Category: Creative Thinking and Innovation

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Four words

Statue of Franco Harris at Pittsburgh International Airport (January 2023)

I did not know Franco Harris, the Pittsburgh Steeler icon who passed away on December 20. I had the privilege of meeting him briefly at an event in Pittsburgh about seven years ago.  To a kid like me growing up in the 1970s, Harris was a larger-than-life figure and, in person, a most engaging and kind person who was far more than the single football play that he was best known for.

A first-round NFL draft pick in 1972, Harris went from Penn State to becoming a Pro Bowl running back in each of his first nine seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers.  He surpassed 1000 yards in eight of his 13 professional seasons, and his performances were a driving force in the Steelers becoming the premier team of the 1970s.  He was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1990.

Many football fans, however, would quickly associate Harris with one play in his career.  On December 23, 1972, Harris scored a game-winning touchdown with seconds left in regulation of a playoff game, a play subsequently known as “The Immaculate Reception.”

The unusual play—one of the most iconic in NFL history—featured Harris grabbing a deflected pass just inches from the turf and outrunning the stunned Oakland Raider defense to the Steeler endzone.  In mere seconds Pittsburgh fans went from despondence to pandemonium.  The television announcers and viewers throughout the country were in disbelief.  The officiating crew was likely in confusion, and the scoreboard operator at Three Rivers Stadium changed the final tally to 13-7 after the extra point was made. 

I write about creative thinking and innovation.  How, you may wonder, does “The Immaculate Reception” relate to anything of the sort?

Four words: Go to the ball.

Harris’ obituary in The New York Times included a description of “The Immaculate Reception” shared with nfl.com in 2019.  After seeing quarterback Terry Bradshaw throw the pass downfield, Harris explained that he thought, “Go to the ball.”  It was a phrase instilled from his college coach. “That’s what he always told us in college, but in college I never listened,” Harris said.

This time, however, his instincts followed.  Go to the ball.  The phrase is reminiscent of National Hockey League great Wayne Gretzky, who credited his father in saying, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

None of the players on the field could have predicted the flight of the pass to Steeler receiver French Fuqua or whether it was going to land or amazingly be caught by Harris. Neither Pittsburgh coach Chuck Noll nor his staff scripted the outcome or possibly could have. Yet, however it is dissected, Harris and his “go-to-the-ball” mindset in the microseconds of the play were an improvisational brilliance resulting in a shoestring catch while never breaking stride in the roughly 45-yard sprint to the endzone. 

General Michael Hayden, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency who is a Pittsburgh native and avid Steeler fan, weighed in on the play in an NFL Films documentary.  “Just think of everything that had to happen just so and almost every one of those ‘just so’s’ had to be unplanned,” he said. 

Those “just-so’s” of the 15-second play amounted to a gift of improv magic from Harris to football fans past, present, and future.

“To improvise,” Madson (2005) wrote in Improv Wisdom, “it is essential that we use the present moment efficiently.  An instant of distraction…robs us of our investment of what is actually happening” (p. 36). 

Harris used the moment flawlessly without a speck of distraction.  Perhaps the quote would have made him smile…with rule #1 coming first.  Go to the Ball. 

References:

Kirby, J. (2014, September 24).  Why businesspeople won’t stop using that Gretzky quote.  Maclean’s. https://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-business-people-wont-stop-using-that-gretzky-quote/

Madson, P. R. (2005). Improv wisdom: Don’t prepare, just show up. Bell Tower.

NFL Films. (2022, December 23). How “The Immaculate Reception” name came to be: A football life.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlPZ39HnJU

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Windshield wipers: Still indispensable a century later

…by an inventor who saw a problem while traveling

NEOSiAM 2021/Pexels

I sometimes wonder what inventors were thinking in their initial stages of problem-solving after problem-finding. 

Specifically Mary Anderson…whose invention 119 years came in handy on this snowy morning in the northeastern US.

It was Ms. Anderson who took her first trip to New York City in the winter of 1903 and noticed a problem: Neither she nor the trolley car driver could see clearly out of the window.   Even the driver had to sporadically stop to wipe off the front of the car.  Ms. Anderson, a real estate developer in Alabama, returned to Birmingham and designed a device that could clear the windshield of ice and snow and be operated from inside of the vehicle.  Her patent was accepted later that year.  Other devices had attempted to solve the same dilemma of electronically wiping off a windshield.  Her design, however, was the first that worked (Lemelson-MIT Program, n.d.).

Two parts of this creative invention are striking: Ms. Anderson had no background in design or engineering, and her invention arrived before the onslaught of cars on American roads.

In other words, in her problem-finding process, Ms. Anderson couldn’t have thought, “Wouldn’t a device like this be great for my Model T back in Alabama?”  In fact, Ford’s Model T wasn’t manufactured until five years after her innovation.  

Finally, as with many other novel ideas, some people initially laughed at the idea of a windshield wiper on a vehicle.  After all, they thought that the back-and-forth movement would distract drivers.  By 1913, the ridicule about the wiper idea was swept away, as they were standard on cars in the US (Lemelson-MIT Program, n.d.).

Reference:

Lemelson-MIT Program. (n.d.). Mary Anderson: Windshield wipers.  https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/mary-anderson

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Reversing for acceleration

…yes, similar to the idea behind my most recent book title.

Island of Hawai’i

One approach to creative thinking is through reversing the order of something.  With brains searching for order and patterns, the other-way-around idea mixes things up in ways that can lead to previously undiscovered insights. 

            Who said dessert had to come last?  (Reverse the order and eat it first.)

            Who said car engines had to be in the front of a car?  (Think of the Porsche 911.)

            Ever see a caboose leading a train? (I saw this last Fall…a rather confusing sight at first.)

            A few recent news items captured the notion of reversal in creative ways. 

First, who said that medical care had to be done in a hospital?  According to an NPR report, an increasing number of hospitals are bringing treatments to people in their homes.  This reversal of the traditional process not only frees up beds for patients needing in-hospital care, but, according to David Levine, MD, of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, this reversal approach leads to better health outcomes for those cared for in their home.  One patient treated in her home described it as “the best thing that’s happened since running water.”

Second, who said that pastors were confined to a church?  A New York Times story described a reversal where pastors didn’t just leave their place of worship and preach on street corners, for instance.  Rather they sermonized on boats as they made journeys between cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The reporters summarized, “It’s on the river that many pastors go fishing for souls,” as many people rely on the boats to travel from one town to another.  One pastor offers services each morning and evening on board, remarking, “I work everywhere.”

Finally, who said that scamming was a one-way process?  A 73-year-old grandmother on Long Island reversed the process in an imaginative way, making the scammer come to her.  In a phone call from someone claiming to be her grandson and in need of $8000 for bail, the woman asked the would-be swindler to come to her house for the money.  After all, she was fully aware of the scam: She had no grandsons old enough to drive.  The “grandchild” arrived at a predetermined time, and with police assistance, was apprehended.  “I feel like—Gotcha!” the creative grandmother said in the Washington Post story. 

The reverse gear…sometimes it sparks an acceleration in creative thinking.