Thinking Inside the Box
Nobody is standing still. Even doing the same thing over and over is progress. Don’t believe me? Look at the companies around us.
As companies try to innovate, they do so either faster than their customers’ needs evolve (and end up producing products or services that are actually too sophisticated, too expensive, and too complicated for many customers in their market) or in most cases don’t innovate as fast they should (and end up losing their market shares).
Companies pursue these “sustaining innovations” at the higher tiers of their markets because this is what has historically helped them succeed.
So as companies get into roadblocks on the way to success they tend to do one of two things. They either do more of the same thing or less of the same thing. It should be clear why they do that. ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ as they say.
But is this approach really suited for today’s market and consumer? Well, lemme tell you a story.
Spoiler alert: It’s not.
In 1942, Albert Einstein was teaching at Oxford and one day he gave an exam to his physics students. After leaving the lecture theatre with his assistant, his assistant remarked ‘Dr. Einstein the exam which you just gave to the senior class isn’t that exactly the same exam you gave to the same set of students last year?’
‘Yeah Yeah’ said Einstein. ‘It’s exactly the same.’
‘How could you that?’ the assistant was incredulous.
‘Well’ replied Einstein. ‘The answers have changed’
What was true in 1942 is even truer now. The answers are always changing. Take the question ‘How do you get from point A to point B?’ would your answer today be the same as it was a few years ago? or in 1942?
What is the purpose of thinking?
Puzzle this question for a minute or ignore it and read on for my answer.
So it’s clearly a case of ‘what got you here will no longer get you there’. To borrow another saying from Einstein; ‘doing the same thing repeatedly, and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.’
That’s right, in this day and age; it would be insane to keep doing the same things over and over. But remember what I said? ‘…as companies get into roadblocks on the way to success they tend to do one of two things. They either do more of the same thing or less of the same thing.’
It would seem that sustaining innovation is the definition of insane.
So how do we get ahead. Well, we need to think differently. How do we do that?
Let’s answer the question I asked above. What is the purpose of thinking?
The Purpose of thinking is to stop thinking
Daniel Kahneman broke down our thinking into System 1 and System 2. System 1 is autopilot while System 2 is critical thinking.
If you’ve ever had to study for a complex subject’s test, you’ve experienced that headache and fatigue that makes you tired even though you’re just sitting or lying down. Why’s that?
That’s because thinking is a high performance activity that draws energy from us. Imagine complex thought to be similar to that moment when your computer fans come up and start humming away and you know your computer is handling a complex task. Your computers don’t stay in turbocharge mode indefinitely and neither do we. So we think in short bursts. Then we switch over to System 1.
‘When it comes to high performance, the majority is always wrong’
Now we know that but what does that have to do with innovation.
Well if you’re going through life relying solely on System 1 then you develop tunnel vision.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
The box gets a lot of bad press for stifling creativity and innovation but in reality. It’s because we think and exist in a small corner of the box.
A curious case is a phenomenon known as moral dumbfounding which to put it simply occurs when you think something is wrong but you can’t give any good reasons that they’re wrong.
These are things that are legally, technologically, physically and morally possible but you still wouldn’t even think about doing. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a lot of room inside the box to do some thinking.
In various industries, we have an even smaller box called Standards or Norms. Dejure and defacto standards; and when we follow these standards, these guides, we’re just like everyone else getting standard results. So what gives us extraordinary results…well we know sustaining innovation is insane. How about Disruptive innovations?
Breakthrough innovations occur when people decide to break the norms in their industry. A taxi company with no vehicles? A hotel chain with no real estate? These ideas were all unthinkable a few years ago. These innovative ideas still occur within the box i.e. the legal, moral, physical and technological boundaries. As people expand the corner of the box that we’re all stuck in, other people join in and follow the model; Uber begets Lyft which begets Taxify and so on.
So in order to get ahead, we need to stop siding with the majority.
