A music theory book might seem like an unusual place to find inspiration for innovative thinking, but there is a musical principle that provides a useful metaphor for how innovators find inspiration – and also happens to separate the great composers from the mediocre ones. That principle is dissonance.

The Power of Dissonance

In its most extreme form, dissonance is that terrible sound you hear when two notes don’t harmonize, such as when someone sings off-key in a choir. When used in moderation, however, dissonance is powerful, as evidenced by the emotional response provoked almost without fail by the song “Someone Like You,” the singer-songwriter Adele’s masterpiece. In the run-up to Adele’s sweep of the 2012 Grammy Awards, the Wall Street Journal published a piece pinpointing the subtle examples of dissonance sprinkled throughout the song as its secret, tear-jerking power.

Dissonance, by definition, creates tension, and makes listeners crave resolution. Resolution is the natural direction for music to take, and so when it happens, it provides immediate relief without most listeners ever realizing the tension was there in the first place. Though it can be difficult to identify as a layperson, the best composers understand its power and use it consciously to make their music more provocative, by following the dissonance where it naturally leads them.

What can innovators learn from this?

Think of musical dissonance as an “unnatural” phenomenon that must be resolved to allow the “natural” state of musical harmony to return. The problem is, recognizing disharmony in the real world can be much more difficult than identifying a sour note in a musical composition, since we’re so accustomed to seeing certain problems as intractable, or “natural.” When a person can identify the dissonance of these situations, refusing to accept their “naturalness,” it allows them to lean into that dissonance and follow the path it carves to a logical resolution – though one that most wouldn’t consider until it happens, just as most people can’t identify musical dissonance except by the emotion it produces when it resolves.

Two inspiring stories of innovation show us how simply recognizing a problem as an unnatural form of dissonance, rather than accepting it as the natural state of things, can open up new creative paths and vital solutions.

Listening to Unheard Voices

When Shubhranshu Choudhary , a journalist for the BBC, traveled to Chhattisgarh, his home region in India, to cover the escalating guerrilla warfare there, he was troubled by much of the reporting he was seeing. News agencies were portraying the conflict in a two-dimensional, black and white manner. They were overlooking complex problems and misrepresenting the voices of the locals. Choudhary  rejected the narrative that the rebels were all fanatically committed to the opposition Maoist cause. He began asking questions. What was the real reason the people of his home region were taking up arms?

He discovered that rather than a conflict between political ideologies — local communities, even people he had known from his childhood, were resorting to armed conflict to draw attention to severe needs. The civil authorities had been ignoring their problems, and so the people living in small, rural communities saw joining the rebels as the only opportunity they had to make their voices heard.

Choudhary left the BBC to work full time on finding a solution to the problem that ...