← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
492. Breaking Free from Functional Fixedness
00:30:01
In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer delves into the intriguing concept of functional fixedness—the mental block that limits our ability to see alternative uses for familiar objects. Drawing on the popular saying, "when all...
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- [00:00]
Melina Palmer
Welcome to episode 492 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about functional fixedness.
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Matthew Confer
Ready?
- [00:11]
Melina Palmer
Let's get started.
- [00:16]
Podcast Announcer
You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.
- [00:32]
Melina Palmer
Hello.
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Matthew Confer
Hello everyone.
- [00:34]
Melina Palmer
My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. You've probably heard the saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? Well, that's the concept of functional fixedness, which is the focus of today's episode, and it originally aired back in March of 2022. It's funny, while I was looking to see if there were any new and interesting examples of functional fixedness, while researching to do this refresh, I found a flip of this which said that the inability of someone to realize that they can use a wrench to drive a nail into a piece of wood and not just a hammer is an example of functional fixedness. We tend to look just at the all you have is a hammer problem, but knowing that other things can function as a hammer when you need them to, even if that isn't their intended purpose, is an extension of the opportunities that exist with this type of mental reframing and not getting stuck stuck in what things are meant for or what they've done. Because our lives and businesses run on habits and predictability, you're going to be surrounded by functional fixedness problems. They might be issues of all hammers, no hammers, or both, and being open to the opportunities that exist when you don't let yourself get bogged down by the way it's always been, or what something was designed to do, or how.
- [01:55]
Matthew Confer
We'Ve always used it, was a great.
- [01:57]
Melina Palmer
Way to help you stand out from your competition and have an edge in your industry. And of course, this episode is going to help you do just that as we dig into what functional fixedness is and how it's impacting you in today's episode. So don't forget, there are links to my top related past episodes and books which are waiting for you in the show. Notes which are found within the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com.
- [02:21]
Matthew Confer
492 all right, so let's jump right in on functional fixedness again. Our when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem. I'm going to start by taking this Analogy a bit to the extreme as I talk about how it works. Sound good? All right, so I want you to imagine you show up to tackle a new skill or concept. You're really excited about this new opportunity, maybe first day on the job and you likely bring every mental tool you might need to help you learn. You are a sponge, ready for whatever life throws at you. It may seem naive to someone with more experience who looks at your enthusiasm with a shake of the head, thinking, I remember when I was a newbie like that, I didn't know anything. I'm so much better off now. You know what I'm talking about. And while experience is important, expertise is also kind of overrated, in my opinion. There are a lot of times where we get so narrowed in on what we think the problem is when we're experts. That curse of knowledge, something I talked about with Adam Hansen when he was on the show, that we don't look at what else could be going on. As you develop expertise, you start to declutter that mental toolbox. Instead of having everything available to look at and use over time, you throw away the drills, wrenches and duct tape while you perfect your hammer. Focused on your hammer, you might enhance its materials, make it stronger and more ergonomic. Everything you do is about creating that ideal hammer. The problem, of course, comes when you are asked to work with someone who only uses screws or who has a firm rule about not creating any holes. A hammer is totally useless in both of those scenarios. And if all you can do is argue about the value of your hammer while the other department members are trying to talk over you to convince you to use drills or non permanent glue, this very quickly becomes a standoff where no one is willing to budge, everyone believes their way is best, and the others are illogical jerks who are unwilling to listen to reason. Your own actions are of course justified due to your fundamental attribution error. There is a link to that episode in the show notes. But this is the phenomenon where we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, both with an internal justification for why we're good people, and this was a one off circumstance, while also blaming external influences for our deficiencies in a way that we don't always afford to others, especially those who are in another department. Someone we would say are a them versus an us. The primary example that's used to explain this is when someone cuts you off on the freeway and you automatically label them as a jerk, a bad person to the core. However, when you cut someone off, you're a good driver, but you couldn't afford to be late and this was just a one time thing or you were distracted because your mom's in the hospital or because that other driver wouldn't let you in In a work scenario for the Fundamental Attribution error, I like to talk about being late to meetings. When someone else, say from the team that works with drills is running late, your hammer team might start complaining about how complicated they try to make everything and make jokes about how they got hung up in another meeting. It's so typical for a drill person to be late. They're so inconsiderate. If you or someone else from the hammer team is running late, well there were extenuating circumstances. Everyone will understand because you had back to backs and you needed to get a snack at some point, right? Episode 92 is all about fundamental attribution error, so I'm not going to talk about it more now, but it is important to know that you see others as different from you and will tend to judge them and their ideas more harshly, not giving them the benefit of the doubt that you might give yourself and members of your team. When this combines with functional fixedness and where everyone has their own way they believe is right, so everyone else must be wrong and you need to prove to them that you are correct and they're trying desperately to do the same thing, it's a recipe for distrust and a lack of productivity. When you look at your own business interactions, how often are you arguing a point you know to be true while others are fighting just as passionately for something they believe in? Or how often have you proposed a great idea only to be told we tried that once 10 years ago and it didn't work? Those are hammer drill problems and examples of functional fixedness in the workplace. In the episodes on Confirmation Bias and the Focusing Illusion, I talk about how the subconscious will filter through information to determine what is important and let everything else sort of fall by the wayside. You've potentially heard me talk before about how your subconscious can process approximately 11 million bits of information per second compared to the 40 bits of information for your conscious brain. If we put that another way, it means that for every one piece of information your brain decided was relevant or important enough to focus on, there were 275,000 other things it filtered out. Isn't it possible that the one thing someone else is arguing is one of those 275,000 things that your brain filtered out and didn't focus on? Or that you are looking at just one of the many possible correct alternatives that could work. As Rory Sutherland says in his book Alchemy, the opposite of a good idea can still be a good idea. Functional fixedness or being set in your ways is very similar to confirmation bias and the focusing illusion. If you go in looking for examples for why hammers are the best or or were to search for articles about how drills have ruined walls, again, taking this analogy way too far. But we're in this together now. You'll find information to support that. Similarly, the drill people that want to look up how hammers are more likely to cause big holes or how nails don't secure things as well as screws will be able to find that as well. This shift in perspective to allow for the 275,000 other things that could also be true shows how even when you disagree or are saying completely different things, you can both be right. To put it another way, everyone else doesn't have to be wrong in order for you to be right. That picture could be hung with a nail, a screw, command strips, or something else you haven't thought of yet. Each has its pros and cons and are worth evaluating. Even if you only have a hammer, you can still add in a perspective of the other tools that are available, maybe those that used to be in your toolbox but you've done away with as you've gained expertise. Sometimes you have the benefit of knowing someone with a drill and someone else with adhesive strips to have a conversation with. Other times you need to try and emulate their perspectives without them being there. Regardless of the situation, whether you have people to connect with or not, this is all about getting out of your own functionally fixed way. And one of my favorite stories that I think is such a great example of overcoming functional fixedness comes from Apollo 13. In case you aren't familiar with the story, there's a movie about it that came out in 1995 featuring Tom Hanks as one of the astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission. And I've linked to a little clip in the show notes here that showcases some of what I'm going to talk about here right now now. But I do recommend the movie. It's great. So Apollo 13 is one of the NASA missions that was intended to land on the moon. But very early into the journey they had an unexpected emergency that very easily could have ended in disaster, but the team was able to work together and bring all three members of the crew home safely. Shortly after an oxygen tank exploded, they realized they would have to abandon the main spacecraft and move to the lunar module, or lem, and turn it into a makeshift lifeboat. One big problem was that it was designed to sustain two men for 45 hours, and they needed it to sustain three men for 90. No small task. To make matters worse, they realized mid emergency that there had been a clear lack of communication between the teams who had been on the projects designing the Lemon and the main spacecraft. They were siloed teams, much like our hammer and drill people from before. And they never imagined anything from one area would need to work on another. Something that's very obvious in hindsight. But there had been no need to touch base as they were working on their own parts. Each worked happily on their own projects, which didn't matter until it mattered. In this case, the CM lithium hydroxide canisters, which are used to scrub carbon dioxide out of air so humans can breathe in space, were square on one system and round on the other. Sadly, this type of problem isn't limited to Apollo 13. In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one team was using English units of measurement while the others were using the metric system, something that wasn't discovered until the thing was in space and unable to function properly. And I promise NASA isn't the only organization to do this. I'm not picking on them intentionally. They just have really public failures when things go wrong. And even when the stakes are high. Little things like this can be missed when you're too focused on your little area that you're working on. And it can cause a big problem. So back to Apollo 13 and its canister issue. They didn't fit together naturally, and the team needed to figure out how to get a literal square peg to fit in a round hole under limited time with only the items available in the spacecraft. And they had to be able to explain how to make it work to a team without experience with this specific sort of work, who were about 200,000 miles away with communication systems that were a lot like a walkie talkie, and you thought trying to communicate with your team over zoom was hard. When presented with the problem, the engineers and other team members on the ground all explained why it couldn't be done, what might go wrong, how they'd never simulated that, and that they didn't want their departments to be responsible for making a guess that the pieces weren't designed to do what needed to be done. To this, flight director Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris in the movie, replied, I don't care what anything was designed to Do I want to know what it can do? A remarkable reframing that may just have saved three lives. This simple statement can essentially give the brain permission to look at the problem in a different way, to free itself from the mental constraints that it's putting on the situation. By focusing too narrowly on one particular aspect. When things were going right, what something was designed to do mattered. In a crisis, who cares? We need to make something now that can achieve this one goal. How do we do it? I talk often about how easy it is to find the right answer to the wrong question. This Apollo 13 example is a perfect showcasing of that. All the responses from the engineers and others on the team may have been technically accurate, but they didn't help solve the problem at hand. They didn't give the astronauts enough clean air to breathe so they could get home safely. While you might not be dealing with life and death stuff like they were, in this case, you still would benefit from having someone be your gene crayons on projects. Someone who can help you see what you might be missing, something amazing or useful that's right in front of you. But because you have blinders on that are keeping you focused on the wrong stuff, you just can't quite see. Even a shift from something simple like what is five plus five will not get you to the same place as how many ways can we make? 10. Reframing the conversation so the team can look at things from different angles is so important. As another example of functional fixedness, I want you to imagine you're presented with a candle, some thumbtacks and a box of matches. Your task is to affix the candle to the wall and light it. When presented with this problem in the original 1945 study, and when replicated multiple times over the years, people try to use the thumbtacks to stick the candle to the wall, which doesn't work and often get stuck and just give up. They see the box that the matches or tacks came in as just a container and sort of dismiss it. So they don't even see the very obvious solution of emptying the box, lighting the candle and melting a bit of wax to then stick it to the box and then use the thumbtacks to affix the box to the wall. Easy. Functional fixedness puts the box into a box, so to speak, and it's hard to see it as anything different than how it was presented. Interestingly, a subsequent study found that five year old children didn't have the same barriers. They solved the problem much faster than the adults and Even six and seven year olds, five year olds didn't yet have that container association in their brain, so it wasn't a hindrance. When you're too deep into a problem or when you've become an expert, as I talked about at the beginning of the episode, you have this curse of knowledge that can keep you from seeing all the opportunities that are just outside the norm. This highlights an important balancing act for you and your teams between expertise and the unknown. Depth and breadth, focus and looking out into the abyss for opportunities. You can't be looking for all the possible ways to use something or how things can be different all the time. You'd never get anything done. Having a background knowledge of associations and how things work is important, but it's also important to understand that functional fixedness is a problem and it can keep you stuck sometimes in a way that will keep you from innovations or or from solving the right problems. One of my favorite examples of this, which is very related to functional fixedness, comes from a great article in the Harvard Business Review called Marketing Myopia. The original article was by Professor Theodore Levitt back in 1960, and it's still really relevant for businesses today. One of the very brief examples that just had a little note in it was talking about the buggy whip business, and that could have been a great industry to be in until the turn of the century when automobiles started being much more popular thanks to Henry Ford. If the makers of buggy whips had their mission statement as something like we make the best buggy whips in the world, which is very narrowly focused, when cars come around, they can't compete. Nobody wants buggy whips or to use buggies when you can have a car. The business though, is stuck by being too myopic. If instead they had realized they were in the business of making things go, or in the transportation industry, they would have been in a much different place and might still be around today because they could have pivoted to making engines or something. I remember when I was first introduced to this article while doing my undergrad. I can still see my professor writing on the board and I remember the room that I was in for this class and he was talking about people who make drills. Very fitting for our conversation today and saying that they need to understand that they aren't in the business of selling people drills, they are selling holes. The customer doesn't necessarily want a drill. That's just the best way they know to make the right size hole. But if someone can eventually make a better hole, no one will need drills anymore, just like buggy whips. When you're fixated on the myopic perspective of what you do or how you do things, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is that hammer, you can be missing the bigger picture, which isn't necessarily a problem until sometimes it's too late. As you think about starting to apply all this into your work, I don't recommend starting with something big like your company's mission. Have some warm ups on less consequential projects first. Maybe something that's interesting and where there's some potential to try something new, but it isn't going to make or break the company, like a new process for the department, or reevaluating your budget, or maybe redoing some email templates your department uses, or the way you structure your meetings. Let's use that last one as an example. Instead of just saying we've always had a weekly one hour meeting and sticking with that approach, maybe ask what's the benefit of having meetings instead of focusing on the agenda you've always had, which may have gotten a little stale and you more have people running through the motions than really preparing and getting good value. Say what's the most important thing we could accomplish with a meeting? Or what do we want our meetings to do? Or what would we gain from a different format of communication? Or what does our team need from each other? Or what's the best way to support each other? I'm going to stop with my long list of questions that I could inevitably get into here, because I'm guessing you get the point and that you can see the difference that comes from a slightly different question. Properly wording the question is so critical for where you end up. Again, understanding the problem you're trying to solve. Each of those questions gets you somewhere different and you need to know what you want to accomplish before you start diving in on solving the problem. In overcoming functional fixedness and loss aversion, it's important to not look at what you've always done and then think about tweaking it. That's going to end up with a weird, ineffective Frankenstein's monster of meetings and communications, one where you likely just add extra stuff on top of your already ineffective meetings which no one wants. I recently had a follow up conversation with Matthew Confer, who was on the show in episode 158 talking about three steps to better Decision making, which he also has a TEDx talk about and that is of course linked for you in the show notes along with that episode I reached out to him as I was working on the content from my second book, what yout Employees need and Can't Tell youl, which is being finished up right now. I'm so excited, but more on that to come soon. Anyway, I asked him about managing change in organizations and he shared some insights about how they're making meetings more effective internally at ability. One simple thing they did was changing up the questions they asked and how they set up the meeting, including having everyone answer a fun rotating question like who would play you in the movie of your life? And also having each person share the most important thing they thought about that week. Now just think about that for a minute, how differently that frames the meetings and what it says about your entire organization or department. If one of the three things you share in your weekly meeting is the most important thing you thought about that week, how does that prime the experience people have during the week? They might be thinking about if this thing they're thinking about is worthy of sharing in the weekly meeting, or if maybe they should spend their time on something else. It also helps showcase the importance of thoughtfulness, which you know, I love, which can have an overall benefit that ripples throughout the business. Getting out of your own functionally fixed way about even something as simple as legacy meetings can have such a huge impact on your company overall. And that impact is just starting with something small like meetings. One last little tidbit before we close out the show. In general, when there's an issue with functional fixedness, both sides are holding on so tightly to their own respective hammers. Like all the biases, heuristics and concepts I share here on the brainy business, it's easier to see these things in others than in ourselves. But I challenge you to look for your own hammer in each encounter. What are you fixated on that's keeping you closed off to the other person's perspective? How might things be different if you asked a different question or look for a new opportunity? As a reminder, there is a worksheet waiting for you in the show notes@the brainybusiness.com194 to help you work through functional fixedness in your life and business. I want to leave you with a paraphrased reminder of that statement from Gene Kranz during the Apollo 13 mission because it's such an important reframe and something you can use in other situations as well. It doesn't matter what something was designed to do, you need to know what it can do.
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Melina Palmer
So what got your brain buzzing as you Learned about functional fixedness today for me, I love that Apollo 13 NASA example from Gene Krantz. And it always comes up for me when I think about functional fixedness. The framing of I don't care what it was designed to do, I want.
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Matthew Confer
To know what it can do.
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Melina Palmer
It's so smart and helpful and something that you can be interjecting for yourself all the time to be just a little bit more thoughtful about these things and to think more creatively. And speaking of NASA, they asked some researchers back in the day how they could determine which potential hires were innovative and creative thinkers like, you know, Gene Krantz, so they could stay away from this type of problem more often than not. There wasn't a test at the time, but the researchers created one and decided to use it on children as well, to see how creatively they could think about things. It was so simple. It was just asking people how many uses they could come up with for a paperclip.
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Matthew Confer
Of the four and five year olds.
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Melina Palmer
That they asked, 98% scored at genius level based on their ability to come up with ideas for the uses of the paperclip. They have a great use of what's known as divergent thinking, that really creative, outside the box type of thinking. Fascinated by this, the researchers went back and checked on them five years later when they were 10 years old and only 30% of those same kids now scored at genius level for the paperclip uses. Remember, it was 98% just five years before. And when they checked in on them again at age 15, only 12% scored at genius level. The same kids over the years that lost this ability. And when adults were asked the same question in the general population, only 2% scored at the genius level. So this shows that we all really had the capacity to be creative, divergent thinkers. Not bogged down by functional fixedness, but we've become more convergent thinkers over time. Our schooling and experience have taught us that X does Y. And when we can get so bogged down we can't even think about what else it could do, even when we were able to come up with so many examples or opportunities earlier in our lives. The good news is you can get better at this though. You can build that muscle again. You don't have to be stuck to do this. Practice coming up with wild, outside the box creative ideas for how to use everyday things, whether it's a paperclip or a fork or a bowl or anything else. If you have access to a young child who can inspire you, all the better. And so you know what you're shooting for. Most people can come up with a 10 to 15 uses for that paperclip.
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Matthew Confer
And that might feel like a lot.
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Melina Palmer
But the most creative are coming up.
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Matthew Confer
With over 200 uses. Whoa.
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Melina Palmer
So while you don't have to get all the way to 200 ways to use that paperclip, if you can start trying to channel that divergent thinking more often, practice not getting in your own way and shutting down your brain. With convergent functional fixedness blocks, you can be more innovative and see this value show up across your life and work. This is very much in line with the question storming exercises and trainings that I do with teams. If you want a path into this and a way to help your teams to be more creative, definitely reach out to me. You can send an email to molina@the brainybusiness.com or you know, come send an email through our website the brainingbusiness.com and contact me. Would love to be able to talk with you about that. And as you come up with your own creative ideas or things you've done before innovative thinking uses for those paper clips, come share them with me on social media. I'd love to hear about them. You'll find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, along with links to my top related past episodes, books and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 492 and just like that, episode 492 on functional fixedness is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Dr. Nalanjana Desgupta, author of Change the Wallpaper. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.
- [29:43]
Podcast Announcer
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.