Think
Tips and tricks for coming up with ideas, for stopping you squashing somebody else's ideas, and to sanity check whether an idea has legs...
Thinking Outside The Box
This is a popular challenge - 'you've got to think outside the box'. The idea being, you need to look outside your areas of expertise and knowledge to come up with new, innovative ideas. Here is a classic simple exercise to demonstrate the concept:
The task is to join all 9 dots together using 4 straight lines without taking your pen off the paper. Give it a try (if you haven't seen this exercise before, the solution and explanation is here).
The trouble is, 'think outside the box' is easy to say but incredibly hard to do when you've grown up inside that box, when your history and all of your successful experiences come from inside that box. The reason a successful business can be challenged, and ultimately beaten, by a new contender is that the new contender doesn't play by the rules whilst the incumbent can't see anything but the rules.
The issue is described well by Charles Handy in his book 'The Elephant And The Flea':
"Checkhov's The Cherry Orchard was written one hundred years ago, but its moral still works. It is the story of a one-time rich family facing economic ruin. Their one asset, apart from the family home, is their large cherry orchard, now of no commercial value. A business friend suggests to them that they could turn the orchard into an estate of holiday cottages, and so retain their old home. They hardly hear him, the idea is so alien to their ears and their past. In the end, he, the outsider, buys it and they are evicted. Checkhov calls his play a comedy, but it could more accurately be termed the tragedy of our times."
We see this issue at play in all areas of life. Tim O'Reilly describes it in his essay 'The Internet Paradigm'. IBM and DEC couldn't let go of their orchards in the 1980s, and companies like Microsoft and Dell became the new leaders. Microsoft is now being challenged by the likes of Google. There are countless examples in business, but the sports field is where the issue is most obvious. When an unknown enters a competition as a wild card and leaves all previous champions in their wake en route to the winner's podium, the reason is simple: a) they are usually incredibly talented; and b) nobody knows their style, and they pay scant attention to the 'rules' of play.
Six Thinking Hats - by Edward de Bono
Useful technique to help with brainstorming, examining an idea from different angles:
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Lots of resources available on the net for this one, starting with the book: Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, published 2000 by Penguin Books, ISBN 0140296662.
Articles
| Link | Description |
| CIA guide to optimised thinking | Book available for download, covering the psychology of analysing surveillance data, and how to avoid our natural cognitive biases in reasoning (May 08) |
| Dr Edward de Bono on creative thinking | Presentation Zen blog post about Dr Edward de Bono with great comments for and against his methods (May 08) |
| On... wonderfully large leaps of logic | Blog post challenging the logic behind email apnea and why we need to analyse what we read and not just jump on the latest popular bandwagon (Feb 08) |
| When patterns mislead | Blog post (mine) covering Duncan Watt's analysis of the Tipping Point. Good example of critical thinking - don't assume, think! (Feb 08) |
| Eight tips for better brainstorming | Article on BusinessWeek online, by Robert Sutton. Clue is in the title (July 06) |
Books
- Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
- Current issues and enduring questions: A guide to critical thinking by Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau
- Sources of Power: How people make decisions by Gary Klein
Thinking Outside The Box: Solution
