While one would assume that mankind, having kicked in his remarkable brain at birth, would progress through life as a thinking sentient being. The reality is that, largely, we have developed the ability to plough through life without actually thinking at all.
Most of us are reactive rather than proactive. Our actions are predicated on a set of patterned behaviors, based on value systems, our over developed sense of right and wrong, and our individual and collective experience. This combination of experience and values, or feelings, establishes an emotional rather than logical approach to daily life which condemns us to prejudice, restrictive paradigms, poor ability to problem solve and conflict. Assumption and aggression become the norm, replacing analysis and assertion.
Philosophers and thinkers through the ages have been aware of this problem and in the last 30 years there has been a great deal of focus, at business schools, in corporate offices and corridors on the need to create a class of manger who has the skills and the willingness to THINK. Management literature is liberally sprinkled with catch phrases which point tantalizingly to a better way:
Lateral Thinking, The big picture, Win win, Thinking out of the box, Helicopter view, Design Thinking……all clichés and catch phrases used ad nauseum at seminars and in management meetings, mostly by consultants, who have no more knowledge of their meaning or provenance than their audience. Shouted loudly from podiums and in meetings like a giant Band-Aid slapped on our crippled brains. Easing the symptoms but never addressing the cause.
So, is there a better way and if it is better, why are so few people doing it. If lateral thinking or Integrated thinking et al is the answer to success and in the words of Roger Martin “fixing the game” why don’t we all do it.
The answer to that question lies not in the nature of the new approach but in our entrenched education, experience and expertise which, while it allows us to study and admire the work of De Bono, Benjamin Zander, or a Roger Martin, makes its application impossible. Before we can fully appreciate a new way we have to recognize and remove the barriers erected by the old way.
BARRIERS TO CREATIVITY.
PATTERNS AND MODELS
Patterns or structures, now more popularly referred to as models, make thinking unnecessary. We learn these patterns as we grow and develop. From the simplest of tasks like getting dressed, making tea or crossing a road, they enable us to operate quickly and efficiently in our life space, as we use established processes and ignore irrelevant information. For example, crossing a road as a pedestrian requires an entrenched pattern:
Look right, look left and look right again, determine the threat posed by approaching vehicles and if safe cross, to the other side.
Information not relevant to the model is ignored. If questioned after the crossing, pedestrians seldom remember the colour of the vehicles approaching, or the description of pedestrians around them. Information not relevant to the pattern is simply discarded. As we grow older and as we become more educated our patterns become more established and entrenched. We ignore more and more relevant information as we try to shoe-horn new problems and challenges into old models.
We also have to be aware that patterns are often culturally or regionally based. Crossing the road in Japan or Europe requires a different pattern i.e. look left, look right and look left again, vehicles drive on the right not the left! One of my mentors once spent a great deal of time and effort recruiting a Human Resources director for an Indonesian Mining company. He met every criteria, sailed through the interview, made a great impression in the three months he held the position but his appointment was never made permanent. When the reasons were established it turned out that local management were offended by his table manners, they were not bad, but they were different.
Patterns close our minds to new ways, new ideas and different diverse cultures. In seeking new ways to think and problem solve we need to be able, when appropriate, to set the patterns aside and re-examine all of the information available, not only that which reinforces existing models.
ORIGINS AND EDUCATION
Chances are, if your origins are Western, that your thinking patterns are linear. Not that you made a choice, the historical origins of thinking processes in the West trace back to the Greek Philosophers and specifically to Aristotle. Aristotelian Logic was fixated with the search for truth or perfection and has its basis in taking an idea which exists, breaking it into its component parts and then seeking to perfect each separate part, thereby creating a perfect whole. The motor car is an appropriate example. The first workable vehicle took to the road in 1908 and nothing has really changed. The wheels are no longer made of wood and iron, rather of allow and rubber, but there are none the less four wheels. The body work may be composite, alloy and plastic but is it really different? The component parts are all approaching perfection but they remain recognizable versions of the 1908 original. Is there a better way of getting from point A to point B, probably. Is my generation likely to find it, no.
Eastern Cultures base their thinking on parallels. They exploit one idea while actively seeking and developing parallel solutions, allowing for far greater innovation. The digital watch was invented by the Swiss in the 1960’s. They treated the prototype as a curiosity and exhibited the original at a watch fair in Geneva without bothering to patent their discovery. The idea was snapped up by Texas Instruments and Seiko of Japan and in the next ten years the Swiss lost 70% of their market share. Their fixation with perfecting what existed prevented them from seeing the potential of what could be.
If our culture discourages innovation then Education knocks the final nail into the proverbial coffin of the lateral mind. There is an old cliché “Children start their school lives as question marks and graduate as full stops”. Questioning, blue sky thinking and innovation are disruptive influences in the modern classroom, where teachers strive to teach knowledge which already exists, not encourage original thought.
Teachers also employ one of the most insidious symbols in the history of human evolution, the tick.
Popular misconception is that this symbol indicates that an answer is correct i.e.
In fact the symbol is simply an instruction. “Do not think about this problem or question any further, nor should you explore alternative solutions”. Forever more 3+4 will be equal to 7 by order of the mighty ü
This may be acceptable in the classroom but in real life one has to accept that, 3+4 = 12 or, 3+4 = 31, are viable and accurate alternatives. (The first is simply the answer in base five while the second is binary) Education teaches us to stop thinking, life and our desire to succeed, insists that we do not.
Edward Be Bono, not critical of education per se, describes its function as being akin to teaching a pupil to navigate his or her way across a landscape, blank, but for a series of holes. In each hole is a body of knowledge. There is a geography hole, a mathematics hole, a history hole etc. The teacher’s function is to teach pupils the location of each hole and to familiarize them with the content, not to encourage the digging of new holes. Further or tertiary education finds us specializing in one particular hole, digging ourselves ever deeper until we completely lose touch with the reality of the landscape, other bodies of knowledge and innovation.
To become an innovator you have to be willing to step back from your particular field of expertise, think beyond your first answer, which will probably be wrong or inadequate anyway, and find alternative solutions and new beginnings. It is not sufficient to simply seek to perfect that which already exists.
VALUE SYSTEMS AND BOUNDARIES
We suffer from our value systems. They are taught to us through parables, stories, rote learning, passed on through generations and become part of our very beings, inviolate and unquestioned. Wars are fought and conflicts flourish over centuries, as a consequence of principal and our overdeveloped sense of right and wrong.
There can never be peace in the Middle East, Racism persists all over the world, I will never employ a fat person, hunting is wrong…………
As a classic example:
There are two very disseperate religious groups which eschew the consumption of Pork. They both originate in the hot steamy climates of the Middle East where, in the distant past, eating pork would probably have resulted in a certain and certainly painful death. This is clearly no longer the case yet, the “Value System” in which they are immersed from birth, absolutely prevents any deviation from this illogical norm.
Value systems, often derived from experience which is no longer relevant, stop innovation in its tracks. The phrases, “we have always done it that way” “that’s how we do it round here” “we have been doing this for 30 years” come to mind.
The phrase “You can’t do that ! ” usually delivered in an offended tone, rings around the highways of every major city in the world. Usually directed at the back of a rapidly departing taxi, or in our context Minibus taxi. Well, the reality is, they just did and all the exasperated yelling in the world will not change that. In reality, they, the collective taxi drivers of the world, whether in New York or Cape Town, more efficiently transport millions of commuters by selectively ignoring the rules. We are justifiably annoyed because the rules or boundaries which they ignore are in fact relevant, there for the good of all. What, however, about those boundaries that we should be re-examining, not following blindly, as we metaphorically yell, “you can’t do that” while our competitors overtake us in the new global economy.
The Chinese are the Taxi Drivers of the industrial world. We may not like them but we cannot ignore their success. Just as we ride in those taxis, we buy Chinese goods……….
Please accept that your value system is largely an accident of birth. Contrary to your deeply held belief, you are not the only person who knows the difference between right and wrong and that, if you have had 20 years of experience in a particular field, it may well be that you have actually had 1, which you have, having successfully buried your creativity, repeated 20 times.
Innovation requires that we set aside experience and that we question established values, no longer applying those that are inappropriate. Rules for the sake of rules, belong in high schools not in successful enterprises. Successful Companies develop their own shared value systems and norms, through consultation and innovation, constantly re-examining boundaries and discarding those rules which no longer add value.
EGO AND CONTROL
Once we establish ownership of a model or an idea we develop an egotistical attachment which makes it very difficult to accept that some other mere mortal could come up with an idea or a new model which may be better.
Entrenched senior managers often differ from God only in that God does not think that he/she is a senior manager. Creating a new process or flighting a new idea has cost many an enthusiastic youngster his position or promotion.
New ideas and new business models threaten the Egos and self-worth of senior managers. As a result, in many organizations, debate, progress and innovation are stifled.
I lost a very lucrative consulting position in a major oil company by questioning the wisdom or using a the owner of 28 franchised restaurants to launch, in a key note address, the franchise of 850 service stations across South Africa. The oil company, internationally, owned 4,500 existing franchises and controlled a budget which, when measured against the economies of countries, was placed 30th. I felt and expressed loudly my concern, that the approach diminished the value of the experience and expertise held within the Company. I was surprised that my appeal for further discussion was politely ignored and more surprised when my consulting contract was cancelled the following day. I should not have been, the original idea was the only contribution that the CEO had made to the launch.
There is a very appropriate Benjamin Zander quote:
“The conductor of an orchestra makes not a single sound. His power comes from his ability to make others powerful”
As leader and managers we need to encourage ideas and innovation and recognize that our egos have no place in the world. Ownership of old ideas just makes us old!
IN CONCLUSION
(With sincere thanks to Bob Dylan)
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old world is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend a hand
For the times they are a-changin’
Duncan Nel (2010)
The work of Edward De Bono is acknowledged as his books and videos provided the base on which this article is founded.
My thanks to John Anthony Heather who dragged me, kicking and screaming, out of my very comfortable accounting hole.