Blending Expertise

One of the key strategies that the unusually successful team at Marvel Comics employs to avoid the sophomore slump on sequels is what an excellent HBR article ("Marvel's Blockbuster Machine") dubs, selecting for "inexperienced experience":

"In movies, whom you hire is a big part of what you get. And as the saying goes, 'The best predictor of future performance is prior performance.' Marvel Studios subverts this maxim in a fascinating way: When hiring directors, it looks for experience in a domain in which Marvel does not have expertise.

Of the 15 MCU directors, only one had experience with the superhero genre (Joss Whedon had helped write the script for the movie X-Men and had created a critically acclaimed comic book arc for Marvel). Instead they had deep knowledge in other genres—Shakespeare, horror, espionage, and comedy. They often came from the indie scene. This experience allowed them to bring a unique vision and tone to each film: Thor: The Dark World has Shakespearean overtones; Ant-Man is a heist film; Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a spy movie; Guardians of the Galaxy is a giddy space opera..."

This is a fascinating management technique. To deliberately select for inexperience along certain dimensions is very counter-intuitive when you're thinking in terms of efficiency, productivity, etc; but when the goal is freshness, perhaps it should be a much more familiar method, to stack the deck towards creative outcomes.

Turns out, 3M, the legendary product development shop (they sell almost as many products ~55,000+ as they have employees!), figured this out a long time ago:

"The benefit of people sharing knowledge across fields is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process. Normally, the brain files away ideas in categories based on how these ideas can be used... 3M takes conceptual blending so seriously that it regularly rotates its engineers, moving them from division to division. A scientist studying adhesives might be transferred to the optical-films department; a researcher working on asthma inhalers might end up tinkering with air conditioners. Sometimes, these rotations are used as a sudden spur for innovation. If a product line is suffering from a shortage of new ideas, 3M will often bring in an entirely new team of engineers, sourced from all over the company... 'We want to ensure that our good ideas are always circulating.'"

(From, "Imagine," the same book where I found the incredible origin story of the post-it note.)

The point of the 4M examples (see what I did there? 3M + Marvel = ...) is simple: when you're seeking insights, the key is NOT always deeper subject matter expertise, but rather, blending across disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives. So the question for someone bringing an outside perspective into a new context isn't, "Is my experience relevant here?" But rather, "How might my experience shed fresh light on the problems here?"

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.