late in january 1975, a 17-year-old german girlcalled vera brandes walked out onto the stageof the cologne opera house. the auditorium was empty. it was lit only by the dim, green glowof the emergency exit sign. this was the mostexciting day of vera's life. she was the youngestconcert promoter in germany, and she had persuadedthe cologne opera house to host a late-night concert of jazz
from the american musician, keith jarrett. 1,400 people were coming. and in just a few hours, jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play. but right now, vera was introducing keithto the piano in question,
and it wasn't going well. jarrett looked to the instrumenta little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer. then the producercame over to vera and said ... "if you don't get a new piano,keith can't play." there'd been a mistake.
the opera house had providedthe wrong instrument. this one had this harsh,tinny upper register, because all the felt had worn away. the black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small. it wouldn't create the volume that would fill a large spacesuch as the cologne opera house.
so keith jarrett left. he went and sat outside in his car, leaving vera brandes to get on the phoneto try to find a replacement piano. now she got a piano tuner, but she couldn't get a new piano. and so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to keith jarrett,
begging him not to cancel the concert. and he looked out of his car at this bedraggled,rain-drenched german teenager, took pity on her, and said, "never forget ... only for you." and so a few hours later, jarrett did indeed step outonto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano
and began. (music) within moments it became clearthat something magical was happening. jarrett was avoidingthose upper registers, he was sticking to the middletones of the keyboard, which gave the piecea soothing, ambient quality. but also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling,repetitive riffs in the bass. and he stood up twisting,pounding down on the keys,
desperately trying to create enough volumeto reach the people in the back row. it's an electrifying performance. it somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. and the audience loved it. audiences continue to love it because the recording of the kã¶ln concert is the best-selling piano album in history
and the best-sellingsolo jazz album in history. keith jarrett had been handed a mess. he had embraced that mess, and it soared. but let's think for a momentabout jarrett's initial instinct. he didn't want to play. of course, i think any of us,in any remotely similar situation, would feel the same way,we'd have the same instinct. we don't want to be askedto do good work with bad tools.
we don't want to have to overcomeunnecessary hurdles. but jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. and i think our instinct is also wrong. i think we need to gaina bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantagesof having to cope with a little mess. so let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science,
from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll. so cognitive psychology first. we've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacle, can actually improve our performance. for example, the psychologist daniel oppenheimer,
a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers. and he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were givingto some of their classes. so the regular handout would be formattedin something straightforward, such as helvetica or times new roman. but half these classes were gettinghandouts that were formatted in something sort of intense,like haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce,like comic sans italicized.
now, these are really ugly fonts, and they're difficult fonts to read. but at the end of the semester, students were given exams, and the students who'd been askedto read the more difficult fonts, had actually done better on their exams, in a variety of subjects. and the reason is, the difficult font had slowed them down,
forced them to work a bit harder, to think a bit moreabout what they were reading, to interpret it ... and so they learned more. another example. the psychologist shelley carsonhas been testing harvard undergraduates for the qualityof their attentional filters. what do i mean by that? what i mean is,imagine you're in a restaurant,
you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversationsgoing on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focuson what's important to you. can you do that? if you can, you havegood, strong attentional filters. but some people really struggle with that. some of carson's undergraduatesubjects struggled with that. they had weak filters,they had porous filters --
let a lot of external information in. and so what that meant is they wereconstantly being interrupted by the sights and the soundsof the world around them. if there was a television onwhile they were doing their essays, they couldn't screen it out. now, you would thinkthat that was a disadvantage ... but no. when carson looked at whatthese students had achieved, the ones with the weak filters
were vastly more likely to have some realcreative milestone in their lives, to have published their first novel, to have released their first album. these distractions were actuallygrists to their creative mill. they were able to think outside the boxbecause their box was full of holes. let's talk about complexity science. so how do you solve a really complex -- the world's fullof complicated problems --
how do you solvea really complicated problem? for example, you try to make a jet engine. there are lots and lotsof different variables, the operating temperature, the materials, all the different dimensions, the shape. you can't solve that kindof problem all in one go, it's too hard. so what do you do? well, one thing you can dois try to solve it step-by-step.
so you have some kind of prototype and you tweak it,you test it, you improve it. you tweak it, you test it, you improve it. now, this idea of marginal gainswill eventually get you a good jet engine. and it's been quite widelyimplemented in the world. so you'll hear about it, for example,in high performance cycling, web designers will talk about tryingto optimize their web pages, they're lookingfor these step-by-step gains. that's a good wayto solve a complicated problem.
but you know what wouldmake it a better way? a dash of mess. you add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to makethe problem-solving work better. and the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process,
the marginal gains, is they can walk yougradually down a dead end. and if you start with the randomness,that becomes less likely, and your problem-solvingbecomes more robust. let's talk about social psychology. so the psychologist katherine phillips,with some colleagues, recently gave murder mysteryproblems to some students, and these studentswere collected in groups of four and they were given dossierswith information about a crime --
alibis and evidence,witness statements and three suspects. and the groups of four studentswere asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime. and there were two treatmentsin this experiment. in some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well. in other cases, three friends and a stranger. and you can see where i'm going with this.
obviously i'm going to say that the groups with the strangersolved the problem more effectively, which is true, they did. actually, they solved the problemquite a lot more effectively. so the groups of four friends, they only had a 50-50 chanceof getting the answer right. which is actually not that great -- in multiple choice, for three answers?50-50's not good. (laughter)
the three friends and the stranger, even though the strangerdidn't have any extra information, even though it was just a case of how that changed the conversationto accommodate that awkwardness, the three friends and the stranger, they had a 75 percent chanceof finding the right answer. that's quite a big leap in performance. but i think what's really interesting is not just that the three friendsand the stranger did a better job,
but how they felt about it. so when katherine phillipsinterviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job. they were complacent. when she spoke to the threefriends and the stranger, they had not had a nice time -- it's actually rather difficult,it's rather awkward ... and they were full of doubt.
they didn't think they'd done a good jobeven though they had. and i think that really exemplifies the challenge that we'redealing with here. because, yeah -- the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move ... these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative.
but we don't feel that they're helping us. we feel that they'regetting in the way ... and so we resist. and that's why the last exampleis really important. so i want to talk about somebody from the backgroundof the world of rock 'n' roll. and you may know him,he's actually a ted-ster. his name is brian eno. he is an ambient composer --rather brilliant.
he's also a kind of catalyst behind some of the greatrock 'n' roll albums of the last 40 years. he's worked with david bowie on "heroes," he worked with u2 on "achtung baby"and "the joshua tree," he's worked with devo, he's worked with coldplay,he's worked with everybody. and what does he do to makethese great rock bands better? well, he makes a mess. he disrupts their creative processes.
it's his role to be the awkward stranger. it's his role to tell them that they have to playthe unplayable piano. and one of the waysin which he creates this disruption is through this remarkabledeck of cards -- i have my signed copy here --thank you, brian. they're called the oblique strategies, he developed them with a friend of his. and when they're stuck in the studio,
brian eno will reach for one of the cards. he'll draw one at random, and he'll make the bandfollow the instructions on the card. so this one ... "change instrument roles." yeah, everyone swap instruments --drummer on the piano -- brilliant, brilliant idea. "look closely at the mostembarrassing details. amplify them." "make a sudden, destructive,unpredictable action. incorporate."
these cards are disruptive. now, they've proved their worthin album after album. the musicians hate them. so phil collins was playing drumson an early brian eno album. he got so frustrated he startedthrowing beer cans across the studio. carlos alomar, great rock guitarist, working with enoon david bowie's "lodger" album, and at one pointhe turns to brian and says, "brian, this experiment is stupid."
but the thing isit was a pretty good album, but also, carlos alomar, 35 years later,now uses the oblique strategies. and he tells his studentsto use the oblique strategies because he's realized something. just because you don't like itdoesn't mean it isn't helping you. the strategies actuallyweren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list -- list on the recording studio wall.
a checklist of thingsyou might try if you got stuck. the list didn't work. know why? not messy enough. your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whateverwas the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely. and what brian eno came to realize was,
yes, we need to runthe stupid experiments, we need to dealwith the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts. these things help us. they help us solve problems, they help us be more creative. but also ... we really need some persuasionif we're going to accept this. so however we do it ...
whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt tripfrom a german teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and playthe unplayable piano. thank you. (applause)