Range - David Epstein Page 0,71

Sprint Nextel and living in rural New Hampshire, solved the challenge using radio waves picked up by telescopes. Pre-retirement, Cragin had collaborated with scientists, and found that those specialist teams often got mired in working out small details at the expense of practical solutions. “I think it helped me being out of that,” he said, “having moved on.” A NASA official noted, diplomatically, that “there was some resistance” to Cragin’s solution at first, “because it was using a different methodology.”

That was exactly the point. Still, Appert and Cragin had some tangentially relevant work experience. Other outside-in solvers thrive because they have none at all.

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In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker famously hit a reef and leaked its payload into the Prince William Sound. It was a monumental environmental and commercial fishing disaster. When oil mixes with water, spill workers refer to the resulting goop as “chocolate mousse.” Throw in low temperature and spill responders are working with material that has the viscosity of peanut butter. It is devilishly difficult to remove.

Almost twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spill, thirty-two thousand gallons of oil remained stubbornly stuck along Alaska’s coast. One of the most intractable challenges for oil spill remediation was pumping oil out of recovery barges after it was skimmed from the water. In 2007, Scott Pegau, research program manager at the Alaska-based Oil Spill Recovery Institute, figured he might as well try InnoCentive. He offered a $20,000 reward for a solution to getting cold chocolate mousse out of recovery barges.

Ideas rolled in. Most were too expensive to be practical. And then there was the solution from John Davis, so cheap and simple it made Pegau chuckle. “Everyone kind of looked at it,” Pegau told me, “and just said, ‘Yep, this should work.’”

Davis, an Illinois-based chemist, had been pondering the oil spill challenge while waiting for flights during work travel. Naturally, he started with chemistry solutions, but made an about-face. “You’re already dealing with a chemical pollutant more or less,” Davis told me, “so you want to do as little chemistry as possible” in order to avoid adding more pollutants. He abandoned his specialty and turned to a distant analogy. “I visualized the problem as drinking a slushy,” he said. “You end up having to whip around the straw to stir it up. How could you make it so you don’t have to work so hard to get that slushy out?”

The slushy question in turn reminded Davis of a brief experience in construction. Years earlier, he was enlisted for a day to help build a long flight of concrete steps that ran down from a friend’s house to an adjacent lake. “They just needed an extra person to carry the pails or do whatever, grunt work,” he told me. “I’m not a super-strong guy, so I wasn’t really awesome at that, I’ll be honest.”

Concrete was unloaded at the top of the hill and sent sluicing down a chute when it was needed at the bottom. Davis was standing at the top, concerned about a massive mound of concrete that was already hardening while it baked in the sun. He alerted his friend’s brother. “Watch this,” the brother told him. He grabbed a rod attached to a motor and touched it to the mound of concrete. “It fluidized instantly, just like whoooosh,” Davis recalled. The rod was a concrete vibrator, which is just what it sounds like, a shaking piece of metal that keeps the components of concrete from sticking together. “When it came to my mind it was a eureka moment,” Davis told me.

He called a company that sold concrete vibrators to learn a few details, and then made a diagram of how the vibrators could easily attach to a barge and do to “chocolate mousse” what they already do with concrete. Counting diagrams, the solution was a total of three pages.

“Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’ If it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry,” Pegau said. “I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.” Pegau was basically describing the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar