Loading the problem

Learning Objectives

Upon completing this book, you will be able to:

• Explain why load, and not pause, is the often-overlooked yet decisive half of incubation.
• Execute the directed loading technique in four steps on a real-world problem.
• Write your failure indices to prepare your mind to recognize the solution when it appears.
• Recognize the signal of sufficient load: explain the problem and its dead ends without referring to notes.
• Explain, without using magical language, why pause is helpful, and why it's not simply that "the unconscious solves on its own."

A Brilliant Idea About Something You Don't Know

Let's conduct an experiment before explaining anything. Here's your task, and you have sixty seconds to come up with it in your head:

Propose a truly original improvement for glass bottle manufacturing.

Go ahead. One minute. An idea worth considering.

If you're not from the glass industry, you're likely to feel a void. It's not that you're not creative: it's that you lack material. You don't know how glass bottles are made today, what's been tried, where the costs are, or what constrains the process. Without that material, your mind can only produce generalities (“make them more eco-friendly”, “automate”) that anyone could say without knowing anything.

Now compare it with a problem from your own field, one you're familiar with. Ideas come easily there because you've been carrying material around without realizing it. The difference between the two cases isn't your talent: it's what you've loaded up.

This is the most important lesson from this module, and it goes against everything that's said about creativity. The idea of the shower, the walk, the one that comes “out of nowhere”, doesn't come to just anyone. It comes to those who've already loaded up the problem in-depth. The pause doesn't create material; it only recombines what you loaded up before.

“The pause doesn't create material; it recombines what you loaded up.”, Thesis of Module II

The Overlooked Half of Incubation

When people talk about incubation, they talk about the pause: "leave the problem and go for a walk", "sleep on it". All the attention goes to the visible and pleasant part, the rest, and none to the invisible and laborious part that makes it work: the directed loading.

Go back to the bug from Topic 1, the one that was solved by walking. The trick question was: did the walk solve it or the six hours prior? Now you have the complete answer. The six hours were the directed loading; the walk was the pause. Without the six hours, the walk produces nothing, just like your minute on the glass bottles. Incubation is those two halves together, and the first is the one nobody teaches you.

That's why this module dedicates an entire book to directed loading (this one) before touching the pause (the next one). If you do the directed loading well, the pause almost takes care of itself. If you do it wrong, no pause in the world will save you.

The Directed Loading Technique

Loading is not "thinking a lot about the problem" in a diffuse way. It is a specific procedure with four movements that fills your mind with ordered material and precisely locates where you are stuck. These four movements are the loading card, the deliverable of this book.

The problem in one sentence. Write the problem in a single sentence, concrete and specific. Not a topic ("marketing"), but a problem ("how do I get customers who try the product once to come back a second time"). If you need two sentences, you still don't understand it well: keep refining until it fits in one.

The map of what is known. Pour out everything you know that is relevant: the data, the resources you have, the real constraints, the actors involved. Don't order it elegantly yet; get it out of your head and onto paper. The goal is to see at a glance the material with which your mind will work during the pause.

Failed attempts and why they failed. This is the movement that almost everyone skips, and it is the most valuable. List what has already been tried, by you or by others, and, next to each attempt, the exact reason why it failed. It's not enough to say "we tried lowering the price and it didn't work"; write "lowering the price didn't work because it attracted customers who would go to the first cheaper competitor". The reason for the failure is extremely valuable information: it tells you which faces of the object have already been ruled out.

The edge of knowledge. Finally, mark the exact point where your certainty ends. What is it that you don't know and that, if you did know, would change everything? This edge is double: it tells you if you really have an information problem (red light of the traffic light, which you should have already ruled out) and, above all, orients your mind towards the frontier where the solution is.

Failure Indices

Why does writing down failures and their reasons carry so much weight? It's due to a mechanism with a name: failure indices (Seifert and colleagues). When you record where and why you got stuck, you leave a kind of "tag" associated with that dead end in your memory. Later, when your environment presents you with something, an image, a phrase, an object, that matches that tag, your mind will recognize it as relevant instead of letting it pass.

This is called opportunistic assimilation: a well-loaded problem leaves failure indices that environmental cues can activate. That's why solutions seem to come "out of the blue" during a break, you see something everyday and suddenly it connects with your problem. It wasn't a coincidence: it was a tag you left yourself, waiting to be activated.

“A stuck designer wrote down his failure index: “I couldn't find a way to close the packaging without glue”. Days later, while putting away clothes, he saw how a pizza box closed, with a tab and slot, without glue, and the solution jumped out. The pizza box was always there; the failure index was what made it visible.”

The Signal of Sufficient Load

How do you know you've loaded enough and it's time to let go? There's a simple and reliable signal: you can explain the problem and all its dead ends without looking at your notes. If you can tell someone, or the wall, what the problem is in one sentence, what you know, what's been tried, and why it failed, and where your certainty ends, all from memory, then the material is truly loaded. Not just annotated.

As long as you need to consult your notes to reconstruct the problem, keep loading. Incubation works with what's in your mind, not with what's on paper. The paper is the scaffolding of the load; the signal that you can remove the scaffolding is being able to hold the problem without it.

Why it Works, No Magic

It's worth debunking a myth before it takes hold: incubation isn't "your unconscious solving the problem in the background" while you're walking, like a computer that continues calculating with the screen off. That image is comforting but false. What happens is more straightforward, and it's backed by evidence. Two mechanisms, neither magical:

The Forgetting of Fixation. During the pause, the incorrect associations-those two or three ideas that had you stuck-weaken over time (Smith and Blankenship). It's not that the correct answer appears: it's that the incorrect one that was blocking you disappears. When you return, the wrong path no longer captures your attention, and for the first time, you can see another side of the object. The pause doesn't add anything; it simply removes the obstacle.

Insight as Reinterpretation. With the obstacle out of the way, the mind can reorganize the material you've loaded and see it in a new light, as explained in Chapter 1 (Kounios and Beeman). That's why the material is so important: you can't reinterpret what you've never loaded. The pause is the condition; the load is the content.

Loading Pan-Atlantic

Let's look at the directed loading executed on our case. This is what a well-made loading card looks like, your turn comes next.

Thread case, Pan-Atlantic. The loading card, movement by movement

1 · The problem in one sentence. Transfer merchandise between truck and ship without unloading, classifying, and reloading each product separately.

2 · Map of what is known. We are in 1955. We have trucks and trailers, cargo ships and tankers, cranes, steel and aluminum, welding, railways, port warehouses, and specialized labor. We don't have satellites, sensors, or computers. The dominant cost is not the ship's journey, but the time it spends stopped at the dock while being loaded by hand.

3 · Failed attempts and why they failed. Hiring more stevedores: failed because the bottleneck is not the number of hands, but the number of times the cargo is handled. Putting the entire truck on the ship: failed because the wheels and chassis take up space that doesn't pay, trucks don't stack, and saltwater damages them. Better cranes and warehouses: failed because it accelerates one step, but doesn't eliminate any.

4 · The edge of knowledge. We know we need to stop handling the cargo piece by piece. What we don't know is: what exactly should go on the ship, if not the entire truck or loose boxes? That's where our certainty ends. That's the edge.

Notice movement 3: each failure comes with its exact reason. "Putting the entire truck on the ship failed because the wheels don't pay and don't stack." That reason is a powerful failure index, it leaves the label "I need what's inside the truck, not the truck". And notice the edge of movement 4: it doesn't say "I don't know the solution"; it precisely locates where what we know ends. A problem loaded like this is ready to be solved. We'll do it in the next book.

Guided Practice

Now it's your turn. Don't copy the card from section 7: write it in your own words, and, this is what's important, try to do it without looking back at it. You'll recall that the sufficient loading signal is being able to reconstruct the problem from memory. This exercise is, at the same time, the loading of Pan-Atlantic and the proof that you loaded it.

Glossary of Key Terms

• Load: The neglected half of incubation: filling the mind with ordered material about the problem before the pause. Without load, the pause has nothing to recombine.
• Directed loading: Four-step procedure: the problem in a sentence, map of what is known, failed attempts with their reason, and the edge of knowledge.
• Failure index: Label that leaves in memory where and why you got stuck; allows an environmental cue to activate the solution later (Seifert).
• Opportunistic assimilation: Mechanism by which a well-loaded problem makes incidental environmental stimuli be recognized as relevant.
• Fixation forgetting: Weakening, during the pause, of the incorrect associations that blocked the solution (Smith and Blankenship).
• Sufficient load signal: Being able to explain the problem and all its dead ends from memory, without looking at notes.

Final Reflection and Self-Assessment

Bibliography and Recommended Readings

• Sio, U. N. and Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does Incubation Enhance Problem Solving? A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1). [The strong empirical basis of incubation: 117 studies.]
• Seifert, C. M. et al. (1995). Demystification of Cognitive Insight: Opportunistic Assimilation and the Prepared-Mind Perspective. In The Nature of Insight, MIT Press. [Failure rates and the prepared mind.]

• Smith, S. M. and Blankenship, S. E. (1991). Incubation and the Persistence of Fixation in Problem Solving. American Journal of Psychology, 104(1).
• Wallas, G. (1926). The Art of Thought. [The preparation and incubation phases, a century before modern evidence.]

Next Topic

You've already loaded the engine. You know that incubation consists of two halves, loading and pause, you master directed loading in four movements, and you understand why it works without resorting to magic. You have Pan-Atlantic loaded and ready.

The next book, Topic 4: Letting Go and Coming Back, is the other half. You will learn to choose the correct pause (why walking works and social media doesn't), how long to let go according to the problem, and, the most fragile part, how to structure the return so as not to lose what emerges. Because incubation ideas are volatile: if you don't capture them well, they evaporate. With that book, you will complete Module II and have the entire engine working, ready for the workshop on the five techniques.

The pause doesn't create material; it recombines what you loaded.