Watch out for "Moreness"

Let's check in with Heraclitus (the ancient Greek philosopher who was the world's first creativity teacher). His words of wisdom for us today are:

"The way up and the way down
are one and the same."

Pretty enigmatic. But I think there's a creative strategy implicit in this insight, and I interpret it to be: "Watch out for Moreness." When things are made larger, they take on a complex, new life of their own, and unexpected -- even undesirable -- things can happen.

Here's an example. Let's say that you have a recipe for strawberry shortcake that serves four people.

One day you invite over seven friends to eat this desert. To make it, you simply double the recipe's proportions.

On another occasion, you make it only for yourself and a friend, and you halve the proportions.

Now, let's suppose that you invite 50,000 people over for strawberry shortcake. At this point, the biggest challenges confronting you have nothing to do with the recipe. These include buying strawberries on the commodities market, making deals with the teamsters to deliver enough cream, traffic-flow coordination, and large-scale renting of tables, chairs, bowls, and spoons. The same things can happen when situations become larger: issues come up that weren't even thought about in the original plans.

Two questions to ask yourself as you contemplate a current problem or issue: Where would you be better served with "less" rather than more? What problems might having "more" create for you?

Tags: creativity, innovation, Heraclitus

Comments

[Athena]

Great post! It gives me a lot to think about.

[David Armano]

Roger,

In the world of user experience, we call this "feature creep"—adding too many features that aren't really needed. When you add the perpective of how long this kind of thinking has been around—it just goes to show you how humans haven't really changed all that much.

PS, I like the new header better than the old.

[Paul]

My favourite saying on moreness is KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. If you look at the world of design, usually the simplest ideas are the best. In identities and branding for example, the best logos are those that are really simple - Nike, Shell, Apple (prime example). A fellow designer once told me "if you can't draw a logo in the sand, then it will fail".

Another example of moreness. The BBC used to have a logo that was three slanted boxes, each underlined with Red, Green and Blue lines. However, it was hard to reproduce on screen (as television has a low resolution), being four colour it cost a lot to reproduce, and it dated very quickly.

The logo that replaced it in 1997, is far simpler. Three square boxes, with the letters BBC in each, set in a simple but elegant typeface - Gill Sans - and utilises just two colours (black and white). Nearly ten years on, it still looks current, and has been used alongside a variety of the corporations sub-brands succesfully.

Just a few of my thoughts on moreness. It's a topic that is very much on my mind at the moment.

Loving the blog by the way and good luck with the Ball of Whacks!

[Timothy Johnson]

Roger - great post. I'm always warning my clients and students alike that "those whom the gods wish to destroy they give unlimited resources."

Case in point, in the Project Management class I'm currently teaching, we did an exercise on requirements gathering. Two groups were planning a wedding; two groups were designing the ultimate "man room." For each of the two projects, I put a major constraint in the way (the wedding had a budget of $10K; the wife had to approve the "man room" design).

The result? Those who had the constraints actually defined their requirements more easily than those who had "carte blanche"

Pretty powerful lesson for the students on the impact of resource constraint.

[isabella mori]

oh wow - how many people use the word "moreness"? probably not too many. i just posted an old poem of mine that talks about moreness, too. you can see it here. and it talks about food, too ...