Honeywell
was programming them. And Microsoft wasn’t the first software
company—that dates from 1955, the year Gates was born.
It’s also true that Gates did not even come up with the idea that
software was a separate industry from hardware. It was the users
who did that, by copying his software from machine to machine.
Gates hated the idea at first. He saw the Altair and his software as
a single package. But to his credit, he finally saw that his software,
residing on different hardware, was a blessing and not a curse.
Now that you know what really happened, let’s go back and ask
our original question. What did Bill Gates want?
In high school, he wanted to grow up, work in computers, and
make a lot of money. Legend has it that he vowed in high school
to make a million dollars by the time he was twenty. That wasn’t
unusual. It was the dawn of the computer age, and lots of young
people dream of getting rich quick. In college, he and Allen talked
about starting a software company. The Altair contract gave them
that chance. From there, Gates wanted the Altair to dominate the
computer market because that meant more sales for his software.
The Altair let him down. It was a good living, and he had an
important position in the computer industry at a very young age.
But it wasn’t enough. He saw that it would not lead to the fortune
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he dreamed of. So he switched back to another of his wants: a col-

lege degree. At the Altair conference, he then switched what he
wanted again. He saw a way to get back into the computer world
with an idea even bigger than making Altair software.
Let’s look closely at this last switch. He went from what he
wanted—an Altair monopoly—to what users and other hardware
makers wanted: software that any hardware could use. By taking
account of what these two groups wanted, he became the richest
person on earth. That’s definitely something he wanted.
As we see from the Gates example, you have many wants, and
they might be different at different times. You want to solve a prob-
lem that matters to you, and you want the solution to come out the
way you want. But others matter too. Otherwise, you won’t find
a solution, or the solution just won’t work. In this step of Think
Bigger, you assess your problem and breakdown as they apply to
the wants of three sources: you, the targets of your solution, and
third parties who matter most. In his case, that was clear: Gates,
computer users, and hardware makers. In your case, chances are it’s
not as obvious. That’s why we give your wants their own step in the
Think Bigger method (see figure 5.3).
Figure 5.3 The Desires Triangle.
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THE BIG PICTURE SCORE
If you ask someone what they want, they might give you a specific
target. For example, “I want to get the Nobel Prize,” “I want to
start my own restaurant,” or, in the spirit of Gates, “I want to
make a billion dollars before the age of thirty-five.” But in reality,
these are only means to an end. Why do you want to start a res-
taurant? There must be some desire it fulfills. If you don’t get to
start a restaurant, is there another outcome that would still fulfill
that desire?
You can see right away that this search for a desire accounts for
the great uncertainty of life. When you apply that to Think Big-
ger, there are many directions your solution can take to solve the
same kind of problem. You might find the problem worth solving,
but only certain solutions will fulfill your desire. Have you ever
explained a problem to someone, and when they offer a solution,
you think, “I don’t want to do that.” That’s because the problem
appealed to you, but their solution did not.
In Think Bigger, you don’t want to devote time and effort solv-
ing a problem you care about then end up with a solution that you
don’t want to undertake. Remember Gates’s situation both before
and after the Altair conference: you need a solution that your tar-
get and third parties want as well. Our Big Picture surfaces all
these wants early to help guide every step of your progress toward
a solution.
Let’s pause to consider the role of emotion in decision-making. You
might think that the best decisions are purely rational, with no emo-
tions entangled at all. But that’s impossible. If you think you’re making
a decision without emotion, you’re fooling yourself. As the philoso-
pher David Hume tells us, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave
of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve
and obey them.”
You can use reason and rational methods of problem-solving
but to what end? To get what you want! It’s your wants that
explain why you even try to solve a problem in the first place.
Even price, that basic building block of economics, is nothing
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more than what a buyer wants. You’re willing to pay four dollars
for a jar of jam and I’m willing to pay two dollars. But the price is
three dollars. So you buy it. I don’t. Why? Because you want the
jam more than I do. If neither of us wants any jam at all, we’re
willing to pay zero.
Decades of research has shown us the countless ways our emo-
tions bias us in our search for information and in its interpretation
and processing. Allowing our emotions to dictate the decision-
making process can lead us to make poor choices. In Think Bigger,
we do not attempt to eliminate feelings from the ideation process.
Instead, we separate the articulation of feelings from the informa-
tion gathering and choice creation process. Specifically, we use the
Big Picture tool to provide you with a holistic understanding of
what the various wants really are. That way, this information about
desire is used when choosing among the various ideas you generate
from Choice Mapping.
The Choice Map is the tool you use for information gathering,
processing, and ideation. We will get into that in the next chapter,
but for now, I want you to know that in this step feelings, wants,
desires, emotions—whatever word you want to use—matter. They
are important in the ideation process as they play the important
role of providing you with a choosing criterion. As you will see,
using the Big Picture Score is a much more comprehensive way of
identifying the best idea from the myriad ideas you create from
your Choice Map.
The three nodes of the Big Picture are you, your targets, and
third parties who matter. At the top of the “Big Picture,” you will
answer the question “How do I want to feel when I create the ideal
solution to my problem?” Note that this question makes it clear
that we’re not asking you to leap ahead and come up with a specific
solution you want. Of the many possible solutions you might come
up with, what emotion should they all have in common?
On the bottom left, you answer the question “How do I want
my target audience to feel when I solve this problem?” In this case,
you should try to understand how an individual or group might be
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directly affected by the solution to your problem. This step requires

you to look beyond your own wants for now. So when identifying
their wants, take into account the kinds of users you’re targeting for
your idea, how their wants are specific to your problem, and how
they want the solution to feel.
On the bottom right of your “Big Picture,” you answer the ques-
tion “How do I want my third parties to feel when I solve this
problem?” Think widely about two groups: people who might be
allies in the solution, and people who can impede it. Who else cares
about this problem? Who else cares about your target? Are their
competitors in the market that might try and deter you? You won’t
be able to satisfy all these wants because some will conflict—for
example, allies versus competitors. Think Altair versus other hard-
ware makers for Gates. But you must be aware of these wants to
avoid surprises down the road.
In your “Big Picture,” you will look among the wants at every
angle of the shape and use the Big Picture Score as the tool to tally
and weight the most common wants among every party involved.
In a perfect world, the solution you create will cater equally to all
three groups. But in reality, there will be conflicting wants within
each group and across groups. So, in the end, you will have to opti-
mize for the party you want to please most and choose a solution on
their behalf. You will come back to use this tool in Step 5. For now,
only focus on writing down the wants of those who will influence
your problem-solving process.
While you must account for the wants of all other parties, your
wants as the innovator remain paramount—that’s why they go at
the peak of the Big Picture. This is very different from the standard
“customer first” approach that dominates many innovation meth-
ods. For example, Design Thinking tells you to do extensive cus-
tomer research to thoroughly understand what they want. That’s
fine—and the result fills a corner of the Big Picture. But if you don’t
satisfy the wants of the innovator, nothing happens at all.
You might have experienced this yourself: a brainstorming ses-
sion results in a solution. But after that, nothing happens. Why?
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Nobody wanted to do it. The solution did not satisfy their wants.
This tends to happen in organizations when the problem comes
from above. Imagine some higher-up wants a solution. The group
brainstorms a solution that satisfies the higher-up though it doesn’t
satisfy the group itself. But no one ever admits it.
THE ROLE OF THE BIG PICTURE SCORE
In the Think Bigger method, the Choice Map is where you record
the information about what the problem is and the evidence you
have to date that can be used to help create a solution to the
problem. Think of the Choice Map as your information-process-
ing tool. The second tool of Think Bigger is the Big Picture Score.
This tool takes the Big Picture shape you created and applies a
scoring method to help you make a concrete decision. The Big
Picture is our shape used for writing down the wants of all par-
ties, the Big Picture Score is the tool we use. In contrast to the
Choice Map, the role of the Big Picture Score is to provide the
necessary space to identify and express motivations, preferences,
and emotions.
We often believe that problem-solving should be devoid of emo-
tion, so we go out of our way to suppress our emotion from the
process. However, in Think Bigger, we not only surface those emo-
tions, we embrace them, because those things we call biases can
actually help us at critical points during the ideation process.
Your Big Picture Score will serve two main functions during the
Think Bigger process: as your selection criteria and as a check to
keep you on the right path. When you doubt whether or not you’re
going down a rabbit hole, ask yourself these questions:
1. Are you solving the problem you want to solve (i.e., the Choice Map)?
2. Are you in line—and being consistent with—with your wants?
If you are a visual learner, use the shape in figure 5.4 to find your
score.
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Figure 5.4 Big Picture scores for different solutions.
PREFERENCES FIRST
You might be wondering, “Isn’t it premature to identify my wants?

After all, at this point, all I’ve done is try to understand the problem
and I have no options to compare and contrast.” It’s precisely at this
time that it’s best for you to step back, pause, and ask yourself, “If
I were to find or create the ideal solution, what would it feel like?”
Research shows that we’re far better decision-makers when we
predefine our criteria—meaning, we do so before identifying our
choices and beginning the process of comparing and contrasting.
For example, researchers observed that when hiring managers pre-
defined their hiring criteria, they were less likely to hire based on
gender stereotypes and more likely to hire based on performance
and fit for the role. This holds true, even when considering seem-
ingly analytical tasks like stock picking. A 2007 study examined the
experience of 101 stock pickers making investment decisions on
a daily basis. For stock pickers who identified and addressed their
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more intense feelings—rather than shying away from them—their

daily investment returns were higher on average than those who
reported less emotional attunement. The study also found that
investors who were able to identify and explain their feelings in
detail managed to control bias in their choices more effectively.
Beyond that, an analysis of several angel investing groups found
that investment leaders who used a “gut feel” to describe the blend
of analysis, intuition, and emotions involved in their intuitive pro-
cesses were better able to effectively predict profitable, entrepre-
neurial investments.
Given the uncertainty, social attunement, and emotional chal-
lenges involved in starting a business, emotional intelligence should
be particularly beneficial in this setting. Emotions are a cornerstone
to entrepreneurial success, as revealed by a survey of 65,826 busi-
ness owners revealing that emotional intelligence (EI) is a stron-
ger predictor of entrepreneurial success than general mental ability
(GMA). Similar to Gates, who kept his wants in check and stayed
attuned to his inner emotions as he developed Microsoft, you will
use your wants to guide you as you frame your problem, reframe it,
and search for solutions to get your big idea. When we address our
emotions and become aware of them, we are more likely to choose
a solution that makes us confident and empowered. That is why
Comparing Wants is essential to Think Bigger—this step leans into
your emotions and the emotions of others to give you a big picture
view of the direction your idea can go.
FILL IN YOUR BIG PICTURE
Identifying underlying wants is not a simple task. Take your time.

Here are some words that might help (see table 5.1).
As with the problem breakdown, make long lists first. Then nar-
row them down to three to five options for each. And by the way,
we start using the Big Picture Score after breakdown for a deliber-
ate reason. If you do it after the problem statement, you don’t know
enough about your problem yet to take this next step. The breakdown
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table 5.1
Underlying Desires
Accepting Graceful Neat Timely
Airy Groundbreaking Noisy Tolerant
Bright Hip Orderly Unified
Bubbly Honorable Outgoing Unusual
Compelling Impactful Patient Vibrant
Chic Innovative Perceptive Vintage
Detailed Kind Quick Wistful
Dependable Knowledgeable Quaint Witty
Elegant Lavish Raw Youthful
Earthy Loyal Rational Young
Fair Modern Safe Zany
Fancy Mysterious Sociable Zealous
deepens your understanding of the problem and also starts direct-

ing your solution toward certain wants of your own, but it happens
unconsciously. Now is the time to make those wants conscious.
PLEASING ALL PARTIES
In Gallery 771 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,

there hangs a painting of an elegant and mysterious woman (see
figure 5.5). She looks to her left while her body turns slightly in the
same direction. Her left hand, at her thigh, directs your eye to the
narrow drape of her gown. Her right arm stretches just behind her
to rest on the edge of a round table. The room is dark, her gown is
black, and her pale skin glows: bare arms, décolletage, and her face
in profile like a crescent moon.
Madame X, by John Singer Sargent, is one of the most famous
portraits in Western art. Gallery 771 bears the name Portraiture in
the Grand Manner. But there, you won’t see Sargent’s thirty stud-
ies and earlier versions of Madame X in pencil, watercolor, and oil
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Figure 5.5 Madame X, the final painting by John Singer Sargent. Wikimedia Commons.
(see figure 5.6). You also won’t see one of the thin straps of her
dress drooping off her shoulder because viewers complained that
it made her look less than proper (see figure 5.7). Sargent painted
over it (see figure 5.8).
Figure 5.6 An alternative sketch of Madame X. Wikimedia Commons.
122
Figure 5.7 Another alternative Figure 5.8 A third alternative

sketch of Madame X with her strap sketch of Madame X with no
draped. Wikimedia Commons. strap. Wikimedia Commons.
The various versions of Madame X show Sargent’s range of wants

in his aim to portray his subject. He began the portrait in 1883, when
he was twenty-seven years old and already an established painter.
He also worked without a commission, which was a very unusual
move for a working artist. His subject, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gau-
treau, was three years younger and a well-known socialite in Paris.
Sargent explained, “I have a great want to paint her portrait and
have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone
to propose this homage to her beauty.”
Gautreau did indeed allow it. We don’t know why, but whatever
the reason—and we can guess several—Sargent successfully satis-
fied her as a third party. The users were the art public, and there he
ran into a problem. That drooping strap caused a furor. One critic
wrote, “One more struggle, and the lady will be free.” The gallery
showing the painting—another third party—took it down. That’s
when Sargent repainted the strap.
Sargent further explained that he had other wants to fulfill when
he painted the drooping strap. He wanted to show the “unpaintable
beauty and hopeless laziness” of Madame Gautreau.
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He had to give up that want to please his users and the gallery.
But not completely—the laziness still comes through.
We can see that even in art—that unrivaled bastion of personal
expression—a working artist must find balance in the Big Picture
Score. Sargent knew that if he just satisfied himself, the Paris art
world would shun him, and his career would be over. Artists are
free to create whatever they want. But if they want their creations
to be understood in the world outside their own heads, they need
to evaluate their creation through the lens of the Big Picture Score.
WANTS IN ACTION
As you develop a greater awareness and understanding of your

wants, you will become better at avoiding paths that lead to dead
ends. This is informative, no matter what kind of problem you’re
solving.
Let’s try it together. Imagine you’re an award-winning songwriter
and you set out to write a new song. That is a big task—your last
single was a hit on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and the pressure is
on because your record label wants to keep the momentum going.
You wonder how to continue your success in songwriting to create
another hit. Aside from your record label, your fans expect another
catchy tune with meaningful lyrics in this next piece. So, to make it
more manageable, you write down your problem and break it down
into two subparts.
Main Problem: How do I write my next hit song?

Subproblems:
What entertaining subjects can I write about?
What sounds or instruments can I use?
When comparing wants, you must start out by jotting down

everything you want from your hit song. After all, how can you
write something if you don’t even like it? Recall the shape of your
Big Picture—that will help you define your choosing criteria. It is in
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the top part of the shape you will use to fill in the lines with boxes
next to them.
Your list of wants might look like this:
• I want the song to be catchy.

• I want the song to match my brand as an artist.
• I want the song to be relatively easy to record.
• I want the song to sound folksier than my past work.
• I don’t want it to be too expensive to record.
This list probably echoes your problem breakdown to some

degree. It might even lead you to go back and revise that break-
down! Notice all the adjectives—that’s right, you are describing the
idea you want to create.
Now, you might be thinking, this sounds like something a song-
writer would do without Think Bigger—and you would be correct!
Think Bigger is the closest match we can make to how creative
thinking happens in our minds. Even for artists, it helps to make
explicit what they want from a solution, rather than following along
with whatever impulses arise in any moment.
Next, write down the wants of your target. It is here you must
be as specific as possible. For example, your target can’t simply be
people in their twenties. That is too large a scope, as a twenty-one-
year-old is generally quite different from a twenty-nine-year-old.
For instance, the twenty-one-year-old might want a pop tune to
hear in the club while the twenty-nine-year old might want a song
with rock influence that can be played at a bar. How do you find a
balance? A good way to understand your target is to interview them
or someone who knows a lot about them. The aim is to figure out all
the things—big or small—your target would want from a solution
and go from there.
It is important to note that every target group has wants in
common and wants that differ. So, let’s return to the subproblem,
“What entertaining subjects can I write about?” Some of your target
might prefer songs about romance and fun, while others will want
a song about overcoming heartbreak and finding oneself. Not every
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solution can satisfy all the wants of your target group. But you need
to know what all those wants might be. Then, you can choose stra-
tegically, to meet the largest set of wants, or the wants you prefer
to meet based on your own personal wants. To help you list your
target’s wants, I will provide you with a guide and structure to fol-
low along.
To interview your target, or someone who knows your target
well, like a musical trends specialist, you will need to narrow your
focus. For any problem you solve, the target is always people, even
if you’re solving a problem for an organization. If you are finding
solutions for an organization, you must ask, who are the people in
the organization that will use the solution?
Here, I have created a profile for you to fill in—this will help you
identify who might be a good fit for interviewing:
• Age (person) or size (company)

• City or region of primary residence
• Socioeconomic status (e.g., income, education levels, occupation, or
association memberships)
• Brand affinity/product usage (purchasing history and brand loyalties)
• Psychological details (personality, lifestyle, political affiliations)
• Friends, allies, or competitors
• Other relevant details
Once you’ve narrowed down your target—let’s say, in this case,

your target is fans of your previous songs, the fans who have been
with you from the start, and those who were exposed to you from
your last hit—on the right, list what your target wants in a potential
solution. These questions can help in your interviews. Note that
they mirror what you ask about your own wants:
• What do you want this solution to do in an ideal world?

• What do you want from a solution (money, recognition, promotion)?
• What kinds of solutions do you prefer in the long run (e.g., technical,
inexpensive, flashy)?
• What do you think the solution should feel like?
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• What kind of “aura” or “brand” would you like it to have (easy, edgy,
timeless)?
• How do you want others to describe your solution?
• What about this problem do you care about most?
Think about what your fans want and start jotting it all down in
your Big Picture, this time in the node labeled “Target.” I’ve created
a list for you to compare your own to:
• I want the song to be memorable or “catchy.”

• I want the song to sound like an extension of the last album.
• I often prefer songs “you can dance to.”
• I’d love to hear a collaboration with another of my favorite artists.
• I prefer that the song not sound auto tuned.
Do any of these overlap with the “Wants” we identified in your

list? If you see overlap, that’s a good sign! It means you are piec-
ing together the adjectives that will help define your potential solu-
tion. Once you’ve started to parse these wants together, it is time to
think about who else might matter for the success of your solution.
We call these people “Third Parties.” In the case of your next hit
song, these people might be your record label, or competing artists.
As we mentioned before, your record label is putting the pressure
on for you to make a song that will be another hit. They will put
constraints on how “folky” your song can be, or maybe they will
want it to sound like your previous hits. Maybe competing artists
are experimenting with a sound similar to what you’re going for.
No matter the case, it’s your job as an innovator to figure out who
might have the biggest impact on the success of your solution. And
you need to know what they want. As with your target, you want to
interview the third parties. Here are some of the factors to account
for when deciding who to interview:
• Who else cares about this problem?

• Who else cares about your target?
• Who might be an ally or obstacle for any potential solution?
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• Where do they fit in the larger picture?

• What do they have to gain or lose from a potential solution?
Let’s narrow down your “Third Parties” to be the record label.

Here are some of the questions you can ask either your production
manager, the lead for your project, or some of the market experts
who work there:
• What kind of solution would they not like to see?

• What kinds of solutions are they expecting?
• Are there certain factors that could aggravate or ingratiate one of these
parties to you?
• What kind of “aura” or “brand” would most appeal to them (e.g., easy,
edgy, timeless)?
• What will they get out of a solution (e.g., money, time, happiness)?
• What is their motivation to see you succeed or fail?
• Why do they care about this problem?
• What might their wants be?
After doing a few rigorous interviews, your list for third parties
might look something like this:
• My label wants the song to be catchy.

• My label wants the song to be cheap to produce (e.g., use synthetic
sounds rather than live recordings).
• My label would prefer the song sound very similar to my last album
which sold well.
• Critics would prefer more complex lyrics (i.e. they said the lyrics on my
last album were too simple).
Jot them all down in the node of your Big Picture Score labeled
as “Third Parties.” Once again, you might notice that some of the
wants overlap. Others might be very different. The point is, these
lists can help you decide later down the line what trade-offs you can
make among the different solutions later on. In our song writing
example, as you begin to compose your melody, put the lyrics into
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place, and add some beats to the mix, you will likely come up with
several ideas. That is good. You must carry multiple ideas forward
to complete the Big Picture Score.
As you listen to each song—let’s say you’ve come up with three
different versions of your new hit single—you will check off how
each version tallies up and accommodates your wants as the ide-
ator, the wants of your fans, and the wants of your record label. As
you will see in Step 5, you will Choice Map to create myriad ideas
that at face value, will all sound useful and novel. Your “Big Picture
Score,” will help you take a step back and see (1) how desirable
each solution is overall, and (2) which parties you favor for each
solution. Ultimately, the Big Picture Score helps you choose an idea
based on the party or parties you want to optimize for.
YOUR OWN BIG PICTURE SCORE
You now have your Big Picture. You have all your wants with the
boxes to check off beside them. And you have all the wants that
align and conflict amongst all parties involved in the process of
finding a solution that will succeed. You will use these to calculate
your Big Picture Score. It’s natural to have competing or conflicting
wants as part of your Big Picture—don’t try to resolve those right
now. It is impossible to please everyone about everything, which
is why you, the ideator, have to choose. In Think Bigger, the act
of choosing comes in phases and the Big Picture is used in each
phase. In Step 5, it will serve as your selection criteria when choos-
ing amongst the multiple solutions you will create. In Step 6, as you
describe your idea to outsiders, your Big Picture helps you remem-
ber and articulate the “why” behind your idea.
With your Big Picture Score in hand, you are ready to search for
the pieces needed to create the ideal solution for your problem. We
will now continue to build your core tool to Thinking Bigger: the
Choice Map.
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6
STEP 4: SEARCH IN AND
OUT OF THE BOX
THE SEARCH
We now return to the Choice Map, where you have your draft prob-
lem and subproblems. It’s time to search for tactics and precedents
that solve each subproblem to some degree, somewhere, at some
time. So our next question is: How do you search?
In this day and age, searching is easy, thanks to Google. I type in
my key words and voilà! A treasure trove of information populates
before me eyes—sometimes into the millions of hits on even the
narrowest of topics I choose to pursue. But Think Bigger aims for
something much narrower and more focused: real-life examples of
success. Must I sift through millions of websites to find them?
Here we get help from an unsung hero of innovation by the name
of Lloyd Trotter. In the late 1990s, he became the first African-
American member of General Electric’s executive committee, when
GE was the largest and most successful company on earth. Because
of this success, Jack Welch, the CEO at the time, became the most
famous business leader in the world. Trotter is known in the field of
manufacturing operations for helping GE’s factories become mod-
els of efficiency and continuous improvement. He was also a leader
of the diversity movement across the corporate world, first at GE
STEP 4: SEARCH IN AND OUT OF THE BOX
and then nationwide. Less well known is the method Trotter used
for both achievements—in manufacturing and diversity.
So far, I’ve given you lots of examples of innovators who used
many of the principles of Think Bigger in practice, consciously or
not. Trotter is the first person in the history of innovation to for-
malize those principles into a clear method that we all can use. As
Isaac Newton stood on “ye shoulders of Giants,” the Think Bigger
method is itself in many ways a product of great minds and forces
that have come before it—with a special debt to the brilliant Lloyd
Trotter.
I had the good fortune to interview him in the summer of 2020.
Here is his story.
He started out as an apprentice in the Cleveland Twist Drill
Company and was the first Black employee on the payroll. They
sent him to night school at Cleveland State for a college degree.
During his time there, one of the company’s distributors had a
problem with a GE machine—and Trotter easily solved it. When a
GE employee came to fix the problem and saw Trotter had already
found a solution for it, he was asked to work for the company one
day a week to redesign the machine. He did. Eight weeks later, GE
offered him a job.
So began his GE career as a field service engineer for the lighting
business. That was 1970. By 1990, he was president and CEO of GE
Industrial, in charge of factories around the world. He recalls that
it all began with a simple observation:
When I started looking at our factories, there were sixty of them

all over the world. And everywhere I went, really—I called it sheer
genius. You know, somebody was doing something that no one else
was doing. And you know, the thought process was that why aren’t
we our own consultants? How can I get a best practice from Europe,
as an example, and to the US, or a best practice from Mexico to
Europe or whatever? And that led me to say, I need a process with
rules. And the process was let’s have every manufacturing unit begin
to identify where they think they’re world class. They’re not world
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PART TWO
class as a total entity, but they may do certain things well like inven-
tory turns, which means cash management, or labor utilization.
I just wanted to make it simple. One to five, five being a best
practice, one being you didn’t really know what you were doing. Zero
meant that you didn’t even know what we were talking about. That’s
where I put together this matrix, to tell me what you think you’re
good at along certain key things for manufacturing: inventory con-
trol, cycle times, productivity, you name it.
So was born the Trotter Matrix. Ask anyone who worked at GE in

the 1990s, and they’ll remember it. The Trotter Matrix is the direct
ancestor of our Think Bigger Choice Map. In terms of application,
Trotter used it for one specific purpose, while Think Bigger adapts
it for problems of all kinds.
Here’s how the Trotter Matrix worked:
By putting this matrix together, I had each of the plant managers and
their finance guys measure themselves on where they thought they
were on a scale of one to five. One meant that you really understood
the practice, you knew of the practice, but you really weren’t that
good at it, or whatever the measurement was. And then a five was
you were best-in-class. You believed that you were in the best in the
world, in your world or anybody’s world, at doing it.
So, everybody did their self-measurements. I then got all of the
finance guys and the manufacturing guys together and we went
through it. And what happened was, most people gave themselves
high marks when they really shouldn’t have. Which I expected, to
be honest.
There were two manufacturing units, one in France and one in
North Carolina, where I thought the way they graded themselves, they
were pretty much god-like. I asked the first team to tell the group why
they thought they were that good. They got up and they were laugh-
ing. It was pretty clear they hadn’t taken the exercise very seriously.
So the second team got up. And before they even started trying to
explain why they thought that they were that good, the plant man-
ager said, “I lied. I didn’t take this seriously. I want to take the time
132
to do a redo and be honest with myself.” And that’s what we did. And
then that started it, once we were honest with ourselves.
The Trotter Matrix took off when everyone realized how much it

helped them. At first, they thought it was a test, where they would
get a score, and that would be the end of it. But Trotter had a very
different idea. Over the years, he learned best practices by visiting
a variety of plants and taking in the best of what each of them did.
That’s what he wanted all of the participants to do in an organized
way with each other.
If you were a three or less, then you will contact the plant manager
who is at the highest category, a four or five, and they will be your
coach and mentor to show you how they did it so that you don’t have
to go through all of the institutional learning in order to create this.
You can grab what you want, steal shamelessly what they had, and
you’ll have a coach to do it.
The Trotter Matrix became part of ordinary operations. If you

scored high in some category, you had to plan over the next year
to teach someone who scored low in that category, and vice versa.
At the end of the year, each individual had to report on who they
taught and who they learned from.
It took less than a year for results to show—and for the CEO of
GE, Jack Welch, to notice:
We were averaging two percent variable cost productivity. And we

took the two percent up to seven percent over a six- to seven-month
period. That caught Jack Welch’s eye. We were in a meeting about
the three-year plan. And he just blatantly said, “Lloyd, what are you
guys doing? What are you hiding? And where is this coming from?”
The improvements his finance team showed him for us were over the
top, better than any he had seen in his career.
After that meeting, the Trotter Matrix spread throughout

GE. It was one of Welch’s secret weapons, as he built a thriving
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PART TWO
conglomerate of twenty-four different companies in twenty-four

different industries. Critics insisted that conglomerates are inef-
ficient by nature, arguing that there was no reason for NBC TV to
be under the same roof as GE’s medical equipment business, and
so on for the remaining industries. But Trotter offered a reason,
and a great one, why the critics were wrong about conglomerates.
The more diverse the range of industries interacting the better
because it dramatically expands the range of best practices to
steal from one another. This way, everyone learns and improves
together.
Welch appointed the world’s first Chief Learning Officer, Steve
Kerr, who made the Trotter Matrix a core feature of GE’s manage-
ment education program in Crotonville, New York. As new man-
agers came in for training, they all learned how to use the matrix
to “steal shamelessly” from throughout GE. Kerr spread Trotter’s
reporting system too, so everyone had to learn or teach the method
across the whole company, every year. Trotter, and then Kerr, fur-
ther expanded the matrix to external sources as well. For example,
GE’s quality control program borrowed from Motorola, and it took
many elements from Japan’s Kaizen.
Trotter used the matrix for diversity too:
We started our diversity launch in General Electric; we were

nowhere. There was an article where GE falls short, in the New York
Times. And I was quoted in that article and got a little bit too flip-
pant. I was the only African-American on the corporate Executive
Council at the time. And they asked me a question. And I said, “If I
manage my business the way we’re managing diversity, I would have
been fired a long time ago.” And guess what, they printed it in the
paper, that statement.
So, I got a call from Jack. I said, “Are you ready to fire me?” And
he said, “No, you’re right. So now what are we gonna do about it?”
Well, the first thing, we agreed that we didn’t have the answers. At
the time there were three organizations—Xerox, IBM, and I believe
it was AT&T—who were being touted as best-in-class in getting affir-
mative action and diversity going in their corporations.
134
I took a team, not HR people, of operating people to these places.

In my mind, relegating some of these social things to HR is the
wrong thing to do. They should help. But it’s an operating problem.
And we made it an operating problem that I led. And we went to
these places. We took notes. And we listened. And then we took the
best of all three of those and then formed it and put it into a culture,
our culture, the way we thought our culture could accept it.
We can see that in any form, for any problem, the Trotter Matrix
begins with humility. Instead of thinking you know the answer, you
admit that others, somewhere, at some time, might know better.
Trotter cites that humility as key to his original idea:
I had an opportunity to start really from the bottom. You know, be

one of those individuals using their hands every day and then, at
times, ignored when I had suggestions on how to do things differ-
ently. I guess that changed my thinking or reinforced my thinking
about where ideas come from.
THE CHOICE MAP IN ACTION
Trotter’s original matrix always had the same problem at the top:
How to improve my factory? The subproblems were standard fac-
tory functions, and the sources were all his factories. He and Kerr
adapted it to apply to other problems, across all GE companies.
Here’s an example from the GE Way Fieldbook, by Robert Slater:
The service people in the Medical Systems business have learned

how to remotely monitor a GE CT scanner as it operates in a hos-
pital, at times detecting and repairing an impending malfunction
online, sometimes before the customer even knows a problem exists.
Medical Systems shared this technique with other GE businesses—
in jet engines, locomotives, Motors and Industrial Systems, and
Power Systems—bringing overall improvement to GE businesses as
a whole. Now GE businesses can monitor the performance of jet
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PART TWO
engines in flight, locomotives pulling freight, paper mills in opera-

tion, and turbines in customer power plants. This capability gives
GE the opportunity to create a multibillion dollar service business
by upgrading installed GE equipment.
Here is another example from the early 2000s to show just how
the Trotter Matrix worked in detail.
Crotonville gave an incoming management cohort this problem:
How can GE Appliances move to online commerce? At the time, GE
made appliances of all kinds, from toasters to refrigerators. Ama-
zon and other online stores were just taking off, so GE wondered
if they should start selling appliances directly to consumers online.
But there’s a catch: GE had always sold to big stores, who then sold
the appliances to customers. If they started selling directly to cus-
tomers, wouldn’t the big stores cut them out and buy appliances
from their competitors instead?
The Crotonville cohort took on this problem and started a Trot-
ter Matrix (see table 6.1). The draft problem was simple: How to
move from wholesale to online commerce in appliances? They then
broke down the subproblems into the chain of activities for selling
appliances.
As we noted before, the problem and subproblems stay in draft
until the last moment—when you have a solution that fits them.
The Trotter Matrix put the twenty-four GE businesses as column
table 6.1
Trotter Matrix (blank)
Problem (Draft): Wholesale to Online Commerce in Appliances
Subproblems (draft) Fin. Plast. NBC Med. Power Mort. Appl. Etc.
Customer identification
Customer retention
Customer credit
Wholesaler retention
Customer service
Distribution
136
headings because that’s where they search first: GE Finance, GE

Plastics, NBC TV, GE Medical, GE Power, GE Mortgage, GE Appli-
ances, and so on.
The cohort then does team management, to decide who searches
on which subproblem, who maintains the chart, whether they get
together every evening to update each other, and so on. Then they
search. Remember that Crotonville has the records of all GE units
and what they scored high on, so that’s the first place to search.
The cohort also comes from different GE companies, so they give
each other leads that way. They follow up each lead by calling the
manager responsible for the successful example and asking exactly
how it works.
Day by day, they fill in the matrix with successful examples they
might want to use for their final combination. That means even the
cells are a draft—you don’t know which ones you will use. Here’s
our example partially filled in (see table 6.2).
Behind each X is a short description of the example, why it
works, and how it might apply to this problem. In this example,
the cohort stopped. That’s because they found their big idea—and
it came from a most unusual place. GE Finance had a product that
you could only get online if you were a GE employee, as part of its
employee benefits package. So, this appliance cohort asked, “What
if we offer appliances online only to GE employees and their fami-
lies, as a benefit? The big stores won’t get mad—it’s just an internal
table 6.2
Trotter Matrix (partially filled in)
Problem (Draft): Wholesale to Online Commerce in Appliances
Subproblems (draft) Fin. Plast. NBC Med. Power Mort. Appl. Etc.
Customer identification X
Customer retention X X
Customer credit
Wholesaler retention X
Customer service X
Distribution X
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PART TWO
benefit. There are 300,000 GE employees, with family—that makes

a million customers, and they’ll all surely buy appliances. We can
work out all the technical details with a million customers and
make a profit right away, without alienating the big stores.”
Note that they did not solve the original problem. Instead, they
solved a smaller version. Their final matrix had this as their final
problem statement: GET STARTED IN ONLINE COMMERCE
FOR APPLIANCES. That’s what they solved. They did not solve the
whole problem—which is fine. You can’t solve every problem in
two weeks. You can’t solve every problem in two months. Some
problems you can never solve. But the Trotter Matrix showed them
how to try. And now, Think Bigger does too.
As it turns out, GE accepted this idea—which had such positive
outcomes, that a few years in, they expanded it to include employ-
ees of companies that did business with GE. That created a highly
profitable pool of millions of additional customers—and the big
stores never objected. The internal appliance program remained
in place for more than fifteen years until GE sold off its appliance
business in 2016.
On that score, note the last X on the Matrix, Appliances / Distribu-
tion. Here’s that idea: Why not have employees pick up their online
purchase at the big stores that sell GE appliances? The store gets a
cut of the profit. Great!
Now, you can see how we make the jump from the Trotter Matrix
to the Think Bigger Choice Map. We leave off the columns because
we don’t limit our search to GE companies. In practice, GE didn’t
either, but they did not show those other sources on the matrix
itself. In the Choice Map, we make room for all sources in the same
place by putting the tactics we find side-by-side in each row. Here’s
how the final Choice Map looks for the same appliance problem
(see table 6.3).
This is a relatively simple problem with a relatively simple solu-
tion. You can see how the Choice Map accommodates great com-
plexity beyond that, with space for lots of different tactics from an
infinite variety of sources. There are no columns, so it’s no longer
a matrix. That’s why we call it a Choice Map: like a map, it shows
138
table 6.3
Choice Map
Problem: Get Started in Online Commerce for Appliances
Subproblems Precedents
Customer GE Finance: employee
identification benefit
Customer retention NBC TV: success A GE Power:
success B
Customer credit
Wholesaler retention GE Power: success C
Customer service GE Mortgage: success D
Distribution GE Appliances: store
pickup
possible directions for you to choose. In our case, it’s the combina-
tions to solve your problem.
With his matrix, Trotter pioneered formal search as the main
cognitive tool for innovation. Remember: all thinking is an act
of memory. To solve a complex problem, your brain probes your
shelves of memory to find the right pieces of the puzzle. Search
adds more pieces of the right kind on your memory shelves, so you
have a greater chance of solving the problem by putting some com-
bination of them together. The Trotter matrix, and now our Choice
Map, helps you keep track of these mental steps—because for com-
plex problems, it’s all too much to keep in your head.
CURIOSITY PAYS OFF
You don’t need me to point out that Lloyd Trotter was intensely
focused on the task of improving efficiency across GE. His matrix
approach was groundbreaking in a number of ways, but one of his
most valuable contributions was his insistence on putting people
with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and expertise in the same
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PART TWO
room to tackle a problem together. That aspect of his work under-

scores a key tenet of Think Bigger: looking beyond familiar domains
for clues to solve your problem.
Leonardo da Vinci is possibly the most iconic example of some-
one who showed us how creativity benefits from gaining knowl-
edge in domains far beyond familiarity and core expertise. Aside
from his most famous paintings, the Mona Lisa and The Last Sup-
per, he was a man who filled up notebooks with countless vision-
ary, innovative ideas. A simple flip through these fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century notebooks shows designs for machines that were
precursors to modern robots, automobiles, helicopters, airplanes,
and military tanks. If you were to visit his home, you would find
that da Vinci was a man who was constantly learning about many
different things—physics, chemistry, anatomy, engineering, paint-
ing, and sculpting, just to name a few.
As da Vinci studied these various fields, he was always breaking
ideas and materials down into their elemental components, collect-
ing bits of knowledge from different domains, and looking for ways
to combine them into innovations. By breaking something down
to its fundamentals, he realized that those components could be
modified and recombined to create something new.
I consider him the first person in recorded history to consciously
recognize the value of searching out of domain to generate new
ideas. You might say this illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant
was simply born a genius. Indeed, we often feel great innovators
have a unique quality that makes them polymaths, gaining exper-
tise in multiple fields at once. However, he wasn’t an innovator
because he was an expert in numerous individual fields but rather
because he took the time to explore new areas of knowledge and
make connections where others did not.
The ability—and curiosity—to search across many domains of
inquiry, collect examples, and later combine them into new innova-
tions is the cornerstone of the Think Bigger method. This process
was da Vinci’s real competitive advantage—and like him, you must
allow your curiosity to guide you. It is, however, important to cre-
ate a balance between developing expertise in particular areas and
140
exploring unrelated areas of curiosity. Also, like da Vinci, when you

explore other areas of interest, you’re finding tactics for what works
best in other domains and the potential strategies you could use.
IN DOMAIN, OUT OF DOMAIN
In our Trotter Matrix, note the two categories of tactics. Using

the stores that sell appliances for online appliance pickup is “in
domain.” That is, the tactic comes from the same domain as the
problem: appliances. Selling online, only to employees as a ben-
efit, is “out of domain.” The tactic comes from finance, a domain
that’s different from the problem domain. We have seen this dis-
tinction before. For Henry Ford, the Oldsmobile stationary line was
in domain, and the moving line of the slaughterhouse was out. For
Reed Hastings, Blockbuster was in domain and gym membership
was out.
In Think Bigger, we make these two categories explicit. Here’s a
way to remind you to search for both (see figure 6.1).
The first two columns of your Choice Map should include the
nonredundant best practices in the industry of your problem.
Remember, Henry Ford used the Oldsmobile assembly line as his
in-domain best practice to speed up the production of the Model T.
Those first two columns are where expertise matters most—they
provide us with a clear threshold to explore more creative solutions
in the space and establish the value added.
As the ideator, first building a strong foundation of in-domain
best practices helps you set your goalposts before moving on to
the next three columns in your Choice Map—the out-of-domain
examples of success. In the Choice Map, we prioritize having more
out-of-domain examples. This is because those examples make
our ideas powerful—think of Ford using moving tracks from the
Chicago slaughterhouses and japanning with black lacquer paint.
The search for in-domain or out-of-domain examples requires
the ideator to ask, “Who has solved this subproblem successfully in
the past?” That means anyone, anywhere, anytime, in any way. You
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PART TWO
CHOICE MAP
PROBLEM
PRECEDENTS
SUBPROBLEMS
IN DOMAIN OUT OF DOMAIN
Figure 6.1 Choice Map.
don’t seek “current” examples because you have no information on

those. The “past” includes yesterday. Trotter might have thought
he studied Xerox’s current diversity program, but in reality, he only
had information on what they had done so far. That is, the past. So
don’t ask, “What is X doing?” Ask, “What has X done?”
In each row, your subproblem will be different. Some rows might
be entirely out of domain—which is encouraged, especially if your
problem is something unknown within that problem definition’s
domain. But no row should be entirely in domain. Again, you must
always search out of domain for every subproblem—and there is a
good reason for this. Using mostly out-of-domain practices in your
Choice Map encourages a more innovative solution. My own data
analysis shows that for Choice Maps that hold an average of fifteen-
plus tactics (five tactics per subproblem with at least three of which
142
are out of domain), their subsequent idea generating is perceived

as significantly more creative by peers and colleagues.
For in-domain tactics, recall that in Step 2, when you broke
down the problem, you consulted experts to gain what you could
of their knowledge base to help inform your thinking. Now is the
time to ask those same experts for in-domain tactics. We noted that
sometimes you get those tactics during your Step 2 interview about
problem breakdown, if the expert is hard to reach or willing to talk
only once—in which case, it is fine to set out to ask both questions
in that one interview.
When searching out of domain, you can't rely on experts in the
same way. For out-of-domain searching, your tactics can come
from anywhere. Later in this chapter, I explain the art of search-
ing out of domain. It’s more difficult than in domain, but as the
data shows, it’s the greater source of innovation. The key to gen-
erating your best ideas is the diversity and quality of your out-of-
domain tactics.
The Choice Map cells are small to keep the map manageable.
Make them larger, and the whole map is too big to see all together.
In the cell itself, you can just put a shorthand marker: Ford would
put “slaughterhouse,” Hastings would put “gym membership.”
You then have a more detailed note behind each cell. We call these
“micro-notes.” If you use a digital spreadsheet, this is easy to set
up. The micro-note is specific and concise about what matters most
for that tactic. The micro-note for the slaughterhouse might read “a
moving line with stationary workers speeds production.” The one
for gym membership might read “flat monthly fees insure steady
income independent of use.” Micro-notes specify the tactic and its
benefit to your idea. While you certainly are not going to replicate a
slaughterhouse or a gym, you might use a moving line or flat mem-
bership fee in your own solution.
So, now you know the basic mechanics to use the Choice Map
for search. To conduct a productive search, you must understand
where everything you find will end up.
We now begin the art of the search, starting with the mental dis-
cipline of Lloyd Trotter’s key insight: “steal shamelessly” from the
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PART TWO
success of others. Above all, this is a frame of mind that you have
to embrace and practice, which we will cover here.
I offer a word here about legal patents and copyright. These rules
vary by country, but in general, you need to make sure that you stay
within the law. If you can’t afford to pay the patent or copyright
fee, don’t use that tactic. In reality, very few tactics have this kind
of legal coverage, so don’t let this fear constrain your search. If you
find a tactic that you suspect has a patent or copyright, then look
further into it.
There is also an ethical question: Trotter tells you to “steal
shamelessly,” but stealing is a crime! Of course it’s only a meta-
phor. Patents and copyright cover actual stealing. Outside of that,
it’s more a feeling that you’re taking something without permis-
sion. Trotter gives us the ethical answer: cite your sources. His
whole Trotter Matrix system makes it explicit where each tactic
comes from. You can do the same. Matisse, remember, made sure
to cite his sources. Picasso did not. We can conclude that Matisse
was more ethical than Picasso.
For each tactic, it’s important to have evidence that testifies to
its merit. You rarely find facts and figures that show a tactic suc-
ceeds, so you need other markers. For example, there was no sta-
tistical study to show what percentage of gym profit came from the
one tactic of flat-fee membership. Instead, Hastings relied on the
simple judgment that a flat fee did indeed reduce other penalties,
and gyms that used flat fees seemed many and profitable.
We see this even in technical fields where there is a lot of data.
For example, let’s examine how Google itself came to be. The
Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started out using Alta-
Vista as a search engine for their doctoral research. AltaVista was
the very first program to automate internet searches, using a web
crawler that mined every page on the internet. The chief competitor
was Yahoo, where humans coded each page. AltaVista was faster,
but was Yahoo still the better search engine because of higher
quality results?
The Google guys relied on their own judgment—and a grow-
ing consensus among users—that AltaVista was better. The next
144
tactic they combined was library author citations. The more times
someone else cited your name in a footnote, the higher your author
rank. The Google guys decided to apply that to websites, so the more
times another site linked to your site, the higher you would rank.
That allowed them to display AltaVista results by rank order, rather
than randomly. Only then did the Google guys realize they had a
great search engine the wider world might want to use. Before that,
they were just working on their doctoral research.
The last piece of the puzzle was money. How could they make a
profit? Yahoo made money as a portal, where it had everything on
the same page: email, news, shopping, weather, sports, and anything
else you wanted to put there—plus search. They sold banner ads
and popup ads that showed up on the same page. This was conve-
nient, but all of that content on the same page made Yahoo slow to
load. AltaVista and Google just offered search, and made no money.
If they added banners and popups, it would slow down the search.
Their biggest advantage over Yahoo was speed. So this was a no go.
Then, the Google guys noticed a website called Overture in their
search. It was a search engine without many users, but they were
selling ads and displaying them—not as banners and popups—but
as search results in a nice little list on the side of the page. Interest-
ingly, these ads didn’t compromise search speed. So, the Google
guys wrote that feature into Google—and only then did they over-
take Yahoo. Nearly twenty years later, ad search still accounts for
roughly eighty percent of Google’s revenue.
Until the Google guys found the Overture piece, Yahoo remained
the most successful search engine. This demonstrates that you
search for pieces of what others are doing, not the whole thing.
AltaVista solved one piece of the puzzle, library citations solved
another piece, and Overture solved a third. You have to use your
own judgment as to whether or not the specific tactics you find
work well enough for you to borrow it for your Choice Map.
Once you find a promising tactic, ask experts if they think it con-
tributes to the idea’s success. That’s how the Google guys singled
out AltaVista in the first place—from expert judgment in the field,
including their own. Experts are usually happy to comment on what
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works in their field. Don’t stop at just “Yes, it works,” or “No, it

doesn’t.” Ask the experts why they think that. Not every expert
knows everything about their field. Their explanation will reveal
to you the depth of their knowledge and understanding of the tac-
tic you ask them about. Ask experts only about tactics within their
domain. When you find an out-of-domain tactic, consult an expert
from that domain rather than from the domain of your problem.
The relationship between out of domain and expertise gives us a
distinct angle on diversity. If you do Think Bigger as a team, mem-
bers from different backgrounds will have different views on what
the problem is and how to break it down. The more diversity the
better. But expertise matters too. In practice, people with the most
experience in the problem’s domain will tend to dominate these
two steps. Experience creates a diversity trap. And discrimination
prevents some people from getting experience, so valuing people
for their experience can reinforce discrimination.
In Think Bigger, we handle the problem of diversity by leveling
the playing field. First, when you work as a team, always do each
task as an individual. That gives everyone an equal shot at contrib-
uting. Second, out-of-domain search cancels out the experience
advantage. People with less experience in the domain have fresher
eyes when searching beyond it. As we see from our many examples,
out-of-domain tactics are more innovative than in-domain ones
and often come from non-experts. The Choice Map search is a skill
you learn that gives you a creative advantage, despite any lack of
experience in the problem domain. With repetition, you become
expert in doing it.
When thinking of diversity in the context of a Choice Map,
always remember that the quality of your idea depends on the qual-
ity of choices you include in your map.
LEVERAGING DIVERSITY
We’re told, time and time again, that diversity enhances creativity and
performance in organizations. Dozens of studies over the last decade
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document that almost every measure of group diversity—nationality,

education, occupation, geography, or ethnicity—enhances creativity
and performance in organizations. Still, we tend to find a certain dif-
ficulty involved in leveraging diversity, one that Think Bigger helps
to address.
As the late Katherine Phillips illustrated in her groundbreak-
ing research, simply bringing people from different backgrounds
together to sit at one table is not enough to reap the benefits of
diversity. To leverage diversity of thought, you must have a culture
of information sharing and conflict resolution where all voices are
heard, respected, and understood. When you encourage people who
are from different domains to individually fill in the Choice Map
with in-domain and out-of-domain precedents and tactics, you will
automatically get an array of non-redundant ideas. By conducting
an individual search, and coming together to share the tactics and
precedents found per row, each group member will be encouraged
to share their ideas—no matter how wild or complex they might
seem. In practice, I can say that the Choice Map naturally—and
effectively—creates a group dynamic that encourages divergent
thought and truly leverages the power of diversity.
WHY NOT FAILURE?
Invariably, when I teach the Think Bigger method, some students

ask, “Why don’t we study failures too?” It’s a fair question. Start-
ing in childhood, our parents and teachers tell us that we learn the
most from failure. We then go on to repeat that as adults, to other
adults, whenever anyone fails. The real purpose of saying this is
to keep your spirits up and not take failure personally. Failure cer-
tainly teaches a moral lesson—that nobody’s perfect. And bouncing
back from failure can help build resilience.
Unfortunately, though, many people don’t bounce back. If you
think about it carefully, it’s not the failure that helps in your per-
sonal growth. It’s how you react to it. The failure itself simply
teaches the wrong way to do something. And perhaps humility.
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If failure was the best teacher, then I would tell you to fail as much
as possible in order to learn as much as possible. Failure hurts, and
that makes you remember it. But it’s not at all the best teacher.
Imagine that you’re a contestant on a TV show where you have to
survive on your own for a month. A helicopter drops you off, naked,
in the middle of a forest. There’s plenty of water, and the best source
of food is the vast variety of mushrooms growing throughout this
forest. I offer you two books to improve your chances of survival:
an encyclopedia of five hundred varieties of poisonous mushrooms
found in the forest or a short guide to ten edible ones. You may
choose only one book. Which do you pick?
If you want to become an expert in mushrooms, by all means
pick the encyclopedia. But you have a very different aim: to sur-
vive. You need to build shelter, find fuel for a fire, devise a means to
create flame and collect food to sustain yourself. You also need to
make something to wear, especially for your feet. In other words,
you have a list of pressing subproblems to solve, and the short
guide to ten edible mushrooms gives you the answer to one of
them. The encyclopedia of poisonous mushrooms offers answers
to none.
You might also ask, “Don’t I learn best from my own experi-
ence rather than the experience of others? Isn’t experience the best
teacher?” Let’s return to my hypothetical forest. This time, you
have no books. So you set out to learn from experience. You pick a
type of mushroom that looks similar to those you’ve eaten before.
You try it and get violently ill. What did your experience teach you?
Not to eat that mushroom. You try another type. You get sick again.
And so on, through the forest.
But then you happen upon another contestant. She’s been there
two weeks longer than you—and she’s tried twenty-two mush-
rooms before finally finding one that didn’t make her sick. Do you
ask her to point it out to you, or do you say, “No thanks, I want to
learn on my own?” Experience can be a very good teacher, but it’s
also the slowest. Learning from your fellow survivor on the island
will be much faster—and safer—than testing dozens of mushrooms
until you chance upon one that works.
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Lloyd Trotter would have needed to spend decades running each

of his factories to learn a fraction of what he could gather from the
accumulated experience of his plant managers. Picasso spent years
becoming an expert painter on his own, but there were lots of expert
painters with ideas floating around. He leapt forward in innovation
by borrowing from other artists, most notably African sculptors. It
would have taken him years to master the techniques of African art
through experience. Instead, he learned from other artists. In your
Think Bigger search, you will find lots of mushrooms, but only the
rare edible ones should make it onto your Choice Map.
Another frequent question I get is “Won’t the effort to avoid fail-
ure make us risk averse? If innovation is always risky, shouldn’t we
embrace failure?” It’s true that some entrepreneurs advise would-
be innovators to “fail early and often.” They treat each new attempt
as an experiment, and some experiments fail. But following the
Think Bigger method reduces your likelihood of failure by being
systematic—even methodical—about the act of innovating.
Let’s look at the scientific method, where not all experiments
are equal. There are good experiments and bad experiments. I want
you to avoid the bad ones. Think Bigger shows you how. Don’t rely
on trial and error—that will have you sampling five hundred mush-
rooms. That’s a bad experiment—inefficient at best, deadly at worst.
By contrast, Think Bigger turns up a higher number of good ideas
with a reasonable chance for success. Implementing these ideas will
be an experiment, yes, but one with greater odds for victory because
you’ve built it from a strong foundation of successful tactics. As we
know, an estimated 90% of startups fail. While those are useful to
know about, they should not go into your Choice Map. You want to
increase the odds that the experiment you are going to try will not
fail. Isaac Newton did not stand on the shoulders of failed experi-
ments. He stood on the shoulders of past achievements.
Using aspects of previous success stories does not automatically
eliminate risk. The Netflix launch was an experiment, but it was
based on solid tactics. In science, researchers often spend more
time constructing an experiment than conducting it. Don’t fear
failure, but don’t seek it either. Think Bigger builds your idea from
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solid components to give you a better chance that your experiment

will actually succeed.
STRATEGIC COPYING
As we’ve said time and time again in this chapter, there is an art to
the search—what Trotter calls “stealing shamelessly.” Let’s refer
to this as “strategic copying” instead, to reduce the negative impli-
cations. While it might sound new, you actually have been “stra-
tegically copying” your whole life—right down to the very words
you speak. Did you invent your native language? Of course not. You
copied it from others! As is the case for most of what you know.
Have you ever heard that, “Imitation is the highest form of flat-
tery?” That’s because imitation—its all its forms—allows us to
acquire and transmit culture, norms, and social conventions. Yet,
the act of imitation can sometimes lead us astray. Experiment-
ers found this out in a comparative study of human toddlers and
bonobo apes.
Imagine a scientist standing in a room holding a box. A bonobo,
with lanky arms hanging to the ground and bright eyes, wanders in
and is shown a box with a treat inside it. The experimenter then
begins to move his hands and arms in wild gestures, this time open-
ing the box and handing the bonobo the treat. Again, the experi-
menter makes wild, random gestures with his hands—tracing
circles in the air and drawing lines. The bonobo stands and watches
with curiosity, waiting patiently to receive the treat from the exper-
imenter, who hands it to the bonobo after his movements.
Next, a four-year-old human toddler named Michael walks into
the room, with the same experimenter holding the same box and
showing the treat to the child. The experimenter then repeats the
same gestures in the air as he did with the bonobo, opens the box,
and gives Michael the treat. The experimenter repeats his actions
again and again as Michael watches him.
Later, the experimenter leaves the room and box. Michael is
brought back into the room, where he sees the box. Thinking of the
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treat inside, Michael goes up to the box and copies the random ges-
tures he saw the experimenter conduct beforehand—tracing circles
and lines mid-air—before opening the box and taking the treat. The
experimenters then send the bonobo back into the empty room,
with the box in the center. The bonobo simply walks up to the box,
opens it, and eats the treat. Michael, the human toddler, copied
the gestures even though he didn’t need them to get the treat. The
bonobo didn’t do any of that.
This does not mean that bonobos are smarter than human tod-
dlers. The point is that humans imitate too much sometimes.
There are parts you don’t want to imitate. You just to open
the box.
We can go back over all our examples and see what parts our
innovators did not take. A butter churn has a long wooden pole—
Nancy Johnson didn’t take that part. The slaughterhouse workers
wear white coats—Henry Ford didn’t take that part. Picasso didn’t
become a sculptor in wood—he took just the angular facial features
from African art. And so on through the history of innovation.
People tend to think copying is wrong. Or maybe that it’s con-
sidered stealing. While there are, and should be, legal constraints
against certain types of stealing, the act of copying is often linked
with creativity. More often than not, when we copy, we’re simply
strategically replicating what has been done before us, in order
to pull out its most important components. For instance, famous
authors such as Stephen King (and his son, Joe Hill) might copy
entire pages from other books when they are feeling writer’s block.
Many authors engage in this practice, using different styles and
rhythms than those they are used to, to spark an idea—and, of
course, to avoid that most feared image for any writer who has ever
tried to write and nothing comes: the empty page.
Failure to understand partial copying blocks innovation. You
might say to your boss, “Let’s borrow technique A from company
Y.” The boss replies, “We’re different from company Y.” Or “We
already tried A and it didn’t work.” In the latter case, most likely
they tried A + B + C from company Y—that is, they tried to copy too
much. They never tried just A.
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Breaking down success to just that part you want to borrow is

a rare skill that you can develop. Generally, we tend to see success
and think we must imitate everything about it or nothing at all.
In reality, you’re looking for the particular tactic behind some of a
precedent’s success—a sweet spot. You must strategically copy suc-
cessful tactics, not imitate the entirety of a successful precedent, to
target a solution to your problem. In fact, data from my Think Big-
ger student projects consistently show that students who believe in
the value of strategic copying end up creating solutions that indus-
try leaders and their peers judge as more novel and useful.
WHY OLD IDEAS?
Why, you may ask, do we create a Choice Map filled with old ideas?
Creativity and innovation mean something new for the future.
That’s the opposite of the past. Right?
Well, not so fast.
Let’s imagine a company wants to make a new cell phone app
to support a healthy lifestyle among its users. It decides to crowd-
source ideas for the app. Anyone can submit as many ideas as they
want. The ideas go into a database, and everyone rates all the ideas.
Starting out, you think you have to come up with something
attractive to people that’s easy to use and that’s never been tried
before. You do some research. After a while, you begin typing up
your idea. You stress that this is a regular, easy-to-use app, but it
also has some new features never seen before on a health tracker.
You submit your idea to the database.
Now you look at what other people submitted. You rate each of
these different ideas on creativity, purchasing interest, potential
profitability, and the clarity of the submission. You see that they fall
into two categories: First, some people have described apps that you
know from your research already exist, with minor tweaks. Although
perfectly functional, there’s not much new. Second, you see the
opposite: ideas that are so novel that they depend on technology
that either won’t work on a cell phone or doesn’t even exist yet.
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Now you notice a third category. Some ideas fall between “prac-
tical but not new” and “new but impossible.”
You submit your ratings for all three kinds of ideas: practical
but not new, new but not practical, and halfway in between. When
all the results are in, you wonder: Which of the three kinds got the
highest ratings?
As it turns out, we know the answer. Two of my colleagues,
Olivier Toubia and Oded Netzer, ran a study with over two thou-
sand people who rated more than four thousand ideas. They used
a clever tool of language analysis to determine the novelty of each
concept. For example, if your idea pairs “health” and “exercise,” the
tool shows how often other idea descriptions make the same pair-
ing. If your idea description has lots of pairings identical to other
idea descriptions, it gets a low novelty score. But if your pairings are
not similar to other idea descriptions—for example, “health” plus
“skydiving”—then your idea description gets a high novelty score.
After everyone submitted their descriptions, the study then
asked participants to rate all the ideas on “creativity.”
Which kind of idea got the highest creativity score: the most
novel, the least novel, or in between? Toubia and Netzer reported
that “ideas that balance well familiarity and novelty, as measured
by the combination of ‘ingredients’ in the idea, are judged as more
creative.”
Something is “familiar” if you’ve seen it before—in Think Big-
ger terms, that’s a precedent. Creatively solving a problem comes
from taking old pieces and combining them into new forms. Remem-
ber that the past started a second ago. Has that ingredient ever existed
before? If not, it’s not a viable component of a successful innovation.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
Let’s return to the problem of how exactly to search. You’re fish-

ing in an ocean that covers all of human experience, throughout all
time. And you’re not even using a net—you’re spear-fishing, looking
for tactics and precedents one by one. Where do you even start?
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I mentioned before the value of seeking experts to find in-domain

tactics. But no expert knows everything in their field, and you can’t
interview all the experts in existence. Your primary source will be
written material. For that, a research librarian can be a big help.
More than likely, you will use Google to find most of your tactics.
It’s become the biggest library in the history of the world.
The question you ask determines the quality of your answers.
In domain, you look for best practice, like Trotter did. GE’s inven-
tory of best-practice tactics from each of its twenty-four indus-
tries made for a rich source of out-of-domain tactics across those
industries. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t inventory best-practice
tactics the way Trotter did. I just Googled “best practice mar-
keting new products,” and got over a billion hits. When I scroll
through the first dozen or so results, I find not a single tactic.
I get mostly opinion on what someone claims is a best practice.
Why should I believe them? I have to hunt and hunt and hunt to
find a single example where someone explains that tactic X helped
company Y achieve result Z.
Notice the difference between “best practice” and “best-practice
tactic.” At GE, you couldn’t just claim you had a best practice and
expect everyone to believe you. Trotter verified the results of each
unit’s matrix. When you interview experts, this distinction is key. If
the expert says, “The best way to achieve Z is to do X,” what do you
say next? Ask for an example. Without that, you don’t have a tactic.
You have someone’s opinion.
The best solution is for your Google search terms to match your
subproblem, even as you speak with experts. Long before Google,
Ford asked, “How do other automakers reduce production time?”
That led him to the Oldsmobile assembly line. That’s an in-domain
precedent. He also asked, “How do other industries reduce produc-
tion time?” That led him to the slaughterhouse moving line and
Ford struck gold with an out-of-domain tactic.
That is what you must do with Google. Enter your subproblem in
terms specific to your domain, and then enter it as a general ques-
tion to cover all domains. For example, let’s say you’re trying to
improve taxi service, and one of your subproblems is “How do we
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make taxi fares cheaper for the consumer?” For in-domain tactics,
you search similar travel domains where someone solved that prob-
lem. For out-of-domain tactics, you strip away the domain. Go back
to the subproblem and leave the domain blank: “How do we make
[blank] cheaper for the consumer?” Now fill in that blank with a
more generic term that does not refer to any specific domain. We
call that domain agnostic. For example, you could say, “How do we
make a moderately priced service cheaper for the consumer?” Can
you see how this immediately opens a larger world of options to
consider?
Skilled Choice Mappers master all three kinds of out-of-domain
search: agnostic, partial, and parallel. Once you get used to doing
it, you will unearth lots of good examples. And the more you find,
the more selective you can be. This is different from the dilemma
of too much choice because you encounter the tactics one by one.
Still, it’s wise to keep a longer list of promising leads that you add to
each time you find a good tactic. Then go back and study each one
further. Take your time. Select only the strongest tactics to enter
on your Choice Map.
The best way to think outside the box is to literally go into other
boxes. Since domains have different levels, you can also go par-
tially out of the box before making a full jump—this would be a
partial search. For example, you could say something like “How do
we make personal travel cheaper for the consumer?” That’s wider
than taxis but still within travel. You can even target an unrelated
parallel domain by first making the subproblem agnostic and then
thinking of a different domain that fits. For example, first you ask,
“How do we make a moderately priced service cheaper for the con-
sumer?” Then you think of other moderately priced services: laun-
dromats, coffee shops, dog-walkers, moving vans, cable television,
and so on. Then you search each one: for example, “How do laun-
dromats provide a moderately priced service?”
Here are some examples of the three kinds of out-of-domain search.
Draft Subproblem: How can we motivate children to learn math?

Agnostic: How can we motivate children to learn?
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Partial: How can we motivate children to do something that isn’t exciting?

Parallel: How can we motivate children to eat healthy food?
What is the best way to get children to brush their teeth every day?
How do museums and libraries manage the behavior of children?
What is the most effective way to get children to do chores?
Draft Subproblem: How can we transport donated organs more efficiently?
Agnostic: How can we transport delicate objects more efficiently?
Partial: How can we transport delicate medical supplies more efficiently?
Parallel: How do food companies keep food fresh in transit?
What is the fastest way to ship glass sculptures?
What is the best way to travel with a newborn?
How do bakers transport wedding cakes to the reception?
Draft Subproblem: How can we get customers to trust that our food is
healthy?
Agnostic: How can we get people to trust us?
Partial: How can we get customers to trust us?
Parallel: How do banks get people to trust them?
How do car salespeople get people to trust them?
How do chiropractors make clients comfortable and trusting?
Who is the most trusted skydiving company, and what do they do?
Here’s a more thorough example of an out-of-domain search.

Let’s say my main problem is how to make the subway a better
experience. Well, people often have to wait for the subway. One
of my subproblems might ask, “How do I reduce the unpleasant-
ness of waiting?” My agnostic search asks about people waiting
in general. My partial search asks about people waiting to board
transportation—for example, planes and ferries. My parallel search
asks what nontransport places make people wait.
The parallel search leads me to Disney World. As you wait in
line, they have interactive games and activities to occupy your time.
They have express lines, batch boarding, funhouse mirrors, and sin-
gle rider lines. I also found Best Buy, where a single serpentine line
funneling toward all the cash registers means you can’t compare
wait times and complain. Whole Foods uses color coding for dif-
ferent lines.
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On the one hand, a Think Bigger search is a lot of work. But for
people who are curious about how things work, searching is fun
and exciting. Remember that the single consistent characteristic
of creative people is curiosity. For creative people, a Think Bigger
search is a joy.
IDEA-WORKING
Google, the library, other sources of written material: these are all
vital for search. Yet we began this chapter with techniques to talk
to experts because human beings will always know and understand
things in ways that mechanical forms never can. Here we return to
the question of finding tactics through experts, a technique that
greatly widens the circle of relevant people to consult. Google, the
library, and other written material will cite names that you can then
approach directly. Or perhaps you might know relevant experts
already. To find even more, I encourage you to use Idea-Working.
Now, you’ve heard the advice about networking over and over I
am sure: Meet as many people as you can. Go to as many confer-
ences as possible. Join committees, attend events, take up hobbies,
and chat with strangers in the elevator. The next person you meet
could be the one you need to know.
The concept behind this approach is that success lies in a num-
bers game, and quantity gives you the best shot at finding someone
useful. Social media makes this even easier. Most people approach
networking like a lottery, where you keep scratching the surface and
hope to hit the jackpot. The purpose of networking is to widen your
net. Alternatively, the purpose of Idea-Working is to widen your
idea. The standard advice in networking is to get to know the per-
son quickly. In Idea-Working, you don’t want to get to know the
person. You want to cut to the chase and ask them something useful
about your problem. Think of each relevant person you meet as an
expert and follow the same rules I already gave you to help you in
your search. Don’t ask them for their opinion on how to solve the
problem. Ask them for tactics that solved one of your subproblems.
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The key to Idea-Working is how you end your conversation with

each person. You should tell them how helpful they’ve been, but
you don’t want to take up too much of their time. Is there someone
else they know who might be interested to talk to you about your
problem? You might get ten names. You might get zero. A good
target is three. You then reach out to each of those three. Ask them
for tactics, and end the same way. Ask for three more names. Three
becomes nine; nine becomes twenty-seven. Your list of tactics
grows and grows.
Now you can see the difference between networking and Idea-
Working. Networking involves a large number of low-quality con-
versations. Idea-Working produces a small number of high-quality
conversations. Some people brag that their network is more than a
thousand strong. For Idea-Working, it’s rare to go beyond twenty-
seven for any one subproblem. That’s because you will find that the
tactics the experts cite begin to repeat. As soon as your new tactics
halt, you should stop.
I want you to notice as well the length of time you hold onto
your contacts. In networking, it’s forever. You keep as many people
as possible on your list because you never know when in the future
you might want to call on them. In Idea-Working, you talk to the
expert once and then never again. There are exceptions, of course,
where the expert proves especially helpful, interested, or friendly.
For those, ask if you can get back to them as you think of more
things as you proceed. For example, you might get a new tactic, and
then ask a previous expert to assess whether that tactic was actually
a contributing element of success.
If you have five subproblems, start a separate Idea-Working
stream for each one. The topics might overlap down the road
because your subproblems are interrelated. That’s perfectly fine.
Feel free to ask the same expert about different subproblems if they
have the time and if it’s relevant to their expertise.
Do you notice a difference between networking and Idea-
Working? Which is more pleasant? One of the chief reasons people
go to business school is to network. But I know from my students
that most of them feel they fail at it. When I ask in class, “Who here
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is a good networker?” few hands go up. The stories pour out about
how awkward and insincere they feel selling themselves. Introverts
essentially experience it as a form of social torture.
Whenever I explain Idea-Working to the class, I hear a collec-
tive sigh of relief. At that point they are starting their Choice Map
search. In the weeks that follow, I get a stream of students who
pull me aside to say they started Idea-Working and they thank me
for teaching it to them. They even use it for traditional network-
ing events. Instead of the usual networking chatter—where do you
work, where did you go to school, I have a dog too—they describe
their problem briefly and ask if the person can think of any tactics.
It might not lead to actual results, but it’s a much more interesting
conversation and makes for a better traditional networking contact.
Networks have become a major topic of study for social science
research. Scholars recognize two kinds of network ties: strong and
weak. You can guess what they mean: a strong tie is someone you
interact with on a regular basis, while you rarely interact with a
weak tie. Idea-Working gives you weak ties. A famous study by
Mark Granovetter found that weak ties produce greater knowledge
because strong ties tell you what you already know.
Many studies since Granovetter’s have confirmed the power
of weak network ties. In 2007, Lee Fleming, Santiago Mingo, and
David Chen compiled a list of more than thirty-five thousand inven-
tors who had worked on patents with at least one other person.
A strong tie meant you worked on that patent with someone you
already worked with before on a previous patent. A weak tie meant
you worked on that patent with the person for the first time. The
results? Weaker ties produce more patents and also more creative
ones: meaning, inventions that spanned categories rarely or never
seen before.
Here’s another weak-tie example. Giuseppe Beppe Soda, Pier
Vittorio Mannucci, and Ronald S. Burt studied the list of producers,
directors, and writers for the long-running television show Doctor
Who. They found that producers often worked on consecutive epi-
sodes, but directors and writers did not. They came up with a cre-
ativity index, and then judged episodes according to whether or not
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the producer, director, and writer worked together before. Their

results showed that the less that team worked together before—
that is, the weaker the ties—the more creative the episode.
We can see that weak ties lead to more out-of-domain tactics,
and they give us further guidance to take advantage of diversity
too. Strong ties tend to be family, friends, and people you work
with. These are typically less diverse than weak ties. Idea-Working
gives you a reason and a technique to seek out those more diverse
ties. It’s basic human nature that the more different people are, the
harder it is to communicate. Idea-Working makes it easy.
Even when you reach out to a complete stranger, the nature
of your question immediately breaks the ice. You’re not trying to
be their friend or even add them to your network. You’re asking
an interesting intellectual question and looking up to them as an
expert in the subject. Most people are flattered and happy to talk.
The more diverse the experts you reach, the more creative your
solution, thanks to more out-of-domain tactics you find.
HEDY LAMARR STEPS OUT OF HER BOX
For Think Bigger, an “expert” is someone with experience in the

field of your problem or subproblem. Chances are, you’re not an
expert in all—or even any—of those fields. You might feel, as a nov-
ice, that somehow it’s an act of hubris to take on a problem that
experts haven’t solved. Well, we’ve already seen some examples of
innovation by novices: Nancy Johnson wasn’t a mechanic or engi-
neer, and the NASA Jet Lab team knew nothing about ventilators.
Let me give you another example that you might find even more
striking. It’s about the Hollywood movie star Hedy Lamarr.
Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Lamarr became a film star
at the age of eighteen. Six years later, MGM Studios brought her
to Hollywood and promoted her as “The World’s Most Beautiful
Woman.” The year was 1938, and she quickly became one of the
film industry’s top leading ladies. In her spare time, she liked to
tinker with ideas for inventions: for instance, she tried creating a
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new kind of traffic light and soda tablets you could add to water,
to name a couple. When she made friends with the eccentric mil-
lionaire Howard Hughes, he agreed to fund her experiments. In
time, a portable laboratory and a staff of assistants followed Lamarr
around everywhere she went—even onto the movie sets.
As an Austrian Jew familiar with European politics, she knew that
war was coming, and she always kept that possibility in the fore-
front of her mind. When the war began, the first threat for America
was the German U-boat fleet. It ruled the North Atlantic. Without
American help, Europe would fall to the Nazis and America would
become the next target. So Lamarr set out to direct her tinkering to
solve the U-boat problem.
U-boats were incredibly difficult to stop because they jammed
the radio signals that guided Allied torpedoes. As soon as a torpedo
launched, the U-boat would pick up the signal and send out its own
signal at the same frequency, directing the torpedo astray.
In 1939, Philco released a wireless remote control for radios.
Lamarr set out to modify it in such a way as to prevent another
signal from jamming it. The Philco remote was a cube six inches
wide with a dial on top like a telephone. You dialed the frequency
you wanted. But what if the torpedo launched at one frequency
and then changed to another one along the way? Before the U-boat
could figure out the second frequency, the torpedo would arrive.
Lamarr got that idea from the player piano. It works by a mech-
anism that you wind up; then, on its own, the piano turns a roll
of thick paper with holes that match the piano keys. As the paper
rolls, it activates different keys. Why not launch the torpedo with
a similar roll that moves the radio receiver from one frequency to
another? A simple motor mechanism in the torpedo could turn the
roll—just like in the player piano.
Lamarr was a trained pianist and played duets with her friend
George Antheil, a composer known as the “Bad Boy of Music.” He
shocked the music world with his symphony Ballet Mécanique: it
used sixteen player pianos, two grand pianos, electronic bells, xylo-
phones, bass drums, a siren, and three airplane propellers. Antheil
wired the player pianos so they played together.
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As the story goes, Lamarr had her aha moment sitting at the
piano with Antheil. He hit a key and then she hit the same one at a
different octave. Then a different key, and so on. She proclaimed,
“Hey look, we’re talking to each other, and we’re changing all the
time!” What she did at that moment was strip her subproblem of
its domain: how to communicate automatically as the message
changes—on the piano, between player pianos, and to the Allied
torpedo.
Lamarr and Antheil built a portable radio remote control with
a thick paper roll that moved among different frequencies as the
holes rolled past. They made it for eighty-eight different frequen-
cies in honor of their source, the eighty-eight keys of a piano. They
received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 for a “secret communica-
tion system.”
Alas, the American military ignored the invention. They had
their own scientists working away at all kinds of problems and
ignored outside innovations. Remember weak and strong ties? But
eventually, they did come to their senses. Twenty years later, during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, they adopted Lamarr’s frequency-hopping
for torpedoes. Later on, it became a key component of other wire-
less technology as well, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, cordless
phones, cell phones, and other digital devices. In 2014, long after
they both passed away, Lamarr and Antheil were inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame.
I offer this story to show you how nonexpert outsiders can learn
just enough about a field to put together an innovation for it. I hope
you see how Hedy Lamarr’s invention followed the steps of Think
Bigger. Even if you’re not an expert, you can do it too.
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7
STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
A GREAT COMBINATION
Louis Jordan, “King of the Jukebox,” was one of the leading musi-
cians of the era just before rock and roll. One of his most famous
songs is “Beans and Cornbread.” These two start out fighting, but
then they realize how well they get along, like
wieners and sauerkraut

hot dogs and mustard
sisters and brothers
chitlins and potato salad
strawberries and shortcake
corned beef and cabbage
liver and onions
red beans and rice
bagels and lox
sour cream and biscuits
bread and butter
hot cakes and molasses
Louis Jordan is the poet of great combinations. That’s your aim

in this step of Think Bigger: to select from the tactics you found to
PART TWO
make a great combination. And like beans and cornbread fighting

at the start of Jordan’s song, you might first think two tactics can’t
possibly go together. But the most creative solutions come from
such combinations where at first you can’t see the connection, and
then you do—like the Philco remote control and the piano roll in
the mind of Hedy Lamarr.
You will recall from our basic Think Bigger diagram that the
six steps don’t proceed in a straight line. The curved arrows show
that you actually go back and forth between the various steps as
you proceed. This is especially true in Choice Mapping, when the
solution starts coming together. This is hard to see in our exam-
ples because there’s no complete record of what the innovator
thought at each step. You have at least a thousand thoughts every
day, and just one step of Think Bigger can entail many thousands
of thoughts.
You now understand your problem, which has a fair amount of
complexity. You have an idea of the “Big Picture,” and the terms
of what you want. A mix of your research and experience helped
you identify a collection of tactics that you can draw upon to start
imagining and reimagining different combinations until you find
one that works. It sounds simple enough! Yet, we know that it is
never as seamless as the stories told in hindsight.
When we think about the creation of “big” ideas, we often
assume that the people behind those “big” ideas have stories that
are greater than life. If you sift through all the details and round-
abouts, it might surprise you to learn that even the biggest ideas
of the biggest personalities were created the same way as any
other innovation. They defined and broke down their problem,
identified tactics far and wide, and combined them in a useful,
novel way that makes sense to those who matter for making the
solution a reality.
To introduce you to the practice of Choice Mapping, I want to
tell you the story of someone who had a really big idea—one of the
great revolutionaries of the twentieth century, who not only accom-
plished something big in his lifetime, but left an indelible mark on
future generations. Unlike prior examples described in previous
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
chapters, this time, I am not talking about a scientific discovery, a

piece of art, or a new business. Let’s now look at an “idea” that is
used by people across the globe as if it were a familiar technology.
I am referring to the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience. The
“father” of this idea was Mahatma Gandhi.
If you read the stories about Mahatma Gandhi—of which there
are dozens of variations—they will describe to you a man who, in
his youth, was extremely shy and a failed lawyer. They might tell
you about the difficulties he had in the familial relationship with
his father and his wife. They might try to uncover the eccentricities
of his mind and heart. But to get his big idea, he did exactly what
I am asking you to do.
Let me tell you how I believe Gandhi created the idea of non-
violent civil disobedience. As I tell you this story, I focus not on
the man and the story of his life but solely the pieces he combined
to create his big idea. The problem that Gandhi wanted to solve
was, “How do I help the Indian people gain independence from the
British Empire?”
What were his subproblems? There were three that were critical
to solve for:
1. How can a subjugated people take effective action against a mighty

power without violence?
2. How can I unite people divided by religion, caste, language, and geo-
graphic region?
3. How can I gain support for new ideas in the face of traditional Indian
beliefs?
The solution to his first subproblem was inspired by Britain

itself. On a trip to London in 1906 as the leader of the Natal
Indian Congress in South Africa, he observed the actions of the
suffragette movement led by Emmaline Pankhurst. There, a new
generation of women pressed for the right to vote through the
organized program of getting arrested to make headlines and gain
sympathy for their cause. Their main tactics were marches that
the authorities declared illegal and hunger strikes that “tore at
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PART TWO
Figure 7.1 (left) Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter Christine Pankhurst and another
suffragette pictured with their picket sign; (right) woman being arrested in protests
for voting rights.
the hearts of the public.” Upon observing the actions of the Brit-
ish suffragettes, Gandhi famously wrote in an article published
in South Africa for the Indian Opinion of November 1906, “Today
the whole country is laughing at them, and they have only a few
people on their side. But undaunted, these women work on stead-
fast in their cause. They are bound to succeed and gain the fran-
chise, for the simple reason that deeds are better than words.”
He provocatively challenged Indian men to emulate the “manli-
ness” shown by English women. Gandhi adopted the strategy used
by Pankhurst and developed it further as a philosophy and set of
methods for nonviolent civil disobedience that are known today
as Gandhian techniques.
For his second subproblem, Gandhi turned to Leo Tolstoy, the
great Russian novelist. Tolstoy was a noble, and toward the end
of this life he turned his family estate into a classless society. His
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Figure 7.2 Leo Tolstoy in the woods by his estate.
Figure 7.3 The “Tolstoy Farm,” in South Africa, later named the “Ashram.”
PART TWO
followers set up Tolstoyan communes to follow his principles

of perfect equality among all people, where all could live and
work together. Gandhi set up one just like that in South Africa
and called it “Tolstoy Farm.” He used it as a way to bring people
together in equality and teach them his methods before leading
them out to get arrested. Acts of civil disobedience can provoke
violence from the police or angry mobs, and the protesters them-
selves are often tempted to fight back. They need training first,
and immersion in the philosophy and techniques of non-violence
that Gandhi taught them.
For his third subproblem, Gandhi looked to an ancient Indian
tradition: the holy man. All the religions of India recognize this fig-
ure, and Gandhi started talking, acting and dressing the part. You
can see this progression in what he wore. When he first discovered
the suffragettes, he dressed in the style of an English lawyer. When
he set up Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi dressed like an Indian peasant, just
as Tolstoy himself started dressing like a Russian peasant on his
classless estate. Gandhi then changed the name of the farm to “ash-
ram” and dressed like an Indian holy man, in a white loincloth and a
single white cloth over his naked chest. An ashram is the headquar-
ters of a holy man. Last but not least, he invented a new term to
replace “nonviolent civil disobedience:” satyagraha. In Hindi, satya
means “truth” and graha means “hold to.” He became a holy man
spreading the philosophy and methods of satyagraha throughout
the country.
Gandhi took entirely disparate tactics—from both the East
and the West—and combined them in a way that transcended the
boundaries of culture, language, geography, and religion in India.
He thus created a movement that encompassed all his subprob-
lems and, ultimately, solved for his main problem. The idea of non-
violent civil disobedience is “big.” It’s powerful. It has become uni-
versal and has become the go-to tool for people around the globe
calling for justice. This tool was most famously used during the
Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1960. But even
today, people continue to pull out this strategy for solving myriad
social problems.
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
Figure 7.4 Gandhi pictured as a young man dressed as a lawyer (left); Gandhi on
his Tolstoy Farm dressed in all white as a peasant (middle); Gandhi dressed as a
“Holy Man” (right).
CHOICE MAPPING: THE TOOL
Recall the quote in chapter 1 from the great French polymath,

Henri Poincaré, “Invention consists in avoiding the constructing
of useless combinations and consists of the constructing of use-
ful combinations, which are in infinite minority. . . . To invent is
to discern, to choose.” This quote famously appeared in his 1913
book The Foundations of Science. In it, he further explained that
“invention” is choosing useful combinations amid a multitude of
useless ones and, “Among chosen combinations the most fertile
will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which
are far apart. Not that I mean as sufficing for invention the bring-
ing together of objects as disparate as possible; most combinations
so formed would be entirely sterile. But certain among them, very
rare, are the most fruitful of all.”
Here, Poincaré endorses our Think Bigger emphasis on out-
of-domain tactics. And he would know. His ability to combine
“disparate” elements made him perhaps the most creative sci-
entist who never won a Nobel Prize. For thirty years, from 1882
until his death in 1912, he derived and applied advanced math-
ematical formulas to an astounding variety of problems: celestial
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PART TWO
mechanics, fluid mechanics, optics, electricity, telegraphy, elastic-

ity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, gravity, relativity, cos-
mology, topology, number theory, electromagnetism, differential
equations and algebraic geometry. Yet none of these subjects fit a
Nobel category.
Poincaré may not have won a Nobel Prize, but his work did
lead to a Nobel Prize being awarded to one of the greatest scien-
tists in history: Albert Einstein. While working as a patent clerk
in the Swiss Patent Office of Bern, Einstein would spend his days
sitting at his desk reading proposals for inventions of all kinds.
In his downtime between reading patent papers, he would read
Poincaré, singing his praises and claiming in his journals, “Poin-
caré realized the truth [of the relation of everyday experience to
scientific concepts] in his book.” Einstein recognized in Poin-
caré the beauty of searching beyond the parts of the world that
interest you and exposing oneself to the unfamiliar. Historians
and scientists alike have claimed Einstein as the clerk behind the
review of patents for the gravel sorter and the electromechani-
cal typewriter, among others. He also filed more than 50 patents,
including patents for the refrigeration system, the sound repro-
duction system, and the automatic camera. These inventions,
and Einstein’s exposure to them, are responsible for triggering
his famously powerful thought experiments on relativity. Einstein
even refers to the Bern patent office in his 1905 Annus Mirabilis
(miracle year) papers as his “worldly cloister,” where he “hatched
[his] most beautiful ideas.”
You now have a Choice Map that includes your problem, your
problem breakdown, and a row of tactics from best practices within
industry as well as a number of best practices from entirely differ-
ent industries. These are the materials that you will use to generate
multiple solutions to your problem. In a prototypical 5 × 5 Choice
Map, which, in its simplest form, has the potential to give you 3,125
different creative combinations, you start by taking one tactic per
row, line up the five tactics—one per subproblem—in your head,
and then you ask your mind to imagine how might you combine
these tactics to make a solution. Recall the Nobel Prize winning
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
work from Eric Kandel from chapter 2 of Think Bigger. Your mind
works like a giant library system with shelves and shelves of infor-
mation bits and, anytime you form a thought, you take information
bits from different shelves. Imagine how those bits of information
can be combined and recombined in nearly infinite ways to create
a thought.
When Choice Mapping, I am being deliberate at putting in front
of you what information bits you have to work with so that you
can be deliberative about combining your various tactics. So, I am
helping to jog your memory about those tactics, but like any other
thought exercise, you are lining up the set of ideas in your head and
asking yourself, “What could I imagine?” and, “What could I create
if I were to put these pieces together?”
Notice how, when Choice Mapping, you are necessarily creating
“useful” and “novel” combinations because you are only combin-
ing tactics that provide a solution to one of the subproblems you
have identified. And, by taking tactics from diverse industries, you
are ensuring that the combinations you generate will be both use-
ful and novel. This is not to say that they will all be equally good.
Some combinations will be better than others—and the way you
decide is by using your Big Picture Score, to compare and contrast
which of the ideas you create are in line with the greatest number
of your wants.
Whenever we engage in the task of coming up with a really good
idea, we find ourselves at various points stuck. We hit a wall and
try to figure out how to scale that wall to solve the problem. Unlike
other methods of innovation, Think Bigger does not rely solely
on mind wandering or taking breaks. Think Bigger is not hoping
that the pieces will randomly come off the shelves in your memory
bank and form connections. Instead, having an informed Choice
Map in hand gives you all the relevant pieces that you need. With
these pieces in front of you, anytime you are stuck, anytime you
see that the current solution in mind is not working, all you must
do is identify a different set of tactics from the very same Choice
Map and imagine, “How might I put these pieces together in a way
that could work?”
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PART TWO
TAKE YOUR TIME
As you start to Choice Map, I urge you to resist the temptation to

rush to your first good idea. If you’ve done a lot of brainstorming
in the past, you might feel at this point that Think Bigger takes
too much time. Remember that one reason brainstorming is so
popular is that you can get it over with fast. One hour, two hours,
maybe a whole day—but after that, you’re done! For quick answers
to problems within your experience, that’s fine. But for creativity,
that’s a mistake.
The legendary basketball coach John Wooden once said to his
players, “Hurry up but don’t rush.” In Think Bigger, you can cer-
tainly hurry up—by carving out the time in your schedule to do
each step one right after the other. But don’t rush. That is, don’t do
the step itself so fast you do it badly. This is especially important in
Choice Mapping. You have all the elements you need: the problem,
subproblems, tactics, and Big Picture. Quick—let’s throw together
a solution! But Learning+Memory shows that the quicker the solu-
tion, the less creative it is. You need time to let your mind make less
obvious connections.
I want to show you an exercise that demonstrates the value of
persistence, where you don’t settle for the first and most obvi-
ous solution. I’ve done this hundreds of times with thousands of
students.
Take out a pen and paper and think of a toothpick. Now time
yourself. In the next two minutes, come up with as many ideas as
possible for how to make use of a toothpick.
Ready. Set. Go.
Two minutes are up. Stop.
Label that list #1.
Let’s do it again. For another two minutes, make a new list of
ideas for using a toothpick.
Ready. Set. Go.
Label this new list #2.
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
The third time’s a charm—so let’s do it again. In two minutes,

make yet another list of ideas for how to make use of a toothpick.
Ready. Set. Go.
Label this list #3.
That’s all—three rounds are enough. Now count how many ideas
you had in each round. If you’re like most people, you probably had
more ideas in the first and second rounds. Now do this: circle the
best ideas. Those are the ones you think are the most novel and
valuable. Now I ask, “Which list has the most circles?”
In your first toothpick round, you probably went after the low-
hanging fruit—the most common uses for a toothpick. In the sec-
ond round, you felt a bit stretched as you struggled to come up
with new ideas that you’ve never actually seen a toothpick used for.
When I asked you to do the third round, you may have said to your-
self, “Not again!” But lo and behold, when I pushed you further, you
came through with your best ideas.
Most people have the most circles in list #3—those are your best
ideas. Mostly, the fewest circles were in list #1. Note that the qual-
ity of ideas tends to go up each time you do it. The first list has the
most ideas, but the last list has the best ideas. When I teach Think
Bigger, I show how data across the board indicates that as the quan-
tity of respondents’ ideas decreases, the quality of the ideas actually
goes up. This might lead you to become a bit demotivated—but the
key factor in this step is to persist beyond what you think you’re
capable of. In Think Bigger, we want better ideas, not more ideas.
But to get to those better ideas, you have to persist, keep going, and
not be satisfied with your first ideas.
The psychologist Brian Lucas ran an expanded version of our
toothpick game. He asked his students to come up with ideas—for
ten minutes, in two rounds—for what to eat or drink at a Thanks-
giving dinner. Before they started, he asked them to predict which
round would yield more original ideas. Then they did the two
rounds. After, they rated all the ideas on a 1–3 scale for originality.
So what were the results? I think you won’t be surprised to hear
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PART TWO
that students predicted they would do better in the first round, but
the more original ideas came in the second round.
These experiments make an eloquent case for persistence but in
an unusual form. We mostly think of persistence as the endurance
to complete a task: climbing a mountain, learning to swim, or work-
ing until midnight on a major project. We see now that persistence
works for ideas too.
Your greatest ideas will only come to you when you make your-
self comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s important to keep
Choice Mapping. Keep trying different combinations until you find
one that is in line with your “Big Picture” Score.
Often, we trip ourselves up in the creativity process by remind-
ing ourselves to, “Be creative.” Telling yourself to be more creative
only puts more pressure and distracts you from your ability to come
up with your best solutions. My colleague Melanie Brucks studies
the phenomenon dubbed the “creativity paradox,” where the act of
telling someone to think creatively actually makes them less cre-
ative. It’s quite common for a teacher or manager to tell you to
“think creatively,” or “use your creativity” to solve a problem. Now
think: Did that actually help you be more creative?
In one study, Brucks had two thousand people use different
products—toys like Lego bricks, office supplies like paper clips,
and mobile phone apps—to play “creative” games that would put
them in a creative mindset. They did this for an hour every day
over two weeks. For half the participants, Brucks told them to write
down their most creative ideas after playing the game. She told the
other half to simply write down their ideas. The results showed that
the participants who were told to be “creative” produced far fewer
ideas—and far fewer novel ideas. Brucks concluded that the “cre-
ativity” mandate adds too much pressure and offers no guidance on
how to think creatively in practice.
Think Bigger removes both obstacles. It offers clear guidance
on how to be creative and applies no pressure to be novel in the
process. Quite the opposite. It explains how no singular element
of your solution is novel. Paradoxically, this helps you be more
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
creative. If you focus on following our Think Bigger steps, the cre-
ativity part will take care of itself
CHOICE MAPPING IN PRACTICE
Before we get our hands dirty and practice Choice Mapping, allow
me to share with you an example of a Choice Map using one of my
favorite modern innovations. This example shows the thinking that
goes on between and during our different steps—specifically, how
the innovator’s mind moves around the Choice Map and back and
forth from their Big Picture Score. Problem, subproblem, tactics,
wants, combination: they rise and fall as waves in a current that
move you toward your solution.
The problem domain is meat: or rather, not-meat. Recent
research tells us that meat production accounts for some 15 per-
cent of global warming—and beef is the worst offender. Yet global
meat production keeps climbing. As people get richer, they eat
more meat. One attempt at a solution has been to make beans and
other vegetables look, cook, and taste like meat. So far, that hasn’t
worked. The market for such substitutes has grown fast, but it’s still
a drop in the bucket. Besides, even their biggest fans concede that
these substitutes don’t really look, cook, and taste like meat.
Enter Ethan Brown, an environmental engineer with a green sen-
timentality and a track record of solving hard technical problems
in the energy-meets-climate space. With this unique background,
he set out to solve the problem: how to make not-meat a viable
alternative to meat. His interest in this—that is, his desire—came
straight from his own field of environmental science. I was able to
interview Brown in early 2020 and get a better understanding of
how such a great problem-solver goes about his work. Here now,
is the story of Choice Mapping from the mouth of the innovator
himself:
In fine Think Bigger style, Brown broke down his problem:
Problem: How Do I Help Non-Meat Products Replace Meat?
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PART TWO
Subproblems:
1. How to make a healthy alternative that looks, cooks, and tastes like meat?
2. How would I make a meat-like substance without animals?
3. How do I make this alternative the same price as traditional meat?
Right away, you can see that the makers of the existing meat
substitutes might have started out with this same breakdown.
Brown starts his search and sure enough, for subproblem #1, he
finds plenty of tactics that combine various natural vegetable foods,
especially soy. These are all the existing substitutes. His search con-
firms they are not sufficient—they look like meat, but they don’t
really cook and taste like meat. But that’s all right. He knows that
one subproblem is only part of the story. Perhaps he will find ele-
ments to improve the existing substitutes when he searches on the
other subproblems.
Now he searches for subproblem #2: a meat-like substance with-
out animals. Pause. Hmmm . . . Isn’t that the same search as #1?
No. Those vegetable substitutes are not actually “meat-like,” if
you look at the science behind them. And Brown is a scientist. He
thought, “Perhaps their basic composition is why those substitutes
fall short, rather than how we process them.” He now asks himself,
“What is meat, really?” He studies that question and finds that it
has a chemical structure very different from all the components of
the vegetable substitutes. Sure, soy has protein, but it’s not meat
protein. So Brown asks, “Has anyone created meat protein without
animals?”
We can see that Brown reframed subproblem #2 so much so that
it now became the problem at the top of a new Choice Map.
Problem: How Can a Product Resemble Meat in Composition?
Subproblems:
1. How do I get the same meat proteins from non-meat sources?

2. How do I re-form them into a new substance?
3. How do I get people to accept this as real meat, not a substitute?
4. How do I match the price of traditional meat?
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
For his search, Brown dove into the scientific literature about
the composition of meat and its proteins. That led him to a sub-
set of scientists working on how to break down plant protein and
reform it into animal-like structures. That was out of domain from
his own background, but in domain for the problem. Then from
his own domain, energy engineering, he found the next piece of
the puzzle: procedures from hydro fuels that build proteins back
up into a new substance. That was out of domain to the problem.
That took care of subproblems #1 and #2. For #3, he found a key
tactics in the dairy industry—a related domain. In the anti-fat trend
of the 1990s, milk gained an unfair reputation as an unhealthy food.
The “Got Milk?” ad campaign reversed that image by showing that
milk was good for you—and of course, you liked the taste. Could
he do the same with his new product? Would he be able to convince
the public that his creation wasn’t a substitute for meat—it was
meat, just in a different form?
The answer was . . . yes. It worked! The result was a product that
looked, cooked, and tasted far more like meat than traditional veg-
etable substitutes. On his innovation, Brown founded the company
Beyond Meat in 2009 and its initial public offering came in May
2019. As of July 2022, Beyond Meat has a market cap of $ 2.36 bil-
lion making it the world’s 3396th most valuable company.
Brown spent an enormous amount of time on the search stage,
and because of this, he changed the overall problem along the way.
He read everything he could, found early academic research on
protein re-formation, and thought about it all day every day—even
when he was in the shower and walking his dog. He had a problem,
framed it in a unique way, had in- and out-of-domain tactics, and
immersed himself in the search. This is what allowed him to create
the unique combinatorial solution that’s now Beyond Meat.
Although Beyond Meat is doing well, Brown is still working on
subproblem #4: “How do I match the price of meat?” A good place
to start would be searching for tactics in supply chain methods
across all industries. Today, he’s still chugging along, just as pas-
sionate, dedicated, and motivated as he was at the beginning, when
he went all in on a big idea. We do not know how the idea may turn
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PART TWO
out, but as of July 2022, Beyond Meat is the leading meat substitute
brand in North America.
NOW YOUR TURN
Let’s do a Choice Map example together. For the purposes of our

exercise here, I have picked something that many of us use in our
everyday lives—that way, it is familiar. But of course, you can apply
this same method to all kinds of problems.
Problem: How can I efficiently carry a good computer mouse with my

laptop?
Subproblem 1: How do I make it easy/convenient to carry?
Subproblem 2: How do I make it difficult to lose?
Subproblem 3: How do I make the tracking function work smoothly?
To search for tactics, begin in domain. You might find something

like a high-tech key-chain charger that solved the first subproblem.
It clips onto keys, or a belt, and stores the cord inside the device.
A search online will turn up a best-selling lanyard specifically for
a computer mouse or stylus. That solves the second subproblem
by using an audio input slot as a place to attach it. You might find
the Logitech mouse, which works on any surface, is ergonomically
designed, and even has customizable buttons. These are all in-
domain tactics. When you combine these tactics, you might come
up with a highly serviceable state-of-the-art piece of equipment.
But it won’t be very creative. A lot of people in the tech industry
would think it looks familiar.
To be more innovative, we look out of domain.
For the first subproblem, we look more generally for anything
that gave customers something easier to carry. Credit cards! Much
more convenient than bills and coins or even a checkbook. But
what type of credit card? They’re not all equal. We look further and
find that the Discover Card is ultrathin, mostly blank, and has no
raised numbers or features. It’s the easiest credit card to carry.
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
For the second subproblem, we look for anything that found a

new way to keep track of stuff. Sticky notes! Bright, colorful, self-
adhesive, and lightweight—such simple qualities really help the
average consumer keep track of almost anything. The colors espe-
cially distinguish it from the typical gray or black mouse.
For the third subproblem we ask, “Is the mouse the only way to
capture hand movements?” A mousepad is another way, but that’s in
domain. Out of domain we find motion sensors for home or office
security, or simply to switch lights on and off. The Fibaro motion sen-
sor detects light, heat, motion, and has voice controls—all of which
open up possibilities beyond the normal hand movements for a mouse.
Here is the Choice Map I built for this example (see figure 7.5).
Now we make different combinations. I’ll give you two ideas
I had when Choice Mapping for this example.
What if we combined the key-chain charger and the stylus lan-
yard, both of which are in domain, with the motion sensor? We
might create a small spherical sensor you place on any surface to
don’t leave a scky residue
Figure 7.5 Choice Map filled in, computer mouse example.
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PART TWO
make the area around it a touchscreen that mimics your computer

screen. You can program it to recognize certain finger movements
or even voice commands for specific functions like “zoom” or
“scroll.” Finally, the device comes clipped onto a lanyard and has a
coiled USB clip for easy charging and carrying.
Another combination uses the Discover Card, sticky notes, and
the Logitech mouse for a minimal mouse style that comes with
a self-adhesive sleeve—like a wallet that you attach anywhere on
your laptop. Some cell-phone cases have similar thin wallets to hold
credit cards. Our extra-thin mouse slides directly into this sleeve
and only comes in bright colors, making it harder to lose.
These are just two of many possible combinations. I want you
to take a few minutes and make some of your own. By taking one
tactic from each subproblem row, what can you create? What type
of solution can you come up with? Write it down, study it, and con-
sider whether it would work and how. Do this a couple of times.
Take it as a chance to practice your combining and reimagining
skills and try to create a solution to this problem.
After you do this, you have practice in Choice Mapping. The next
time you do it, the task will come a bit more easily. As with any
complex skill, you get better with practice. You learn to Think Big-
ger and Bigger.
STAY OPEN-MINDED
Recall that in Step 4, we emphasized the value of bringing together

a set of individuals in a team who offer diverse perspectives and
knowledge. Diversity helps you make the best version of your Choice
Map, in which you have unexpected and counterintuitive tactics.
In the Think Bigger process, I am going to give you strategies that
help you become more comfortable doing the mental gymnastics of
combining seemingly contradictory tactics. That’s how we’re able
to come up with those truly novel and useful combinations.
Research clearly shows us the value of the unfamiliar. Over eleven
years tracking the progress, popularity, and awards won by fashion
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
designers, data indicates that designers who spent more time living
in a foreign country were more likely to win fashion awards. They
were also more likely to be recognized as unique and innovative. For
example, Chinese-born designer Uma Wang made headlines as her
clothes stormed the catwalks of Paris, London, and Milan during Fash-
ion Week—recognized mainly for her contemporary draped designs
and innovative pairings of textured fabrics. In an interview with Vogue
France, Wang claimed she drew from her Chinese heritage and her
work in both Shanghai and London. With these influences, she was
able to combine Eastern references and Western counterparts, with
a focus on developing new, innovative materials. Similarly, we see the
same phenomenon in the designs of Oscar de la Renta, who grew up in
the Dominican Republic but also worked as a couture assistant in Paris.
Studies show that bicultural and biracial individuals are more
likely to perform better at creative problem-solving tasks. When
people are exposed to contrasting cultural narratives, it makes them
more creative. This is because they have learned to see connections
between ideas that would otherwise, in a local context, be viewed
in opposition. Now I am not saying that to be creative, you must
be biracial, bicultural, or a world traveler. The point is that having a
malleable and open mind is what makes those with bicultural back-
grounds more creative—and this is a trait any of us can adopt with
a few simple tricks embedded in the Think Bigger method.
Let’s do an activity that puts you in the right headspace to come
up with an idea that’s novel but remains familiar at its core. I want
you to take out a pen and piece of paper. Imagine you’re given the
task of coming up with ideas for new products that your local uni-
versity bookstore could sell.
First, you’re presented with the image of a fishing pole. The fishing
pole is metal and sturdy, equipped with a hand grip, line guides, and
a reel. The fishing line is wispy, and it’s weighted down by a small
hook at the end. Considering this image, list all of the ideas that come
to mind. Then, step back and take a few minutes to think about the
image. Afterward, pick up your pen and write down a final idea.
Put that list aside and instead imagine a whiteboard and repeat
the same process.
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Now I want you to go back to the initial list of ideas you had for
the fishing pole. As you look back at them, start to contemplate
nine objects you’d typically see in a bookstore—a calculator, index
cards, mugs, keychains, pens, notebooks, textbooks, a hoodie, or
backpack. Then, come up with some new ideas for your final prod-
uct that the bookstore could sell, keeping in mind the fishing pole
and those nine objects. Write these down.
Now repeat the previous step for the whiteboard example.
For the third and final activity, look again at the list of ideas
you came up with for the whiteboard. As you think about your
final product, keep in mind nine objects that are rarely found in a
bookstore—for instance, a piano, a Swiss Army knife, a hammer, a
treadmill, a helmet, jewelry, roller skates, speakers, or a handbag.
Great—you have your ideas! Now look down at your lists and
compare them.
When creativity expert and researcher Justin Berg performed
this study, it showed how beginning inputs strongly shape the end
outputs when dealing with creative idea development. If you’re
anything like the subjects in his studies, the ideas you came up
with when presented with an unexpected item for a bookstore,
such as a fishing pole, were likely more novel than the useful ideas
you came up with when presented with a typical bookstore item,
such as a whiteboard. In the third experiment, those presented with
the familiar whiteboard, and then nine unfamiliar bookstore items,
actually came up with the most creative ideas. They were even rated
by bookstore employees and customers as the most novel and use-
ful. It’s important to understand that the first bit of content we’re
presented with as we generate new ideas often anchors the trajec-
tory of the novelty or usefulness of our final products. Being pre-
sented with the expected or unexpected completely changes the
way we go about ideating.
That’s why it’s so important for you to have more out-of-domain
ideas written in your Choice Map. By having more out-of-domain
tactics, you have the chance to put novelty at the front of your big
idea while keeping usefulness in mind. And that’s why Choice Map-
ping is so unique.
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
STRATEGIC COMBINATION
The art of Choice Mapping first involves strategically combining

the cells in your Choice Map. If you’re in a group setting, every-
one must first, as individuals, select one set of tactics from each
row—circle or highlight them in different colors to keep track.
Then, using your highlighted tactics as inspiration, write down a
paragraph describing your ideal combination. As you draft your
description, ask yourself, “If I had $100,000 to bring my combina-
tion to life tomorrow, what would it look like? Would it be a prod-
uct? A service?” Use your imagination to connect the dots! Once
you have your first paragraph written down, I want you to repeat
this process again—this time using different tactics from every row.
Ask yourself, “How would this look different than the last combina-
tion you imagined?”
Once you’ve used every tactic in your Choice Map, share each
description with your fellow group members and debate whose
idea seems the most feasible—while prioritizing novelty. If you’re
on your own, share this description with those around you—your
roommate, your friends at dinner, your family at the next gathering,
your colleagues, or your gym buddy.
Beginning the art of Choice Mapping with this process is impor-
tant because it gives you a threshold. Just know that, at first, you
will naturally anchor to an idea that already exists in your head.
With the right tools, you can get past this. Let me show you how.
RANDOM COMBINATION
There sometimes comes a moment in Choice Mapping where you

feel stuck. Nothing “sparks” in your mind. No combination appears.
Here I offer you a way to combine different tactics without first see-
ing how they go together. I recommend this step even if you do see
a good combination already. You’ll see why.
If you’ve been working on your own Choice Map through this
book, you now have it filled in. If your map has five subproblems
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and five tactics for each one, and you take one tactic from each
subproblem. Remember, that makes 3,125 possible combinations.
You can’t possibly try them all. But do try at least five of them using
something like dice, or a random number generator. You can find
one easily on Google. Enter five rows and five columns, and it spits
out a new combination for you to assess.
At first, you might look at that set of five tactics and think, “I’ll
never imagine anything from that.” Don’t sell yourself short. Of
course you won’t see something right off. The pieces won’t sim-
ply snap together in an elegant, logical way. Let the combination
incubate in your mind. Here is some encouragement from the phi-
losopher David Hume: “Nothing is more free than the imagination
of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas
furnished by internal and external senses, it has unlimited power
of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all
the varieties of fiction and vision.”
Note how Hume extols the power of human imagination, but he
keeps it within the limits of your “stock.” Sometimes, when I first
explain how the best ideas come from tactics, someone will protest,
“But that limits my imagination!” Hume would reply, “Correct.” As
Learning+Memory tells us, the only source for your imagination is
the stock of what you’ve learned. And remember the problem of too
much choice: if you don’t limit the elements you set out to com-
bine, your brain goes into cognitive overload. It either shuts down
or falls back on whatever is familiar.
Let’s work through the idea of random combination in more
detail. From your 5 × 5 Choice Map, let’s say the dice or the ran-
dom number generator gives you the numbers 2-5-3-1-2. That
means you will take the second tactic from subproblem one, the
fifth tactic from subproblem two, the third tactic from subproblem
three, the first tactic from subproblem four, and the second tactic
from subproblem five. Those are the five tactics you now take the
time to imagine in combination. I recommend at least five rounds
of the number generator to give you five different random combi-
nations to try.
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
Here are some comments from my students about their Choice

Map experience:
In the past week, I tried very hard to combine my most random,

out-of-domain tactics. I thought it would feel impossible or make
little sense, but after trying it, I actually came up with more inspir-
ing ideas.
In the phase of combination, I found that I was not thinking outside

of the box as much as I would have liked. So, I pivoted my method of
choosing and decided on the most out-of-the-box tactics in each row
to come up with some of my best combinations.
It was in the out-of-domain combinations that produced the most

promising results for me. Pushing myself to think out of my comfort
zone definitely paid off.
Personally, I prefer to start by only combining the out-of-domain

tactics in order to encourage the most novel combinations.
If you’re working in a group, get your random numbers and have
each person come up with their own combination from it. Then
show each other the combinations you came up with. You will be
amazed at how different the solutions are. Right away, you will also
see that Hume was right: limits don’t hamper your creativity.
You can then go on to see if there is a way to improve or combine
different solutions that the group came up with. Think of this as a
sort of combination of combinations. Don’t be afraid to swap pieces
in and out from solution to solution. That’s part of the beauty of
Choice Mapping—that despite the limitations in place, there are
so many possible choices to make. Have the group make a list of
all possible combinations and then review them one by one. Pick
out the ones that are most novel and solve the problem most fully.
Next comes the Combination Template (see figure 7.6). This is a
summary of your solution, with just the subproblems and the single
tactic for each.
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PART TWO
Figure 7.6 Subproblems and domains.
Build this Mini Map for up to five combinations. More than

that creates too much choice. You next assess each Combination
Template in light of your Big Picture Score. I’ve found that this
quickly brings one or two Combination Templates to the fore-
front. Sometimes the phases of search and Choice Mapping lead
you to somewhat revise the Big Picture Score itself. But if noth-
ing fits, you might have to go back one or more steps to restate
your problem or subproblems, search again, or make more Choice
Mapping combinations. Time and time again, those I teach this
method to are surprised and impressed by how many interest-
ing ideas they get by using dice or the random number generator.
Figure 7.7 shows one such idea based on the Combination Tem-
plate in figure 7.6.
Your aim at the end of this step is to have one or two Mini Maps
that make a solution you want to implement. But implementation
comes after Think Bigger. Our next chapter shows one last step
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
Figure 7.7 Final Choice Map write-up.
before that, where you take the idea that formed in your mind and
expose it to the world.
HOW MANY IDEAS?
Now, you might be asking, “OK, but how many times do I throw the
dice? And how many times do I have to reset this random number
generator?” Here’s my answer: do it until you have at least three
combinations that feel right. In a Random Combination Template,
make sure you have your main problem written at the top, your
subproblems on the left-hand side, and only the tactics that you
randomly rolled. That’s it. Once you have those pieces to make up
your Combination Template, write a one-paragraph description of
what your tactics combine to create.
I want to challenge you—even when you think you’ve completed
the minimum Combination Templates to keep up your search. Con-
tinue to roll the dice or load your random combination generator to
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PART TWO
pull together the cells in your Choice Map. I want you to combine cells
in your Choice Map until you have built out as many Combination
Templates as you can to compare with your Big Picture Score and see
which one is most in line with it. Alternately, you might find ways to
combine different elements from each combination that allow you
to recombine and create a more ideal-feeling end result. Remember
the power of persistence that we learned from Brian Lucas! To get
the highest-quality ideas, you must persist beyond what you think
is possible.
In Think Bigger, my students typically come up with ten to thirty
ideas over the course of three hours. Now, that certainly seems like
a lot! But, if you’re working in a group setting, the ideas will accu-
mulate rather quickly. You will begin to narrow your list of ideas to
those that are simple. Since each combination is theoretically novel
and useful, simplicity is a critical secondary criterion as you move
forward with several combinatory ideas since many people across
domains, geographies, and demographics will need to be able to
understand it.
Once you have narrowed your combinatory ideas down to at
least three, you are ready to choose which idea you will take with
you to the final step of Think Bigger. If you find yourself with less
than three ideas, create more random combinations until you have
three to move forward with.
HOW DO YOU CHOOSE?
As we mention throughout the book, Think Bigger is nonlinear, so

it is important to have all your pieces handy from all the steps you
completed. This To help you choose which combinations to use in
Step 6, bring back the “Big Picture Score” you created in Step 3.
Recall that you identified the wants of all parties involved in the
success of your idea—your target, yourself, and third parties. Since
you and/or your group members will inevitably anchor on the sexy,
top-of-mind ideas and circle on them, you are going to constrain
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STEP 5: CHOICE MAP
your ability to choose the best combination to proceed. On top

of that, each combination will be better or worse than one or the
other for different reasons. So, we go look back to the work done in
Step 3 to give us our choosing criteria.
Now, take your three to five combinatory ideas—if you have
more combinations because you are conflicted, that is fine too. No
matter the number of combinatory ideas you have, one by one, you
will individually measure each idea against your Big Picture Score
lists from Step 3. Recall, each category in your list had a box beside
it (see figure 5.1 from chapter 5). That list is what you will run
through and check off as you test whose wants each Combination
Template falls in line with.
When working in a group, you must individually go through
the Big Picture Score and check off the boxes on your own before
coming back as a group and coming to a consensus. When you
have checked off the boxes in each category—the target, your-
self, or third parties—make note of which stakeholder is the
weakest. If any of your combinatory scores reach a tie, you must
look at how many boxes are checked for each stakeholder and
determine the one you want to prioritize and optimize for. Which
idea scores the highest for all parties? Which idea scores high-
est overall—and which group does is weighted the most in that
high score? The idea you should prioritize, and ultimately should
move forward with, should score highly across all parties. If you
are a visual learner, use the diagram from figure 5.4 to plot out
your scores and see where one category leans heavier than any
of the others.
We go back to the Big Picture score because it gives you the
opportunity to also look across all your Combination Templates
and say to yourself, “Well, this idea scored highest with my target
but I want it to score a little higher with third parties. Can I take a
piece of the other Combination Template that scored higher with
my third parties and recombine it with this other idea?” You can
mix, match, and optimize your idea by using the Big Picture Score
to get the best idea possible.
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PART TWO
Once you’ve completed your Big Picture Scores, take the idea
with the highest score and see if your idea:
1. Answers all your subproblems.

2. Collectively improves the current status of competing products in the
marketplace (for instance, Pfizer drastically improved the vaccine mar-
ketplace by creating an mRNA-based vaccine that was more effective
than the antigen-based flu vaccine).
3. Is liked by you and your fellow group members.
You are now ready for your sixth and final step of Think Bigger.
You see your idea—now the question is, do others see it too?
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8
STEP 6: THE THIRD EYE
Y ou now have a raw idea in the form of a Choice Map. The

temptation is to rush out and quick! Prototype it, pitch it.
Ready, aim, fire!
Hold on. Step 6 is the last phase of ideation before you move on
to action. In this step, you must do a series of feedback exercises to
learn if you have an idea that’s different from the ideas that already
exist. If so, how is it different? What possibilities could it create?
You will also try to learn if people understand and interpret the idea
in your head the way you intend them to. This is a critical step in
ideation: deliberately gathering input from others to help give final
shape to your idea.
Before I begin, let’s play a song.
SCRAMBLED EGGS
Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away . . .
These eight words are among the most famous song lyrics in music
history. Yesterday was an immediate #1 hit for the Beatles in 1966,
and since then more than 2,000 other artists have recorded it,
PART TWO
including Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye and Frank

Sinatra. MTV and Rolling Stone named it best pop song of all time,
and BBC radio named it best song of the twentieth century.
One Beatle wrote the song: Sir Paul McCartney. During the sum-
mer of 2020, I had the good fortune to speak with him, and I asked
him about Yesterday. My question was: “How did you get the idea?”
It was 1964, and the Beatles already had great success with sin-
gles, albums and live performances. McCartney was twenty-two
years old. He woke up one morning with a tune in his head. To help
remember it, he quickly added nonsensical words:
Scrambled eggs
Oh my baby, how I love your legs . . .
Imagine my delight as Sir Paul sang to me these original lyrics.

With just the tune and those few words, he took his idea to the
other Beatles, his producer, other singers, and just about every-
one he ran into. He wanted to make sure it was not a song he
heard before, that he copied without knowing. He asked if it was
familiar—did it remind them of some other song?
Note what he did not ask: whether they liked it. The song grew as
he asked around. Each time, the song was a little different. He noted
how people reacted to it, both in their words and facial expressions.
He was feeling his way toward the best version of his idea. While on
vacation in Portugal, during a four-hour drive from the airport to
his friend’s house, McCartney rolled the melody around in his head
and turned his mind to the lyrics. He sang them over and over in
his head until they sounded just right—slightly poetic, a bit lethar-
gic, and unmistakably nostalgic. Upon arriving to his friends home,
McCartney excitedly grabbed the first guitar he saw and played his
melody while singing the lyrics, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed
so far away . . . ”
He explained to me that the first time he played the guitar to
hear if the lyrics fit with his tune, he played it badly. The only gui-
tar his friend had was a right-handed one and McCartney was left-
handed. But still he realized something very important: the lyrics
192
fit! Hearing what was in his head played back to him, he now under-
stood how to take his imagined song and make it real. His new idea
was ready to show his band and their producers.
When he played it for the other Beatles, he asked them how to
arrange it for their foursome. They all gave the same reply: McCart-
ney alone should sing it, with nothing but his guitar. But George
Martin, the band’s producer, gave them another idea: McCartney
should sing it with a string quartet backing his vocals.
Surprised by this suggestion, McCartney replied to Martin,
“We’re a rock ’n’ roll band! Why would we ever include a string
quartet?”
Martin replied, “Try it. If you don’t like it, we’ll just take it out.”
So they tried it. When McCartney listened to the result, Martin’s
idea clicked—it made the piece feel whole. The way McCartney
explained it, he and Martin understood the same unspoken things
about the song. They had the same idea and they were seeing it
play out.
The story of “Yesterday” is a good illustration of the Third Eye
Test. The ideas McCartney had from his own conception, plus the
feedback from others, slowly melded together to become a new and
improved thing. Had he not gone to his bandmates, producer, or
close friends to hear their input and rework his original idea, the
song would never have become what it is today.
That’s why for me, the most remarkable part about this story
is not that original tune popping into his head. We know how that
happens, especially when the mind is relaxed. Tunes often popped
into McCartney’s mind while he was lying in bed. Rather, it was
his immediate questioning of his idea in such a structured way—a
methodical approach that we now know helps to refine the quality
of any such idea. When he woke up to a tune in his head, McCart-
ney intuitively knew he had to answer several questions: First, is
this tune different from what already exists? If so, how is it dif-
ferent? Second, if I were to create this song, how can I learn what
people hear? And, as I learn what people hear, can I learn how to
create the song that I want to sing? It can be said, after that initial
germ of an idea arose, that McCartney instinctively went through a
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PART TWO
quasi-version of what I want to give you next, as our last Think Big-
ger step. I call it the Third Eye. Before implementing his idea—that
is, making the actual recording—McCartney showed the patience
and discipline to spend the time to find out if others saw what he
saw, felt what he felt, and experienced what he did upon hearing
his new idea.
You will do the same with your Choice Map. It’s time to put your
new idea out to the minds of other people to find out if they see it too.
I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN
Think of the feeling you get when you explain something complex
to someone else and they say back, “Oh, now I see.” It feels good to
you because you realize that what you imagined can form in some-
one else’s imagination too. They don’t just understand. They see
and feel it too. What they “see” is a complex thought that forms in
their mind. Like all thoughts, an emotion comes with it. It evokes
the pleasure of success when they see what you see, plus the same
emotion you feel about the idea itself.
Neuroscience locates this spark of understanding in your work-
ing memory, in the prefrontal cortex. It’s the part of the brain
behind your forehead. In Hindu and Buddhist philosophy it’s called
the Third Eye. You might have seen paintings of gods or saints with
a third eye on the forehead. Like much of secular Asian philosophy,
modern science confirms this phenomenon. Note that the location
is not in what neuroscientists call the visual cortex, which is located
at the very back of your head. And yet in English, and many other
languages, we say we “see” an idea when it forms in our minds.
That’s because visual understanding is actually just as complex as
the idea you’re trying to get across.
Walt Disney understood this, and in 1958 he made a short film
to demonstrate it: 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree. Four of his studio artists
all painted the same old oak tree on a mountaintop, all at the same
time. The results were completely different in style. You would
never know they painted the same exact tree.
194
In the Third Eye, you will discover that your idea is like each art-
ist’s interpretation of the oak tree. It is subjective to the eye of the
beholder—you, who had the idea, and the people you will inevitably
test your idea on in this Step.
Now, I want you to look out a window and start describing every-
thing you see. Imagine what you see is a photograph, and then divide
it into a hundred squares. Describe fully what’s in each square.
Then divide it further into a thousand squares. Your description
has much more detail. Divide it again, and you’ll realize that it’s
impossible to describe everything you see. Like a digital screen, you
can keep going until you have a multitude of tiny dots. Describing
each dot, and how they combine to form shapes, will take you close
to forever.
When you look out the window, your visual cortex lets you take
in the whole scene—but it then connects to your working memory
to view the scene in a meaningful way. Your eyes pull from those
thousands of dots and shapes and colors a subset that strikes you at
that moment. Those pieces come together in your working memory
and you “see” something you can describe in words. The same thing
happens when a strong memory pops into your head. They are all
versions of the Third Eye.
In Asian philosophy, this Third Eye takes on a mystical cast as an
organ of enlightenment. But even in English, “enlightenment” has
two possible meanings—spiritual or practical. The spiritual version
means you connect with some higher power. The practical version
means you “see” in the scientific way I describe here. McCartney
enlightened me about how he wrote the song “Yesterday.” I under-
stood it, and felt it too.
In Think Bigger, the sixth step leads you through a series of exer-
cises that help you see how others see your idea. How is it different
from what already exists? What do others focus on when they learn
of your idea? How can you use that information to create greater
alignment between your intentions and others’ perceptions?
This step is not about convincing others your idea has value.
It’s not about getting customer feedback so that you can tweak
it to make it more attractive to them. That happens after Think
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PART TWO
Bigger, in implementation. It’s also not about getting votes. It’s

about whether the idea is worth doing. Your friends will vote “yes”
because they like you, and strangers will vote “no” because your
idea is different from their ideas. Furthermore, it’s not about get-
ting buy-in from potential investors, partners, or other allies in
implementing your idea. That too comes after Think Bigger.
I give you this list about what the Third Eye is not because all
these techniques are standard advice for gathering feedback. Yet
all those techniques skip a key step that answers the following
questions: Do others actually understand your idea in the way you
want them to, both intellectually and emotionally? And does their
understanding alter your idea or how you describe it to the outside
world? Once you do this step, you will ask yourself, is it worth pur-
suing? If yes, you’re done with Think Bigger and you can move on
to implementation.
DO YOU LIKE IT?
Most people are naturally social. In the modern age, social media
has turned this natural desire into an industry. It looks to me, as
the mother of a teenager, that anytime a person sees something
new, they take a picture and post it on Instagram or some other
platform. Then they refresh their device every five minutes to see
what new things others posted too—not just for their photos but
for the number of views and the comments on them, from simple
“likes” to back-and-forths that can go on for days or even months.
As a scientist, I wonder: Do these view counts, likes, and com-
ments reflect what people actually think in any meaningful way?
I found some answers in the work of Duncan Watts from Microsoft
Research. He and his team created an artificial music market on a
website they called the Music Lab. There they offered users forty-
eight unknown songs by unknown artists to listen to.
The site recorded fourteen thousand visitors. But not everyone
heard the same thing. Watts placed a fifth of them in an “indepen-
dent judgment group” that got brief excerpts of each song and rated
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each one as to whether they wanted to download it. The rest of the
visitors made up eight different “social influence groups.” There,
you got the song excerpts but also the past record of how others
in your group rated the songs. In the social groups, the songs that
received early praise ended up the most liked across the board—
and the songs with the lowest early ratings were the least popular.
In the social groups, visitors rated a song according to how others
rated it before rather than relying on their independent judgment.
There are two extreme positions revealed in this study—both
objectively good music and objectively bad music influence overall
market performance. The tricky thing about “like” and “dislike” in
this context is that such emotions are subjective to the end user’s
personal taste. Watts’s study eloquently revealed that there is a little
truth to both feelings when there is an underlying objective consen-
sus. But that consensus only exists at the extremes on either end of
the spectrum. Songs rated as “best” by those in independent worlds
were also rated “best” across all worlds—similar to McCartney’s
“Yesterday.” Likewise, the songs rated as “bad” among individu-
als were rated poorly among all groups. Songs rated in the middle
of the distribution had less consensus across the multiple social
worlds. What we end up seeing is that we often end up weighting
social influence more heavily when we don’t know how we feel.
If your song was really, really good—like “Yesterday,”—or really,
really bad—like “Scrambled Eggs” might have been, no matter
which world the song is heard in, there is more consensus. In other
words, only in the cases where the songs were in the extremes did
the ratings offer any useful information. Most songs—more than
95 percent—were not the outliers. In which case, the judgment of
their value was purely subject to social influence. This makes know-
ing whether a song was “liked” or “disliked” uninformative.
Simply asking someone, “Do you like it?” produces superficial
reactions at best. At worst, they reflect biases of the moment—how
others voted—or deeper biases from longer experience or prefer-
ence. When someone says they like your idea, that itself isn’t useful
because you cannot know the countless possible biases that con-
tribute to their judgment.
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I pay special attention to the “like” problem because social

media has made it a worldwide habit to rate things willy-nilly. It’s
a normal human tendency to want other people to like your idea.
The Third Eye seeks something much harder to get at and far more
valuable. You must make it clear that you’re not asking others to
judge your idea because they will naturally want to do so. Using the
Third Eye to test your idea is a complex task that calls for the same
degree of thought and care that you gave to the other five steps of
Think Bigger.
LISTEN TO YOURSELF
The first step for the Third Eye is to tell yourself your idea. Write it
down and then say it aloud. Next, without writing anything down,
describe your idea to yourself, again out loud. Then write down
what you said as best you can recall. Don’t record it! This is an act
of memory. Now edit what you wrote for clarity and meaning. Read
it over a few times. Then put it aside. Again from memory, speak
out loud your idea and description.
Repeat.
You will find that your idea and description change each time to
some degree. Speech is creative: as the thought of what we want to
say finds its way from our brains to our mouths, we see new ways
to say it. We then hear what we said and see that it’s different from
that initial thought. In a very real way, speech creates thoughts. As
you hear yourself speak, you create in your mind an image of your
idea. Is it the image you intended? Does it present the feeling you
want to convey? Do you see what you wanted to see?
As a blind person, I am very aware of the power of speaking your
thoughts. Technology today lets me “read” by converting text to
speech. So to read, I listen. I can tell right away when the words of
the text, spoken aloud, create in my mind the image and feeling the
author wants to convey. This is true for everyone, blind and sighted
alike—but people think that just reading ideas has the same effect
in the mind. It’s not even close! The science of the Third Eye, the
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prefrontal cortex, and thought formation back me on this. Speak,

hear, think, repeat.
Keep in mind the Big Picture and Choice Map Template through-
out this step. Both inform the way you communicate your idea. Use
the “Big Picture” to remind yourself of what you want to achieve
and ask yourself, “How do I want to feel about the solution?” And
how will others feel about this solution? In other words, why do
you care? Where the Big Picture is meant to remind you of your
hopes, the Choice Map Template keeps you grounded in communi-
cating the problem and solution in a concrete way. This will ensure
your rhetoric doesn’t get too lofty or tend too much toward just the
problem or just the solution.
Once you can say your idea out loud to yourself fluently, without
looking at your notes— you are ready to say it to someone else.
Find someone you trust—this can be a friend, your romantic part-
ner, a coworker, your two-year-old—it can even be your pet! Tell
them to simply listen without any reaction. Saying the same words
to yourself and to someone else are two very different experiences.
In the presence of other people, when we feel they are observing
us, we are better able to quiet our internal minds and see ourselves
from the perspective of an observer. We see things from their point
of view, even when they say nothing at all. The simple knowledge
that someone is listening makes us process information through
the eyes of an observer.
Once you’ve said your idea out loud to someone else, note any dif-
ference from when you spoke just to yourself. Did I change the way
I worded the idea? How did I phrase one part of the idea compared to
how I said it to myself? Did I feel at ease saying the idea to someone
else? Make note of the changes you made and how you felt saying your
idea and then move on to the next type of feedback in the Third Eye.
WHAT WORKS
You are now ready to approach experts in your domain of interest.

But you will not ask them for feedback in the way they’re used to.
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You don’t want their judgments about your idea. You want very
specific advice for the solution you came up with.
Remember that the other person knows nothing about Think
Bigger. They might have experience with one or more of the steps
because Think Bigger mimics how creative ideas and innovations
come to be. But very few people are conscious of these steps, even
when they do them. Assume ignorance. Don’t tell them how you got
your idea. Cut to the chase and tell them what it is.
You aim to get across to others what the problem is, what your
solution is, and why it’s important to you. Say that to them right up
front: “Can I tell you my idea to see how it sounds to you?” Beware:
even that neutral preface might lead them to conclude that the idea
sounds, “good,” or “bad.” After you state and describe your idea in
the same words you used on yourself before, quickly ask your next
question before they get a chance to vote “Yea” or “Nay.”
So what questions do you ask, exactly? You can’t say, “Do you see
what I see?” because they can’t possibly know what you see. They
only know what they see. And you can’t ask questions too different
from normal feedback questions or else they will take too long to
puzzle through what your question means. Here’s a simple way to
proceed that helps tease out from their minds what’s most useful
for Think Bigger. We call it What Works.
You: Can I describe my idea to you?

Answer: Sure.
You: (Describe idea)
Then, ask:
• What worked? Why?

• What didn’t work? Why?
• How would you improve the idea?
To get meaningful answers, you’re looking to talk to people

who might know and care about the idea to some degree. To find
them, you can use the technique of Idea-Working for these Third
Eye questions too. One expert leads to another. Still, don’t be
surprised, despite your efforts to keep things neutral, if someone
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says they like or don’t like your idea. This kind of opinion typically
implies “If I were in your shoes . . .” Of course, what they would
do is different from what you would do because you have different
desires, abilities, and knowledge. So make it clear you’re talking
about yourself. You’re not asking them what they would do to solve
the problem.
Some people will hear your question as “Will this idea work?”
They might rush to give their opinion on that. However expert they
might be in the domain, no one can predict the future, especially
about new ideas. So if they opine on whether or not it will work
(they will mostly say new ideas won’t work), listen politely, and
then bring them back to your questions. You’re not asking about
the overall idea. You’re asking what part works, what part doesn’t,
and if they have any suggestions to improve it. These are unusual
questions for most people, so you might have to rephrase them a
few times to get the person to understand.
Keeping judgment out of the discussion reduces bias too. If the
person even just thinks, “I don’t like this idea,” they tend to follow
that bias and give you a long list of what doesn’t work. And if the
person actually says they don’t like the idea, you then tend to follow
your own bias and discount whatever else they say. That makes for
a double whammy of confirmation bias.
In addition to our three questions, be prepared to answer other
questions and explain your idea more fully as needed. Be open to
the possibility that these conversations can last longer than you
expected. That’s usually a good thing, as it allows you to speak more
in depth. In that case, you might reach into your Choice Map and
explain the tactics that underlie your solution to one or more sub-
problems. Try to make it a natural flow rather than a formal presen-
tation of the Think Bigger method.
Analyze each conversation right afterward. Did they make any
assumptions about the subproblems that you didn’t anticipate? Did
they identify a subproblem that you missed? Did they identify a new
tactic? Should you replace a current tactic with a different one? Do
they identify a different way of thinking about your combination?
What are the variations in how you might imagine your idea?
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Once again, keep going until you no longer get new inputs of con-
sequence, and your understanding of the idea no longer evolves. At
that point, you’re ready for the next form of feedback in the Third Eye.
PLAY IT BACK
I want you to close your eyes. Picture a dog—any dog at all, perhaps
your favorite.
Now imagine a pair of pants on that dog. Yes, picture the dog
wearing pants. I want you to take out a piece of paper and draw that
dog wearing pants. Now look at what you drew.
Is your dog tall? Or short? Long? Light fur? Dark? And what about
the pants? Do they cover two legs or four? Did you color them in?
In all one color, polka dots, stripes, or another pattern? Is there a
belt, suspenders, or buttons? How much of the leg do they cover?
I’ve had thousands of students do this exercise. They have drawn
dogs wearing pants on just their back legs, just their forelegs, on all
four legs as a single garment, and as two separate ones. The pants
appear in multiple colors, styles, designs, and even material—
corduroy, for example. The dogs were even more various: short legs,
long legs, short tails, long tails, no tails, short hair, long hair, short
ears, long ears, short snout, long snout. There is actually an ongoing
debate on the internet about what a dog with pants should look like.
The instruction, “Draw a dog with pants,” seems simple enough.
But different people see different dogs and different pants—and,
therefore, different combinations of the two. We might think that
when we see something in our mind’s eye and say it out loud that
other people see what we see. With the dog and the pants, the only
way to know is to see what they draw. In Think Bigger, we can’t see
the picture that forms in the mind of the other person. So we can’t
see if they see what we see about our idea.
We tend to think that what we think is the truth is true. The
late social psychologist Lee Ross calls this phenomenon “naïve
realism.” We think we’re being logical, objective, and rational—and
therefore accurate in our analysis, judgment, and decisions. So we
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think that if other people are logical, objective, and rational, they
will agree with us and see what we see. But the opposite is the case.
Every human brain is different. Everyone’s life experience is dif-
ferent. Everyone’s desires and knowledge are different. You might
think you’re being realistic—that is, that your ideas match reality,
but that’s impossible. It’s only your interpretation of reality, which
will always be different from someone else’s.
When two nations play each other in the World Cup, the fans of
each country decry the referees for missing all the infractions that
the other team commits. Without fail, each fan base swears that the
referees are biased against their team. When two groups with oppo-
site political beliefs about an armed conflict watch the same media
broadcast, each believes that the reporters are biased against their
view. And so on for every possible topic that people can disagree on.
Human perception is always subjective. Immanuel Kant’s semi-
nal work on the subject, Critique of Pure Reason, dates from 1781.
Since then, psychologists have continued to formally document
countless variations on the same theme. Despite this long history
of analysis, people will still tell you they are being objective when
they give their thoughts. You can’t address this directly with people,
but it helps to use subjective language: What does this conjure up
in your mind? What does it make you feel? What thoughts does it
provoke? You don’t want their cold analysis. You want to learn as
much as you can about how your listeners experience your idea.
In this phase of the Third Eye, you refine your understanding
of your problem through the Third Eye of other people. I call it
“Playback.” You do this with a different set of people—in particular,
nonexperts. First, explain your idea in less than five minutes. Then
tell them: “It would be helpful for me to hear you describe my idea
back to me.”
Note how this is very different from What Works. Playback is a
much shorter, simpler conversation—in two parts. You want them
to answer right away, of course. Just say thanks. Don’t discuss it
further. Then a day or two later, ask them again. But this time, don’t
repeat your own description. Say, “It’s a day later—I wonder, what
do you remember? It would be helpful for me if you could describe
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my idea back to me.” Don’t warn them ahead of time you will do
this. You want the second question to come as a surprise.
If the person comes from your problem domain, wait longer
between questions. It could be a week, or even a month. This is
because their own knowledge and interest will lead them to think
about the idea afterward. Wait for that thinking to peter out. You
need a period where they haven’t thought at all about the problem,
so they have to think back and remember.
Playback tells you several things about your idea. How well do
you communicate your idea at this stage? What is most memorable
about your idea? What are other people’s emotions regarding the
idea? Are they enthusiastic, bored, or skeptical? It’s not a test of
how accurately they remember your idea—it reveals what your idea
makes people remember, and why.
When you hear other people describe your idea back to you, they
naturally have gaps in their memory. They will not retain the pieces
of your idea they don’t recognize—and that is where you strike
gold. The pieces of your idea that your Playback partner does not
recognize will be changed by them, in order to fill in what’s unfa-
miliar with the familiar. The differences you observe between what
you described versus what is said back to you will open new doors
for you. In the words of New York University neuroscientist Joseph
E. LeDoux, “Added connections are therefore more like new buds
on a branch, rather than new branches.”
We use Playback because it helps us expand and build, where
feedback is simply designed to solicit advice. Playback is unique
because we now understand that learning is more about recogniz-
ing and extending preexisting patterns than scribbling over what
came before. Highlighting the unique pattern you have constructed
(your current idea) and continuing to iterate, little by little, will set
you up for greater success.
Memory is not a mirror—it’s reconstructive. This is the cor-
nerstone to understanding Learning+Memory. You don’t have a
perfect snapshot of every house you’ve lived in or every mailbox
you’ve seen. You have bits and pieces that you constantly com-
bine and recombine when organizing the concept in your mind.
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This reconstructive process is innately creative. As we know from

Eric Kandel, our brains naturally revise and edit patterns—and this
process extends beyond recalling singular images to larger, more
abstract concepts as well.
In the 1930s, the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett asked
people to listen to folktales from other countries and then recount
these stories at a later date. As you might guess, unfamiliar stories
were not remembered as well as familiar stories. More surprising,
however, was that errors in memory were not random. Rather, sub-
jects often rewrote similar parts of the stories in their own minds—
particularly the parts that made the least sense to them. Bartlett
concluded that when facing problems, humans draw upon mental
schemata, or shelves of stored knowledge in our brains, to fill in any
minor gaps (or possible subproblems) in our memories. Therefore,
remembering is an imaginative process that involves building upon
past experiences.
Once again, this step allows you to alter your idea and how you
express it. If people don’t remember what you most want them to,
continue to misunderstand, or show any of the emotions you want
your idea to provoke, then adjust what you say accordingly. This
might change your idea statement, which might change your Choice
Map, which might change some part of your full Choice Map—
which is useful. It’s all a part of the refining process. And the more
artfully this is done, the clearer and more concise your idea will be.
THE THIRD EYE TEST
Our first three exercises in Third Eye gradually expand the range of
viewpoints you bring to your solution, through first your owns eyes
and then the eyes of others. Our last exercise takes this sequence
one step further. You ask other people to re-imagine your idea with
complete creative freedom.
The natural tendency for recombination from Learning + Mem-
ory results in a very common reaction to any new idea. You tell
someone your idea, and they say, “Well if I were you. . . . ” This last
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piece of the Third Eye encourages exactly this human tendency: to

reimagine ideas we hear from others.
First, describe your solution in full. Then ask them to change it
however they think best. You can ask clarifying questions, but that’s
all. It’s not a debate about their version versus your version. You
want to find out what they imagine.
Do this with several people. Then study their different versions.
You will gain insights that lead you to adjust your solution and how
you describe it, and even to understand it better yourself.
You now understand all the ways in which others can see and
imagine the possibilities of your idea—this gives you a Third Eye. As
you proceed toward making your idea a reality, you can never predict
what might happen. Including whether it will succeed or not. But you
do know that at every step of the process, as you make one choice
after another, every time you encounter a problem or roadblock, you
can go back to our six steps and use them just for that piece.
Congratulations! You have now completed the Six Steps of
Think Bigger. If after all this, you ask yourself, recalling the Passion
Test from Step 1, "Do I still feel excited about the problem I have
solved? Do I see the idea and is it worth pursuing?” And the answer
to these is a resounding, “Yes!” Now comes the time to implement.
The six steps of Think Bigger came about by me using them
myself. The problem became how to use what we now know about
the creative mind to make a practical method people can use. Now
that you know how to do the steps yourself, you can use Think Big-
ger again and again, as I have. As you do, your skill and bravery will
increase. With these tools, I hope you will be able to Think Bigger
than you have before, to make dreams you thought far beyond your
reach at last come true.
ON BIG IDEAS
We end where we began, with Frédéric Bartholdi and his Statue

of Liberty. Did he know, at its opening October 28, 1886, that his
sculpture would come to mean what it does today?
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His original idea was to celebrate both the American ideals of

freedom and their triumph in the Revolutionary War and Civil War
through his creation. Right away a different artist, Emma Lazarus,
reimagined the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to a better life for
immigrants arriving in the harbor—well before the iconic “hud-
dled masses” imagery of her famous poem was drafted. Bartholdi’s
France struggled to hold onto the ideals of liberty from the French
Revolution, while Lazarus was a descendant of immigrant refugees
from the Portuguese Inquisition. Each brought to the same work of
art a different imagination that contributed in different ways to its
living history.
Enter a third creative thinker—Georgina Schuyler. The Schuy-
lers were an old Dutch family from the early days of New York with
a noted lineage—Georgina's great-grandfather was Alexander Ham-
ilton. Georgina was an influential philanthropist and patron of the
arts. Lazarus’ poem was one of many Schuyler commissioned as
part of the effort to raise money for the Statue of Liberty and she
ultimately mounted a campaign to add the poem to the base of the
structure. She succeeded in 1903—seventeen years after the offi-
cial opening. Her creative combination effectively multiplied the
impact of both the statue and the poem for posterity.
Ultimately, what makes a big idea is when others see the idea,
connect with it, and make it their own. Each observer of the idea
brings their understanding to it so that the idea itself goes well
beyond anything the original innovator could have imagined.
Lady Liberty is not a big idea because of the effort it took to build
her. She is not a big idea because of her location. She isn’t even a big
idea because of Emma Lazarus’ words at her base. She is a big idea
because she has come to mean something different to every individ-
ual who beholds her—yet she remains universal. The idea of Lady
Liberty extends well beyond a symbol, showing people the promise
of what they can become. She inspires our potential and manifests
our dreams. Each of us brings our meaning to her as she reflects
hers back on us, and collectively, we all add to the big idea. Mil-
lions have entered New York Harbor as immigrants seeking a better
life. They each saw Lady Liberty, emotionally connecting to her as
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they embarked upon a new life in a new land, and in turn, created
their meaning—their own story that became part of the ongoing
tale. This continues today in the form of grandmothers who mar-
vel at Lady Liberty as they enter the harbor, movie directors who
place the statue prominently in a scene, newcomers on descending
planes, who gaze upon her neon glow in the morning sunlight—just
as I have on countless morning bike rides.
As innovators, we all want to create a big idea in a similar way.
We all want to Think Bigger. And while you as an individual creator
can’t predict the future, here’s what you can do. You can be clear
about the problem you’re trying to solve—and you can gain clarity
about why you want to solve the problem. You can also work to
understand why solving the problem is valuable to you and how
the solution you have come up with works. If you can do all of that,
then you’re Thinking Bigger. And someday, you might discover that
as others see the intention behind your idea and internalize it in
their own lives to solve their individual problem, little by little, the
idea scales and scales—and iterates—to become bigger and bigger.
For all the “bigness” that we’ve covered in this book—which at
times, I know, can be daunting—to some degree, it’s comforting,
if not liberating, to know that all the world’s revolutionary inno-
vations are comprised of familiar elements. What has made inno-
vation so elusive is that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree all
along. We can’t create new elements; we can only combine and
recombine old ones.
As Mark Twain put it, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It
is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into
a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make
new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making
new combinations indefinitely, but they are the same old pieces of
colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
We can find refuge and inspiration in knowing that someone,
somewhere, at some time, has already solved most, if not all, the
pieces required to puzzle together our next big idea. After all, if
Newton was able to stand on the shoulders of giants and change
his world, then why can’t we use what we already know and find a
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unique combination of solutions to change our world for the bet-

ter? So go be curious—because the longer you collect puzzle pieces,
the easier the puzzle is to solve.
You now know a great secret that has been hiding in plain sight:
how our minds put together our best ideas. So the next time a prob-
lem confronts you, grab your kaleidoscope, give it a few turns, and
start to Think Bigger.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Think Bigger took nearly a decade to complete from first inspira-

tion to final manuscript. Along the way, I had help from many more
people than I can thank here.
Bill Duggan, for his pioneering work to apply the new science of
Learning and Memory to the theory and practice of creative think-
ing and innovation.
Carl Blaine Horton, my Ph.D. student and my right arm, for his
dedication to making Think Bigger what it is today and for helping
me create the many exercises that make up the course, this book,
and the accompanying workbook.
Glenn Hubbard, then Dean of Columbia Business School, for
appointing me Academic Director the Entrepreneurship Program,
which gave me a solid base for my research on innovation.
Craig Hatkoff, dear friend and a Founder of the Tribeca Film Fes-
tival, who early on helped me make Think Bigger a practical tool
rather than just an academic exercise.
The current Dean of Columbia Business School, Costis Maglaras,
along with Vice Deans Jonah Rockoff, Kent Daniel and Malia Mason,
all of whom gave me institutional, intellectual and moral support
for testing Think Bigger in the classroom and then gave me the time
to write the book. So too for two successive chairs of the Manage-
ment Division, Adam Galinsky and Stephan Meier.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My fellow faculty in the Management Division gave me a trove of

ideas from their research and informal chats, especially Dan Wang,
Modupe Akinola, Malia Mason (again), Adam Galinsky (again), and
the late, great Kathy Phillips.
Think Bigger drew from a vast number of other researchers as
well. Here I note just a few that I know personally and helped me
beyond their published studies: Melanie Brucks, Brian Lucas, Oliv-
ier Toubia, Oded Netzer, Justin Berg, Gita Johar, Jacob Goldenberg,
Steven Sloman, Brad Stone, Harry West, Eric Kandel, Richard Axel,
Theresa Amabile, Mark Lepper, and Joseph LeDoux.
Three leading innovators gave me personal interviews: Sir Paul
McCartney, Ethan Brown, and Lloyd Trotter.
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, introduced me Phil Dormitzer and
Alessandra Gurman, who told me the mRNA vaccine story.
Stacey Boland of NASA told me the COVID ventilator story.
Deborah Dugan, for helping me get these interviews and for
showing me innovation in action at every turn.
Greg Shaw, who provided expertise and advice on the story of
Bill Gates.
My Think Bigger course benefited from expert coaches who
helped students understand to apply the method: Michael Costa,
Sharda Cherwoo, Shaun Butnik, and Julie Harris. A very special
thanks to Neale Godfrey, the wind beneath my wings and the men-
tor of mentos in Think Bigger. To Doug Maine for tirelessly expand-
ing the number of people who learned and know about the Think
Bigger method.
The Innovation Fellows at Columbia Business School provided
ongoing support for Think Bigger students: Vince Ponzo, Joan
Affleck, Michael Auerbach, Pamela Bell, Michael Costa, Toos Daru-
vala, Deborah Dugan, Max Engel, R.A. Farrokhnia, Michael Frank,
Neale Godfrey, Tom Higbee, Sara Holoubek, Jake Kahana, Shah
Karim, Ceci Kurzman Douglas Maine, Milind Mehere, Eduardo
Mestre, David Park, Ryan Riegg, Jaime Robertson-Lavalle, Maneesh
Sagar, Joanne Wilson, Ed Zimmerman, Stacy Ruchlamer, Mattan
Griffel, Richard Harris, Alfred Drewes, Dominick Correale, Evan
Bienstock, Kunal Sood, Pamela Bell, Jo Schneierr, Marcus Brauchli,
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
David Pham, Nick Gernert, Nitzan Hermon, Tiffany Pham, Bob

Friedman, Hope Taitz, Melina Denebeim, Jonathan Mariner, Brown
Johnson, Woody Driggs, Michel Brogard, Pamela Horn, Meghan
Cross Breeden, David Beale, Sham Mustafa, Briana Ferrigno, Allie
Surina Dixon, Amy Murphy, Jeff Lagomarsino, Lloyd Trotter, Mark
Schneider, Carolina Viegas, Shaun Budnik, Harry West, Chris Heb-
ble, Liz Lindsey, Sean Prendergast, Joao Matias, Terry Lundgren,
Jonathan Krane, Matthew Shay, Barry Salzberg, Alice Chen, Brad
Hutton, Scott Clemons, Udayan Bose, Ira Shapiro, Martim De Mello,
Murli Buluswar, Amol Sarva, Jamie Fialkoff, Kai-Fu Lee, Suzanne
Nossel, Muredach Reilly, Walt Mossberg, Jacob Schlesinger, Ghita
Sennouni, Geoff Cook, Kevin Chilton, Jamiel Sheikh, Vijay Aggar-
wal, Molly Himmelstein, Mary Donohue, Sabine Gaedeke Stener, Raj
Maheshwari, Mark Brooks, Elizabeta Ealy, Miklos Sarvary, Harold
Pincus, Rhett Godfrey, Kristie Kristovski, Nick Gogerty, Shawnette
Rochelle, Helen Fisher, Matthew Baron.
The Innovation Salon gave Think Bigger students exposure to new
ideas in a wide range of innovations, worldwide. Marcus Brauchli
helped recruit the speakers. I thank them all: Scott Clemons, Walt
Mossberg, Lloyd Trotter, Brad Hutton, Paul Francis, Marc Lore,
Matthew Shay, Terry Lundgren, Ira Shapiro, Suzanne Nossel, Jacob
Schlesinger, Marcus Brauchli, Dan Wang, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, J.B. Lock-
hart, Dan Farrel, J. Allen Brack, Sean Prendergast, Helen Fisher,
Amanda Bradford, Lisa Clampitt, Mark Brooks, Geoff Cook, Miklos
Savary, Roger McNamee, Nick Gernert, Chris Britt, Paul Johnson,
Nick Gogerty, Jamiel Shiekh, General (ret.) Kevin Chilton, Sabine
Stener, Jodi McLean, Matthew Baron, Chris Meyer, Harry West, Hod
Lipson, Steven Rosenbush, Rabbi Irwin Kula, Tim Ryan, Peter Caldini,
Dr. Yasmin Hurd, Sir Alex Halliday, Ethan Brown, David Blei, Anne
Bauer, Jerome Pesenti, Danny Meyer, Xavier Rolet, Kara Swisher,
Geoff Heal, Mary Jane McQuillen, Ann Fox, Kyle Godfrey, Caitlin Lac-
roix, Jamiel Sheikh, Dee Charlamagne, Sham Mustafa, Liz Grausam,
Sam Schatz, Hawk Newsome, Chivona Newsome, Ed Zimmerman.
My PhD students helped hone the Think Bigger method in the
classroom and in debates outside: Mike White, Genevieve Grego-
rich, and Erica Bailey.
213
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My research assistants provided heroic assistance throughout

the entire Think Bigger Project: Sean Kaczmarek, Eleanor Bentley,
Jordan Antebi, and Allie Sinclair.
Two high school interns, Corey Brooks and Nalla Sagna, helped
on research and served as readers and commentators.
Jake Kahana and Jan Simon helped with visual design.
Juliana, my tandem biking companion, for all the rides along the
Hudson to Lady Liberty and back.
Antony Giles, my dear friend, who plays the role of therapist and
never allows me to give up. I am counting on you to use your musi-
cal talents help me write the Think Bigger song.
Myles Thompson, publisher, who has left no stone unturned to
help make this book the best it could be.
My mother, for your never-ending encouragement and faith in
me.
Jasmin, my sister, for always being there for me.
A special thank you, Dr. Andrew Marks, for not breaking up with
me when I ignored you for countless hours to work on this book.
And above all, I thank my hundreds of Think Bigger students.
You made the method come alive.
214
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INDEX
Page numbers in italics indicate figures or tables.
Abu Simbel temple, Egypt, 9, 10, 14 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, 20, 21,
African sculpture, 16, 17 22, 34, 93, 206–207; early life of,
aha moment, 61; of Christie, 48; 6; Salon de Paris and Egypt trip
ideators view of, 50–51; of of, 6–7; Suez Canal lighthouse
Lamarr, 161–162; scientist design of, 7. See also Statue of
observing, 52 Liberty
Allen, Paul, 48, 110–111, 113 Bartlett, Frederic, 205
Altair, 110, 111, 113–114, 115 BASIC programming, 110, 112, 113
AltaVista, 144–145, 146 basketball game, 91, 92
Amazon.com, 99 Bathers, The, 18, 18
American Council of the Blind, 102 “Beans and Cornbread,” 163
American Missionary Association, 23 Beatles, 191–193
American Revolution, 7, 207 Bell Laboratories, 49
American Tobacco, 44 Benz, Karl, internal combustion
Antheil, George, 161–162 engine and, 30
Archimedes, 36, 38 Berg, Justin, 182
Aristotle, 36, 94 Best Buy, 156
artistic endeavors: camera invention best practices: Choice Map tool and,
and, 13, 15; Impressionism and, 141, 170–171; Google and, 154;
15; “singular creative genius” in, in and out of domain use of, 141,
18; “strategic copiers” and, 19 154; Trotter learning about, 133
ashram, 168 Beyond Meat, 177–178
Asimov, Isaac, 98 Bezos, Jeff: Amazon.com launch
avant-garde, 16 of, 99; internet and, 97–98;
subproblems and criteria of,
Bartholdi, Charlotte (mother), 11, 98–99
12, 13 BF Goodrich, 44
INDEX
biases: brainstorming creation of, right-and left-, 39–40; split-brain

45–46; problem identification theory about, 41
understanding of, 75; Third Eye brainstorming: bias creation in,
Test and, 197 45–46; creative problem-solving
big picture, 32, 52, 164, 199; and, 43; Diehl and Stroebe study
decision-making and emotions in, on, 45; direct experience and, 46;
115; problem and solution appeal “idea diarrhea” in, 45; rules for, 44
in, 115; solutions and, 117–118; Brin, Sergey, 47–48, 144
three nodes of, 116–117; wants Broca, Paul, 41
identification and awareness in, Brown, Ethan: dairy industry
108, 115–117 and, 177; meat and proteins
Big Picture Score tool, 60, 108, 117, composition search of, 177;
119; break down and, 120–121; in Beyond Meat innovation of,
Choice Mapping, 171, 174, 186, 177–178; meat substitute problem
188–190; EI and GMA and, 120; domain of, 175; problem break
predefine criteria and “gut feel” down of, 176; search time of, 177;
in, 119–120; rabbit hole questions subproblem 2 search of, 176
for, 118; role and function of, Brucks, Melanie, 174
118; songwriter example and, Buddha, 38
127–129; underlying desires list Burt, Ronald S., 159
for, 120, 121 butter churn and spatulas, 25, 26, 27
Bing Nursery School experiment,
56–57 camera invention, 13, 15
Biographia Britannica, 36 CDC. See China Centers for Disease
BioNTech-Pfizer collaboration: Control
COVID-19 vaccine and, 86–87; Center for the Interdisciplinary Study
GISAID database use in, 86; of Language and Literacy, 70
mRNA technology research in, Cezanne, Paul, 18, 18
86–89; Operation Warp Speed character insight, 41
and, 87–88; subproblems of, 88 Chen, David, 159
blind people vacation planning: China Centers for Disease Control
“consumer insight” and, 104–105; (CDC), 86
experts use in, 102; group and cut choice: innovation and, 19; Jam
in, 101; outsiders and, 105–106; Study and, 57–58; Marsalis on
subproblems list for, 100–101; jazz restrictions and, 59; Miller
users and, 103–104 research on, 58; motivation
Blockbuster, 80, 141 and, 57
Boland, Stacey, 66–68, 81, 82 Choice Mapping: back and forth
bookstore activity, 181–182 movement in, 164; Big Picture
Bourla, Albert, 87 Score use in, 171, 174, 186, 188–
brain: character insight and, 41; 190; Brown innovation example
creativity and analysis of, 43; of, 175–178; Brucks “creativity
Learning+Memory model, 52; paradox” and, 174–175;
MRI image of, 42; Ogawa and Combination Template for, 185–
MRI use regarding, 41–42; 186, 186, 187–189, 199; computer
230
INDEX
mouse example for, 178–180; Civil Rights Act, 79, 168

conclusion jumping temptation Civil War, 7, 207
in, 172; diverse industries tactics Clay, Zanna, 150
for, 171; final write-up for, 186, Cleveland Twist Drill Company, 131
187; getting stuck and, 171–172, cognitive overload, 58, 184
183; great combinations aim in, Combination Template, 185–186,
163–164, 170; highest score idea 186, 187–189, 199
and, 190; idea creation story in, computer mouse, choice mapping
164–165; information bits and, example: choice map example for,
171; Learning+Memory and, 184; 179; combinations for, 179–180;
Lucas persistence exercise and, Fibaro motion sensor and, 179;
173–174; open mind importance in-domain tactics search in, 178;
and bookstore activity for, out-of-domain search in, 178–
181–182; out-of-domain tactics 179; problem and subproblems
combining for, 185; out-of- of, 178
domain tactics importance “consumer insight,” 104–105
in, 182; persistence value and conversation analysis, 201
toothpick exercise for, 172–173; copyrights. See legal patents and
random number generator use copyrights
for, 184, 187–188; simplicity COVID-19 pandemic, 76, 81;
criterion in, 188; strategic BioNTech-Pfizer collaboration
combination use in, 183; student and, 86–89; deaths from, 65–66;
comments about, 185; tactics innovators and, 66; JPL and,
collection for, 164; “useful” and 66–69, 73
“novel” creations in, 171; value creative problem-solving, 43
of unfamiliar in, 180–181; wants creative space: Bell Laboratories
identification and, 188–189. See Murray Hill and Holmdel sites
also Gandhi, Mahatma comparison, 49; creativity
Choice Map tool, 31, 33, 59, 70, and, 49–50; Google’s offices as,
129; best practices and, 141, 47–48, 48; Newton’s apple tree
170–171; diversity in, 146–147, and, 47, 47
180; information gathering and, “creativity paradox,” 174–175
116, 118; main problem and creativity tests, 39–40
subproblem examination in, 90, creator’s discernment, 19
93, 93; “micro-notes” and, 143; Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 203
multiple solutions generation Crotonville, New York, GE’s
in, 60; old ideas and, 152–153; management education program
in and out of domain search in, in, 134, 136–137
141–143, 142; “past” use in, 142; Cuban Missile Crisis, 162
problem statement in, 70; tactics curiosity, 43, 140–141, 157
and precedents search in, 130, “customer first,” 117
145–146; Trotter Matrix and, 132,
138–140, 139 dairy industry, 177
Christie, Agatha, 48 decision-making, 115
Chrysler, 44 De la Renta, Oscar, 181
231
INDEX
Descartes, René, 36 Food and Drug Administration, 87

Design Thinking: brainstorming and, Ford, Henry, 28–30, 33, 34, 46, 80,
46; “customer first” in, 117; three 105
phases of, 96 Ford Motor Company, 30; cost
Desires Triangle, 114 reduction strategy of, 29;
Diehl, Michael, 45 customer affordability, 28–29;
direct experience, brainstorming “japanning” paint process of, 29;
and, 46 moving assembly line at, 28–29,
Discover Card, 178 151; in and out of domain and,
Disney, Walt, 194 141
Disney World, 156 Foundations of Science, The
“disruptive technology,” 27 (Poincaré), 19, 169
diversity: in Choice Map tool, 146– 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree, 194
147, 180; Trotter Matrix use of, four Ps model, 94, 101
134–135 Franklin, Aretha, 192
dog with pants exercise, 202 freedom, 5, 8, 20, 59, 103, 205
Dormitzer, Philip, 86–88 freedom and constraint: Bing
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Nursery School experiment,
(Edwards), 41 56–57; cognitive overload in, 58;
duck on rock game, 91 Jam Study, 57–58; Marsalis on
DuPont, 44 jazz restrictions, 59
French Anti-Slavery Society, 7
Edwards, Betty, 41 French Second Republic seal, 11,
“Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia,” 12, 14
7, 10 Fussell, Jacob, first wholesale
EI. See emotional intelligence ice-cream factory of, 27
Eighty Percent Test, 107
Einstein, Albert, 65, 70, 170 Galileo, 36, 38
emotional intelligence (EI), 120 Gandhi, Mahatma, 169; holy man
emotions, 115, 120, 207–208 and third subproblem of, 168;
Envision Smart Glasses, 102 nonviolent civil disobedience
ethical question, 144 strategy of, 165; problem
experts: Idea-Working and, 158, and subproblems of, 165;
160; in and out of domain, 143, Salt March and satyagraha,
145–146, 154; problem break 168; suffragette movement
down regarding, 102–104; Third observations of, 165–166;
Eye Test and, 199–200 Tolstoy and second subproblem
of, 166, 168; “Tolstoy Farm” of,
fantasy animal exercise, 9 167, 168
Fernbach, Philip, 75 Gates, Bill, 48, 109, 111, 115; Altair
Fibaro motion sensor, 179 software and, 110, 112; BASIC
fill-in-the-blanks, 54 programming and, 110, 112, 113;
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 16 Microsoft and PCs, 110, 112;
five forces model, 94 pirates and, 112; vision of, 113;
Fleming, Lee, 159 wants of, 109, 113–114, 120
232
INDEX
Gautreau, Virginie Amélie Avegno, ice cream, innovation of, 22; butter
123 churn and spatulas use in, 25, 26,
Gaye, Marvin, 192 27; as “disruptive technology,”
GE Appliances, 137 27; hand crank addition to, 25,
GE Medical, 134, 135–137 26; Johnson Patent Ice-Cream
General Electric (GE), 44; internal Freezer and, 27, 27; pewter use
appliance program of, 138; in, 23–24, 25; wooden bucket use
Medical Systems business of, in, 23, 24
135–136; Trotter Matrix and, “idea diarrhea,” 45
132–135; Welch and, 130 idea pitching, 82–83
general mental ability (GMA), 120 ideation process, 55–56, 108
German U-boat problem, 161 Idea-Working: experts and, 158,
Gestalt psychology, 52 160; high-quality conversations
GE Way Fieldbook (Slater), 135–136 in, 158; key to, 158; networking
Gibbs, Roger, 66 concept and, 157; problem
Gibson, Ken, 41 description in, 81–82;
GISAID database, 86 subproblems and, 158; Third Eye
GMA. See general mental ability Test use of, 200–201; weak ties
Google, 40, 49, 130; AltaVista and, 159–160
search engine and, 144–145; best implementation, 21, 46, 76, 96, 186,
practice tactics and, 154; offices 196
as creative space at, 47–48, 48; Impressionism, 15
Overture website and, 145 in and out of domain, 182, 185;
Granovetter, Mark, 159 agnostic and partial and parallel
Great Depression, 43 search in, 155; best practices use
Great Plague of London, 35 in, 141, 154; computer mouse
Gregory, Richard, 54 and, 178–179; experts and tactics
Gulick, Luther, 90 in, 143, 145–146, 154; out-of-
“gut feel,” 120 domain search examples in,
155–156; Poincaré and, 169–170;
Halley, Edmund, 36 subproblems and, 142–143;
Hamilton, Alexander, 207 Trotter and Ford and Hastings
hand crank, 25, 26 examples of, 141
Hanks, Tom, 43 Industrial Revolution, 28
Hastings, Reed, 80, 141, 144 information bits, 171
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 54 innovation, 73; creative combination
Hemingway, Ernest, 16 for, 54; creator’s discernment in,
high-quality conversations, 19; deconstructing, 22; familiar
158 elements in, 208; Ford Motor
Homebrew Computer Club, 112 Company, 28–30; ice cream,
Hooke, Robert, 37 22–27; implementation and,
Horton, Carl Blaine, 82 21; Beyond Meat as, 177–178;
“how” questions, 76 passion in, 38; Poincaré on, 19;
Hughes, Howard, 161 process, 27–29; team reliance in,
Hume, David, 115, 184, 185 20–21
233
INDEX
“Innovation Marketplace” day: Kant, Immanuel, 203

corporate use of, 85; idea pitching Karikó, Katalin, 86
in, 82–83; insights learned from, Kepler, Johannes, 36, 38, 93
84–85; “invest” in, 84; linguistic Kerr, Steve, 134, 135
analysis in, 83, 84 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 38,
“inside” and “outside” box thinking, 79–80
30, 46 King, Stephen, 151
insight, 41; “consumer,” 104–105; Klann, William “Pa,” 28, 46, 50
“Innovation Marketplace” day “knowledge illusion effect,” 75
and, 84–85; Köhler on, 52; special Köhler, Wolfgang, 51–52
moments of, 38–39
“instinct,” 40, 70 Laboulaye, Edouard de, 7–8. See also
Intel, 110 Statue of Liberty
internet, 97–98 Lamarr, Hedy: aha moment of,
interview: targets, 125–127; third 161–162; German U-boat
party, 127–128 problem and, 161; invention
invention, 13, 15, 27; definition of, idea tinkering of, 160; player
73; Einstein and, 170; hand crank piano idea of, 161, 164; “secret
as, 25; Kepler and, 36; Lamarr idea communication system” of, 162
tinkering with, 160; Poincaré on, Last Supper, The, 140
19, 169; weak ties and, 159, 162 La Verité, 11, 11, 14
law of gravity, 36–37
Jam Study, 57–58 Lazarus, Emma, 5, 207
“japanning” paint process, 29, 33, 141 Learning+Memory, 50–51, 52, 54,
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA 172, 184, 204–205
(JPL), 66, 79, 160; Boland easy- Lefebvre, Jules, 11
to-understand manual, 67–68; legal patents and copyrights, 144
Covid-19 and daily WebEx Lenoir, Etienne, 30
meetings at, 66; ventilator Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, 16, 17
shortage problem and, 67; VITAL Library of Alexandria, 54–55
prototype of, 68, 69, 76 “like” problem, 198
Joan of Arc, 38 linguistic analysis, 83, 84
Jobs, Steve, 38, 81 look out window exercise, 195
Johnson, Nancy, ice cream Lucas, Brian, 173–174, 188
innovation of, 23–27, 30, 33, 34,
73, 151 Madame X, 121–124, 122, 123, 123
Johnson Patent Ice-Cream Freezer, Madison, Dolley, 22
27, 27 Madison, James, 22
Jordan, Louis, 163–164 Manhattan, New York, 3–4
Joy of Life, The, 16, 17, 18, 18 Mannucci, Vittorio Pier, 159
JPL. See Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Marsalis, Wynton, 59
NASA Martin, George, 193
Matisse, Henri, 21, 144; Joy of Life,
Kaizen, 134 The, 16, 17, 18, 18; Picasso
Kandel, Eric, 52, 54, 171, 205 meeting with, 16–17
234
INDEX
McCartney, Paul, 195, 197; idea National Federation for the Blind,
questioning and Third Eye use 102
of, 193–194; Martin idea for, 193; National Inventors Hall of Fame, 162
Portugal vacation and realization Natural Language Processing, 83
of, 192–193; tune and word ideas NBC TV, 134, 137
shared with others, 192 Netflix, 80, 149
MECE. See mutually exclusive and networking concept, 157
comprehensively exhaustive Netzer, Oded, 153
memory: mind wandering and, neuroscience, 6, 41, 52, 194
51–55; Third Eye Test and, Newton, Isaac, 39, 93, 131, 149,
194–195, 204–205 208; apple tree as creative
mental kaleidoscope, 208–209 space for, 47, 47; law of
“Mesoamerican ballgame,” 91–92 gravity assembled by, 36–37;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New mathematical formula discovery
York, 121 of, 38; two versions of gravity
“micro-notes,” 143 story about, 35–36
Microsoft, 110, 112, 120 Nobel Prize: of Bell Laboratories, 49;
Miller, George, 58, 92 of Kandel, 52, 171; Poincaré and,
mind wandering: aha moment and, 169–170; of Sperry, 41
51–52; fill-in-the-blanks and, nonviolent civil disobedience, 165
54; Gestalt psychology and, 52; Nutt, Paul, business decisions study
Learning+Memory lens in, 51, of, 73, 74
52, 54; memory and, 51–55;
motivation choice and, 57; Ogawa, Seiji, 41–42
perception and, 54; psychological Oldsmobile, 28, 29, 141, 154
benefits of, 50 open mind, 181–182
Mingo, Santiago, 159 Operation Warp Speed, 87–88
Minto, Barbara, 93–94 Osborn, Alex, 43–44
MITS, 110, 112 Overture website, 145
Mona Lisa, 140
Montgomery bus boycott, 79 Page, Larry, 47–48, 144
Moore, Gordon, 113 Pankhurst, Christine, 166
motivation, 57, 72, 77, 118, 128 Pankhurst, Emmaline, 165–166, 166
Motorola, 134 Parks, Rosa, 79
MRI image, 41–42, 42 passion test: Idea-Working in,
mRNA technology, 86–89 81–82; “Innovation Marketplace”
mutually exclusive and day and, 82–85; problem
comprehensively exhaustive description in, 81; Third Eye Test
(MECE) concept, 94, 95–96, 96, and, 206
101 perception: mind wandering and, 54;
Third Eye Test and, 195–196, 203
Naismith, James, 90–92, 92, 99, 107 Persian miniatures, 18, 18
“naïve realism,” 202–203 persistence exercise, 173–174
Natal Indian Congress, South Africa, pewter, 23–24, 25
165 Philco remote, 161, 164
235
INDEX
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia thought exercises for, 71–72;

Mathematica, 37 writing down of, 70–71
Picasso, Pablo, 20, 21, 22, 34, problem statement, 70, 73, 78, 82,
144, 149–150; Les Desmoiselles 120, 138
d’Avignon, 16, 17; Matisse
meeting with, 16–17; self- rabbit hole questions, 118
portraits, 13, 15, 15 random number generator, 184,
Plath, Sylvia, 43 187–188
“playback” conversation, 203–204 Road Ahead, The (Gates), 111
player piano, 161, 164 road map guide, 30, 31
Poincaré, Henri, 20; on invention, root cause analysis, 101; multiple
19, 169; out-of-domain tactics causes in, 95; Wikipedia article
and, 169–170 on, 94–95
Popular Electronics magazine, 110, Ross, Lee, 202
111
Pound, Ezra, 16 Şahin, Uğur, 86–87
Presley, Elvis, 192 Salon de Paris, 6–7
problem break down: Bezos and Salt March, 168
art of, 97–99; Big Picture Score Sardinia, 103, 104
tool and, 120–121; blind people Sargent, John Singer, 121–124
vacation planning and, 100–106; Scheffer, Ary, 6
Brown and, 176; business success Schumpeter, Joseph, 20
stories and, 96–97; creativity Schuyler, Georgina, 207
problem in, 106; duck on rock scientific method, 149–150
game to basketball in, 91; search, 155, 178–179; Brown
experts and users in, 102–104; time on, 176–177; curiosity in,
five subproblems limit in, 92; 140–141, 156; diversity and, 146;
hurrying through, 93; MECE ethical question for, 144; failure
concept in, 94, 95–96, 96, 101; and reaction in, 147–148; Google
Naismith and four subproblems and, 130; Idea-Working in, 157–
in, 90–91; other models of, 94; 160; learn from experience or
outsiders and, 105–106; revision others in, 148–149; legal patents
and Eighty Percent Test for, 107; and copyrights regarding, 144;
“sparking lot” use in, 107 looking beyond familiar domains
problem identification: biases in, 140; old ideas and, 152–153;
understanding in, 75; definition in and out of domain regarding,
in, 74, 75, 89; “instinct” in, 70; 141–146; scientific method and,
“knowledge illusion effect” in, 75; 149–150; “steal shamelessly”
MBA and Engineering students in, 143–144; “strategic copying”
and, 72–73; Netflix empire and, and, 150–151; tactics finding in,
80; passion test for, 81–85; 153–154; Toubia and Netzer idea
problem statement change in, study in, 153. See also Trotter
73; right problem finding for, Matrix; Vinci, Leonardo da
65, 74–75; solution rushing and, “secret communication system,” 162
74–75; think small in, 79–80; self-portraits, Picasso, 13, 15, 15
236
INDEX
Seurat, Georges, 16 Student Non-Violent Coordinating

Sinatra, Frank, 192 committee, 79
“singular creative genius,” 18 Stukeley, William, 37
Slater, Robert, 135–136 subproblems, 124; Bezos and, 98–99;
Sloman, Steven, 75 of BioNTech-Pfizer collaboration,
social media industry, 196 88; blind people vacation
Soda, Giuseppe Beppe, 159 planning list of, 100–101; Brown
Soitoux, Jean-François, 6 search of, 176; in Choice Map
solution rushing, 74–75 tool, 90, 93, 93; of computer
songwriter, wants identification and: mouse example, 178; five limit
Big Picture Score and, 127–129; of, 92; of Gandhi, 165–166, 168;
main and subproblems in, 124; Idea-Working and, 158; Naismith
target wants and interview, and, 90–91; in and out of domain
125–127; third party interviews, and, 142–143
127–128; wants overlap in, 127, Suez Canal lighthouse, 9, 10, 14
128; your want list for, 125 suffragette movement, 165–166, 166
Southern Christian Leadership Sultan (chimpanzee), 51–52
Council, 79 Swiss Patent Office, Bern, 170
“sparking lot,” 107 SWOT. See strengths, weaknesses,
speaking your thoughts, 198–199 opportunities, and threats
Sperry, Roger, 41, 42
split-brain theory, 41 think bigger method. See specific
standard ventilator, 69 topics
Statue of Liberty, 4, 4, 14, 206; F. think small, 79–80
Bartholdi inspirations for, 5–6, Third Eye Test, 61, 193; biases and,
9, 10, 11, 12, 13; emotional 197; Big Picture and Choice
connection to, 207–208; Lazarus Map Template use in, 199;
poem on, 5; Schuyler and, 207 conversation analysis in, 201;
“steal shamelessly,” 134, 143–144, 150 Disney short film about, 194;
Stein, Gertrude, 16 dog with pants exercise for, 202;
step analysis: “how” question for, enlightenment and, 195; experts
76; open-ended phrasing and and what works questions for,
questions for, 76; step up and step 199–200; human perception
down in, 77–78, 77–78; upside- as subjective in, 203; idea and
down pyramid use in, 76–77 description change in, 198;
Sticky notes, 179 Idea Working technique for,
“strategic copying,” 19; authors 200–201; input from others in,
and, 151; Clay experiment and, 191; judgment and, 201; “like”
150; parts and creativity link in, problem in, 198; look out window
150–151 exercise for, 195; memory and,
strengths, weaknesses, 204–205; “naïve realism” and,
opportunities, and threats 202–203; others re-imagine idea
(SWOT) model, 94, 101 in, 205–206; passion test and,
Stroebe, Wolfgang, 45 206; “playback” conversation for,
stuck, getting, 171–172, 183 203–204; prefrontal cortex
237
INDEX
Third Eye Test (continued<) Van Buren, David, 66, 67

location of, 194, 199; social Van Gogh, Vincent, 16
influence on, 197; social media ventilator shortage problem,
industry and, 196; speaking your 67–68
thoughts power in, 198–199; Vinci, Leonardo da, knowledge from
tell someone else in, 199; tell different domains search of,
yourself your idea in, 198; visual 140–141
understanding and working VITAL prototype, 68, 69, 76
memory in, 194–195; Watts
study on, 196–197; Yesterday and Wang, Uma, 181
McCartney story about, 192–194; wants identification: awareness
your intentions and others’ and understanding in, 124;
perceptions alignment in, 195– big picture and, 108, 115–118;
196. see what you see and, 194 Big Picture Score and, 118–120;
thought exercises, 71–72 Choice Mapping and, 188–189;
Tolstoy, Leo, 166, 167 Desires Triangle in, 114;
“Tolstoy Farm,” 167, 168 emotions in, 120; Gates and,
toothpick exercise, 172–173 109–114; pleasing all parties
Toubia, Olivier, 153 in, 121–124; songwriter example
Trotter, Lloyd, 134–135, 139, in, 124–129; three sources of,
142–144, 149–150, 154; best 114
practices learning and, 133; Washington, George, 22
factories observation of, 131–132; Watts, Duncan, 196–197
GE and, 130–131; on Trotter weak ties, 159–160, 162
Matrix, 132–133 Wedell-Wedellsborg, Thomas, 74
Trotter Matrix: adaptation of, Weissman, Drew, 86
135–136; Choice Map tool and, Welch, Jack, 130, 133–134
132, 138–140, 139; diversity use of, Wernicke, Karl, 41
134–135; GE and, 132–133; as GE West, Rebecca, 81
management education program what works questions, 199–200
core feature, 134; humility as Whole Foods, 156
key in, 135; management cohort Wikipedia article, on root cause
online commerce problem use analysis, 94–95
of, 136, 136–138, 137; in and Wooden, John, 172
out of domain of, 141; “steal wooden bucket, 23, 24
shamelessly” and, 134 World Altair Computer Convention,
Türeci, Özlem, 86–87 Albuquerque, 112
Twain, Mark, 208 World Health Organization, 87
underlying desires list, 120, 121 Yahoo, 144–145

upside-down pyramid, 76–77 Yesterday, 191–192, 197
“useful” and “novel” creations, 33, Young, William, 27
59, 129, 171
users, 102–104 Zuckerberg, Mark, 48
238

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T HINK BIGGER

ALSO BY SHEENA IYENGAR

The Art of Choosing

Copyright © 2023 Sheena Iyengar

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and

Cover design: Noah Arlow

1 What Is Think Bigger? 3

3 Step 1: Choose the Problem 65

W hat do you do when you have a problem and there is no

Business School. I noticed that our many courses on entrepre-

SHE IS A BIG IDEA

I live in Manhattan, a small island rich in its unique capacity to cap-

her—inspired by similarly notable objects but also unique? In other

THE STORY OF AN IDEA

The idea of the Statue of Liberty begins with Bartholdi himself. He

that guarded the royal tombs and became instantly transﬁxed at

Lady Liberty’s arm on the fundraising tour, where spectators could

innovation can help set you on a path to unlocking your creative

OPENING THE BLACK BOX

I want you to imagine a fantasy animal. No, not a dragon, phoenix,

Figure 1.6 A portrait of Charlotte Bartholdi.

Figure 1.7a-f A comparison showing the progression of Bartholdi’s inspirations for

Figure 1.9 Picasso’s Autoportrait Expressionist

people began to buy them instead of paintings. Toward the end of

Picasso came of age as a painter when Impressionism was already

were essentially “strategic copiers.” By this, I mean they learned

This deﬁnition echoes an older statement by the economist

THINK BIGGER IN ACTION

Before I walk through the six steps of Thinking Bigger, I want to

That would be Nancy Johnson. She was in her ﬁfties, a volunteer

1. How do I make the outer container smaller so it uses less ice?

To remedy this, Johnson added a hand crank—an invention

Figure 1.15 Plunger butter churn. Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 1.16 Wooden spatula with holes, used for cooking.

1. How do I reduce the cost of labor?

Let’s start with labor. The previous century’s Industrial Rev-

That left the third subproblem: reducing the cost of materials.

THE THINK BIGGER ROAD MAP

Now that I’ve walked you through the essential characteristics of

Step 1: Choose the Problem

to deﬁne any problem. Your task is to choose from among them

Step 2: Break It Down

Any major problem is made up of multiple, smaller problems. To

Step 3: Compare Wants

Step 4: Search In and Out of the Box

Each industry, branch of science, or area of expertise has its own

Step 5: Choice Map

Step 6: The Third Eye

THE INNOVATOR WITHIN

At this point you might ask yourself, “Can I do it?”

THE APPLE OF INSIGHT

You might know this story:

latest mathematics and the works of the scientists who came

In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximat-

You might not understand all the references and reasoning

force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between

What exactly struck Newton under the apple tree? It wasn’t an

idea of a “center of gravity” goes all the way back to Archimedes,

It’s easier for me to remember people by . . .

• You’re better with faces than names.

called it, became their most-used method for ideation—and it

Let’s analyze the ﬁve rules of brainstorming.