An observation: most of my best ideas come to me during business trips. Ideas that then lead to major projects or products, ideas that are worth a lot – they tend to materialize in a plane, or behind the wheel of a rental car, or in a hotel room far from home. In fact, this is not just me – I hear similar stories from many other knowledge workers and managers.
Now, during these trips we are typically hurried, harassed, and often exhausted with jetlag. So what is it that makes us more creative? I can speculate that part of it may simply be that when away from the normal office routine, away from the day to day duties of work and life, we are jarred out of some mental auto pilot mode. And certainly meeting new people from different organizations can lead to cross-fertilization of ideas (after all, that’s why I started IORG – to get and give the opportunity to talk to diverse professionals). But part of it is the fact that these trips may be the only time we have away from interruptions!
With knowledge workers interrupted every 3 minutes on average (that amazing finding by Prof. Gloria Mark et al in UC Irvine), it is not surprising that the respite of even a few hours away from it all – away from telephones, colleagues, cellphones, SMS, and incoming mail – can make a huge difference. Ah, being alone in a quiet hotel room, with one’s brain and computer but no outside distractions…
In fact, there is a classic story from the history of technology that illustrates the power of such a room. William Shockley of Bell labs is credited as co-inventor of the transistor in 1947. The actual fact is that he wasn’t; he was the team leader, but his teammates – Bardeen and Brattain – invented the point contact transistor without him. When he realized he’d missed out on one of the most important inventions of the century Shockley was so annoyed that he locked himself up in a hotel room for a number of days, only emerging when he had a better implementation – the superior Junction transistor. But it took the locked room…
The problem these days is that the isolation of these trips is showing cracks. All hotel rooms now have network access. Cheap telephony can bridge distance (luckily, in my case, most of my trips span half the globe, so many who might interrupt me are fast asleep when I’m awake). And even the airlines, whose planes were once immune to any incursion, are playing with network and cellular access. Bad idea…
Maybe all it takes is to do what Shockley did – intentionally book a room and disconnect. But this is not a done thing; no company would fund it for its employees (they do send teams to various retreats, which may be great for the team’s joint thinking – but not individuals). Oh well…
