Stepping out of the box (part 2): Techniques for stepping out of the box

This post continues from this post, and explains some steps that can be taken to step out of the afore-mentioned box.

Start anywhere but at the start
If you were to write a book, a criminal novel, where would you start? Most people I guess, would figure out a plot, and then start fiddling with the details. What if you just started to write? Don’t have a plot; don’t know how it ends or who the killer is. Just write something crazy, introduce us to the situation where the protagonist comes across the murder. Put in as many weird details as you can, then start working them out. The result will be very different than if you start by deciding how the murder took place, how the murderer covered it up and then write the book. In inventing it’s the same, most people start either with a technology or an unmet need. Don’t do that, find somewhere else to start. Find a crazy theory of where to start.

How about this? Most people start companies that they either know something about or that interest them. Find out what you know the least about and start with that. Find something that interests no one and start there. Think about roads, extremely boring, and I know nothing about making them. Maybe that’s a good place to start, exactly because I don’t know anything I can’t have any preconceived notions, I don’t know that I have to make the roads using asphalt and stone, maybe because I don’t know that I had to go to a university to ask someone, maybe I went in to the wrong building and met the wrong guy, but maybe it turned out that he had just invented a cheap material that would be perfect for roads, only that he hadn’t realized what the material was for? Maybe he had invented something completely different and you could go with that instead?

Find a starting place that is outside the normal, then you force yourself to think in a new way.

Challenge yourself beyond your capability
The previous example also advocates this point. A friend of mine considers himself a pickup artist, which means he goes out twice a week to pick up girls, and are fairly successful. However, he never uses the same approach twice, so each time he picks up a girl the difficulty goes up, and so does his success rate. My theory is that the more approaches he use, the further he comes from what is normal to do when picking up girls, and the less he is categorized as “the guy who just want to get laid”. It also shows that he is having fun, he’s a cool guy, that loves what he is doing. He says random things, and because of that he get’s random results. My point is that for us that accompany him we always think “that is never going to work”, but sometimes it does, and we are as surprised each time. The thing is that you never discover new grounds if you keep doing the same stuff. A business example would be the notion that start-ups cannot sell to fortune 500 companies. So people will generally tell you to not try. Why not? You have nothing to lose, call Microsoft, tell them about your product, request a meeting. Don’t think your product is good enough? Well, then your that guy sitting on the sideline saying that’s never going to work while your friend steps out of his comfort zone and get the girls. Embarrass yourself, fail, but try; you will be surprised at what you can achieve!

Give yourself over to chance
We make our decisions based on our assumptions, that means that there’s systematic errors in your decision making. If you want something new to happen you can throw a dice. Should I go to that interview or that interview? Throw a dice, let chance decide, not because there’s faith and everything is supposed to happen and so forth, no, because then you end up in situations that you normally wouldn’t be in, and then you get to think about problems that you normally wouldn’t.

Ask someone different
Take the Play-Doh example above, the solution to the problem wasn’t anything that was in the toolbox of the director or the MBA’s, it was a preschool teacher that came up with a solution. Again, if you keep doing the same you get the same results, if you ask the same people you get same answer. MBA’s are all in the same box, so ask someone that’s outside the box, maybe that can shed light from an angle you haven’t seen. If you however are a preschool teacher try asking an MBA. If you are a CEO, try asking someone on the floor, of you are an entrepreneur try asking an athlete.  Find people that are different than you, that think different, that knows less, ask them and listen to them. It's not always those that should have the answers that have them, we often just assume they do. Did you know that monkeys can pick stocks just as well as professionals? Often better? Consider this excerpt:

“In the four years since [Chicago Sun’s Monkey] has chaired and inspired this contest, his stocks have posted annual returns of 37 percent, 36 percent, 3 percent and, in 2006, 36 percent, beating the major indexes every time. It's proof that you don't have to be an insider CEO, an insider hedge-fund manager or a loudmouth on CNBC to make money in the market.”

(read the entire article)
How about that? So maybe amateur investors should stop listening to professionals and go ask the monkeys, or even start making their own theories - that shouldn't be based on the ideas of the financial advisors. (I would go get a sociologist to explain the nature of socially constructed reality if I wanted to make money on stocks, stock brokers don't even know what it is and yet the sociologist will claim thatit controls their every move).

It’s ok to be wrong
Seriously. It is. Whenever in an argument over what’s right and what’s not, try to think “what if I’m wrong”. A good way to do this is to whenever you have a discussion about something, take a break, go to someone that agrees with you and argue the other point. Often we are so sure that we are right that we cannot for the life of us even consider the alternative, but remember that the other person is just as likely to be right if that person believe in her ideas as strongly as you do!

Question all assumptions!
It’s well known that kids have an easier time learning languages than adults. Is it true? I don’t know. It takes a kid two years to learn their first language in a way that they can make themselves understood, and still it’s a couple of years before they speak it any good. I’m pretty sure I could learn French in four years if that’s all I had to do. That kids can learn to speak languages easier than adults is a cultural assumption. It’s something we all (or most of us) believe to be true. The thing is that it doesn’t have to be true, it can of course be true, but if you start questioning these assumptions when you come across them you will surprisingly often find that maybe they aren’t always true. The man running the factory in the example above assumed that his product could only be used for cleaning wall paper. His assumption was wrong, now we assume that making Play-Doh was his best course of action, maybe we are wrong? When you talk to someone, try figure out what yours and theirs basic assumptions are. Challenge them.

Crisis
When everything goes as planned it’s easy to keep routinely doing the tasks you have always done. When crisis appear, that’s when you have to think about new ways to do something. In a way crisis force you to consider option you otherwise wouldn’t, a teenager might not get into the educational program she wanted, so she has to look for new options, a company might discover that their product is no longer in demand, so they have to find new products, or new uses for their products. A new father might discover that his life is turned upside down, so he has to change his routines and his survival strategies.

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Stepping out of the box (part 1): Taking the red pill / Drinking the Kool-Aid

What is the box?
Coming up with radical inventions requires you to step out of the box, but what does this mean? Well, the box is a metaphor for your preconceived notions. The box is the Matrix. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes and blinds you from the truth. It is said that Edison once fired a man for salting his soup before he tasted it; the reason is that this implied that the man was so blinded by the box that he forgot to check its validity. The man couldn’t know that soup needed salt if he hadn’t tasted it, but of course he assumed that he had to salt it because he had eaten so much soup that the salting was on autopilot. The box are all those things we take for granted. From the small things, such as “hamburgers are eaten with a side of french fries, not rice” to the big things, like, “the earth orbits the sun”, some of these assumptions may be true, but this isn’t really the point, the point is that the assumptions block us from thinking differently.

Why should we step out of the box?
First let’s look at why we are in the box. Our minds are designed to maintain the reality we believe exists, and generally this is very useful. What if you had to rethink how to open a door each time you walked through it? What if you had to decide if you liked your girlfriend each time you met her? What if the doctor had to convince you that the drugs you are taking actually will help each morning? It would make life extremely tedious, and the strain on our cognitive ability would be very high, so that our brains would require a lot more energy, i.e. we would need bigger brains and more to eat, which isn't good from an evolutionary perspective. Another reason we are in the box is because it is useful to maintain a sense of stability and reality. Research even shows that after people make a decision on any topic the brain will start to justify the decision so that you won’t change your mind so easily. This also goes for belief. Think about politics, when you decide that a certain party or politician is the one that should be elected it is really hard to change. This is called cognitive dissonance, and is just one of many mechanisms that help us maintain a healthy sense of continuity and reality, it makes us feel consistent. Historically this was useful because it freed up the brain to solve more important issues with its limited resources, in modern day society it's useful for that very same reason.

The problem with our sense of continuity is that it blocks our ability to think about what the world would be if it wasn’t the way it is. This is why US presidents are reelected more times than not. We strive for continuity, because we don’t understand how the world could be different. Stepping out of the box allows us to think about the world in new ways. It allows us to see things that others cannot see. First when you free your mind from the idea that transportation is either by foot or by horse can you start thinking about cars. Did you know that the wheel was never invented on the American continent before the Europeans arrived? They had circles, but no wheels, how weird is that? And no one can blame them, this is how our minds work. We see everything that exist as obvious and natural (the wheel for you and me), and everything that don’t exist, well it generally doesn’t occur to us.

Let me give you an example. I heard an anecdote that goes something like this: Once upon a time, in the olden days a man was running a factory, this factory produced a type of malleable sticky clay that was used to remove sot from the walls. You see, back in those days people warmed their houses by burning coal, and this left residue on the walls. A person would then buy some of this clay-like substance and roll it on the wall, the sot from the coal would then stick to the blob. Since the blob was white the coal would color it so you could even see when it was so dirty that you had to get a new one. One day however the sales started declining, a thorough market analysis revealed that people were using less coal to heat their houses, thus the demand for white clay-blobs fell as well. The manager of this factory started to worry, so he hired the best MBA’s in the kingdom to figure out what to do. The MBA’s effectivised the routines, lay off people, streamlined shipping and so on until they had reduced the cost of the factory to the point where it was impossible to reduce them further. The factory was however still in a crisis, because the problem of course wasn’t the cost, it was that no one needed their product. So what was he to do? In total despair he went to dinner to his sister, she was a preschool teacher, and as casual dinner conversation he explained everything and that he was probably going to lose his job and would have to shut down the entire business. His sister asked if she could look at the product and the manager fished out a piece of white clay from his pocket, his sister started molding it into shapes, and decided to bring it to her daycare the next day to show the kids. When she came back, she suggested making the clay in different colors, calling it Play-Doh and marketing it to kids. Today this business is much bigger than the wallpaper cleaning business of decades past ever was.

The moral of the story is of course that when you look outside the box of your usual surrounding you find solutions that you wouldn't otherwise find. This manager hired MBA’s, and no offence to MBA’s, they’re great, but they all think alike. If you need someone to think different, then don’t use people that think like you and each other. If you do the same, then how come you expect different results? MBA’s have a set of tools, and when you have a hammer, a surprising amount of problems looks like nails. Only when the manager (by chance in this case) got someone that thought differently to think about the problem could a radically new idea come about. To continue reading click here.

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Storytelling continued

Carmen Agra Deedy is a brilliant storyteller and a children’s books author. Originally from Cuba, she moved to the United States when she was a child. Recently I came across a video of her telling a story at TED, and because my last post was long and tenuous, without any video it seems fitting to add another post with this incredible storyteller. Watch the video, and think about what tools she uses to get you excited about the next part. Where do you get physical reactions? What emotions flutter through you? Do you like her as a person? Why / why not? These are the answers that any good storytellers need to understand.


Talk by: Carmen Agra Deedy tells a story. Settle in and enjoy the ride -- Mama's driving!