Alan Iny
Reasonable
Doubt
Get
ready to change your most fundamental beliefs
The uncertainties of the present have seen when many of the world’s most established ideas are under renewed scrutiny. Things you held to be self evident – the benefits of benchmarking, core competence, brushing your teeth in the morning – are no longer so. At such a time, the Boston Consulting Group’s Alan Iny has co-authored a book called Thinking in New Boxes,where he presents a way to break free from obsolete mental models and create new ones that work in the new economy. In a telephonic interview with Corporate Dossier from his home in New York, the creativity specialist talks about staying grounded while letting your imagination fly.
The uncertainties of the present have seen when many of the world’s most established ideas are under renewed scrutiny. Things you held to be self evident – the benefits of benchmarking, core competence, brushing your teeth in the morning – are no longer so. At such a time, the Boston Consulting Group’s Alan Iny has co-authored a book called Thinking in New Boxes,where he presents a way to break free from obsolete mental models and create new ones that work in the new economy. In a telephonic interview with Corporate Dossier from his home in New York, the creativity specialist talks about staying grounded while letting your imagination fly.
Doubt everything
You are a prisoner of your current mental models and you need to break free
of them in order create something new. You perceptions of reality, assumptions
about the future. Above all, doubt that the way you’ve been going about
gettings things done will continue to serve you well over the long run. It is
usually much harder to change existing ideas than come up with new ones. That’s
why outsiders in an industry are often the ones who have Eureka moments – like
Facebook creating the world’s most important social network rather than AOL.
Prospective Thinking
Prospective Thinking
If you’re driving on a road that you know well in pitch darkness, you’ll
only need a lantern. But if you’re driving down a road in unfamiliar territory,
you’re going to need powerful headlights. Prospective thinking is about using
higher power headlights to navigate and prepare for many possible futures. It’s
about using your imagination to ask questions and envision many different
scenarios. The three most useful areas to concentrate on are consumers, the
competition and megatrends. What could you do to get your customers to use your
products as often and routinely as they do toothbrushes? Or, suppose no one
uses toothbrushes five years from now because there’s a device they can bite
into that cleans and massages their teeth and gums perfectly in ten seconds?
Diverge and converge
Divergence involves creation of new ideas and new ways of looking at old ideas. It’s about acts of rebellion as you suggest audacious new shifts. The Linux approach of allowing free access to a very high-level operating system environment represented a radical new shift at a time when the conventional assumption was that only the source could write code. Divergence is about expressing of wildly opposing ideas, beliefs, opinions and visions, including those that are unpopular, reactionary or downright absurd. But these things are unlikely to lead to practical value if you haven’t articulated your essential inquiry. For example, you may be asking: what would it take for 60% of Indians to set my company’s web-site as their home page? Convergence is about translating these ideas into reality. This is where a wide set of ideas shift in people’s minds, like the flipping of a high-voltage switch, into the realm of fully illuminated plausibility. It’s not unusual to have to go through several rounds of divergence and convergence in the decision process.
Imagining the future
Scenarios are an elegant way to improve strategic thinking and long term planning. They relate to a distinct, often far-out future. There are four building blocks to building scenarios – trends, extreme possibilities, variables, hypotheses – and the process requires doubt, prospective thinking, divergence and convergence. If you’re in the airline industry, imagine a scenario where traffic drops by 90% in five years. What could cause this scenario? The key is to have the eventual users of the scenarios participate in developing them. I’ve done several workshops in India and my experience is that scenario planning is still fairly new here and Indian executives haven’t used it widely.
Building new boxes
People are constantly told to think outside the box, but the truth is, we can’t make decisions, let alone create new ideas, without a box – which is the name we give to the mental model we use to simplify things. Nobody can deal with the many complicated aspects of real life without first placing things in boxes. One of the most common boxes is the category, as in, “we are an automobile company.” In times of uncertainty, the trick is to understand your existing boxes so that you may break free of them and create effective new ones. This actually takes an enormous amount of time and effort. But in the end, new ways of thinking will free you to see not only what is possible, but also what you must do to survive and thrive.
Nothing lasts forever
There is no idea that will remain valid in perpetuity, so you must continue creating, modifying, selecting, implementing, rejecting and sometimes replacing your boxes. Watch out for the signals: the advent of new technologies and product/service offerings, new customer needs, changing value propositions (e-books displacing hardcover books), the entry of new international competitors and suppliers, changes in your organisation’s performance metrics. Pilots have to pay attention to many different dials on their dashboards, some more critical than others. If one dial exceed its parameters, the pilot needs to concentrate on that particular issue. If three or more dials are abnormal, there may be an emergency. Broad events like a new regulatory scheme, the shift overseas of production in your industry, macroeconomic events like ongoing inflated commodity prices or sociological changes like the movements for democracy in the Arab have the potential to disrupt your business model in the long run.
Diverge and converge
Divergence involves creation of new ideas and new ways of looking at old ideas. It’s about acts of rebellion as you suggest audacious new shifts. The Linux approach of allowing free access to a very high-level operating system environment represented a radical new shift at a time when the conventional assumption was that only the source could write code. Divergence is about expressing of wildly opposing ideas, beliefs, opinions and visions, including those that are unpopular, reactionary or downright absurd. But these things are unlikely to lead to practical value if you haven’t articulated your essential inquiry. For example, you may be asking: what would it take for 60% of Indians to set my company’s web-site as their home page? Convergence is about translating these ideas into reality. This is where a wide set of ideas shift in people’s minds, like the flipping of a high-voltage switch, into the realm of fully illuminated plausibility. It’s not unusual to have to go through several rounds of divergence and convergence in the decision process.
Imagining the future
Scenarios are an elegant way to improve strategic thinking and long term planning. They relate to a distinct, often far-out future. There are four building blocks to building scenarios – trends, extreme possibilities, variables, hypotheses – and the process requires doubt, prospective thinking, divergence and convergence. If you’re in the airline industry, imagine a scenario where traffic drops by 90% in five years. What could cause this scenario? The key is to have the eventual users of the scenarios participate in developing them. I’ve done several workshops in India and my experience is that scenario planning is still fairly new here and Indian executives haven’t used it widely.
Building new boxes
People are constantly told to think outside the box, but the truth is, we can’t make decisions, let alone create new ideas, without a box – which is the name we give to the mental model we use to simplify things. Nobody can deal with the many complicated aspects of real life without first placing things in boxes. One of the most common boxes is the category, as in, “we are an automobile company.” In times of uncertainty, the trick is to understand your existing boxes so that you may break free of them and create effective new ones. This actually takes an enormous amount of time and effort. But in the end, new ways of thinking will free you to see not only what is possible, but also what you must do to survive and thrive.
Nothing lasts forever
There is no idea that will remain valid in perpetuity, so you must continue creating, modifying, selecting, implementing, rejecting and sometimes replacing your boxes. Watch out for the signals: the advent of new technologies and product/service offerings, new customer needs, changing value propositions (e-books displacing hardcover books), the entry of new international competitors and suppliers, changes in your organisation’s performance metrics. Pilots have to pay attention to many different dials on their dashboards, some more critical than others. If one dial exceed its parameters, the pilot needs to concentrate on that particular issue. If three or more dials are abnormal, there may be an emergency. Broad events like a new regulatory scheme, the shift overseas of production in your industry, macroeconomic events like ongoing inflated commodity prices or sociological changes like the movements for democracy in the Arab have the potential to disrupt your business model in the long run.
B y
Dibeyendu Ganguly CDET140131
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