ist Magazine January 2022

Feature

A nother all-too-common scenar- io: the team has gotten together and spent several hours gen- erating ideas. Then, everyone gets five sticky dots to vote for top ideas. Most people will do this in five minutes and immediately dash out the door. They weren’t forced to engage System 2 thinking, so they won’t. Their decisions will rely on System 1, with all its concurrent biases, shortcuts and mistaken intuition. There will never be the deliberate, conscious, effortful thinking that’s needed at this stage. If this is the typical process in your innovation sessions, you need to make some significant changes. The brain is a “Bayesian inference machine.” Huh? Bayesian logic is a very specific, formu- laic method that provides a disciplined way of combining new evidence with prior models. So, the reference to our brains being a Bayesian inference machine is obvi- ously a metaphor, although a very apt one.

shaking up. Given that our human ten- dency is to retain existing mental models, you need to consciously be doing things to help you and your team break out of this natural limitation on new thinking. Our brains are constantly making shortcuts, mostly in the interest of con- serving energy. As a result, your brain will subconsciously limit your thinking in ways you’re not aware of, unless you consciously and actively manage it. Remaining vigilant about these neuro- science-based barriers can help you dra- matically improve your creative thinking and your innovation processes. „ About the Author:

Whenever people are faced with new information, they use it to only slightly refine – not completely rethink – their existing models/beliefs/hypotheses. Rarely do we assume new data means our existing beliefs might actually be wrong. Instead, we make only incremental and minimal adjustments to our existing beliefs; the least possible change in our thinking that will account for the new data. Further, the more experience you have in a subject, the more of these existing as- sumptions you have about it. You are likely not even aware of all these embedded as- sumptions; many of them are so ingrained in your thinking that it wouldn’t occur to you to question them. They are presumed to be fact – if you even consciously recog- nize that you have these beliefs. Obviously, to reach truly breakthrough insights and ideas, you must go beyond incremental thinking. To get there, we need to consider the possibility that our view of the world (or the market, or our product category, etc.) might need

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Susan Robertson empowers individuals, teams, and organi- zations to more nimbly adapt to change, by transforming think- ing from “why we can’t” to “how

might we?” She is a creative thinking expert with over 20 years of experience speaking and coach- ing in Fortune 500 companies. As an instructor on applied creativity at Harvard, Susan brings a scientific foundation to enhancing human creativ- ity. To learn more, please visit susanrobertson.co/

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January 2022 istmagazine.com