It was a pro-bono session in a city in the US MidWest, and the objective was to find innovative ways to improve communications and understanding in the local community, which had been stressed to the point of intermittent violence. The organizers had attempted to statistically represent, within the 16 participants, all segments of the local population according to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and what not, and had done an excellent job. It was the heterogeneous-est group you could imagine, all of them good intentioned active citizens.

The first day went well, and on the morning of the second day, we opened with an exercise: the group sat on chairs in a circle, except for one person who stood in the middle. This person was asked by me to mention something he remembered from the first day, then pick another participant, ask them to stand up, and sit in their place, and so on.

Each person, in their turn, looked around after they spoke, searched for someone who had not spoken before, and sat in their place, relieved, until one of them stood up, turned to me, and said “That’s it, everyone’s spoken” (meaning, for him, that the exercise was over). Nobody spoke, so I started to give the group my innovation facilitator’s “line” (with one of the insights they were supposed to take from the exercise): “Who says you can’t call on one of the participants for the second time?”. But as soon as I had said that, one of the participants, C., an African American (I guess that’s the PC way to say it these days) said (and I quote verbatim, because I will never forget the moment): “Hey, nobody’s picked any of the black folks yet.”

We all looked at each other. I could literally not close my wide open mouth while I looked around the sixteen faces. The lady was right! There were six black people in the group and not even one of them had been called to get up and talk. And what’s worse, when the last non-black declared there was no one left to call, none of us, including the experienced attentive facilitator, had noticed.

Even now, as I write, I am ashamed to admit it. But there it was, and none of the explanations that were quickly offered by the participants could change the basic fact. In some important sense of the word, we were not seeing some of the people in the group. Literally.

It was, of course, the most important moment of our two days. The incident opened a two-and-a-half-hour unplanned discussion, way more meaningful than anything that my facilitation had been able to elicit, or was about to. Much came up, not easy for all of us (sincerely) well-intentioned participants to hear.

I guess there are quite a number of learnings one can derive from this, and I hope that at least we, those who were there, used the opportunity to grow in some way. In the summary notes the expression “discussing the un-discussable” appears prominently as a major benefit of the entire meeting.

But in addition to (or behind, or below) all the human, racial and political aspects, one of the things I took for my professional life was a frightening consciousness of the huge blinding power and deadly combination of groupthink and preconceptions.

Amnon Levav is SIT’s Managing Director. Amnon works with companies to create and deploy programs for enhancing innovation throughout the organization.

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

Click here to contact us

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.

Click here to contact us

Visit Roni at the start2think website

Let’s consider the word “order” for example. WordNet defines order as “logical or comprehensible arrangement of separate elements” and “a condition of regular or proper arrangement”. These definitions, coupled with another meaning of the word – “a command given by a superior that must be obeyed” – can help us understand the power of structural fixedness. It highlights our tendency to embrace order and structure as positive attributes that are not only valuable, but also natural.

But the status of “order” is just half of the picture. Think for a minute about how language reflects what we think about the absence of order, or, heavens forbid, about changing or breaking the existing order. The term “out of order” is defined by Babylon as “not working, nonfunctional, broken”. Similarly, “disorder” is defined by Webster’s dictionary as “want of order or regular disposition; lack of arrangement; confusion; disarray”. It is easy to understand the connection between these terms and the uneasiness we witness when we encourage our clients to dis-order their products or processes.

We all know that language has a strong impact on the way we think and act (Orwell’s Doublethink, from the novel 1984, is a radical example of that impact). In the microcosms of our innovation processes we cannot change language. We can, however, point out the linguistic aspects of fixednesses (in order) to demonstrate the power of the phenomena we try to overcome.

Amit Mayer is a Senior SIT Facilitator, and a creative & didactic manager at SIT Facilitator, and a creative & didactic manager at Medidactic Ltd.

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

Click here to contact us

This one-hour, free webinar introduces you to the concept of “cognitive fixedness”, a major barrier to innovative thinking. We’ll delve into one specific type of fixedness and learn how to overcome it using Task Unification, one of SIT’s innovation tools.

Task Unification offers a new way of observing surroundings, identifying resources and using them creatively.

This webinar mixes hands-on practice and fascinating examples from the world of product innovation, MarCom and problem solving.  At the end of this webinar, you’ll find it easier to view challenges as golden opportunities.

The webinar will be conducted by Shlomit Tassa. Shlomit manages SIT Western Europe Operations, which includes some of SIT’s most strategic clients, such as Bayer, Nestlé, Shell, and Unilever. Additionally, she leads SIT’s Sustainability expertise, working with corporate clients that choose to become greener. Shlomit holds masters degrees in Computer Science and Product Design, and before joining SIT, worked in high-tech companies in Israel and in the US, and later as an independent usability consultant.

Register now by clicking here

Once registered you will receive an email confirming your registration with information you need to join the Webinar.

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

Cognitive Fixedness, first defined by psychologist Karl Duncker, prevents individuals and companies from creating new configurations in the systems they manage.  This often blocks us from seeing potential efficiencies and material reduction, and breakthrough solutions to problems.  SIT tools help break 3 kinds of cognitive fixedness:

1. Structural – The tendency to view products and systems as a complete gestalt.  Many of SIT’s tools help break this particular fixedness.  The following water saving toilet (click to check out the cool animation!) was developed by Villeroy-Boch in an SIT workshop.  Multiplying the water streams resulted in more pressure in each stream, therefore requiring less water.  This product won the ISH Innovation Prize and was chosen by Deutsche Bank in its transformation of its HQ to be the most environmentally friendly high-rises in Europe.

2. Functional – Seeing objects as capable only of fulfilling their original function.  SIT uses the Task Unification tool to help innovators find new uses for existing resources, thus forcing them find new functions for available objects and tackle functional fixedness.  My previous post described several such uses of unexpected resources for generating energy.

3. Relational – The tendency to view relationships and dependencies between variables of a situation as static and permanent.  Assif Strategies, our partners in Greener by Design, described the following case study in the conference: A bus company’s emissions were well above calculated expectations.  They had 100 old buses and 50 new ones, and 400 drivers. Assif discovered that drivers were allowed to select both their buses and their routes based on seniority. Naturally they chose the easier routes (that had less stops and fewer shifts) and the newer buses. The relationship that resulted was that the older buses drove the stop and go routes on 3 shifts, while the new ones drove more continuously and were parked at night, obviously resulting in much higher emissions than necessary. Breaking this relational fixedness required a major cultural change in the company, but by creating a new relationship within existing available resources, the bus company was able to reduce over 10% of its emissions.  Along with some other simple changes, it achieved a total reduction of 50%.

Watch this short video for a new type of green fixedness…

The challenge of breaking fixedness is threefold.  First, the innovator must recognize that they could be suffering from cognitive fixedness, and not seeing the entire potential “playing field”.  Second, after the innovator recognizes certain underlying assumptions in the system in question, they must accept that these can be changed, and not take them for granted, because “this is how we always did it”, or “this is how it must be done”.  Lastly, the innovator must be flexible about the structure, functions and relationships between the system’s elements in order to generate new forms that can lead to new thinking and new solutions.

This concept ties in well to the message of the charismatic keynotes in the conference, who all essentially break a critical underlying assumption about our industry or society: from William McDonough (Cradle to Cradle, MDBC) who questions why can’t a building be as smart as a tree, creating oxygen, food and shelter, to Tom Szaky (TerraCycle) who challenges the entire concept of garbage, to the point that he “no longer sees trash, only cash”, and to David de Rothschild, who endeavors to cross the Pacific Ocean on the Plastiki (homage to the Kon Tiki, of course) using the ocean’s most prevalent waste as means of transportation.

More on fixedness here.

Dr. Gadi Segal, a business partner and a good friend, told me once that “the more therapeutic options you have for a disease, the more likely it is that none of them is really effective.”

When I make the analogy to the realm of innovation I hesitate to conclude that none of the innovation methodologies available is really effective… Let’s just agree that the abundance of approaches and technique is indicative of the magnitude of the challenges posed by innovation.

Some of these challenges have to do with the process of ideation itself – other with that of implementation. Some are more relevant on an individual level – others are more organizational. For the purpose of this discussion we can define one set of barriers that stop us from coming up with the right ideas (ideation / individual), and another set of challenges involved in the attempt to implement these ideas (implementation / organizational). This series of posts will focus on barriers to ideation. We may touch upon implementation challenges at a later date.

Think for a minute about the last time you participated in an innovation session. Think about yourself and about your colleagues. What where the barriers you were facing within that session? Did they have to do with fear of criticism? With the insecurity that comes from not knowing how good your ideas are, or how well they will be received? Were these barriers connected to the fact that some of your ideas might have been a little too innovative? Or was it simply a reluctance to take an active a part in such a public discussion?

If you answered any of these questions with a “yes” – you were facing some of the most common psychological barriers to innovation. While some of these barriers are as relevant in many types of discussions, others are more innovation-specific. Many of these barriers have to do with our common fear of making mistakes – a fear developed and cultivated by mistake-phobic education systems and organizational cultures.

There are several innovation methodologies that focus on dealing with these fears & barriers – the most familiar of which is Brain Storming. These methodologies employ various rules and principles designed to mitigate these fears.

(The next post in this series will further discuss psychological barriers and the methodologies developed around them).

You will notice that these barriers are relevant to voicing or sharing innovative ideas that we, as individuals, have already come up with. These barriers are serious, no doubt, but they have little to do with the actual act of coming up with an innovative idea. The barriers relevant to that elusive phase are quite different. They have less to do with our psychology and more to do with our cognitive capacity.

Take the story of the refrigerator as an example. When this product was introduced to the market (early 20th century) it replaced the formally used ice-box. This simple device used blocks of ice that were put in a designated compartment at the top (the actual “ice-box” that gave it its name). The products kept in the ice-box were organized so that the ones requiring colder temperatures were placed higher (closer to the ice) and the ones requiring more moderate temperatures were placed lower (further from the ice). Does this design sound familiar?

For years we have been bending down to take out our veggies from the bottom drawer of our modern refrigerator, while the freezer door (which most of use much less) is located much more conveniently at the top of the appliance. When you think about it now it seems strange and irrational. Why didn’t the refrigerator industry offer us a refrigerator with the freezer at the bottom and the main compartment above it? And why didn’t we, as consumers, ask for such a design? The answer has to do with a cognitive phenomenon called “Structural Fixedness.” Both engineers and customers have created a strong link between the product and its structure. We have become structurally fixated. That fixedness has survived not only the transition from the ice-box to the refrigerator, but also decades of advance in refrigeration technologies that have followed.

When we suffer from Structural Fixedness we do not choose or intend to overlook potential changes in structure. We fail to consider these possibilities and at the same time fail to recognize our own failure. That is exactly the problem with structural fixedness and other cognitive barriers to innovation. These sneaky bastards are like stealth bombers – they stop us from coming up with innovative ideas and we do not even know they are there (The 3rd post in this series will further discuss the different types of cognitive barriers)

Although we have only touched on the barriers to innovation briefly, one thing is already clear: if we are to develop effective innovation methodologies they must deal with more than one type of barriers. Hopefully the insights we may gain throughout this series will take us in the right direction.

Let’s begin with a simple puzzle:

One of the king’s servants presents him with a bottle and says, “I have in this bottle a magic substance that can dissolve any other substance”. How did the king know immediately that his servant was lying?

The answer is very simple:

If it can dissolve anything, how come it doesn’t dissolve the bottle?!

This is a simple puzzle, and yet many of us need to think a while before we come up with the answer. Why is that?

My explanation is that when faced with a problem we make a very quick and mostly automatic and unconscious distinction between the information that has immediate relevance to the situation at hand and the one that doesn’t.

In this case, for example, we concentrate on the substance and tend to forget about the bottle.

I believe that this “mental block” is related to the evolution of the mind. To help us survive, the mind has been “programmed” through evolution to first and foremost handle immediate threats. And in order to optimally handle threats the mind MUST filter out any information that is not directly related to the threat.

When facing a threatening lion, for example, our ancestors couldn’t allow themselves to stop and examine all the aspects of the situation. They had to make a quick decision either to hunt it or run away (and if they made the wrong decision, well…)

The problem is that today when most of our problems are not immediate threats, we still use a system that was “designed” to handle threats to solve them.

And this is exactly the reason why we need artificial tools, such as SIT, to help us pay attention to details we usually don’t pay attention to. SIT does this by forcing us to prepare two lists of objects before we solve a problem: immediate problem objects and background or environmental objects.

The SIT philosophy is that *everything* that can be found in the problem arena can be used to solve it.

Here’s another clever puzzle:

Which is the next letter in this series?

W, I, T, N, L, I, T,…

The answer is…

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The next letter in the series is ‘S’! It is the first letter of the word ’series’. All the other letters in this series are the first letters of the words in the question itself.

Most people have difficulties solving this problem since they do not consider the question as part of the problem.

See you all in my next posts,
Roni

Visit Roni at the start2think website