Tag Archives: Thinking
Innovation posts of the week: Hybrid Thinking
- The real product of innovation by @ovoinnovation
- Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You by @msuster
- The New Arithmetic of Collaboration – HBR
- Learning to Think Ahead – Business Insider
- “Tweakers” and “Pioneers” in the World of Innovation via @ralph_ohr
- Key Questions to a Company Struggling with Innovation by @lindegaard
- The Hybrid Thinking Manifesto by @thebrandbuilder
- Innovation Isn’t a Matter of Left or Right – NYTimes.com
Innovation posts of the week: Innovation is not creativity
- Disruptive Thinking: 5 attributes to consider by @jjsviokla
- Top 5 Innovation Trends via @innovate
- Is Innovation a Process or an Outcome? via @ralph_ohr
- Innovation Lessons From Tarzan by @skap5
- How biases, prejudices and ignorance can quietly undermine innovation via @chuckfrey
- The cave model of innovation via @philmccreight
- Innovation is Not Creativity – HBR
- Drive Innovation: Suggest Ideas, Don’t Propose Them via @marketingprofs
- When Innovation Strategies Combine – Forbes
- Who buys what? Research finds clues to marketing innovation – Physorg
Reimagine how you imagine
Alright it seems to me that the word ‘imagination’ doesn’t fit in a business context, unless you’re an ad agency it’s been completely banned! The mere mention of ‘let’s use our imaginations’ gets people nervous as if saying ‘what’s that?’ Ok Ok I get it, there are alternatives though and to battle that I use the word ‘reconfigure’ to talk to non-imagine people.
Take for example an interior designer, his/her job is to reimagine the interior of your house. They take what you have and reconfigure it in another way to arrive at something different. They tweak, move, shift, turn your living room in all sorts of ways sometimes by moving the objects already in place or by bringing in new objects from the outside or a mix of both.
The interior designer in the examples below focuses on ‘using what you already have’ to reimagine your living room. The objects might not be new but the small change in the arrangements makes the living room not just look different but also feel different.
This is what imagination is all about.
You don’t have to drink tequila to loosen up (although it certainly helps), you just have to ask ‘what if’ we take this and move it, remove it, turn it, twist it, shake it, etc and see what happens. So if you’re in the process of reimagining how your business will have to work in the future but lost your imagination on your way to being an adult, just put yourself in the interior designer’s shoes and start reconfiguring.
Remove the associative barriers that hinder new ideas
Image via Wikipedia
Last week I mentioned that the number one creative skill you need to master is the ability to free associate, to make connections between dissimilar things. I just stumbled into Ellen Di Resta’s post on the innovator’s perception where she probes further into the concept to which I left a comment:
Hello Ellen,
You’re right. I think it comes down to people’s ‘associative barriers’, or the ability to make new connection between dissimilar things.
For example if I say ‘car’ someone might say ‘tire’ because our minds make that connection automatically because we know it exists. But how about if I say ‘granola’ and someone else says ‘water’, which makes no sense to some of us but if you put the two together that person might see ‘river’.
So in other words when someone sees something different out of the unknown it’s because that person has very low associative barriers.
One of the reasons why most of us can’t make insightful new connections between dissimilar things is because we have ‘high associative barriers’. A person with high associative barriers will quickly arrive at conclusions when confronted with a problem since their thinking is more focused. He or she will recall how the problem has been handled in the past or how others in similar situations solved it. A person with low associative barriers, on the other hand, may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience, or that cannot easily be traced logically.
The question then is how do we remove these barriers?
Understand why
If you’re on the ‘high barrier’ side, it has nothing to do with your parent’s genes, it has to do with with how our brains evolve. Our brains evolve to find order in things, grouping concepts together and finding structure in the environment surrounding it.
Be aware and destroy
I think they key is to be aware of this and then systematically break down those barriers by exposing yourself to new stuff like traveling to new places, talking to people whom you have nothing in common with, reading about stuff outside of your interests and then questioning your own assumptions as to how you think the world works.
The internet provides us with all this and more, and right at the center of it is other people (social media ring a bell?). If you don’t have a Twitter account, get one right now. You’re going to want to follow some people so go to Listorious and instead of looking for people that fit your interests do the opposite and follow dissimilar people (Ex. if you’re into art, follow people in science!) and see what they’re sharing and engage them.
Combine both
If you take two people — one with high barriers, the other with low barriers — and you give them the same information about a problem, they’ll approach the problem in a completely different way. So the objective is to be able to achieve ‘whole brain thinking’, where we can shift from divergent to convergent thinking in the flip of a switch. The more fluid our thinking is the better we’ll be equipped to adapt and make sense of things that look like a puzzle with no shape of form.
What would you add?
Declare war on yourself
Being unconquerable lies within yourself.
The guys @ThinkTank_ asked me for some blogging tips a few days ago and I posted some unconventional blogging advice at BM that I’m sure will rattle some cages. One of the actions steps at that I recommend at the end of the post is to ‘declare war on yourself’, or more commonly known as challenge your assumptions.
Assumptions are the shortcuts, rules of thumb, conventional wisdom, common sense, stuff we take for granted, ordinary thinking that as humans we use to get through daily life, which work for awhile, but they soon become stale truths, like weights holding us back from new ways of seeing, thinking and behaving.
Assumptions get us stuck in a never ending loop of repetition, and you know that leads to more of the same. (more…)
