Christopher Penn discusses an interesting notion–the idea that people don’t actually know what their ideal world looks like.
When we try to solve a problem, or consult with others to help them solve their problems, often time we are told to start by answering this question: In a perfect world, what would this process look like? This product? Etc.
It’s a great starting point–in order to get away from the (assumed) inefficient state of today we need to know what a better state looks like. Even if we can’t get there the answer helps frame the analysis and set goals to work towards. But there is a problem with this approach; it assumes people already know what their ‘perfect world’ looks like.
Chris explains why this is dangerous:
One of my favorite TED talks by Malcolm Gladwell is a brief lecture on the evolution of chunky spaghetti sauce.
Get it? Chunky spaghetti sauce didn’t exist before Howard Moskowitz’s innovation not for lack of desire, but because customers had no vocabulary to even describe the desire deep inside their soul. Their worldview didn’t even have chunky spaghetti sauce in it, so there was no way for them to ask for it.
This is so important, and not just from a product marketing perspective. At Stephen K. Hayes’ Evocation event, one of the exercises we did was to envision and document our ideal day in our ideal life, assuming we had a magic wand to make true anything we wanted (with logical exceptions, of course, like not allowing someone to simply explode the planet). What was interesting to me as we shared our visions of a snapshot of ideal life was that for some of the participants, their lack of knowledge (through no fault of their own) created worldviews of an ideal life that were still limited – not for lack of desire for an ideal life, but because some of the things that would make their life truly ideal don’t even exist in their perspective of the world, so they had no idea that their vision could have been even more ideal.
Tunnel Vision: To be avoided at all costs
This is an important observation. So often, we think we fully understand the problem before us or that we are masters of our domain. It isn’t until we meet someone with a drastically different perspective, or view a presentation, or read a story that shocks us out of our narrow worldview that we find or conceptualize different desirable states. The key is to expose ourselves to diverse and contrarian thoughts and ideas. A great vehicle for that is social media. As Chris explains:
Being an active participant in social media allows me to communicate with people far outside my areas of expertise and far senior to me in their own life journeys. Being able to see how Jeff Pulver runs a conference gave me a whole new perspective on running PodCamp. Meeting and talking to incredibly successful business folks gives me better ideas on how to make the Student Loan Network better at what we do. Chatting with multi-book best selling author David Meerman Scott gives me insights into how publishing works. Randomly experimenting with things like podcasting lets me interview experts that might otherwise have little interest in talking to me.
I used to be a social media skeptic. Needless to say I have made a 180. The theory that broadening your perspective by interacting with people outside of your immediate circle and that bring unique experiences and knowledge-sets to the party is critical to innovation and success has, to me, been proven. Social media and firms that specialize in facilitating these types of conversations (full disclosure: I work for one) are powerful platforms for disrupting our stable states. When it comes to thinking, we need more disruption, not less.
Photo via Sandra Winiasz
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Innovation, social media, social networks
interesting
Bill, I think one of the more overlooked but most important points of an exercise like using social media to expose ourselves to outsiders points of views and opinions is the fact that it can overcome what I call the “follow the leader” effect that happens so often. For example, when “the boss” says something is a good or bad idea for the course of a product’s development, it is almost ingrained in our brains to agree and affirm what “the boss” has said. We will almost go out of our way to convince ourselves and others that what “the boss” has decided is the correct course of action. This does a number of what appear to be positive things for us. Firstly, it allows ourselves to think that the course of action decided upon is for the best (whether this is true or not in our own opinions) which leads to the second point which is that it allows for complacency or laziness (which is human nature) because we don’t have to think up our own ideas or play devil’s advocate to the bosses. Thirdly, and most importantly, it helps puts ourselves “the bosses” good graces.
Being exposed to external sources of ideas completely unconnected to our situation, which as you say, can lead to ideas which may have never even occurred to us in our normal course of thinking opens up a whole new world of possibilities and challenges us to question the norm and (as much as I hate this cliche) “think outside the box.”
Maybe you could expound on this a bit more in your writing sometime in the future?
Sorry for the ranting but I enjoyed this article quite a bit and sort of just threw out my thoughts on the page…
-pjs
nice read. questioning and rambling. Is there ever a danger of overexposure to different ideas, thoughts or influences? Can this overexposure of ideas and influences create an undesireable state of confusion and muddy the water (so to speak) when it used to be perfectly clear? Or are the best ideas always collaborations instead of isolated ones?
There seems to be so many influencial data sources nowadays that a unique idea is a rare thing, everyone claims to be the “original”, when there really just a copy of a copy. Nothings better than the original.
@maplesyrup21: Thanks for stopping by!
@Patrick: I think that is a great point–and I am guessing you’ve experienced this mostly when working in small groups (at least, I have). When you have some that will follow the boss’s lead (for whatever reason) they create the conditions for Asch-like conformity, which leads to staleness in thinking and creativity. And it is rare to find bosses that activity advocate open discussion and challenging of their ideas. At some point, there has to be a hierarchy of authority, but there also needs to be some openness to opposing viewpoints. The goal should be to get it right, not to simply be in charge. I’ll definitely be writing more about this in the future.
@nick L: Thanks for the comment. I think we can all suffer from information overload (which can lead to analysis paralysis), but that is only if we are passive consumers of information. I think we should always be sophisticated consumers of information, systematically and critically approaching what we see and hear. If we take that approach we have a better chance of benefiting from diverse viewpoints.
As to the question of unique ideas, I think that innovation and creativity is inherently collaborative. The best ideas are 1) those that build on previous innovations, 2) typically find unique and creative ways to combine diverse sets of ideas or apply ideas from one domain to another. In some sense, everything is derivative of something else–but being derivative doesn’t automatically mean bad or useless.
Bill, I had to google the Asch comment you made above. If I haven’t said it before, I’ve never been exposed (through formal schooling, etc.) to a lot of the content you discuss, but I sure as heck have experienced A LOT of it in my everyday life. The Asch conformity experiment was fascinating. Keep up the enlightening work. The more I learn about this kind of thing, the more I can apply and use it at work, etc…
[...] presentation drove home two points for me: the importance of challenging our assumptions, the impact of data visualization, and the power of relational [...]
[...] I wrote the other day that, for me, the big payoff of social media is that it both exposes people to perspectives and knowledge-sets that they normally would not come into contact with. This accomplishes two things: 1) it can help destabilize stale ways of thinking and 2) prevent such stasis from setting in going forward. Social media can also help bring individuals together to collectively problem solve and create. Social media can be as active or passive as one wants it to be. It can be engaged so that people “bump” into new and interesting people (case in point, Ana and I just bumped into each other via our blogs–we were not formally introduced or looking for each other or people with our respective skills, etc.), or it can be used to actively organize a diverse group of minds with the goal of solving a complex problem. [...]