Novelty alone is not creativity, whether in the legal strategy for the war on terror or the invention of the Segway

One measure of creativity must be its effectiveness rather than its mere novelty. On that score, as Jane Mayer noted back in the July 3, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, the Bush Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror might have been radical, even unprecedented, but can hardly be called creative:

[T]he Administration’s legal strategy for the war on terror[,] [k]nown as the New Paradigm, . . . rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside.

. . . The overarching intent of the New Paradigm, which was put in place after the attacks of September 11th, was to allow the Pentagon to bring terrorists to justice as swiftly as possible. Criminal courts and military courts, with their exacting standards of evidence and emphasis on protecting defendants’ rights, were deemed too cumbersome. (emphasis added)

Over two years since Mayer’s article, nearly seven years since September 11, 2001, what have we got? As the Christian Science Monitor puts it:

One conviction, of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the personal driver of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. After a two-week-long trial and three days of deliberations, the military court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, convicted Mr. Hamdan of providing material support for terrorism by driving Mr. bin Laden around Afghanistan. In spite of the conviction, legal debate regarding the trial rages on.

I’m not merely ranting about a war in Iraq I’ve opposed since its inception, or of the fraudulent legal analysis that produced this Administration’s conclusions regarding what constitutes torture. I’m pointing out that results count, and what is more telling than an utter and complete failure to meet the very purpose of a radical departure from existing norms? It doesn’t take a cognitive psychologist to recognize the differences between mere novelty and genuine creativity, but it’s plain Arthur J. Cropley does:

The cognitive approach to creativity emphasizes the processes involved in producing effective novelty, as well as the control mechanisms that regulate novelty production, and the structures that result. Merely novel structures display surprisingness and incongruity, to be sure, but they must also be meaningful and practicable to be effective.

Do you remember the Segway? (That’s Dick Cheney, of all people, riding one up there in the upper right of this post.) As Jeff Foust wrote two years ago in The Space Review, in 2001 (before 9/11, of course),

the question being pondered by millions was simple: “what is IT?” “IT” was the codename for the invention that had reportedly been developed by famed inventor Dean Kamen. Details about IT (also known as “Ginger”, its internal codename) were scant . . . .

What was known was that IT was some kind of transportation technology. The Inside report . . . said that the device had wowed over luminaries like venture capitalist John Doerr, who invested in the project while claiming it was as revolutionary as the Internet; Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who reportedly claimed that “cities would be architected” around the device; and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, whose trademark laugh could be heard echoing through the halls of Kamen’s New Hampshire headquarters as he tried out the device during a June 2000 visit. The potential upside of this device was seemingly limitless, providing a sharp and hopeful contrast to the dot.com world, which was crashing to Earth at the same time. The speculation spawned a web site, theITquestion.com, where visitors traded the latest rumors on just what IT might be.

Kamen officially unveiled the Segway on the ABC TV show “Good Morning America” in December 2001. The response was… underwhelming, in many quarters. “I’m tempted to say, ‘That’s it?’” co-host Diane Sawyer blurted out when the sheet covering the Segway was pulled away. “But that can’t be it.”

But that was it. From a technological standpoint Segway was a revolutionary invention: a computer-controlled, self-balancing “human transporter” that was highly maneuverable yet easy and safe to use. However, to the public, whose expectations had bloomed in hothouse of hype fueled by the media and the Internet over the last year, the Segway seemed more like an odd-looking scooter than the device that was as revolutionary as the Internet and would force people to rearchitect cities. . . .

It’s little surprise, then, that Segways failed to sell at anywhere near the levels its backers hoped. When the company issued a recall notice in September 2003 to correct a software problem, it said only 6,000 devices had been manufactured to date. Kemper, in his book Reinventing the Wheel (the softcover version of the book about the development of the Segway that was originally published under the title Code Name Ginger), reported that as of summer 2004—the last date sales figures had been released—less than 10,000 Segways had been sold. (Segway’s media relations office failed to respond to a request last week for updated sales figures.) That’s a far cry from the pre-release belief, voiced by Doerr, that Segway would make its first billion dollars faster than any other company in history. No one seems to be in a hurry these days to redesign cities around the Segway; after all, when was the last time you saw a Segway rolling down the sidewalk?