Practice 2-1. Story pace.
Vision, the hallmark of leadership, is less a derivative of spreadsheets and more a product of the mind called imagination.
–ABRAHAM ZALEZNIK
A San Francisco restaurant owner once asked creativity guru Edward de Bono for advice. The restaurant had been popular in the neighborhood for years. But as the area developed, several other restaurants opened their doors nearby. The increase in choices for his customers brought about a gradual decrease in revenue. Distressed with the downturn, the owner called on de Bono to help find a new edge.
When they met at the restaurant, de Bono asked for a tour. The owner showed him the seating area, the kitchen, the storage room, the cellar, and the office space above. They finished the tour at the bar, where de Bono thanked the owner for the tour and said, “It seems like a great place you’re running here. Now I’m wondering, which part of the restaurant are you most proud of?” Without missing a beat, the owner replied, “The kitchen of course. You’ve seen the equipment—it’s the best. And the workspace is perfect. Our kitchen produces amazing, high-quality food, which is the heart of our formula, and will always remain so. We just need to find a way to promote that again, and win our customers back.”
After a moment’s consideration, de Bono remarked, “Let’s see—you want to revive your business. And you are most proud of the kitchen.” He pondered for a while and suddenly said: “Let’s get rid of the kitchen.”
The restaurant owner was shocked; it wasn’t the advice he’d expected— or wanted—to hear. Worse, this consult was costing him serious money. “What do you mean, get rid of the kitchen?” he replied, unable to hide his panic. “That’s the heart of our business; that’s what we stand for; that’s who we are,” he said, exasperated.
“Well,” de Bono said calmly, “if you want to revive your business, you should get rid of the kitchen.”
“But how can we run a restaurant without a kitchen?” the owner bemoaned.
Detecting early signs of a subtle shift in the owner’s thinking—from denial to resistance laced with some curiosity—de Bono said, “Let’s think about it. What would happen if you no longer had a kitchen? What would your restaurant look like? What would people come here to do? What would attract them? What would be some of the barriers for you to overcome?”
Although the restaurant owner still wasn’t comfortable with the idea, the questions did make him think. “What if we weren’t a restaurant at all, you mean?”
“No,” de Bono said. “Stay focused on the concept of a restaurant. But without a kitchen.”
The restaurant owner, albeit still unconvinced, started to play along. “Well, for one thing, we could use the kitchen space to double the size of the seating area.”
“And how would that be attractive for your customers?” de Bono prompted.
“Well, our seating area hasn’t changed in years; we might be able to remodel it to give it a more upscale, spacious look. Maybe we could even create various different atmospheres to match the moods of our customers.” The restaurant owner, moving beyond his initial resistance, was starting to explore the seemingly impossible idea of a restaurant without a kitchen. “We could actually run it without chefs, which would be a relief, because it’s not easy to find good ones in this area. But there is one big barrier we’d have to overcome: How would we get food on the table?”
“You’re right,” de Bono said. “That is a barrier. What could you do about that?”
The restaurant owner considered some possibilities: “Do we get people to bring it themselves? Should we do something with astronaut food? Should we provide a little kitchenette? Or some sort of oven at the tables so they could make their own food?” He continued to suggest ideas—some good ones, some ridiculous ones—and de Bono didn’t interrupt, careful not to condemn any of them.
And then came the epiphany. “Wait a minute,” the restaurant owner said. “We could get the food from other restaurants. There are Thai, Indian, Spanish, Portuguese, Ethiopian, Mexican, and Italian places nearby. We could become an extra outlet for them, as well as the restaurant with the widest menu choices. And offer that in a modern, upscale atmosphere that fits the type of people that have come to live in this neighborhood in recent years.” He was getting excited, a new formula was born: a voguish restaurant that sourced its food offerings through a nifty logistical system and partnerships with its neighboring colleagues.
Six months later, the restaurant was again the neighborhood’s hot spot. Trendy and intimate, it offered the most diverse menu in all of San Francisco—and probably beyond.1
I’ve identified the word imagination several times already as the source of the “unconventionality” aspect of a vision. Harvard’s Abraham Zaleznik, whom we met in the previous chapter and whose contributions to the field of leadership have been monumental, emphasized the pivotal role of imagination: “Vision is needed at least as much as strategy to succeed. Business leaders bring to bear a variety of imaginations on the growth of corporations. These imaginations—the marketing imagination, the manufacturing imagination, and others—originate in perceptual capacities.”2
Without imagination, you are stating the obvious or holding on to the status quo; your vision falls flat. With it, however, your vision becomes intriguing, exciting, refreshing. Suddenly, it has the potential to energize and mobilize.
“But I’m not a very imaginative person,” people quickly tell me. I hear the same lament from senior leadership teams and midlevel executives all over the world. They tend to confuse imagination with exotic, bohemian, artistic ways of thinking. And sure, that way of thinking is highly imaginative. But it’s not what we’re looking for here. Think of it like this: The very fact that you can plan a vacation proves that you’re imaginative. The ability to look ahead into the future and anticipate events that might unfold is an act of imagination. There’s nothing artistic or eccentric about it. It’s a unique ability that we, as human beings, have developed and that sets us apart from all other species.
In 1981 a patient, known in the literature as N.N. to protect his privacy, suffered damage to his frontal lobe (the part of the brain associated with complicated cognitive functions such as planning) in a car accident. He was no longer able to think about or plan for the future. When researchers asked him what he experienced when told to think ahead, he responded, “It’s like being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair, and then there’s nothing there.”3 N.N. was perfectly able to have normal, intelligent conversations, reflect on his behavior, and access his knowledge. But he was unable to plan his day or imagine life going forward.
N.N. lived in a permanent present, which is believed to be the state of the human brain in its earliest stages of evolution. Only when our frontal lobes developed did we start to become aware of past, present, and future. Along with our ability to envision ourselves on a timeline, we acquired the ability to plan and imagine what tomorrow might look like. We moved from a state of permanent present to one that can anticipate the future. In other words, our ability to engage with the future is one of the things that make us human and that distinguishes us from other species like dogs and cats, who, as far as we know, live in a state of permanent present.
In his landmark work The Image of the Future, early futurologist Fred Polak discovered the critical relationship between a society’s image of its future and its vitality:
Any student of the rise and fall of cultures cannot fail to be impressed by the role played in this historical succession by the image of the future. The rise and fall of images precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.4
Over half a century after Polak described this correlation, we can see it in action in several countries in the developing world today, such as India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia. Propelled forward by their positive image of the future, a future in which they expect a rise in the standard of living, they are energized and entrepreneurial, vibrant and positive. By and large, they accept the current deficiencies of their society because they collectively envision and expect a positive future for themselves and their children.
It’s quite a different picture in some Western societies, especially in southern Europe. Even though the standard of living is often much higher than that of emerging countries, people are depressed, society has stagnated, and vitality is evaporating. Their image of the future is negative and dark. As Polak predicts, without a credible and compelling image of the future put forward by their leaders—specifically political leaders—their cultures risk becoming more and more threatened and becoming a ghost of what they once were.
Polak was among the first to recognize the important role an image plays in society’s vitality, as well as the need for leaders to create and communicate this image, engaging with their creative side. He said, “The spiritual overstepping of the boundaries of the unknown is the source of all human creativity. Crossing frontiers is both man’s heritage and man’s task, and the image of the future is his propelling power.”5
A core leadership responsibility is to find, shape, and describe that inspiring, hope-giving image that stimulates people’s idea of the future. We call it a vision, but, like Polak, we could also have called it an image.
Not coincidentally, image and imagination are etymologically related. In fact, imagination can be defined as the ability to create new mental images with the mind’s eye. Psychologists speak of “the creation of belief-like entities in the mind”6 to describe the term imagination. It’s that kind of vivid imagination that prompted an Oxford mathematics professor, C. L. Dodgson, to write stories for a little girl named Alice. In 1865, working under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, he published Alice in Wonderland, which still stands as a masterpiece of playfulness and creativity in literature today. Alice embarks on adventures that bring her from one logically challenging or inconsistent place to another, taking readers young and old along with her on her imaginative journey.
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be. it would. You see?
—ALICE IN WONDERLAND, LEWIS CARROLL
Are you following?
Our ability to be playful and imaginative is the essence of learning. Without imagination, development and evolution would cease. Progress would halt. This holds true for both society as a whole as well as for us personally. Working with our imagination is critical for self-development and uncovering those unconventional ideas and insights that can fuel our vision. In order to do that, though, we must engage with our creative rather than our rational side. Even Albert Einstein noted that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
But this is where it becomes difficult. It’s easy to say we have to engage with our imagination and our creative side, but for many that remains a hollow phrase. How do you do it in real life? Put your feet up on the desk and stare out the window for hours? We’ve got more urgent things to do than “wasting our time” like that, right? Fast-forward to the section titled Neural Networks in this chapter if you want to understand the neuroscientific answer to this question (or bear with me, since you will get there soon enough).
Interestingly, as children we used to be highly imaginative—without having to stare out the window or put our feet up. We were able to come up with comprehensive stories and adventures using anything on hand, in any setting. A garden could be a football stadium filled with thousands of fans one minute, and a jungle complete with lions and snakes (that we could vividly “see”) the next. Judgmental thoughts did not hold us back; we could thoroughly enjoy and build on our fantasies.
As we mature, though, our rational abilities become more valued and developed while our creative ones grow dormant. Social norms command us to “act normal,” “be real,” and “grow up.” By the time we reach adulthood, our imaginative, playful side has been put on the back burner. And when we do try to ignite our imagination as adults, we often come up empty.
The process of imagination for adults is poorly understood. We’ve made good progress in understanding what suppresses it, but little is known about what fires it up. James Adams’s classic book on creativity, Conceptual Blockbusting, focuses on defining, categorizing, and acknowledging the various blocks that prevent us from “seeing things differently.” Creativity techniques are therefore essentially aimed at attacking what’s in the way so that our intrinsic imagination can blossom. When we are more aware of these blocks, when we can identify and tackle them, the hope rises that we are better able to reach and exploit our creative potential.
Let’s try to encounter some of these conceptual blocks and see what we can learn from the experience. Here’s a great method if you have young children: Take a cue from Lewis Carroll and create stories for your kids (or someone else’s kids), starting tonight. Whether at bedtime or at the dinner table, try to suppress any judgmental thoughts and let the story you create wander into playful, unknown territories. The practice Story Pace actually helps you deliver it in a fun way that will grasp their attention and feed their imagination. And you’ll loosen up some imaginative brain muscles that haven’t been flexed for a while— plus your kids will love it.
Once the kids are asleep, consciously reflect on how you did. Was it easy to come up with stories? What did you struggle with? What surprised you about your story and yourself as the storyteller? Did your kids like your creation? Why, or why not? As you identify the kinds of blocks that may have gotten in your way, this homegrown practice teaches you a lot about the barriers you need to address in order to ignite your visionary capacity.
Why is it that most of us find it difficult to tap into our imagination? What stops us from seeing things differently and thinking outside that legendary box? Let’s look at some of the psychological phenomena that work to suppress imagination.
Biochemists and cognitive scientists study how our amazing neural system called the brain orchestrates bodily functions, from pumping blood to smiling to serving a tennis ball—sometimes even simultaneously. Our brain organizes these functions largely unconsciously. At face value it all seems rather miraculous—and truly, it is. Fortunately, cognitive psychologists give us ways to describe the processes that take place. Here’s a primer of this large body of research to better understand how our imagination works (or not).
Every day we’re exposed to an incredible amount of information. We look around us, we hear, we read, we meet people, discuss, surf the Web, and so on. We expose ourselves to a multitude of sensory inputs. These stimuli are registered, but fortunately not all of them are considered—otherwise we’d quickly go mad.
In fact, by counting the receptor cells of the five senses and their associated nerve pathways, researchers estimate that we process about 11 million bits of sensory data every minute. Yet, by the most generous estimate, we consciously process only forty pieces of that sensory data at a time. The rest is dealt with unconsciously. Or, as James Adams memorably put it in Conceptual Blockbusting, “we have a one-watt mind in a megawatt world.”7
This means our mind does a lot of filtering for us. Even while reading this sentence, you should be experiencing this process. Your senses are picking up other data, such as noises, that you probably didn’t notice until now. It could be birds singing, the dishwasher running in the background, or a car driving down the street; your brain “knows” your reading should not be disturbed by processing these sounds.
Other sounds, however, do grab our attention. If the dishwasher starts to make a funny sound or the car comes to a sudden, screeching stop, your brain alarms you by interrupting your reading. There is a constant filtering of data that your mind performs automatically—a steady stream of decisions about what’s worth processing and what isn’t.
So, your brain decides what to pay attention to and what to make of those things. To do this successfully, the human brain relies on what psychologists call frames (also called schemas, structures, and stereotypes). These frames simplify and guide our understanding of a complex reality,8 protecting us from information overload while helping us comprehend and retain what’s valuable. They “frame” the information that we observe and label it with something we know. These frames have developed as a result of our upbringing, education, and experiences; they provide us with the foundation we need to understand what we experience. In other words, frames are pretty helpful. They help us identify a chair (or a ball, or a pen) in the split second we enter a room, even if we’ve never seen that particular design before. Our sense-making frames immediately categorize the stimuli we take in through our visual receptors because they recognize characteristics we’ve learned over time. As we take in information, the appropriate frame is “pulled from memory” to match the object we’re trying to identify.
But as helpful and powerful as our frames are (remember, without them we’d go mad from information overload), they can also cause trouble.
Sometimes these mental friends lead us to make flawed perceptions, draw completely unjustified conclusions, and prevent us from reconsidering those conclusions. Think about how quickly the process works. Let’s say we see someone dressed in a dark uniform with a shiny badge on a street corner. We’ll probably conclude almost instantaneously that we’re looking at a policeman. That’s because for most of us the only frame we know that combines a dark uniform, shiny badge, and street corner is one that labels the object a police officer.
We don’t consider the possibility that the figure might be a street artist, a woman rather than a man, an actor on his way to a performance, a bank robber dressed up as a policeman, or just someone who likes to dress up in a uniform. We quickly and easily draw a conclusion that’s closed-minded, uncreative, and dogmatic. There’s no playfulness or curiosity at work. And once we learn the truth—that the person is in fact a woman in a dark suit with a gold pin on it—we resort to an embarrassed chuckle, a blush, and a strong desire to move on to something else. We might even get defensive: “Usually I’m more open-minded . . .” Right?
Think about this one. Fred Jones was visiting his hometown when he bumped into an old friend. “Hey, Fred, how have you been all this time? It must’ve been ten years since we last saw each other.” “For sure,” Fred replied. “I’m fine—what about you?” The friend answered, “I’m married now, but to someone you wouldn’t know. And this is my daughter.” Fred looked down at the little girl and asked her name. “It’s the same as my mother’s,” said the little girl. “Then I bet your name is Susan,” remarked Fred. How could he know?
You’ll find the answer in this chapter’s endnotes. Don’t rush to find it, though. Give it some thought. And remember, we’re discussing mental frames—how they can help us, and how they can cause harm by preventing us from seeing all of the options.9
So how come we—sane and rational, smart and well-educated people—fall into these traps? There are a few factors at play, and we need to be aware of them as we cultivate our imaginative side.
First, we unconsciously prefer to seek confirmation of our existing beliefs. Our frames filter out conflicting data, key information that could help us update our thoughts and beliefs. Instead, we hold on to existing beliefs, even when conflicting evidence is right in front of us. Our frames help reshape our perception, sometimes complementing it with things that aren’t even there, just to make sure that our perception fits with our preferred belief system. In psychology, this is called the halo effect. It boils down to our human desire to remain psychologically consistent, so information is interpreted in ways that is favorable to what we already believe or like to believe—for good or for bad.
Imagine you are an amateur tennis player and you’re competing in a local tournament. Your first opponent is the spitting image of Roger Federer, one of the best tennis players ever. The fear you’ll feel is disproportionate to what’s justified, because you’ve assumed your opponent—who plays in your league—would be of similar strength. That belief becomes blurred by the frame you carry with you of that great tennis player who moves quickly, has a great forehand and backhand, and will most likely kill you with his serve. Your perception of your opponent is completed with totally unjustified associations; he might look like Roger Federer, but he isn’t. He might actually be a lousy player. But albeit irrational, psychologically you are already one set behind.
The second reason that explains why we fall into framing traps is that our frames tend to be more obstinate than they should be. The more confirmation we receive of our current thinking, the more convinced we become that it’s true. In other words, our frames grow stronger with time. Our assumptions of what is true become real eternal truths for us, and our convictions can grow so deep that we literally filter out anything that’s inconsistent with a belief that we now consider a truth. It blinds us in a way and shields us from considering alternative perspectives. We’ll dig deeper into this subject in Chapter 5, but to quote Arthur Schopenhauer, “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
To make matters worse, if we’re offered an incentive to hold on to certain beliefs—such as a bonus, an attractive career path, or even just the expectation that our boss will like us—the problem increases. We like to think of ourselves as stable and objective people, but psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated this is not the case.10 For most of us, incentives can create mindsets and behaviors we might not be proud of.11 Think of some of the bankers who contributed to the worldwide financial crisis. It didn’t matter that they knew housing prices could drop (assuming they had some minimal education in economics that explains how prices fluctuate in a free market). Incentives gave them a reason to engage in predatory lending and other unethical practices and to spin a convincing story to reassure their clients that real estate prices only go up. They modified their belief system, as well as their ethical stance, to fit with the practices they were rewarded for. Some with ill intentions, but undoubtedly many also truly “believed” that there was very little risk since house prices had been going up consistently. And undoubtedly, too, some expert (or some senior leader) explained why prices could be expected to continue to rise. It was the explanation they wanted to hear, so they echoed it. Since everyone around them “believed” it, even those with assumed authority and expertise, reality became interpreted this way to ensure their own psychological consistency (halo effect). All of which created the “perfect storm” conditions for a huge framing trap.
In terms of a vision, the inherent risk of inflexible frames is the phenomenon of tunnel vision. This occurs when someone is unwilling to consider alternative perspectives and dismisses any data or arguments—no matter how coherent—that counter the person’s belief system. We already alluded to this dark side in Chapter 1, and we will explore and discuss it (and what to do about it) in much more detail in Chapter 5. But as it relates to imagination, it’s important to have an awareness and understanding of the phenomenon here. After all, any tool intended to increase your creativity is essentially supporting you in constructively breaking through the limitations of your own mental frame set, and looking beyond your assumed “truths” in order to get you to see things that you might otherwise have missed.
So, the concept of frames and their inherent persistence helps you understand what stops you from exploiting your imagination. Tapping into your imagination is about being open-minded: It’s about having a fundamental willingness to challenge your assumptions about what you consider to be true, and reframing those assumptions when it’s called for.
David Copperfield, the illusionist who cuts himself in half daily (and sometimes twice a day) and makes Learjets, the Statue of Liberty, and members of his audience disappear, refers to himself as a scientist of show business. He says:
The stage is our laboratory, and through trial and error we’ve learned a lot about the mysterious inner workings of the brain. We’ve figured out that, with some skill and misdirection, we can get an audience to focus its attention in the right place and at the right time so that we can create the illusion of magic. In fact, these illusions are created not on stage but in the brain . . . The kind of perception I deal with chiefly, though, is based on biology and psychology. The human brain—the most complicated organ on the planet—is the theater where the magic I perform really takes place. The hand is not quicker than the eye, but the hand is quicker than perception.12
Copperfield is actually describing frames here. Our desire for “sense making,” and the way our brain categorizes what we perceive into things we know and understand, is incredibly powerful. We seek the truth and mistake our perception for it. And then we’re baffled by Copperfield’s ability to make a Learjet disappear onstage.
To see how this works, check out the checkerboard image (Figure 2-1), invented in 1995 by MIT’s Professor of Vision Science Edward H. Adelson. You see a checkerboard-patterned square and a cylinder in its right-hand corner. The cylinder is casting a shadow over the checkerboard as a result of a light source outside the picture. There are also two squares, A (outside the shadow) and B (inside the shadow). How do A and B compare?
You probably thought B was lighter than A, right? As you can see in the second picture (Figure 2-2), though, both squares are the same color. In its attempt to make sense of the picture, your brain made a mistake. Your “experience frame” immediately recognized that B was a white square on the checkerboard and should therefore be lighter than the darker squares on the checkerboard.
Even though you now know the answer, your mind is probably still struggling. Did you go back to the picture a few times to check? You did, didn’t you? The fact that the “lighter” square is the same color as the “darker” one doesn’t match what you already know. You are confused, and it takes a few times of checking and double-checking for your rational side, which was tricked by the experiment, to accept this fact.
Now ask yourself a tough question. What was it like to undergo this experiment? Check in with your feelings. You’re probably experiencing some embarrassment about having fallen into the trap. Chances are you also have a feeling of irritation. You’re looking for a rationalization for having missed this answer (“didn’t take enough time,” “couldn’t see it clearly,” “didn’t understand the instruction”), yet in the absence of any good excuse, you are slowly coming to grips with the fact that your mind has been fooled. And it feels unpleasant. You’re probably attributing this to the fact that my prediction of your “foolish” behavior was spot-on. Right? But what’s really at work here is your mind struggling with the apparent inconsistency that a seemingly lighter square can be the same color as a darker one. This struggle is annoying, it plays with your mind, and you probably don’t enjoy it.
That’s what cognitive dissonance does to you, and that’s why we prefer to steer clear from this state of confusion—and if that requires denying reality, so be it (sometimes).
Alan Greenspan was chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. Arguably one of the most influential men on earth during that time, he was known for his market-oriented stance. As former NBC correspondent Lisa Myers once put it, he was “an unabashed champion of deregulation and free market.” His deeply rooted belief system was grounded in these principles, and it served him well for some forty years.
And then it didn’t. Greenspan’s belief that the market would self-correct led directly to the worst worldwide economic crash since the Great Depression. According to American political economist Robert Reich, “Greenspan’s worst move was to contribute to the giant housing bubble. In 2004, he lowered interest rates to one percent, enabling banks to borrow money for free, adjusted for inflation. Naturally, the banks wanted to borrow as much as they possibly could, then lend it out, earning nice profits. The situation screamed for government oversight of lending institutions, lest the banks lend to unfit borrowers. He refused, trusting the market to weed out bad credit risks. It did not.”13
Despite several attempts at rationalizing his actions, beliefs, and assumptions as the crisis unfolded in 2007 and 2008 (when he was no longer Fed chairman), Greenspan finally conceded on October 23, 2008. In response to questions from Congress, in publicly broadcast hearings, he finally admitted to his flaw in thinking that markets would regulate themselves. In his mea culpa he said, “I was shocked because I had been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”14
The concept of cognitive dissonance was first introduced by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957.15 It describes the discomfort that occurs when our beliefs are challenged by contradictory information. As said, most people are driven by a desire to remain psychologically consistent and will go to great lengths to avoid conflict, holding on to their beliefs by rejecting or avoiding any contrary data. Sometimes the brain actually convinces itself that there’s no real conflict, finding reasons to explain the supposed differences away (called rationalizing).
Greenspan’s confusion and dramatic acceptance of his flawed assumptions illustrates the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. It explains why Greenspan ignored earlier evidence from a Fed colleague that the housing market was headed for a cliff. After the fact, he desperately defended his dismissal of these clear warning signs: “There are always people raising issues. And half the time they are wrong. The question is, what do you do?”
As reasonable as that line of thinking might sound, and notwithstanding Greenspan’s great dedication to his job, the fact is that with big roles come big responsibilities. An unwillingness to consider perspectives that don’t align with your deeply rooted belief system isn’t one of them.
We can only hope people in similar positions have drawn lessons from Greenspan’s dramatic error. In Greenspan’s case, his inflexible belief system that mistakes its own assumptions for truths is one we are still paying the price for today.
Let’s look at another example where an unwillingness to reframe assumptions caused tremendous damage. Eastman Kodak is often cited for having completely missed the boat on digital photography. Founded in 1888, and market leader throughout most of the twentieth century, Kodak was brought to its knees in January 2012, when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (from which it emerged in 2013). What is often forgotten is that Kodak was actually well aware of the promises and developments in digital photography. Company executives analyzed digital technology as far back as 1981 (when Sony introduced the first commercial digital camera, the Mavica). So it wasn’t as if Kodak woke up one day and, out of nowhere, digital cameras had emerged, taking the company by surprise. Instead, Kodak knew all too well how the technology progressed. But still the company did not act on it.
That’s what cognitive dissonance is capable of. Kodak executives fooled themselves for too long with a rock-solid belief in their existing business model. As Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui explain, “They could not fathom a world in which images were evanescent and never printed.”16 The desire to hold on to that worldview was strengthened by the fact that the margins on film were so much better than on digital products (60 percent vs. 15 percent). To change course would have kicked a serious dent into their financial outlooks for a few years, so they were wary to enter that transformation, and in the end postponed for too long. This reluctance was most likely strengthened by the incentives that were in place for executives—performance bonuses—which undoubtedly heavily factored in quarterly or annual results and encouraged executives to hold on to a worldview that would pay their mortgage, not one that would challenge that worldview and that would have them consider the “unpleasant” implications of a more digital future.
So cognitive dissonance, and an unwillingness to challenge your own assumptions, can lead to disaster; artfully breaking through your inherent mental frames is therefore required to use the power of your imagination. But that doesn’t happen automatically; it requires an understanding of what it takes to unlock the imagination. Let’s look at two approaches to help us understand what fires up imagination: a neuroscientific suggestion and a psychological take on it.
Gradually, we are making progress in understanding what happens in our brain, at a neuroscientific level, that explains things like imagination. There is still a lot we do not know. Albeit popular, many of the claims about the relationship between brain activation regions and certain functions and emotions are still speculative (something scientist call “brain porn”). But some things about the brain we do know with considerable certainty. Adam Waytz and Malia Mason, scholars at the Kellogg School of Management and Columbia Business School, respectively, list four neural networks that have been identified: the default, reward, affect, and control networks.
The default network and control network are what interest us the most here. Let’s start with the default network. That’s the one at work when we aren’t actively focusing on anything particular—it’s kind of the standby light on your television set. This is by itself a very interesting finding; Waytz and Mason write that “one of the most exciting discoveries in neuroscience in the past decade is that the brain is never truly at rest.”17 That means that when it is in a “task-negative” state (doing nothing in particular) the brain spends considerable time processing internalized existing knowledge. In this state, the brain detaches itself from the external environment and allows us to imagine: what it would be like to be in a different place, a different time, a different reality.
This explains why it is difficult to actively engage with your imagination when there is too much distraction. Your brain simply doesn’t go wandering off, since it is captivated by the state that requires it to process external stimuli. When you are very focused and “in control,” it is predominantly your control network that is at work. In a sense, the default and the control network are therefore each other’s countervailing forces.
It is important to realize that breakthrough ideas are unlikely to occur when you are very focused—your control network dominates and overshadows your default network. Most people recognize that solutions to problems they have been working on can come “out of nowhere” when they are not deliberately thinking about it. For instance, when taking a shower, a walk, or just zoning out. Some people actively seek these idle states through activities like meditation, running, or listening to classical music. And to answer an earlier question we asked about how we could possibly engage with our imagination (caricatured as “putting our feet on the desk and staring out of the window”), neuroscience seems to indicate that experimenting with total detachment would be a good strategy to boost your imagination.
Psychologists use a higher-level description to explain what it takes to unlock your imagination. Theirs builds on the concept of mental frames. Let’s illustrate with a famous anecdote.
In 1983, Steve Jobs was asked to look for his successor as CEO of Apple. The company’s board of directors felt that in order to take Apple to the next level, they needed a more seasoned leader. Although Jobs disagreed with this assessment, he found his ideal candidate in John Sculley. Sculley’s conventional business background and considerable marketing successes at Pepsi appealed to Apple. He was the creator of the famous Pepsi Challenge (a highly successful marketing campaign that showed lifelong Coke drinkers preferring Pepsi in a blind taste test) and seemed to have what it takes to sway consumer opinion. Apple needed someone who could do the same and move Apple computers into the mass consumer market.
American Management Association / www.amanet.org
But Sculley, who started at PepsiCo as a trainee in a bottling plant, was poised to take over as CEO of the company in the near future. Other than introducing Apple computers into PepsiCo’s sales organization, Sculley had little affinity with the emerging technology industry. Being from the East Coast, he also knew little of the Silicon Valley culture. He was hesitant to trade in his successful career at the praised multinational for an uncertain job at a tech firm that was barely out of its infancy phase. Even so, Jobs approached Sculley, who was reluctantly intrigued by the offer.
After having had several conversations, they were nearing the decision point. Jobs, noticing Sculley’s final doubts, realized that more arguments wouldn’t win him over. He decided to make a final appeal with this now legendary quote: “John, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
The question hit a home run, and Sculley conceded. It’s a classic example of the power of reframing assumptions, the psychological direction in unlocking your imagination. The picture Jobs painted of what could be, together with the persuasive final punch line, broke through Sculley’s deeply rooted belief system. Describing the product that was dear to him as “sugar water” was nasty but ultimately true. And Jobs didn’t persuade Sculley with the CEO role, but instead offered him to come along to “change the world.” Jobs’s radical, frame-breaking pitch worked and Sculley conceded. (Sculley’s time at the helm of Apple wasn’t a success, but that’s a different story).
Jobs’s successful pitch to win over Sculley worked much like a good joke does. Just as Sculley listened to some routine arguments for leaving his comfortable, well-paid position, we listen to an unfolding joke with our minds racing ahead in anticipation of an ending consistent with our beliefs. And then the punch line arrives, taking us by surprise. It’s a “gotcha” moment—one that can generate a good laugh (or, as it turns out, a job contract).
Try following the pattern:
Two guys are on lunch break. As they open their lunch boxes, one says to the other: “Not again! I’ve got another peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’m sick and tired of them!” Grumpily, he closes his lunch box. His friend asks: “Well, why don’t you ask your wife to put something else on your sandwiches then?” To which the other guy replies, “My wife? I always make my own lunch.”
Did you catch yourself framing the story that led up to the punch line? The joke may have lured you into a traditional gender-role frame, assuming the first worker’s wife prepared his lunches. The punch line was unexpected, outside the frame you were lured into. That made it surprising and supposedly funny (although the fun factor in a joke rapidly degrades with explanation).
Humor, like imagination, has the power to change our frames—and our way of thinking. That’s why the best salespeople are usually funny and entertaining—they get you to step over your initial reluctance or resistance. Their humor helps you flex your assumptive framework and opens up for the arguments they would like you to see or think about. Also, have you ever heard someone suggest that in order to create some breakthrough ideas you should hold creativity sessions in an unconventional, off-site location where you can really have a good laugh with each other? Now you know why.
Lateral thinking is closely related to insight, creativity, and humor. All four processes have the same basis. But whereas insight, creativity, and humor can only be prayed for, lateral thinking is a more deliberate process. It is as definite a way of using the mind as logical thinking—but in a very different way.
—EDWARD DE BONO, LATERAL THINKING
In 1967 Edward de Bono, the creativity guru introduced at the beginning of this chapter, invented the term “lateral thinking” and explored it in his book The Use of Lateral Thinking.18 It has since become part of the vernacular and is even used as a synonym for creative thinking. Lateral thinking is a set of systemic, deliberate methods for challenging assumptions and opening up innovative ways of thinking and seeing.
One of those methods is the Random Entry Idea Generation Tool. It involves arbitrarily selecting a noun from a list (or the dictionary) and associating it with the issue you are working on. As random as the association appears at first, there’s a good chance you will find some connections. If you’re wondering how to improve the performance of your customer service department, for example, and you randomly select the word “pizza slicer,” finding connections between the two could help you uncover new opportunities.
It might not be easy, and not all objects or nouns will yield instant success. But the process demands persistence. Because your assumptive framework will try to deny any connections, your mind won’t immediately be willing to entertain associations between something as serious as your customer service performance and something as irrelevant as a pizza slicer. But by forcing yourself not to give up too quickly, possibilities will spring to mind. Thoughts of food, cutting, knives, and sharpness could lead to speedy delivery, frozen pizzas, and specialized utensils. Those might trigger thoughts about the importance of follow-through, delivery of fully prepared spare parts, and the development of a special “utensil” to deal with a common customer complaint—one that could delight customers who report a problem. That which at first glance appears unhelpful and silly can trigger a useful thought you might never have considered if you had looked at the issue within the usual frames.
Another de Bono method, provocation, involves generating provocative statements about the issue you’re focusing on. In the case of increasing customer service performance, we might say: Move agents closer to the customer, reward self-service, get customers to help each other, or market it as a new product. Some ideas will be too impractical, too costly, or just too crazy. The value of provocation, though, lies in taking your thinking from static to dynamic. Considering the customer service examples could lead you to the idea of rewarding customers who help other customers, possibly in a virtual community environment. It’s an idea that might never have surfaced if you maintained a strict focus on your own performance improvement.
Using creativity techniques like provocation might feel somewhat gim-micky at first, but they’re very effective at challenging the strong preferences we hold because of our current beliefs and ways of thinking. Let’s try a few more techniques.
WWGD is a method that never fails to surprise me with its productivity. The abbreviation stands for What Would Google Do, a name inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s 2009 bestseller.19 To use this method, ask yourself (or preferably your team, because most of these techniques work much better when applied in a group) how Google—or some other remarkable organization— would solve the issue at hand.
Start by selecting a number of iconic companies that everyone has strong brand associations with: Think IKEA, McDonald’s, Southwest Airlines, Zara, Nespresso, Singapore Airlines, Harley-Davidson, Toyota, Expedia, and Amazon.20 It’s good to have a variety, from self-service (IKEA) and streamlined production (Mc-Donald’s, Toyota) to customer centricity (Southwest, Singapore Airlines) and design (Nespresso). It’s also important to focus on companies outside your industry, even though their products, culture, and ways of working might seem miles apart from yours.
As you think about how one of these companies would tackle the problem at hand, you’re reframing; you’re reassessing your assumptions and moving from an intrinsic, static view of the situation to a more liberated, open-minded exploration of options. WWGD will very quickly generate a lot of ideas. Some of them will be completely useless, but you only need one good idea to get a return on the one-hour investment you’re making with your team.
In a slightly different form, the WWGD method was promoted in the 2005 innovation classic Blue Ocean Strategy,21 written by two strategy professors from the leading European business school INSEAD. The metaphorical title distinguishes between growing, uncontested marketplaces (blue oceans) and crowded, mature, competitive ones (red oceans). The authors aim to help organizations find the former, using two tools: the value curve and the four-action framework.22 The value curve represents the attributes the existing industry is competing on, through the eyes of the customer. For example, the hotel industry competes on factors such as location, service level, facilities, room size, price, and a number of others. In order to find a blue ocean proposition—something that no one has offered yet and that represents a fully untapped market—you can brainstorm new attributes to complement a company’s value curve.
But where would you get new, refreshing attributes from—ideas that nobody has considered yet in their value curve? Inspiration could come from other industries, much like the WWGD method suggests, or other alternatives to a hotel night, such as a caravan park, a friend’s apartment, or even the ordinary night at home. Why look at other industries and alternatives? If you don’t, you’ll only see the factors everybody’s already looking at. Your direct competitors may do a little more (bigger room, later operating hours for the restaurant, larger swimming pool) or a little less (lower price) to differentiate, but essentially they remain focused on the same things, creating a cut-throat red ocean.
Imagine you travel often, with a wallet filled with frequent-flier cards. You regularly stay in hotels, which, thanks to your generous boss, are four-or five-star rated. Yet they can’t compete with home. Why? Because after a hard day at work you check into a hotel that—regardless of its promises— gives you a pretty similar experience: You dine on your own, at an annoyingly slow pace; you kill time getting some work done, having a drink in yet another anonymous hotel bar, or mindlessly watching TV for a while; and then it’s time to sleep.
And here comes CitizenM, a hotel concept designed to meet the needs of a “smart new breed of international traveler, the type who crosses continents the way others cross streets.”23 Understanding this traveler’s boring evening experience, CitizenM has overamplified the lobby space in its hotel. The lobby offers various areas with different atmospheres to suit your evening mood. According to the company’s promotion, the lobby is “designed to function as your living room, whether you want to be alone or connect with some fellow mobile citizens, whether you want to relax or do some work.”
CitizenM recognizes that, for those who spend a large part of their lives on the road, there’s little glamour in killing yet another night in a hotel— no matter how many stars it has—and it extended the traditional hotel value curve with attributes that are more closely associated with home, strongly appealing to a specific market segment. It’s a unique entry in an industry that seemed to have seen it all, where traditional chains fight in a red ocean of high competition.
———
Tapping into your imagination—something you were undoubtedly good at as a child—requires unlearning some of your grown-up beliefs and embracing playfulness and curiosity. It also requires a willingness to challenge your assumptions and suppress the defensive reflex that comes up when some of the things you strongly believe get challenged. As you now know, those beliefs, or sense-making frames, can’t be stopped. They are going to keep making sense of what you experience, which can both help you and get in your way.
Whenever you need to get imaginative, remember the latter. Practice creativity techniques such as lateral thinking, WWGD, blue ocean, or one of the many others that have gained popularity over the years. Learn to appreciate these techniques, even if they don’t instantly lead to breakthrough ideas. By frequently challenging and reassessing your beliefs and assumptions, you’ll get better at tapping into your imagination. You’ll get better at finding the kinds of unconventional, intriguing, creative ideas that can fuel your vision.
