Sceptical? Doubtful? Questioning? How these things can play an important and positive role in how we think.
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Sceptical? Doubtful? Questioning? How these things can play an important and positive role in how we think.
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.
How do breakthroughs happen? It’s amazing how many times they start with a chance observation that triggers a spark which leads to a discovery.
Take the example of how the microwave oven came to be. The first one was built by a company called Raytheon in 1947, but the chance observation behind it took place two years earlier.
How are you feeling? It turns out that your mood could be the difference between solving a problem, or not.
One evening, single parent Jerry Swartz simply wanted to occupy and entertain his three children so he brought home a laser pointer to show them. He started by shining the light onto different objects in the house and eventually started to shine the pointer onto moving objects to keep them engaged. They were simply relaxed, happy and everyone was in a good mood. Then he recounts that unexpectedly, “I knew I had it.”
How do you check if your assumptions are true or not? Even the best experts in the most critical of situations can fail to check assumptions.
Take the incident at NASA, known as ‘the scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history.’ On July 16th, 2013, Luca Parmitano and his fellow astronaut Chris Cassady went out on their second spacewalk together. 45 minutes in, Parmitano felt water at the back of his head. He didn’t know where it was coming from. The command was given to terminate the spacewalk early.
It often makes sense to look at other people’s solutions; to steal inspiration and nab fresh ideas. However, it also limits us to what other people have done. There’s a huge amount of inspiration that can come from looking beyond what others have already tried.
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 we are an expert in something we can become trapped by our own expertise, entrenched in old routes and reassured by what we have known to be true in the past. It has been described by some as the ‘curse of knowledge’, and it can hinder us exploring new ways of doing things.
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 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.
How often have things in your life been influenced by a chance encounter or a happy accident? Chances are there's been a few.
Happy accidents have had a huge influence on our lives. Take Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin by chance after he went on holiday in 1928 without washing away his bacteria samples and on return found bacteria fighting fungus growing in his absence.
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.
Asking questions is a deeply human thing. We are born asking lots of questions. In fact, pre-school children ask an average of 100 questions a day but by the time children are half way through their education asking questions dramatically falls and this trend continues into adulthood.
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 we could learn something from improvising musicians, freestyle rappers and improv comedians?
One thing improvisers are taught is to think ‘YES’ (they have to run with whatever thread is thrown at them, it falls over if they block an idea) – quickly followed by ‘AND’ (as they have to the build upon the idea and add to it in some way).
When was the last time you laughed out loud? Had a deep smile to yourself? Shared a good old chuckle with a colleague?
Researchers have discovered that we laugh less as an adult than we used to as a child - on average children laugh 400 times a day, while adults laugh about 15 times a day*!
Embrace your natural curiosity - in the most unexpected places. Whenever you hear interesting facts, ideas or stories take notice and see what you could learn from them. Ask yourself what new learnings or fresh inspiration you could take to apply to your own challenges.
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?