The Villain Reveal
Have you ever been watching a movie, and only just before they say the words onscreen, you realize who the villain is?
Baaahhhhh! It was Kevin Spacey the whole time!!! How did I miss that?!?!?!
Hahaaa, yeah, me too, but less and less so as I've developed a skill originally coined, 'Thinking outside the box.' More on the origin story later.
The 'box' in 'thinking outside the box' is constructed by a set of assumptions your brain makes, and locks you into a pattern of thinking that prevents you from solving the problem at hand. Thus, the crucial need to think outside that set of initial assumptions.
The magic thing you have to learn to take control of is something psychologists call priming. And, taking control here is more like Tai Chi and less like lifting weights. It's not about brute force, but slight precise adjustments.
Let's get into it.
Think about the color of clouds, please.
Thank you!
Now, think about the color of clean teeth after a visit to the dentist.
Thanks!
Okay, now think of an elephant's tusks, Antarctica, Moby Dick, and answer this question out loud: "What do cows drink?"
If you thought or spoke the word 'milk,' you've demonstrated the power of priming. Cows drink water, like most other land mammals.
This happened, because your brain was primed by my questions to think of things that were white, and when the opportunity to name something white associated with cows came up, your brain took it.
It's possible you noticed that I was trying to trick you, and you kept repeating in your head, "Where's the trick? I know there's a trick coming! What's the trick? Aha! You want me to say milk, but it's water, asshole!"
That's really great : ) Congratulations, you're on the right track. You adjusted yourself from being primed to think about white things, to being primed to think about tricks. This is helpful, but we need a lot more fluidity... like tons more.
Let's go back to that origin story
In the 70's and 80's there was a little puzzle that got popular with management consultants. It asked the puzzle solver to draw nine dots arranged in a grid. Like so:
The challenge was to connect all the dots with no more than four straight lines, but without lifting one's pencil. So, drawing a big capital letter 'E' would not be a solution, because you'd have to lift your pencil, or retrace your path to do it.
Feel free to take out paper and try it yourself, and click the button above to check your answer. Then, read on.
Our management consultant friends in the 80's coined the term 'Thinking outside the box' from this puzzle, because most people who put pencil to paper never attempted to draw straight lines beyond the confines of the imaginary box that the dots form. We need to draw beyond that box to solve the puzzle given the parameters, but even if we do we're still in innovation preschool!
We have to go further beyond
Once you start to master your own priming, you'll see that there are hundreds of ways to solve this puzzle. Here are a few from innovation courses I've held in the past. Some are delightful, some are wacky.
- Draw the dots close together and use a thick marker to connect all the dots with one line.
- Use really long lines, and angle them drawing a big letter 'Z' to connect all the dots.
- Rip the paper and line up the dots. Then connect them with a single straight line.
- Fold the paper like an accordion so the dots fold over the edges, then touch the edges together and draw a straight line along the edges touching all nine dots along the way.
- Fold the paper so that all the dots are on top of one another and pierce the paper drawing a single line through all the dots.
- Use a straight line that circles the globe all the way around tilted just slightly so it crosses the next row of dots on each go around.
- Draw a characature of a line that's curvy and touches all the dots, but has a speech bubble that says, "I don't do drugs" or "I prefer the opposite sex." Remember not to lift your pencil.
- Draw the dots 50 times on 50 sheets of paper, but closer and closer together until they're touching on page 50, and then flip through the 50 sheets simulating a single straight timeline.
- Use a single line of dialog: "You nine here... Let me give it to you straight. In the end, you're all dots!"
In order to come up with any of the above ideas you have to identify and break assumptions you hold.
Assumptions like needing to keep the paper on the desk, or not ripping it, or interpreting 'straight line' as a geometrical thing. You can change your viewpoint, literally bringing your eyes down to desk height and seeing that the dots are perfectly alined from that perspective. You can begin to reimagine what 'connecting' means, or explore negative quantities of lines (any negative number is less than four). You can draw one long straight line, and then rip the line into lots of sections. You can challenge semantic assumptions about the phrasing of the puzzle, operational assumptions about how to execute on the instructions, contextual assumptions and more.
I've given a ton of examples, and made it seem a bit easy to engage this skill, but the truth is breaking assumptions is hard to do. Also, while puzzles are fun practice, we need to affect our thinking in our real lives and in the challenges we face at our jobs.
Going past puzzles
Quick story...
I walked into a building in Manhattan a couple years back. Got my paper security badge, guard pointed toward the elevators, I heard a 'ding!' and walked through the open elevator doors.
I looked for the number 14, but it wasn't there. It seemed like the buttons only had numbers from 20 to 40.
I stuck my hand out to keep the doors from closing, and stepped back out into the elevator bay and right there in a big plaque above the elevator across the hall it said, "Floors 2 through 19."
The ding, the guard pointing, the security badge... I was primed to think I had gone through all the needed steps to get where I was going. It's an easy thing to miss, and there's no reason why an elevator rider should know to look for elevators that only go to certain floors, but this is a very real circumstance, and a tiny example of the world not abiding by reasonable assumptions.
In fact, there are no reasonable assumptions in innovation. The point is to be able to challenge everything about the current understanding of a situation.
Assumption Busting
There are two distinct steps to assumption busting. The first is to enumerate your assumptions. If you notice one assumption you've made about a problem that's great, but the idea is to go beyond. Try and notice the whole blanket of assumptions you are cloaked by.
Second is to bust those assumptions wide open. If you assume your marketing plan will be executed by your team as you expect, and that it'll reach its goals, then consider that your team will execute worse, better, or differently than you expect, and that you might exceed, fall short of your goals, or produce certain outcomes you could not have predicted.
What happens when you become fluid in your thinking in this way, is that your possibilities expand. You begin to consider things others do not, and your capacity for innovation, and effective leadership grow substantially.
