Overcoming Functional Fixedness

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias in which, when things have a defined function, we tend to only think of them in terms of that already defined function. I came across this idea again recently in my friend Mitch Lacey’s Certified Scrum Product Owner Training. Product owners and product managers often work with stakeholders, owners, and customers who are “stuck” in how they think about things. It’s our job to peel back the onion, to discover new options for solutions given the tools available, and to think about how these tools can be used beyond their culturally coded function.

So, let’s see functional fixedness in action, and get on to ways of seeing past it.

Duncker’s Candle Problem

If you haven’t seen it before, Duncker’s candle problem is quite fun. published in 1935 by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker¹, the test is presented with the following task:

How would you fix and light a candle to the wall, in a way that the candle wax doesn’t drop onto the table below? You can use a book of matches, a box of thumbtacks, and the candle itself.

There are a series of puzzles and ideas like the candle problem which rest on our cognitive biases. The nine-dots puzzle is another,² where the task is to connect nine squarely arranged points with a pen, using only four or fewer straight lines. You cannot lift the pen, or retrace any lines.

Both are related to the Einstellung effect: the way in which our brains efficiently find solutions based on past experiences. Einstellung — a person’s attitude, setting, or place of mind — has us think and problem solve in ways we typically have before.

The Candle Solution

When I first encountered the Candle Problem, likely due to my slightly pyromaniac tendencies as a child, I did a lot of wax-melting thumbtacks, pointy-side out, and heating the pins up and pressing the candle against them, then using the matchbook itself as a wax drip protector. But even in this solution, I was modeling past (pyromaniac!) behaviors: emptying the box and pinning it to the wall really is pretty efficient.

Ways to change your Einstellung

I encounter these kinds of cognitive challenges a lot, at work and in my personal projects and study. Approaches to break out of the box that I’ve found helpful include:

1. Change the context: move to a new chair, a new room, the floor.
2. Light physical activity: especially things you can do on ‘automatic’ mode: cook, go for a walk, iron napkins. I’d like to think chopping wood falls in here.
3. Take a shower: and have some note-taking tool or voice AI close by, as solutions tend to come quickly.
4. Take a nap: dozens of seemingly intractable problems have, in the light of the morning, been solve with an ‘ah ha’ realization.
5. Play: whatever that means for you. It’s a kind of light-structure, lateral thinking, depressurizing activity.
6. Defocus: I tend to always think that further, harder analysis will render the solution. But defocusing allows a kind of horizontal, broader contextual thinking to occur.

So, what about you? How do you overcome functional fixedness?