#ThinkfullyHabit: Imagine it
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.
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
WHY?
Mental simulation is our mind’s ability to imagine taking specific actions and simulating the outcomes. It’s a way of anticipating the implications quickly. It’s not just about thinking about the end result, but how you get there and what could happen along the way.
Psychologists have found that when experts make decisions, they typically evaluate them by rapidly running a mental simulation. So, instead of comparing different options, they imagine how a course of action may unfold and how it may ultimately play out. If it works out okay in their mental simulation, they are likely to stick with their choice. If it almost works, then it prompts for adjustments to be made. If they discover problematic consequences, they discount that solution and look for another.
NASA are an organisation well known not only for using physical simulations, but for also using mental simulations to train astronauts to adapt to unexpected and changing situations – they call them ‘sims’. They even get astronauts to run through contingency sims, known informally as ‘death sims’; which they use to think through what they do if one of them dies in space or someone they know dies on Earth while they are in space*.
What we learn from NASA’s approach is that for a sim to be most valuable we need to treat it as real. The implications are that we need to really imagine ourselves following through a course of actions in as much detail as possible. For the ‘death sim’ for instance NASA will make sure that everyone who would be involved in real life takes part in the sim; even inviting family members in. Also the attitude at NASA is that they want a sim to throw up something new because it gives the opportunity to reveal a better way. As the astronaut Chris Hadfield points out, simulations are “where you identify gaps in your knowledge and encounter domino effects that simply never occurred to you before.”
While the death simulation is an extreme situation, it proves the point that there’s very few scenarios we can’t mentally imagine for. The trick is to imagine in a constructive way to think through the scenario, the consequences and the adjustments, and not just let our imagination run wild.
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