On the Right Way to Peel a Banana

Richard Saul Wurman likes to simplify things to initials and numerals: TED is the Technology Entertainment Design conference he created; TUB is The Understanding Business, a company Wurman founded to capitalize on his theories of knowledge.

There’s also TOP, one of his publishing companies, along with Access Press, that produced books on “the topics that matter in our lives”—such as healthcare, wealthcare, travel and child-raising; IA is information architecture, a field Wurman essentially launched three decades ago; or it could stand for “Information Anxiety,” his blockbuster 1990 book that foresaw the growing problem of data clutter and proposed a radical new means of organizing and presenting knowledge.

Then there’s 19.20.21., a massive undertaking to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to reach 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century. In July of this year, his keynote to 14,000 photographers from 134 countries kicked off this 5-year project

Wurman is also known for creating and sharing the TED (and currently the amazing TEDMed conference) conference he launched in the early 1980s, which brought together many of America’s sharpest thinkers in the fields of technology, entertainment and design for sprawling intellectual gabfests. Wurman is now running TEDMED, his new creative conference that addresses the opportunity for vast new convergences in healthcare. He’s also has been involved with all of BIF’s Collaborative Innovation Summits, serving as mentor, storyteller and host of the first two.

“I’m an aficionado of what happens when you get interesting people together and you make it easy for them to overcome their shyness and get them talking to each other,” Wurman says. “Unequivocally the Business Innovation Factory attracts smart individuals who tell a fresh story about their passions, ideas and failures. Looking in the gray area between these stories is where good, inspiring concepts will arise.”

Once described by Fortune magazine as an “intellectual hedonist” with a “hummingbird mind,” Wurman – who turned 75 this year – has created an impressive body of work based on a single epiphany he had as a young man: Human understanding is held back by difficulties in the way writers, designers and publishers convey information. Driven by that awareness, he left the practice of architecture (where he apprenticed with the legendary Louis Kahn) for what he came to call “information architecture,” advocating innovative design and editorial techniques to make data more visual and comprehensible. Eighty-two books later, his outrageously eclectic library reflects those subjects or ideas that he’s personally had difficulty understanding over the years. From healthcare to football to child-rearing, “the things I do are my struggle to see if I can tell the truth,” he says. Several of his books are in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

His latest book is called 33. With its Wurmanesque sub-title Understanding Change & the Change in Understanding , 33 is a fable re-imagined three decades after its original telling as a conference keynote address at the1976 AIA convention. It chronicles the adventures and musings of an eccentric (yet oddly familiar) character: the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination. The bemused, amused, and roundish imp waddles through the city of What-If in the land of Could-Be, trying to make sense of the myriad changes that have transpired in the past 33 years.

In Wurman’s original presentation, he told the tale of the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination who is hired to run a city and county for one year. In exchange for his services, the powers that be agree to do everything the Commissioner tells them to do. “What he did was look at everything that was going on and did the opposite –like change the laws of copyrighting to the right to copy” says Wurman. “The results were astonishingly favorable. In fact, everything he did was so successful that they banished him, as people would predictably do.”

“The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand,” Wurman has said. “It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.”

He likens this “opposite paradigm” to a recent interaction he had with a banana. “For my whole life,” he shares, “ I’ve been opening a banana the way you take it off a tree. And I’ve bruised the top a lot trying to get it open.” Yet by simply looking at the problem from the opposing side, Wurman found that a banana could indeed be opened from the other end—suggesting that the right way to peel it is actually from the bottom up.

Thus the banana becomes a metaphor for creativity and innovation: “Innovators spend too much time trying to design a better version of what already doesn’t work,” he says. “Why are we so focused on making things better – when instead we should be starting again? Is it terrifying? Of course. But is there anything more interesting?”

Richard Saul Wurman lives in Newport, Rhode Island with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their three Biblical yellow labs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.