Chapter Six
Higher Learning
Strategy without self-knowledge is useless. Shakespeare wasn't thinking of corporate vitality when he wrote Hamlet, but Polonius' famous advice to his son Laertes holds the same truth for corporate strategy as it did for an individual in Elizabethan times: “This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, like the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” But what does it mean to be true to yourself? What is self-knowledge? Kabbalistic Judaism teaches that awareness is holiness. Buddhism finds its highest form of spiritual achievement in complete consciousness. So, too, the greatest minds of science, art, music, philosophy, and literature broke through the Dark Ages of fear and dogma through a soaring intellectual Enlightenment.
Whether the quest for deep understanding is intellectual or spiritual, it is the state of knowingness itself that fascinates futurists. Let's call it neural nirvana. Spiritual leaders across all time and space have used meditation, chanting, fasting, and many other rites to tap into this fertile territory. The futurist uses a different sort of ritual to unlock the creativity stuck between our conscious and unconscious minds. That in-between thinking is a key component in what neuroscientists qualify as intelligence: the ability to solve complex problems and make predictions about the future.
Remembering the Future
The first step for a futurist is acknowledging that the primary function of the human brain is to make predictions. Recent brain-imaging research literally illuminates this process—one that may seem counterintuitive at first: we predict the future by referencing the past. At Washington University's McDermott Memory and Cognition Lab, psychologists Karl Szpunar and Kathleen McDermott used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to take pictures of subjects' brains as they remembered a past event, then compared them with pictures taken while the same subjects imagined a future event. Szpunar and McDermott made an important discovery: the same neural networks of the brain “light up” whether subjects are recalling the past or forecasting the future. These researchers state, “In order to form these vivid mental images of the future, what we are doing is relying on our memories.”1
Re-Perceiving the Future
The brain is constantly memorizing data concerning the people you meet, the places you go, and the things you hear, feel, see, touch, and experience. That way, when you encounter something similar, you can pull from this vast store of data and say, “Ah, I know how this goes.” This process is in play even when we are performing as simple a task as visiting an unfamiliar grocery store. Says Szpunar, “If I am imagining myself at the grocery store, the mental images that I have stored in my head are of the local grocery store—it's not just coming out of thin air. I'm retrieving it from my memory and using it in this novel way.” Any nervousness about navigating the aisles of an unknown future is assuaged by memories of the layout of the past. By accessing your memory, you can predict that the lettuce will be next to the cucumbers, not the garbage bags.
This neural mechanism provides us with a sense of security when facing an unknown future—as long as we can find a reference for it in our past. In a study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Jeffrey M. Zacks, an associate professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, focused on the midbrain dopamine system (MDS), a part of the human brain that dates back to our earliest evolutionary phase and is used to provide signals to the rest of the brain when it is faced with unexpected events.2 To build a theory of prediction, Zacks's team used fMRIs to record the brain activity of participants watching a movie of everyday events, from washing clothes to building a LEGO model. The researchers stopped the film at different points, either in the middle of one of the activities or just before the next activity was set to begin—and asked the volunteers to predict what would come next. Ninety percent were able to predict the future when the film was paused in the middle of an activity, but fewer than 80 percent were able to make a prediction at the brink of something new. These moments of unpredicted change sparked primitive midbrain dopamine activity, indicating not only uncertainty in the participants but also anxiety about their uncertainty. As Zacks described it, “They are noting that a possible error is starting to happen, and that shakes their confidence. They're thinking, ‘Do I really know what's going to happen next?’”3
Hence our hardwired inclination to get stuck in the Permanent Present. Zacks hopes to use his understanding of the neurology of predictive perception to help fight such diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. His theory that our ability to predict the future depends on the maintenance of a mental model of what is happening now reinforces the idea that we can easily imagine only what we already know. This helps explain why the future—whether it is represented by dinner coming out of a printer, cockroach robots, or just an old-fashioned natural disaster—consistently catches us by surprise. Instead of regularly practicing foresight, most of us live in the Permanent Present. Letting go of past and future thoughts in order to live in the now may be a worthy spiritual goal of Eastern religions as well as countless self-help pop psychology books, but for business success, our brain's desire to stay in the Permanent Present does no good. We resist changing our thinking and behavior unless, or until, a crisis makes it necessary.
It is the job of the futurist to change that pattern. If our capacity for prediction is limited by what we already know, then the solution is to know more about more things. In other words, because we can't beat the brain's hardwiring, we've got to recruit it by routinely introducing new information, people, settings, sensations, and experiences in order to expand our data bank of memories. In this way, we create more flexible and varied mental models that our brains can use to fill in the blanks of the future. With a richer store of memories, we are able to imagine a vast range of possibilities, understand their nuances better, and make more of the associative links that produce our best predictions about the future.
When your brain makes new connections, insights result. It's like a mental mashup; an established memory collides with new information, and your frame of reference suddenly expands. In that moment, you re-perceive an idea, now in a broader context, with nuances you'd not seen before, and think, “Aha! I've never seen it that way before!” Indeed you haven't. Without the new input and the new synaptic connections that it creates, there's no physical way that you could have seen it that way before.
This moment of insight is what futurists are working for. In that moment, perspective expands and understanding deepens; a cascade of new predictions ripples through the brain and, with it, new ideas start to pop. When this starts to happen in the innovation process, the insights, the new predictions, and the ideas are the material from which a solution is mapped out. The result is a new set of possibilities that fits our interests and matches future conditions. But how exactly do we achieve these insights?
Try Angry Birds.
In my work as a futurist, I have helped my clients produce insights by creating opportunities for their brains to build a broader network of associations. My innovation process is a secular ritual designed to tap into that fertile space between the conscious and unconscious minds or, in neurological terms, the left brain's reasoning and analytical powers and the right brain's sensory and creative impulses. The right brain–left brain dichotomy is a simplification of incredibly complex processes, but it's a useful shorthand for matching the right kinds of activities and settings to the kind of thinking that we want to encourage.
The two hemispheres of our brains become more or less active according to the task at hand. Quick, precise execution and language-dependent tasks require the left hemisphere, whereas big-picture contexts, the creation of meaning, and creative problem solving favor the right hemisphere. We rely on the left brain to handle the present, but we need the associative processing of the right brain to navigate the future.
| Left Hemisphere | Right Hemisphere |
| Tends to break things into their component parts | Relies less on words and language |
| Attends to distinguishing features rather than common ones | Is better at perceiving the “whole picture” by synthesizing and attending to general configurations |
| Processes the world in a linear, sequential manner | Processes different inputs simultaneously |
Unfortunately, we often fail to use what we know about the respective functions of the left and right hemispheres. In business (and in most areas of our lives), we do little to engage the right brain, despite the fact that right-brain activity generates insights. Instead, we take part in a painful modern-day ritual known as the meeting, in an effort to solve a problem or come up with a big idea. Given the left brain's preference for inside-the-box analysis of known quantities, this approach does not lead to the kind of insights that are so prized in innovation. Your left brain just isn't wired for Aha! thinking, so such sessions rarely shift perspectives or generate the insights you're after.
You need to use the right tool for the job, which requires that you understand, first, how the system you're engaging is structured. Futurists apply the analytical powers of the left brain first, to help them get the lay of the land. In my work, I begin that left-brain process with a scan of the four forces. Then comes Angry Birds, or whatever else gets your creative sparks flying. We need to watch My Chemical Romance concerts on the iPhone and attend Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera; we need to listen to lectures by prominent stem-cell researchers and watch Real Housewives of New Jersey; we need to study climatology and take kite surfing lessons. Each new scent, sound, taste, view, touch, movement, and sensation contributes to a rich portfolio from which creative ideas and insights arise. This phenomenon—the ability to make a wide range of connections when presented with a given stimulus—is what cognitive neuroscientists refer to as associative fluency, and is a natural response to novel information.4 New experiences broaden and strengthen our neural networks by building more cross-references between sensory perception (areas related to memory, emotions, symbols, metaphors, and imagination) and reasoning (areas related to judgment, decision making, language, numbers, and planning).
Thinking that emerges from this kind of cross-referencing—and from the activities designed to tap into it—is not language based; rather it appears as memorable moments of clarity. Such moments appear in three forms that I refer to as
Awe, Aww, and “Aha!” moments are fodder for insight generation. Each experience is another piece of the picture that, when put together, presents a complete understanding of the problem you're trying to solve. This is what I call your core insight. Then, with that core insight and its associated ideas in hand, we can return to the left-brain function of figuring out which of our ideas are worth pursuing and what it will take to make them work. This is where strategy is formulated, linking a thorough analysis and exploration of a challenge or issue to an intelligent solution. The ideas can be packaged as projects that are detailed in terms of time, costs, risks, and rewards, and are ready to be tested. These projects can then be further distilled into direct action plans that fit into our daily activities and modes of operation. The Zone of Discovery method is a deliberate process that builds on what you know about the four forces of change and their potentials in the future, and presents a series of steps to discover unique possibilities that align with personal purpose—who you are and where you're going. And it all begins in synapses of the left brain.