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 Photo/Washington Post Employee Michael Beardon uses the express route to get from the second floor to the first at ExciteHome in Redwood City, Calif. New-economy firms are encouraging playfulness in the office to help workers think innovative thoughts. Here is how Microsoft says you solve the question about the eight balls and the balance scale: The minimum number of trials needed is two. Begin by putting three balls on each side of the scale. If they balance, the heavy ball is among the remaining two. Weigh them, and you'll have your answer. If the two sets of three balls do not balance, take the heavier three, and put two of them on the scale, one on each side. If one is heavier, you have your answer. If they balance, the remaining ball is heaviest. However, another school of thought says it could take only one trial. If you randomly picked two balls and placed them on the scale, you might get lucky and pick the one ball among the eight that was the heaviest.
Compiled from the Washington Post | | |
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Cody Robertson's interview for a programming job at Microsoft Corp. was going pretty much as expected: grueling code-writing tests, questions about his background and his love of computers.
Then, just as he began to relax, things got wacky.
Pretend, his interviewer said, that you have eight seemingly identical balls, one slightly heavier than the others. If you use a balance-type scale, what is the minimum number of trials needed to identify the odd ball?
Huh?
Mind-bending job interviews such as Robertson's are fast becoming a rite of passage to the new economy. Many software developers swear that such logic games help them identify computing samurais who think easily in a world without boundaries _ people with the creativity to conceive the next big breakthrough.
While human resources professionals disdain the craze as a quirk of brainy Generation Xers who dominate the dot-coms, some scientists and educators believe they see a method to the silliness.
Playful work environments that foster exploration appear to help drive the innovation that defines the high-tech sector.
From workers sprawled on their stomachs using laptops, to employee playrooms full of Legos and easels, to the rebellion against hierarchy, the culture of the new economy makes work feel unmistakably like play.
Consciously or unconsciously, it recalls the atmosphere of early childhood - the stage of human life when the learning curve is steepest and the pace of learning is unrivaled.
"This is the sort of thing that developed spontaneously in Silicon Valley - informal dress, informal behavior," said Arthur Molella, director of the Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution.
"But now that innovation has become such a watchword for our country, organizational people are starting to look at it psychologically, sociologically."
Molella's center plans a September conference, "The Playful Mind," where educators, psychologists, inventors and entrepreneurs will explore parallels among childhood discovery, scientific discovery and innovation.
At least on the surface, the new economy appears to be full of such parallels. A miniature golf course weaves through the headquarters of iBelong, a start-up in Waltham, Mass., that creates Internet portals for affinity groups.
At the Redwood City, Calif., headquarters of ExciteHome, the Internet portal and leading broadband services provider, a giant red slide is the preferred employee route from the second floor to the first. Rod-juggling and Nerf football games break out periodically - to management's delight - at UNext, a distance education start-up in Chicago.
"Traditional companies held retreats, with the idea of breaking the set, getting everyone out of the mold," said Harvard psychologist David Rose, who studies how children learn. "New companies build the retreat into the workplace."
Shikhar Ghosh, founder of iBelong, recently noticed two engineers - one from China, one from India - playing pingpong in iBelong's lunchroom, talking about why Chinese players hold their paddles vertically, not horizontally. The two work in different areas - she on databases, he on applications - but watching them play fueled Ghosh's sense of possibility.
"Traditional environments encourage a certain kind of thinking and interaction, which works if the world stays more or less constant," said Ghosh. "None of that works if the world is changing around you."
This sounds familiar to Alison Gopnik, a developmental and cognitive psychologist at the University of California-Berkeley, whose research about how young children learn holds fascination for a number of high-tech executives in Silicon Valley.
A co-author of "The Scientist in the Crib," Gopnik shows through cognitive research that babies actively investigate their worlds through play, as scientists do through experimentation.
Unlike the passive vessels portrayed in parenting manuals, she writes, babies form hypotheses, test them, revise them, test them again - all in the process of playing.
The reason humans have the most developed brains of all animals, Gopnik says, is that they have the longest childhoods, a time when parents attend to all their needs, leaving them free to play, explore and learn.
Scientists are among the rare adults in whom the discovery stage survives almost intact, Gopnik said.
"It's not that children are little scientists," she and her co-authors write, "but that scientists are big children."
Says Gopnik: "Every time I give this talk to a bunch of scientists . . . they come up afterward and laugh and nod about the protected period in which babies can play. It resonates very much with how they do science."
Timothy Gallwey, an educator who gained fame as a tennis coach and is now a workplace consultant, makes a similar point in his book "The Inner Game of Work." Real artistry, he says, comes from childlike openness to learning.
"I start someone in tennis by saying: Don't do anything purposeful. Don't try to get good at it," Gallwey said in an interview. "Kids learn fastest because they're willing to mess around."
Gallwey presented his paradigm recently at Viant, the e-commerce consulting firm that incubated such Web sites as WholePeople.com, source of products to feed the body and soul, and Sputnik7, home of streaming video and music.
"Nine out of 10 people bought it immediately," said Howie Spielman of Viant's Catalyst Group. "That's exactly how Sputnik7 happened. Nothing like it had been done, and no one was sure it would work. It's a classic example of what you can do when you don't preconceive boundaries."
Many educators are stunned to see the bottom line-oriented private sector opening itself to creativity and innovation even as the U.S. education establishment heads in the opposite direction _ toward greater standardization, driven largely by testing.
"The testing mania has everyone working from the same book and coming to understand things in the same way, when human minds understand things in vastly different ways," said Harvard education professor Eleanor Duckworth, author of "The Having of Wonderful Ideas."
As in education, there is inherent tension in the new economy between creativity and accountability, between childhood and adulthood.
With so many billions of dollars at stake, creativity has to squeeze itself into the tightest of deadlines. Even the inviting work environments have a bottom-line dimension: Start-up executives want to hold on to their best talent, and with them, such grown-up assets as competitive advantage.
The breakthroughs of the computer revolution owe less to play, of course, than to technical and scientific mastery in combination with creativity - a mix crystallized in the 1970s at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where the prototype of the personal computer was developed.
There were no bottom lines in this community of scientists freed to pursue the romantic destiny of the computer, recalled Alan Kay, now a vice president at Disney, then head of the PARC's Learning Research Group, which developed the laptop and the overlapping windows interface that came to define the Mac. (Both emerged from a mission to create a child-friendly computer.)
But there was no less of an obsession to revolutionize. Kay remembers hours of play with colleagues - playing tennis, biking, daydreaming about an interactive worldwide community.
Play did not interrupt work, however; it simply provided another venue for thinking, he said - just as people often have more brainstorms on the jogging path than at their desks.
Xerox PARC became such an icon that the computer science community tried to copy its environment in the 1970s and 1980s. Computer labs everywhere swapped conference room furniture for beanbag chairs, the choice of PARC.
The dot-coms are mimics, too. First Home built a red slide, then Excite built a red slide. (Now they are one company, with two slides.) Similarly, brain-teaser interview questions migrated out of Microsoft and Apple as techies left those companies to start their own.
Cody Robertson, who faced the Microsoft question about the eight balls in 1996 - he got the answer and the job - now throws similar puzzles at applicants to his own start-up, Neutropic, after they pass exacting technical skills tests.
"A lot of software developers like brain teasers. If you hear a good one, you'll tell it to friends, like a currency of trade," said Matt Kodama, an application developer at Chain Link Technologies in Sunnyvale, Calif., who met his first brain teaser in a job interview and now uses them on job seekers.
Brain teasers (some companies call them "analytical questions") have no proven value in finding these outside-the-box thinkers, and some companies do not use them for that reason. Unlike more standard interview tools, there is no research assessing them. Many companies say they use them only to see how applicants solve problems, not to eliminate those who get the wrong answer.
Steve Pollock, president of WetFeet.com, an online career and job advice service, said they may soon lose value because so many people now are hip to them. Job seekers regularly post the latest teasers on WetFeet and Vault.com, another popular career advice site.
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