What a Surrealist Painting Taught Me about Innovation

How I learned to recognize and overcome the Einstellung Effect

During the initial months of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, I found myself in a home office that was almost completely undecorated. I had a beautiful paint color (Benjamin Moore Jamestown Blue), but it was painted on four otherwise bare walls and around a window looking out onto my front lawn and garden.

I set about carefully acquiring artwork that was meaningful to me to surround me while I worked.

The first, and one of my favorite pieces, is a surrealist painting by a local Long Island artist named?Cheryl Frey Richards. “The Einstellung Effect” was in my Etsy cart for several months, but I finally pulled the trigger and bought it. The artist even dropped it off and we did a social-distanced handoff in my driveway, pandemic-style.

Growing up, my parents had a lot of modern and surrealist art prints (Mondrian, Magritte, Picasso) hung throughout our house, but I had never bought any surrealist artwork for myself.

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

― Salvador Dali

A this point, I had no idea what?the Einstellung Effect was, but the painting — a bright, colorful landscape of a chess piece sinking in turbulent waters — appealed to me both visually and on a deeper level and I couldn’t stop looking at it.

In the painter’s words, “This piece is about running through the motions of life continuing to make the same moves even though they get the same results.”

I hung it on the wall in front of me, just to the left of my desk so I see it in my peripheral vision. I find it to be a reminder to look at things in a new way when I start to feel stuck.

Breaking Down Einstellung to Innovate

The Einstellung Effect, is the development of a mechanized state of mind and refers to a person’s predisposition to solve a given problem in a way they’ve “always done it,” even when better or more appropriate methods of solving the problem exist.?It was first documented by psychologist Abraham Luchins in 1942 in what has become known as?the water jar experiment.

Knowing about this effect is important for people like me who work in innovation (or any creative problem-solving work, really), because it is the?negative effect of previous experience when solving new problems. So even when your most experienced team members think they’re solving problems the best way they can, they might not be thinking so clearly.

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify … into every corner of our minds.”

— John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)

Analogic thinking (where you compare two different?things)?can often help people solve problems quickly, but it can keep you from thinking bigger when you’re looking for better or new solutions.

So how can you combat the Einstellung Effect in your work and life? Here are few tips:

1. Step away from the whiteboard… and then come back to it.?There is recent research that shows that the best ideas often take time to uncover or discover,?despite the belief that the opposite is true.?So take your time, and try a few different approaches to solving a problem.?Keep chipping away at it, even when it feels like the solutions aren’t coming.
2. Cultivate a beginner’s mindset.?There is a?Zen Buddhist concept called “shoshin,” which is the idea of letting go of your preconceptions to develop an open mind like a beginner would have.?James Clear, author of?Atomic Habits,?wrote a?useful short piece on the topic, starting with this tough advice:?Let go of the need to add value.
3. Diversify your thinking.?Get some outside perspectives on your challenge. Ask people who work in different industries.?(When I’m stuck, I sometimes present a scenario to my husband — who?has?much different professional experience than I do and sees the world differently.) If you are problem solving as part of a team, and particularly if you are leading that team,?make sure the group has cognitive diversity. There’s lots of evidence that diverse teams are more innovative and drive results.?When you’re deciding who to include in problem-solving sessions or brainstorms, look for variety in background and perspective.
4. Use creative prompts to shift perspective.?I love doing this with teams in brainstorms. Instead of doing a run-of-the-mill brain dump,?try using fun prompts to stimulate creative thinking.?There are many books and tools to guide new ways of thinking. I particularly like using lateral thinking and trying some crazy questions to approach the problem. For example, how would we solve this problem if we were living in a sci-fi novel? How would [a company in a totally unrelated industry] approach this problem?

As for me, I still look at my painting to remind myself to think outside my comfort zone and to keep from getting stuck in the same old ways of solving problems.?It’s a colorful reminder.

Do you have any creative solutions of your own for not getting into a problem-solving rut? Tell me about them in the comments!

Maura Charles is the founder of Keep it Human. As a Product Leadership Coach and Consultant, she is on a mission to help teams and organizations embrace human skills like communication and emotional intelligence in their ways of working.

She brings 25 years of experience as an editor, product manager, and digital business leader to bear on the challenges of building human-centered high-performing tech teams.

If you’d like to develop more human business and tech teams that hum together to drive results, check out?Keep it Human?and follow Maura Charles on?LinkedIn.