Truck Stopping Distances
See what you think
How do you come up with new and different ideas?
This is a question I’m often asked in workshops that I run.
It can be easy to get stuck in a rut, creating different versions of the same idea. But if you want the output of the creative process to be different, it can help to make the inputs different.
Go somewhere else, anywhere else, than where you normally do, to help spark an idea.
In this example, I went to Quora.
The challenge was to come up with content that truckers would engage with. Now, I wasn’t sure that truckers would be particularly active on Quora, but there they were. And there was one question on there that got much more engagement than the others. And within that, one answer that generated the most reactions.
The question was ‘Truck drivers, what do you wish other drivers knew about driving a truck?’ And the answer was ‘If you cut in front of us, you really don’t appreciate how long it takes us to stop!’ So we wanted to see if we could show how much people don’t understand this important (and resonant) point.
As Chip and Dan Heath explain in their book Made to Stick, if you don’t get people to state what they think the answer will be beforehand they will often post-rationalise it and say ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I thought’.
However, if you get them to commit up front and say ‘here’s what I think the answer is’, when the real answer is considerably different, this can present a gap in their knowledge and help create an element of surprise.
In this example, we presented the audience with information about the truck, the speed it was driving, and the road conditions (dry or wet). When then asked them to pull the slider to see where they thought the truck would stop if it suddenly had to hit the brakes.
There were already lots of diagrams available on truck stopping distances, but we wanted to show the truck on an actual road, going past all the cars – before it came to a stop. This helped make it more concrete, relatable and impactful.
I’ve demonstrated this content to people in workshops, and they’re often surprised by the result.