I have a confession to make.

I’m obsessed with crumple zones – you know, the weak points at the front and back of your car.

See, before crumple zones were first introduced in the 50s, car safety was all about designing cars to be stronger.

Tougher.

Able to take a crash like John Wayne could take a punch.

Problem was – doing this may have helped the car to better withstand a crash, but it meant the occupants took the full force of the impact.

So we should all thank our lucky stars that Mercedes engineer Béla Barényi started thinking passengers would be safer in a car that could absorb the kinetic energy of a crash. Instead of following the thinking of the time and developing a tougher, stronger, more John Wayne-like car, Barényi designed one to be weaker.

Brilliant!

The weak points at the front and back of the vehicle would crumple in a crash, absorbing energy to protect the passengers.

Now you may argue that this thinking wasn’t a big deal – after all, it’s based on high-school physics. But high-school physics had been around much longer than the automobile and nobody else seemed to make the link.

Barényi’s thinking was revolutionary.

And here’s what keeps me up at night:

What else are we looking at from the wrong angle?

What else are we trying to make stronger, when we’d be better off making it weaker?

What conventional thinking should we be putting to rest? Or at last challenging?

60 years ago, conventional thinking said that to make a car safer, you had to make it stronger.

20 years ago, conventional thinking said that nobody in their right mind would trust someone they’d never met on the other side of the world to honour a sale made over the internet. eBay turned that thinking on its head and paved the way for other micro-commerce sites like Etsy and Amazon’s marketplace.

Today, conventional thinking still tells us that you must never bastardise a logo, yet Google’s very successfully done the complete opposite. Not only has it not damaged their brand, it’s built them a fan base!

And just last week, thought-leader Seth Godin made a post about working fewer hours, not more, to compete more effectively.

So what other conventional thinking should we be challenging?

Love to hear your thoughts.

xk

Like this piece? Think Kate’s full of it? Let us know by adding a comment or emailing her here

Tags: bela barenyi, crash, crumple zones, mercedes, revolutionary thinking, seth godin

4 Comments »

1. 

   how bout the convention of using a logo to brand an ad?

   there are some great viral campaigns out there that don’t use a logo. instead, they encourage the audience to discover the ad’s origin on their own.

   and some would argue that’s a more effective brand experience anyway.

   of course, it takes one courageous client, and some very clever creative. but maybe it’ll catch on in years to come.

   Comment by Stef — June 21, 2010 @ 2:47 pm

2. 

   That reminds me of the way Portal 2 was promoted which sounds completely insane, but shows that the makers really knew their audience.

   They released a patch which automatically updated the first game for anyone who owned it. Now all this patch did was introduce an old radio into the game which you had to find on each level.

   The radio mostly played music, but there were ’sweet spots’ on each level where it would play a strange crackle instead. This crackle was morse code. Those who decoded it found themselves with a phone number. Ring the phone number and you’d hear the old modem/internet connection sound – decode that and you’d find yourself looking at preview images of Portal 2.

   No dedicated website. No press release.

   Just thousands of puzzle-solving fans chattering on forums and in gaming press about the next part of the discovery. It had more impact and took up more airtime than any double page magazine ad would have.

   Convention says keep it simple stupid. Portal 2 says 01001110 01101111.

   Comment by kate — June 21, 2010 @ 4:20 pm

3. 

   very interesting post. I don’t really have much to contribute by way of comments on the commercial and industrial aspects of the power of counter-intuitive thinking, save for 2 points that came to mind.

   The first is in martial arts. One might see martial arts as a competition in which the stronger man wins, but then you have arts like tai chi and aikido which teach that instead of meeting the opponent head on, with force meeting force and may the stronger one prevail, the exponent is to flow with the force directed at him and use it against his opponent.

   The other example is from shooting handguns. Quite a few things about shooting are counter-intuitive and involve resisting one’s natural impulses. When i started, i would try and control the recoil and focus on quickly squeezing the trigger in the split-second when my sights were aligned on the target. I was taught that these were things i should not fight. Now instead, i let the muzzle climb and then quickly bring it back on target and i focus on the front sight, so that my pull of the trigger is unconscious, because i am so focused on my sights. My shooting has improved upon making these changes.

   I hope these aren’t too off-tangent, but the point i was trying to make has to do with how counter-intuitive thought was vindicated in these 2 areas.

   Comment by bengkia — July 14, 2010 @ 8:45 pm

4. 

   They’re not off tangent at all, Bangkia.

   I hadn’t considered martial arts when writing the post, but that’s a great example of using energy in a way that goes against conventional thinking.

   Thanks so much for commenting.

   Comment by kate — July 15, 2010 @ 7:18 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment