Dada for Businesspeople: How Randomness Can Inspire Innovation

In the early years of the 20^th century, the “Found Object” movement of artists, including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, challenged traditional notions of what art could be. By elevating everyday objects like water fountains and bicycle wheels to the status of artworks, these figures demonstrated the potential for creativity to be found in the most unexpected places.

Much like in art, predictions about which business ideas will succeed in the marketplace can also be hard to make.

But on the other hand, commitment to an idea—any idea—can also be one of the only surefire ways to the increase the odds of success. That’s according to Robert I. Sutton, an organizational psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

Sutton published an article called “The Weird Rules of Creativity” in Harvard Business Review back in 2001. More recently, he also published “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.” A 2024 book that digs into the causes and solutions for some of the most common and damaging friction troubles within organizations.

In the 2001 article, Sutton points to Apple’s Steve Jobs and his widely touted “reality distortion field” that reportedly cast a spell on those around him. Convincing them that the success of an idea, project or person was virtually certain.

But do cases like these mean companies might as well use a random process to generate possibilities to explore? In fact, it might, according to Sutton. Random selection is actually one of the best ways to ensure new business ideas won’t be biased by knowledge of past successes, Sutton says.

Sutton points to a random selection process used by Reactivity, a software company he advised. The company’s software designers had been concerned that their ideas discussed at brainstorming sessions were getting too narrow.

To help break their product innovation rut, Reactivity employees subsequently participated in an exercise in which they were given index cards and told to jot down on each a technology (one stack of cards) or an industry (a second stack). The stacks were then used to create random pairings of technologies to industries. And the group then brainstormed for five minutes on the possibilities of each pair.

Some of the index card combinations seemed hopeless (how could XML programming reshape the funeral industry?). But others, such as an idea about dynamic risk management in the shipping industry, seemed well worth researching in more detail.

Companies that want to avoid getting stuck in an innovation rut should additionally be especially wary of opinions from customers who use their current products or services, Sutton says. As well as from internal stakeholders who represent their views.

In practical terms, this could mean handling audience or customer research with a healthy dose of skepticism (Disney CEO Michael Eisner even called most of this research—and especially the prospective kind—“useless” in an interview published in the January–February 2000 issue of Harvard Business Review).

Most of the mainframe computer users that IBM surveyed in the 1970s couldn’t imagine why they’d ever want a small computer on their desks.

And according to 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, the success of Etherlink, a high-speed way to connect computers released in 1992, happened because he ignored reports from salespeople that customers were clamoring for a slight improvement in a popular product.

The lessons to draw from all of this? Doing routine work with proven methods is the right thing to do most of the time, according to Sutton. But if part of your mission is to explore new possibilities, then your goal must be to build a culture that supports constant mindfulness and experimentation.

As well as, perhaps, a healthy dose of Dada.