We assume everything is always the result of logical, straight-line thinking. But that isn’t always true.
For instance, take the rear-view mirror in your car.
The rear-view mirror was invented more than 100 years ago by racing car driver Ray Harroun.
He was more of an engineer than a driver. But he wanted to enter the first ever Indianapolis 500 race in 1911, so he designed a racing car called the Marmon Wasp.
His first innovation was that his car would be a single-seater. In those days, every race car had two seats – one for the driver, one for the mechanic.
The mechanic was there to fix the car if it broke down, and he could also tell the driver where all the other cars were.
Harroun said he didn’t need a mechanic. But on the day of the race, the other drivers complained. Without a mechanic, he would have no-one to tell him where the other cars were – it could be a real danger to the other drivers.
That’s when Harroun showed them his second innovation. He didn’t need a mechanic to tell him because he made a large mirror with four metal legs – he screwed it on above the steering wheel.
That way, without taking his eyes off the road, he’d always know who was behind him.
No-one had heard such an idea before but they couldn’t argue – it made sense.
Over the six hours and 42 minutes of the race, Harroun averaged 74.5 miles per hour.
A fast speed for 1911, but not as fast as some of the other drivers.
They would roar past, but they wore their tyres out and had to change them.
In 1911, tyre-changing wasn’t the speedy process it is in modern Formula One. It was slow and cumbersome, which is where his opponents all lost time.
Harroun only had to have four tyre changes. His nearest opponent, Ralph Mumford, had to have 14 tyre changes.
Harroun won the first Indy 500 by more than half-a-mile. And he did it alone, without a mechanic sitting in his car.
The papers called his new device “seeing without turning” (the name rear-view mirror hadn’t been invented yet).
Soon everybody wanted one, and today no car is made without a rear-view mirror.
But it was only much later the truth came out.
As Harroun said: “The car shook so bad I couldn’t see a damn thing in the mirror. But I made sure no-one knew that but me.”
He kept it quiet because the real purpose of the mirror wasn’t to see what was happening behind anyway.
The real purpose was to let him race without a mechanic.
That meant his car was lighter than the others, and the tyres wouldn’t wear out so fast, so he wouldn’t need so many pit stops.
That’s all the mirror ever was, an excuse to get rid of the extra weight of a mechanic.
So the thing we all take for granted as a safety feature was never invented for that. It was invented to get round the rules.
But today, every Formula One car is a single-seater, and every road car has a rear-view mirror.
Because creativity doesn’t always work in straight lines.
It’s good to remember that, because a brief should be the start-point not the end-point.
A spring-board not a strait jacket.
A brief should be the floor, not the ceiling.
As John Webster used to say to me:
” Some of the best parts of the finished thing happen by accident.
That’s why you should always keep an open mind and leave room for happy accidents.”