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Creative Insight Writ Large 135

with a noncorroding plate, and to establish a constant chemical reaction that
would not wear down the components… .” 8
Resorting to unselective search was not a peculiar feature of Edison’s work
habits. Consider how Robert H. Wentorf, the inventor of synthetic diamonds,
describes that process:
About a year and a half later, after hundreds of experiments and grind-
ing tests, we found a process that produced a well-bonded mass of sin-
tered diamond.… we tried … all the possible processes we could think
of. Viewed from the goal end, the route seems almost obvious, but viewed
from the starting end, it is just one of myriads of routes.… 9

In these cases, the problems were solved by searching the relevant pos-
sibility spaces as originally conceived, bringing available knowledge and expe-
rience to bear but resorting to exhaustive search when no selective heuristics
were available. Search – successive cycles of tentative action followed by evalu-
ation – is a basic component of significant creative work.

Subgoaling
A second key component of analytical problem solving is subgoaling, the par-
titioning of a problem into a hierarchy of nearly independent parts that can be
attacked separately. It is common to attribute the success of the Wright Brothers
in inventing a workable airplane to, among other factors, their encouraging
mother, their partnership and the mechanical skills developed in their bicy-
cle repair shop. Gary Bradshaw’s cognitive analysis dismisses these factors as
incapable of explaining the difference between the Wright Brothers and other
teams working on the same problem. Members of those teams no doubt had
10
encouraging mothers as well – most mothers are – they worked in teams and
in some instances they had more advanced mechanical and engineering skills
and greater resources. These factors, although likely necessary for the Wright
Brothers’ success, are insufficient to explain why they succeeded ahead of the
other development teams.
Bradshaw’s analysis shows that the main difference lay in their manner
of working. Everyone who attempted to build a workable aircraft assumed
that there would be a fuselage, wings, a power source and some arrangement
for steering, but these features can be varied in many ways and along several
dimensions, defining a gigantic space of possible airplane designs. Some of the
competitors in the race toward a flying machine searched this space design
by design: settle on a particular design, build it, try to fly it, notice that it does
not fly, dispose of the debris and go back to the drawing board. In the case of a