Inspire different thinking by visiting a parallel world
Motivated by this HBR post about the crossover of ideas from one field to another (who had a clue that NASA spacesuits were made by Playtex who knew a lot about fitting garments to the human form?) I wanted to write a short post to share some experiences I’ve had helping teams and individuals broaden their outlook to reach new possibilities.
I’ve spent the last 4 years working with teams of people aiming to solve a variety of business or organisational challenges. In that time I’ve noticed that there are two sources of insight that very often drive new thinking.
The first is talking to customers. This is a fundamental part of design thinking/human centred design – the process of understanding your customer in detail to identify the challenges that you could solve and create value both for them and your business. Many others have written on this topic and that’s not the main focus of this post, although it often fascinates me when products and services get developed/launched/iterated without strong input from customers. It can be a challenging path for data-led companies, but you should never forget that the data you’re looking at actually represents humans…
The second source of insight is what I would term parallel worlds. Once you’ve got a well defined statement of your challenge and you’ve already gathered all of the data and insight that’s available within arms reach (which is probably what alerted you to this challenge in the first place), then it’s time to reach out and broaden your inputs.
This is important because it is easy to fall into the routine of trying to solve your current challenge by looking at your commonly used reports, data sources and talking with your regular team. If you always follow that path then it can be hard to generate a different kind of solution.
Once you’ve got your standard data haul completed, and you’ve explored what the competition is doing in your challenge space, and also factored in your customer insight, it’s time to go wider.
Parallel worlds give a different perspective
A parallel world is one where someone is facing the same kind of challenge you’re trying to address but in a completely different environment. Drawing insight from these can drive new lines of thought that you would never have reached based on your standard approach.
A couple of examples from projects I facilitated will help bring this to life:
- By understanding how errors are avoided or dealt with at an air traffic control centre and an aircraft maintenance factory a team significantly reduced errors rates in a call centre
- By talking with a doctor and someone who supports people recently made redundant, a team redesigned a whole customer journey using what they learned about landing hard news messages with people
In both of these cases the insight that came from getting out into a different world drove thinking that just wasn’t possible from looking at data (and we had plenty of that).
It’s still possible to get to a new place even if time is short
It doesn’t always have to be about leaving your office though. It’s great if you’ve got the time and budget to get out and visit, and I really recommend you do if you can. But getting a new perspective can sometimes be as easy as reading something different and sharing it with your team, or watching a TED talk and making connections with what you’re trying to solve.
On one project I wanted to give the team a blast of completely different stimulus but I was constrained by time. I had them for a day and I had a window of about 10 minutes that I could use. I used only 6 minutes 40 seconds by doing it as a Pecha Kucha style presentation. It was enough to get them thinking differently.
So, to summarise – definitely talk to your customers and get their perspectives, it’s so important. But once you’ve done that and you need some creative stimulus, see if you can find a parallel world to explore – I guarantee it will lead to some new thinking.
This is a repost of a LinkedIn article I wrote in 2016. I’m consolidating my writing here on Medium.

