Innovation by SIT

The book “Thinkertoys” by Michael Michalko mentions a story on page 7 about a group of scientists who visited a tribe in New Guinea who believed that the world ended at a river nearby.

When one of the scientists had to leave, he crossed the river and waved to the tribesmen as he got to the other side. The tribesmen didn’t respond. When the other scientists asked why they hadn’t responded, they said that they hadn’t seen anyone across the river.

Their belief about the end of the world was so strong that it actually blinded them.

Do you think this happens just to people disconnected from the modern world? Well, I think this happens to all of us all the time. We simply can’t see what we don’t expect to see.

I’d like to share with you something that happened to me that made me think about all of this.

I was supposed to meet someone whom I’d never met before. We’d spoken a few times on the phone and I’d developed an image of the way this person looks.

When we finally met, he looked totally different than how I’d imagined. (Anyone who’s been on a blind date knows the feeling!)

A few days after our meeting, we spoke on the phone again and I realized something very interesting.

I had reverted back to my original image of him - the one I’d had before we met! You see, even though I’d met him and knew exactly what he looked like, the actual meeting somehow did not completely update the original image I had of him.

These two stories demonstrate that when we create a mental image of something, even hard facts can’t easily remove this image.

A few years ago I took a course in “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” The course taught realistic drawing.

What I found very interesting about the theory behind the course was the claim that many of us can’t draw realistically because we don’t really see the object we’re drawing. We see only a degenerate version of the object that’s stored in our mind.

In the course we learnt not to draw the object itself, but rather the “borderline” between the object and its background. Believe me – it worked like magic!

It seems to me that thinking methods such as this drawing method help us erase our mental pictures in order to allow us to paint new ones.

This is exactly what SIT does. It forces us to create a fresh and unbiased view of the problem and possible solution directions.

See you all in my next post,

Roni

Roni and the rest of us at SIT would be happy to talk to you about innovation.

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Visit Roni at the start2think website