Innovation by SIT

Our lives are full of cases of cognitive fixedness that prevent us from making changes, including changes to our careers. Some rules of creative thinking can help us see beyond the well-known and the familiar.

I have been working at SIT for 13 years, facilitating thought processes for new products and services for companies and organizations around the world. The invention of new products is a fascinating process, but just between us – how many of us get to dabble in it? How relevant is it to our everyday lives? On the other hand, perhaps we could use inventive thinking not merely for the development of new products, services and strategies, but also to reinvent ourselves?

After all, one of the major challenges of creative thinking is in the ability to overcome cognitive fixedness – the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, and the inability to notice their other facets. And we all have fixedness. We attribute certain roles to given situations or to their components and tend to be blind to other possibilities. The more we get used to certain presumptions, the more they become axiomatic in our minds, and difficult for us to abandon.

But our instances of fixedness are not restricted to our view of our environment; they also exist in how we think of ourselves. For example, we don’t like ambiguous situations. We already know what our own role is. We know what is required of us; we are acquainted with our responsibilities and know how to address them. But facing a vague situation, one where we don’t know what to expect, is no easy thing, especially when our career is at stake. I am not saying this to dishearten you. On the contrary: if you cannot predict the future, invent it.

When thinking of products, we often encounter functional fixedness, which causes us to think of things or objects as having only one defined function. Naturally, it also applies to our thinking of ourselves. And in both cases, one of the ways to overcome it is to observe the parts, the components, rather than the whole. Doing this provides us with many degrees of freedom, enabling us to think and act differently.

Try, for example, if only as the thinking exercise, to “dismantle” yourself into components. Take a piece of paper and list your capabilities, and not merely those pertaining to your career, but the entirety of your abilities. Now, try to identify which of those, that are normally not utilized at work, might help you grow precisely there.

It is worthwhile to be aware of our fixedness, if only because sometimes knowing is in itself a step toward a solution. Indeed, even if we understand what change we can or want to make, there would still be a long road ahead of us. Implementing change is a complex process requiring determination, persistence and the ability to cope with challenges. But there are some general rules and principles to assist us in implementing our ideas:

• Limiting An Idea Is Better Than Diluting It – Sometimes we make a decision that requires a fundamental change to our lifestyle. Let’s assume, for example, that I was an attorney working for eight years in a law firm, and I have just decided to set up a business that would train lawyers for effective appearances in court. I intend to offer personal and group training for lawyers at every stage of their careers. But, possibly, for me the transition from being an employee to becoming an entrepreneur that establishes and leads an independent business might be too dramatic. If that is the case, I may do what many other people do: adopt a “diluted” version of my own idea, and rather than becoming independent, settle for giving a lecture in the litigation department of the firm. But if you want real change, try to preserve the essence of the idea, even if you implement in a more limited scope. For instance, do not establish an independent business yet, but rather convince the directors of the law firm to set up a department to perform this role and provide such services both within the company and externally. Do not give up your dream!  Make it happen, step by step.

• Define Your Closed World – A Closed World is a term used in inventive thinking to define the system of resources available in our environment. The reason we prefer to use our Closed World is that it is where resources are more readily available for us in order to advance our ideas. The question is what will we find in the Closed World? We tend to crudely separate between the worlds we live in, and therefore will are inclined to use work-related resources when we think about our careers, and resources relevant to our children for issues related to family and children. But that, precisely, is the fixedness. In fact, when our career is on the line, the resources of the Closed World are the entirety of resources surrounding us in our lives, and each of these has the potential to assist us in implementing our idea.

• Intuition Apart – In one of the sketches on “Seinfeld”, George, Elaine and Jerry sit in the neighborhood diner discussing George’s life.  George claims that nothing in his life is working as it should. As a pretty women in the diner smiles at him, George ignores her, presuming that a bald, unemployed man living with his parents is not what that beautiful woman is looking for. But his friends challenge him and George reaches the conclusion that if every instinct in his life was wrong, then maybe it is so in this case too, and therefore he must approach the pretty woman and introduce himself. He goes up to her, introduces himself as an unemployed guy who lives with his parents, and the pretty woman only broadens her alluring smile and whispers: “I’m Victoria. Hi”.

I don’t know what the message of the screenwriters was, but mine is this: every now and then let’s try to do the opposite of what our intuition tells us to do. Not because it is better, but because it is different. Perhaps doing the opposite of what we’re used to doing will break our fixedness and lead us to things we had never thought of and to places we would not have reached otherwise.

Comment: This article was originally published in the Themarker magazine