A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a glass of water. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at the man. The man thanks the bartender and walks out. Why did the man thank the bartender?

When things are established, familiar and work well, it’s rare to question whether there’s an alternative that may prove better. Yet, experimenting and trying new things without an obvious need can sometimes result in a step change.

Conflict can feel really uncomfortable, unprofessional and unproductive. Yet, avoiding conflict can come at the expense of understanding a situation more deeply. Conflict can help clarify issues and lead to better outcomes. After all, it’s the grit that makes the pearl.

Take this challenge: You have a cardboard box full of sand and some buried coins. You’re given a set of chopsticks and a spoon. Without tipping the box over or touching the sand with your hands, how do you get the coins out?

Many of us prefer to keep doubt at arm’s length. It can feel like the enemy, especially if it renders us unable to make progress, blocks our ability to make decisions and causes us to pontificate rather than move forward. But what if a nagging feeling of doubt or a chronic sense of unease was actually more helpful than not?

We are pattern spotters. We love to see connections and work out how things fit together. The other side of the coin is spotting when patterns don’t quite fit together in the right way. However, this can be hard. It’s less obvious and we’re not always tuned into the signals.

You are taken into a room with a table which has three items laid out i) a box of tacks ii) a book of matches iii) a candle. Your task is to attach the candle to the wall using any of the items available, without the candle wax dripping onto the table below. What do you do?

Do you think in a binary fashion? Yes or no? To make sense of the world, evaluate data and interpret information, we simplify and summarise. Often that’s helpful, necessary and much needed. However, the amazing thing is the extent to which we do this. Researchers have found that we have a tendency to reduce this down, often to two alternatives. Good or bad? True or false? All or nothing? We over-simplify complex ideas and problems. Psychologists call this our ‘binary bias’.

The more information you have, the better, right? Well not always. There’s a fundamental fact that we need to get to grips with. More information doesn’t necessarily lead to better decisions.

Most of us have no problem imagining things happening. However, it's often in a free-flowing, unconstrained, escapism way. We may be less likely to apply the same imagination in a more deliberate and constructive way. Yet, applying imagination in order to work through a decision and watch the implications and consequences unfold in our mind’s eye, can be incredibly revealing. Even better, it’s something we can do with very little time and resource. It’s about creating a new habit of consciously thinking through a sequence of events and imagining how a situation may unfold.

When tackling a problem, you may find yourself struggling to find the solution. This may be the case particularly when you are facing a wicked, fuzzy or ambiguous problem where you don’t have enough information or data about it, or it’s an unknown future. In these instances, looking for the single solution may be the wrong focus. Instead, these might be the times that it will help to think of multiple solutions.

Sometimes it’s hard to think beyond the familiar, even if the desire to do so is there. Going to the extremes can be a way to get beyond typical, obvious and predictable ideas. Going to extremes not only allows you to see ideas more clearly, it can help expose assumptions that are holding your ideas back and can rapidly open up the window of possibility in your mind. It’s not that all the final ideas themselves need to be extreme solutions, but the way to get to the best ones may be.

In 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sailed west from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean to East Asia. From the books and maps available to him at the time he calculated where he thought Japan should be located to the west of Spain. Several weeks later he found land. He sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He called the land he discovered the Indies.

How often do you consider the opposite of what you want to know? If you’re like most people, the answer is likely to be not very often.

The 19th century German mathematician Carl Jacobi was known for his ability to solve difficult problems by following a strategy of ‘man muss immer umkehren’ which means, “Invert, always invert.” If you haven’t yet heard of Carl Jacobi, it's worth taking a moment to acquaint with his ideas since he is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring teachers of his time and one of the greatest mathematicians in history.

How often do you find yourself torn between options, caught in a dilemma or pulled by competing ideas? If so, it may be that you are in what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras call the ‘tyranny of the OR’, where you find yourself choosing between two apparently contradictory strategies. They contrast this to the ‘genius of the AND’ which is recognising that ways forward may come from a combination of ideas.

What happens if you are faced with a problem where you can't define the objectives in advance and there’s no apparent ‘right’ answer? What if there’s not enough known about the goals or that things feel too tangled and complex to work out?

There are some problems which can’t be solved very well through using the usual route of identifying the objectives, defining the desirable outcomes and working through a series of scheduled tasks to get there. The Psychologist Gary Klein recognised these as ‘wicked problems’ that need managing in a different way*. It’s these problems where experiments may be the only way to find the route forward.

Do you find yourself in more and more situations where it is nearly impossible to accurately predict or forecast the future? If so, and you find yourself either freezing and unable to respond due to the uncertainty, or leaping forward blindly, then it might serve you well to switch your focus towards speculating what possible outcomes may happen next.

How you think ahead turns out to be quite crucial. A helpful way is to actively anticipate for future outcomes and prepare for potential problems and opportunities. This is different from predicting or forecasting the future, and certainly distinct from guessing what might come next. So, what makes it different? It's when we proactively tune in to emerging patterns, recognise threats or promising signs, extrapolate trends and run through potential consequences - essentially, it’s about being able to imagine a range of possible futures and go on a mental time travel through them all.

We have a tendency to jump to conclusions and to stop exploring the facts and information earlier than we should. We like answers to questions; and as efficiently as possible. It’s even truer in times of greatest uncertainty, so in the current climate this is something we need to be evermore aware of. Jumping to conclusions too soon can mean leaping to premature answers based on what seem to be reasonable (but often incorrect) assumptions, all because we want to resolve uncertainty.

Have you ever stopped yourself putting forward a view or an idea, assuming that someone else has already thought of it? Or felt that an idea was too obvious and didn't need saying because you’d expect everyone else to be thinking the same thing?

It turns out that we can be poor at judging how valuable our ideas are and not very good at evaluating how unique our ideas may actually be.

Drawing can help reveal patterns more clearly, explore ideas more fully and imagine alternative outcomes more easily. We are not talking about being an artist or drawing a piece of artwork, we are talking about visualising what we are trying to make sense of – whether through diagrams, sketches, flow charts or visual representations. It’s not about aesthetics or creating an outcome in its own right, it’s about tapping into visuals as an alternative to language.

How often do we think we’ve understood the whole picture, only to find out our perspective has been one-sided and we’ve missed something? Red Teaming came about during the Cold War as a way of looking from the enemy's perspective. It was used to get people to put themselves in the position of the enemy in order to think through the less obvious and unanticipated scenarios that could then be planned for.

When faced with lots of information or data, it may seem most efficient to categorise into groups and filter out the anomalies, but it can be incredibly insightful to focus on what doesn’t fit.

What’s the odd one out? What isn’t behaving as you’d expect?

The term sceptic is derived from the Greek skeptikos, meaning “to inquire” or “look around”. Being sceptical is very different from being cynical. If being cynical is about distrusting information, particularly when it challenges existing beliefs or holding views that cannot easily be changed by contrary evidence, then being sceptical is about looking for additional evidence before accepting someone’s claims as true.

What if you’ve already decided what happens next? What if you’ve pre-determined the best outcome ahead of time, before you’ve looked for further data or information?

Just like in a pre-nuptial agreement which decides ahead of time what happens following a marriage break up, it can be a powerful strategy to say “If I see X  … then I will do Y …?” before you get there.

Growth isn’t just a matter of learning new things, but also unlearning old limits. When faced with a challenge, actively consider what previous ideas may be getting in the way of thinking about your new situation differently.

When was the last time you were surprised by something? How often are you surprised as you go through your day?

Being surprised is a good thing! If you’re rarely surprised it means you only see and hear what you expect to, and you may be overlooking vital information that should challenge your views.

The information sources we have available to us may be more varied than we initially think. Just how big is your own echo chamber?

Push out further, go broader and add more variety into the range of sources you use.