When a can of paint sits out for too long, the pigment settles to the bottom. If you’re a homeowner painting your living room, you can simply stir the can with a stick as needed. In industrial and commercial settings, though—like car manufacturers and autobody shops—you will have a large number of paint cans that need to remain properly mixed at all times. Therefore, you require a more efficient, reliable solution than stirring by hand.

A company set out to solve this problem. Individual paint can stirrers already existed, so they decided to scale up that solution, creating a rack of multiple stirrers. To do this, a group of engineers put together a system of pulleys connected by a long belt. You turned the first pulley, and it turned the next, then the next, and so on down the line of cans, until each can was being stirred. They set up the pulleys, attached the motor, turned it on, and … nothing. The pulleys wouldn’t turn.

Our co-founder Mike took one look at it and said, “Of course it doesn’t work.” 

He didn’t do the mathematical calculations, but he knew intuitively that with each additional pulley, the force required to turn each stirrer increased greatly because the frictional and viscous forces resisting the movement of the paddles accumulates. You might assume that if it takes .1 horsepower to turn the first pulley, it will take only 1 horsepower to turn all ten pulleys. In reality, because of accumulating friction and load forces, the energy requirement does not scale one-to-one. You need significantly more than 1 horsepower. The motor wasn’t strong enough, so of course the pulleys didn’t turn.

Mike had figured out in a few moments what a team of engineers hadn’t realized in the entire time they were developing the solution. Because of that, VP of Engineering, and Mike’s friend, Michael Docherty told him, “You’re the best mechanical engineer we have,” despite Mike not being a mechanical engineer at all.

What Mike had that the trained engineers didn’t—the thing that made him the best engineer in the room—was a combination of naivete and wisdom and an innate sense of physics.

The Intersection of Naivete and Wisdom

Socrates said, “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

We’ve previously written about both wisdom and naivete and believe both are necessary in innovation. Yet they seem antithetical, one good and one evil, as Socrates says. How do we reconcile these two seemingly diametric ideas? 

The answer is found in another quote paraphrased from Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.” This is true wisdom: the recognition of the confines of one’s knowledge. 

Naivete, as we define it, is not the same as ignorance. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, which then creates a lack of understanding and wisdom as well. Naivete, on the other hand, is a lack of complete understanding. One still has knowledge and perhaps partial understanding. There are simply gaps and holes in the understanding. Rather than precluding wisdom, naivete can actually trigger it. While ignorance leads one to be close-minded, naivete emboldens one to open-mindedness.

The engineers had far more knowledge and understanding than Mike about pulleys and gear trains, but they lacked a more complete understanding of the physics of accumulating forces, and so they did not apply their knowledge properly. The engineers had immediately zeroed in on a belt drive as the best way to solve the problem without considering other factors, but Mike came in with naivete. He did not know what solution was “right” or “wrong,” which meant he was not biased toward any one particular solution. He understood, though, that physics is driven by forces, not mechanisms.

That naivete gave him the wisdom to go back to the drawing board. He started throwing ideas out. “Just how do you do that? Why can't you do that? What if we tried X? Or we could do Y.” 

The CEO of the company was in on the discussion, so he looked at Mike’s boss and said, “We could solve this if you let Mike work on it.”

With some work on the materials and configuration, they did end up solving the problem and created a working rack of paint stirrers. 

Knowing Just Enough to Be Dangerous—and Innovative

Often, having knowledge of something is better than having a complete understanding of it, because it is the belief that you have complete understanding that keeps you from exploring possibilities. Being innovative is about knowing just enough to be dangerous and not so much that you turn into a stiff paradigm of conventionality. 

The true nature of naivete is a lack of limits. When you don’t have complete understanding, and you almost never do, you don’t know what’s possible or not, and you have the wisdom to know that your knowledge may be incomplete. With no limits, you don’t have to color within the lines. You are free to innovate. 

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