In a recent essay, Paul Graham outlined a bunch of different methods for coming up with new ideas. A particularly intriguing one is the misapplication of metaphors:
Perhaps letting your mind wander is like doodling with ideas. You have certain mental gestures you’ve learned in your work, and when you’re not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly. In effect, you call the same functions on random arguments. That’s what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong type.
At work one of my “mental gestures” is to constantly analyze each of the repetitive tasks that make up the serving experience for tiny little efficiencies I can find in them (as I’ve mentioned before). Tonight, during my shift, I became conscious of one of these activities in a very peculiar way. A highly abstracted description of it popped into my head, as if it was presenting itself for the kind of metaphorical application Graham describes only in reverse. It was saying: ‘I’m a habit of thought. Use my to solve some unrelated problem!’ Thing is: I can’t think of an application for it, what it could serve as a metaphor for, what problem it could help solve. So, what I am going to do is to offer it up for you, here, to use as you will. Apply it, misapply it, come up with something new. It’s yours! Happy Hanukah:
When setting up a table for a large party, a Pix server is presented with a problem. The two water pitchers we keep by the sink don’t hold enough water to fill a lot of glasses, even when taken together. Here’s what every other server does: Take one of the pitchers (usually whichever is fullest) and start filling the water glasses. When that first pitcher runs out, the server takes the second one and keeps filling. If there are still unfilled glasses when both pitchers are empty, the server starts to refill the pitchers until there’s enough water in them to finish the job. Here’s what I do: I take the two pitchers and immediately start to fill whichever of them contains less water. Using the other fuller pitcher, I start pouring glasses of water while keeping an eye on the pitcher in the sink. The moment that pitcher is full, no matter how much water remains in the pitcher in my hand, I switch the pitchers’ positions and continue filling glasses. Conversely, if I run out of water in my pitcher, I immediately switch out for the pitcher in the sink no matter how little water has collected in it. By making a switch whenever either of these conditions are met, I am able to pour continuously without any long stops to refill either of my pitchers.
On first glance, this method might seem much less efficient than the one everyone else uses. I have to move a lot more; I’m constantly switching pitchers. But the thing is, the continuous pouring results in the glasses getting filled much faster — there’s no dead time involved (ironically, the advantage is probably greatest when I have to switch pitchers most often which happens when both pitchers are low at the start (since the one in the sink only gets to fill as long as there’s water in the pitcher in my hand), in that case, my system can mean that I’m done with a pouring task before some other server would even have started it (since their first move in this situation would likely have been to fill one of the pitchers to full)).
Earlier, I said that I had in mind a highly abstracted version of this process which I think might be applicable as a metaphor to other unrelated problems. So, what is it? What’s the structural difference between what I’m doing and what other people do? I’m optimizing the input instead of the output. Where most people focus on the fastest way to get water out of the pitchers (for example, everyone’s got their own way of arranging glasses on the trays to make it easier to pour into them without having to move too much or too awkwardly), I focus on getting water into them. By organizing my whole system around its only input, I’m able to make it much more efficient by preventing big breaks in its continuity.
Now, as I said above, this abstracted articulation seems ripe for application. Also it seems valuably orthogonal to normal ways of trying to solve a problem or improve a process: it is intuitive to try to do a thing better by doing it differently, not by changing some wholly other, if related task. If you were forced to apply this logic to some task that you think about a lot what would be the result? What are the inputs to a process you’re trying to improve? How full are your water pitchers before you start pouring?
Tagged: graham, pix, patisserie, server, waiter, restaurant, efficiency, metaphor