How to Revolutionize Any Industry
A short guide to bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative change.
I was recently discussing innovation with friends, and one contended that 10x improvement equals qualitative change. In other words, if something becomes 10x faster, or stronger, or just better, it becomes something else entirely. This article is an exploration of that statement. (That same friend, Robert Hacker, also has a great article on combinatory creativity that introduced me to the concept, which plays a large role in the discussion to follow.)
The Three Forms of Creativity
Whatever we create has its basic elements. These “elements” can be anything. A piece of art might consist of paint and canvas. A computer consists of CPU, hard drive, motherboard, etc. The elements are the one or more things that creation is made of. There is, of course, discretion in determining what can plausibly be deemed an element and should or should not be factored in within any given context.
There are three types of change that take place to create something new. First off, we can engage in combinatory change: adding new elements together to bring about something new. The example I used in an earlier article is the addition of the electric motor to a washbasin to create a washing machine. Second, we can bring about augmentative change: improving the elements so that, while retaining the same basic identity, they perform better. An example of this would be creating a new computer with a faster processor or a screen with more pixels; the element, in this case, a processor or screen, is fundamentally the same, but it has been improved upon. Thirdly, we can engage in design change: this is neither improving upon the elements, nor adding new elements, but simply rearranging or reorganizing the existing elements. This is how a plate becomes a bowl, which is much easier to cut on because of its flatness.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
The distinguishing factors separating combinatory creativity, augmentative creativity, and design creativity are largely based in a difference of qualitative or quantitative change. With combinatory creativity, there is an addition of elements, which is an inherently qualitative change. Even if all the existing elements were optimized by 10x, it still requires some outside addition to be called combinatory. This addition of elements is both necessary for the qualitative change to occur and necessarily brings about a qualitative change. The qualitative change only occurs here when a new element is added, and by definition the addition of a new element must be a qualitative change.
Augmentative changes, wherein the elements are not added to but improved upon—such as when a TV screen is made to have higher resolution or a processor gets more, well, processing power — are, by definition, quantitative changes. A 10x or 100x improvement in this regard does not make for an essentially qualitative change. The basic constituents are themselves unchanging in nature. The combustion engine that can propel a vehicle 100x times as fast as another combustion engine is still a combustion engine. Between combinatory development and augmentative development, there is a clear distinction of qualitative change in the former and quantitative change in the latter.
The third form of creativity is design change. The elements are neither added to nor augmented; they are simply moved about. This is how feet become hands, spoons become forks, and beds become couches. This form of creativity exists outside of the qualitative/quantitative dichotomy. Thus, it is only within this domain that we can possibly bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative advancement.
Photos by Anete Lusina (left) and Karolina Grabowska (right) on Pexels
Why I Can Never Invest in Apple Under Tim Cook
The conversation with my friends began with a playful argument about iPhone vs. Android. I was saying that I would defend the original iPhone design to the death, as superior to any other phone at the time, but I couldn’t do that now that Steve Jobs has passed.
I can’t defend the iPhone under Tim Cook because, for all his logistic genius, he’s not a true innovator. I initially balked at the contention that 10x improvement equals qualitative change (when it arose later in the conversation) because I believe under Tim Cook, every number of years, things will continue to get 10x better in the iPhone. The battery will last 10x as long, the quality of its digital photos will be 10x better, the screen will look 10x clearer, the battery will charge 10x faster, the water resistance will endure at 10x the pressure, and so on. And it’s exactly because of this that I can’t consider him a true innovator. He is leading the advancement of the iPhone down a path based almost entirely on augmentative changes.
I can, however, comfortably defend the original iPhone’s superiority. It was an incredibly powerful tool at the time, but what was really revolutionary about it was the ease of use. Not only did it have functionality beyond many other smart phones (attributable to combinatory creativity), but once other smart phones caught up, the iPhone was still so easy to use that an infant with no training could move through a good bit of that functionality with little effort. The real potency of the phone wasn’t the capability within it; it was that it so readily unlocked the capability within us.
The user interface (UI) is only a design change: The elements are all the same, but the way they’re laid out and accessed can be markedly different. In the case of the iPhone, it came down to thumbs versus styluses or buttons. All of a sudden, with the iPhone’s first of its kind touch screen, we could use our hands directly in a digital world. The thumb is, in fact, the answer to everything here. If a thumb — with its outsized effect on the overall utility of the hand — marks a qualitative change from the neighboring fingers, then a change that doesn’t require the addition of new elements can result in a change of kind. The thumb is, after all, only a simple design change away from all the other digits on the hand. A design change does not necessarily beget qualitative transformation in the way combinatory change does. In fact, the basic elements are not changed at all: Design change is inherently non-qualitative in nature. How, then, can such big, seemingly qualitative transformations come from design changes?
What is the difference between a thumb when compared to the fingers and a processor when compared to a 10x faster processor? The latter represents a change (augmentation) in the elements of the object. The type of change exemplified by the former represents a change in the usability of everything else the object comes into contact with. The hand isn’t that different from the foot; it’s all the same basic elements, none of them markedly improved upon. It’s the meshing with the environment that makes it so useful. Non-qualitative changes can become qualitative in practice only when the combinatory process is still occurring but occurring in an ill-defined way: What’s being combined is the object and, after the fact, everything around it.
A plate isn’t an inherent improvement on a bowl. A vegetarian rarely ever has real need for a plate because most vegetarians seldom ever have to use a knife. It’s only when cutting (often meat) that the flatness of a plate becomes highly preferable to a rounded bowl. A good design change can bring out advanced functionality in something else — sometimes nearly everything else — outside of the actual thing being directly changed. Opposable thumbs make hands that can grab more than tree branches; it is a small change in terms of the hand itself, but it is a key to everything else in our environment.
Bridging the Gap
To understand the potency of a design change, it can help to view the life of a creation as occurring across two stages. First, there is the production stage, when the creation is being made. This is where it undergoes combinatory, augmentative, and/or design changes to become what the innovator envisions. Second, there is the usage stage, when it is actually serving its purpose out in the world. Small design changes in the production stage have the ability to bring about huge effects in the usage stage. The GoPro, at its inception, was not substantially different from other cameras on the market. In the production stage, it was simply designed to be more compact and portable — far from revolutionary. It’s the way this small change allowed people to use it out in the world that made all the difference. The world over those little cameras have become companions for the intrepid, and as such they’ve scaled mountains, jumped from planes, surfed on waves, and assisted in the filming of innumerable other awe-inspiring feats. How much incredible footage was brought before the eyes of millions because of this modest design change?
Most design changes are not so grand as to unlock this mass of untapped potential out in the world. Design changes can consist of bringing a room to life with well-placed shades of green, blue, and purple versus clumsily decorating with the same colors in a way that results in a tacky, clashing, and unattractive appearance. Design changes can result in a more aerodynamic vehicle or a more comfortable chair. Most of fashion and art is a series of design changes, using the same basic elements to create something new. Anatomy is teeming with design changes — look to your teeth, some flat for mashing and others sharp for cutting.
Occasionally, however, small changes can unlock that exogenous, combinatory potential and change the world. Fire burned naturally out in nature before there were ever humans, but it was a hominid that saw burning tinder and eventually thought to put it in a place and form that it could be maintained for sufficient time to cook food with. That basic change agent of fire was applied to food, and for the first time the coctivore (an animal that eats cooked food) came to exist, reducing some of the burden of digestion, and allowing modern humans to so efficiently convert food into energy that we can maintain our super-advanced brains. The advanced usability of fire, when kept this way, resulted in an explosive expansion of the potential of our digestive system. Obviously, we don’t directly combine the fire and our stomachs. The combinatory outcome is downstream, exogenous, and after the fact. The fire brought out the potential of our stomach and thereby the potential of our brain. This is the potential potency of simple design changes; they can draw forth illimitable capability from other things.
The thumb, the wheel, the water basin, the sharpened edge, the iPhone, the modern roadway — in their primary potency — all represent a rearrangement of basic elements into a more ideal form. Whoever invented the airbag and the seat belt didn’t save nearly as many lives as whoever first decided vehicles should drive exclusively on the right (or left) side of the road. Whatever team developed the advanced camera functionality in the iPhone didn’t make as powerful a change as the person who decided that you should transition from one screen to the next by swiping, just like one would with a physical page. The design change that took naturally buoyant pieces of wood and formed them into a vessel, hollow and concave, allowed humanity to master the seas. The combustion engine has changed innumerable lives, but has it made a greater change than holding up a sheet in the right direction to catch the wind, as on the sailboat? The intricate complex of gears inside every analog watch is little more than an extension of the simple design change that brought about the sun dial. All of these unlocked the potential of what was already there. They resulted in powerful, post-creation, combinatory effects. Design change can bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative because the import of the change isn’t found within itself. It is only useful in terms of the way it can act on other things. For this reason, it will always be the simplest changes that make all the difference.
The Point
The crux of my argument is that qualitative change makes for the leaps-and-bounds advancement that can revolutionize an industry. Combination is the only way to bring about qualitative change. Whether the combination occurs in the creation process (as with combinatory creativity), or thereafter, doesn’t matter. However, design changes are special because, while neither combinatory nor augmentative changes can escape their nature of being qualitative or quantitative, respectively, design changes can begin as non-qualitative in the production stage and manifest in qualitative changes in the usage stage. For this reason, design changes have the potential to result in massively asymmetrical outcomes, with tiny tweaks in the production stage resulting in world-changing effects in the usage stage.
No degree of augmentative change can bring about this exogenous, combinatory contingency that design change can. The personal computer was a combinatory creation. The augmentative changes thereafter — that is, making faster and better personal computers — can expand on that initial outcome of unlocking the potential of the user (exogenous combination), but it cannot, at any degree of augmentative change, recreate a new level of exogenous combination.
True innovation is led by the innovator who combines new elements and the designer who reorganizes and rearranges existing elements. Anyone who has an eye on augmentative change — such as when two competing producers seek to put out similar products with different advancements on the same set of functionalities — bars themselves from unlocking the realm of potential that lies only within qualitative change. A company making smart phones that aims to have them be each year faster, with a better screen quality, more efficient batteries, etc., will limit its rate of improvement. The focus of true innovation will always be on combining new elements, or rearranging elements in such a way that it allows for better, after-the-fact combination, such as when UI is improved to such a degree that a phone with similar functionality is more deeply accessed by each user. This hyper-intuitive UI doesn’t increase the functionality of the phone; it increases the functionality of the user, and thereby the combinatory, qualitative change occurs.
This is the means by which a small, hungry entity can in a dramatic fashion overtake a bloated institution, though the latter has all the advantages. Throughout society, the budgets of large institutions — military complexes, corporations, governments, schools, etc. — focus almost entirely on augmentative changes. Augmentative changes are measurable and simple; they often involve very little real creativity. There are sprawling teams of people working on making the same things faster, better, and stronger; meanwhile, a tiny minority focus on real innovation, in the form of design and combinatory change. We always see the true innovator undervalued by society because qualitative change is not readily measurable. There is no easily achievable objective measure for a better UI, heightened aesthetic value, or the superiority or inferiority of one qualitatively different creation relative another — it can quite literally be apples to oranges. It is much easier to measure the increased productivity resulting from a train that arrives 10% earlier or carries 10% more cargo, than to determine how much productivity increases from a more intuitive software, or to recognize what specific changes have made that software more intuitively accessible. For this reason, we neglect the more powerful change agents in favor of the more obvious ones. Any institution or individual that shifts their focus to primarily bringing about design and combinatory changes, if they have any success, will outperform all competitors focused on augmentative changes. And if they manage to bring about significant combinatory and design changes, they will revolutionize whatever industry they find themselves in — or create a new industry altogether.