Break the Rules: How Thinking Flexibly Leads to Innovation
In his book, physicist
Leonard Mlodinow describes how elastic thinking lets people unleash their
inherent creativity.
The one constant in life is change. But rigid
ways of thinking can sabotage our efforts to thrive in a changing environment.
Theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow believes human beings have the unique
ability to think flexibly in ways that would unleash an inherent creativity — a
skill he calls elastic thinking. “Analytical thinking might be how you figure
out the best drive from home to work, but it’s elastic thinking that gave us
the invention of the car,” he said. Mlodinow wrote a book on this topic called Elastic:
Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change, which he
discussed on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM
channel 111.
The following is an edited transcript of the
conversation.
Knowledge@Wharton: What
does it mean to have an elastic mind or elastic thinking?
Leonard Mlodinow: I
talk about two ways that humans think. One is rational, logical thought where
we follow rules. We get from A to B using our logic and analytical thinking.
That’s the kind of thinking they test on the SAT and that most companies look
for when they interview you. That works fine when you’re dealing with
situations that are pretty standard.
But there’s another kind of thinking that we do, and that’s the
elastic thinking where you don’t follow rules. You make the rules, or you break
the rules. You figure out what the rules should be. You try to find new ways of
looking at things when the old ways don’t work or when you’re confronted with a
new situation, which happens to us all the time now. Analytical thinking might
be how you figure out the best drive from home to work, but it’s elastic
thinking that gave us the invention of the car.
Knowledge@Wharton: Are
all people capable of elastic thinking?
Mlodinow: Our species is.
Even though we might think of ourselves as being good physical specimens
amongst primates, we’re pretty much on the lower end of the physical scale. A
chimpanzee could just tear us apart. Others of our related species are much
stronger than we are. What we’ve really had to survive by are our wits and our
inventiveness. About 130,000 years ago, there was a great climatic catastrophe
that dwindled our numbers. Those individuals who liked to explore and had an
appreciation for new things were able to adapt and find new places to go.
That’s what allowed our species to survive. After that, we’ve had a genetic
makeup that really encourages us to look for new things and to enjoy
exploration and new challenges.
Knowledge@Wharton: What
is it about our culture now that requires flexibility to be a top priority?
Mlodinow: If you look at
civilization over the last thousands or hundreds of years, it was for most
people a pretty routine, mundane existence. You might work in a factory. You
might be hoeing fields all day. You didn’t have a lot of contact with other
people, with other cultures. There was no media. Over the last century, that
started to change, especially over the last 10 to 20 years. Since the internet
was invented and social media rose, the rate of change and the number of new
things that we have to face in our lives has been growing exponentially.
Whereas elastic thinking may have been nice for artists, scientists, innovators
a hundred years ago, now it’s really important for everybody in everyday life
just to thrive and to survive.
Think about what happens if you change computers. You have to
learn a whole new system. If you update your Excel, now the old one doesn’t
work. We get emails from people who are trying to sabotage us or break into our
system and who are always finding new tricks. If you want a vacation, on
average people use 26 websites. If you want to get the right price, it’s
constantly changing. You’re in kind of a sword fight with the provider. Everywhere
we turn, things are different. They’re new. We have to find new skills. We have
to adapt.
Knowledge@Wharton: Historically,
people have been resistant to change. In your research, is that still the case?
Mlodinow: That’s something
that’s talked about a lot in the business literature. I found this big gap
between what they were talking about and what the research psychologists were
talking about. The research psychologists were talking about some of the events
that I’ve just mentioned — how the human species likes change and is attracted
to change. In fact, they call it neophilia, the love of the new.
But business literature was talking about how we can overcome
people’s change aversion. When you look at it, what they’re talking about is
trying to get over people’s resistance to negative change. They take out the
word negative, or they call it restructuring or give it some euphemism. But
what it means is asking people to do more work for the same money, or there’s a
change that will make their job riskier. People are change-resistant because
it’s causing them effort or financial harm.
If I were to tell you, “I want you to do 20% more work for the
same money,” you’d resist the change. If I tell you, “I’m going to keep paying
you the same money, but I’m going to give you 20% less work,” I don’t think
you’d resist that change. It has to do with the valence of the change, and
they’re mixing up “change” with “negative change.” But as a species, we tend to
like change. If you do the same job all the time, you get bored. Squirrels
don’t get bored if they do the same thing all the time. They just keep doing
it. But humans do.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
say one way to think elastically is to let your guard down and relax the mind.
Can you explain that?
Mlodinow: Our brain is
constantly generating ideas. You have parts of your brain called association
cortices that are taking ideas or concepts from one area and another, putting
them together and coming up with new ideas. This is constantly bubbling away in
your unconscious mind. If you were to become consciously aware of all that, you
would drown in ideas, as some people who are mentally ill do. But a normal,
healthy person has filters that don’t let most of those ideas into your
conscious mind. They censor them.
The problem is that sometimes the ideas that are allowed into
your conscious mind are the more conventional ones or the ones that are more
promising or more ordinary. Sometimes these censors keep the more creative,
original ideas out. One of the ways to access your creativity is to find ways
to relax those filters so that more starts to get through.
Knowledge@Wharton: People
at the lower end of the corporate totem pole may have these unbelievable ideas
that could positively affect the company, but they may not have the ability to
bring them forward.
Mlodinow: The
more hierarchical a company is, the more it’s an innovation-killer. There are
two ways of approaching a problem or task. One is the top-down way, and that’s
the way of most corporations. That’s the way of the military, where the general
at the top gives the orders and they get passed down and maybe adjusted along
the way. Everyone is very obedient and follows authority. Your brain works that
way when you’re doing analytical thinking. The neurons in your brain work in a
top-down fashion. You have certain structures in your brain that order the
other structures around and organize things. It’s the executive part of your
brain.
But the other way, which is where elastic thinking comes from,
is bottom up. That means all the individuals somehow work together in a way
where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In mathematics, they call
that emergent phenomena. Ants are a good example. Each individual ant has very
simple programming, but ants as a colony can do amazing things.
Corporations need more of this bottom-up thinking. If they want
to be innovative, they have to give the freedom to the people below and the
respect to listen to them and let them interact with each other and come up
with ideas, not just have everything dictated from the CEO down.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
say we’re in a time when we should do a better job of listening to opposing
points of view, whether in the office or in politics, and not shut down any
idea before the conversation takes place.
Mlodinow: The term that many
people use for that is “frozen thinking.” Most people think that they’re always
right. If they are shown to be wrong, they put that in the back of their mind
and keep focusing on confirming what they already believe. That’s very bad for
elastic thinking. It’s very important, when you’re approaching a new situation
or a novel challenge, to be open to new ways of thinking and to let go of those
assumptions.
That shows itself in politics, where we all have our beliefs and
feel very strongly to the extent that we think people who don’t share that are
dumb or nuts or evil. But that’s really not the case. There are reasons that
people come to different conclusions, and that has to do with the unconscious
calculations in your mind.
It’s called motivated reasoning, which is that people have
different philosophies and different needs and desires, and they reason
backwards. They automatically reason backwards from the conclusion that’s
desirable to them. Their minds look at the evidence and sort it out in a way to
lead them to the conclusion that unconsciously they really desire. But they
believe sincerely in what they’re talking about.
If you want to open up your elastic mind and see things in new
ways and be more innovative, a very good exercise is to question your own
beliefs. Look at what other people are saying in areas that are very important
to you, and try and understand how someone who is intelligent and not evil
could come to that conclusion and why they might not accept the things that you
do. Also, look back at times where you were wrong about something. Realize that
the way you think might not be the only way to think, and soon you might
discover something.
Knowledge@Wharton: Have
you seen companies that are embracing this idea of giving employees the time to
engage in elastic thinking?
Mlodinow: I gave a talk at
Google, and they are one of the leaders in providing an atmosphere that
encourages that. They’re a very creative company. It’s important to realize
that when someone is lying on the couch and staring into space, that could be
working. That doesn’t mean you’re taking a break.
It’s very important to interrupt your times of analytical,
focused thought with times of unfocused thought, where you let your mind just
go. That’s when the elastic part of your brain really operates more. It’s
called the default mode of brain operation. It’s when you’re not focused on
something and you don’t have sensory stimulation. After you’ve focused on a
hard problem and thought about it and hit a barrier, it’s that default mode
operation that allows the unconscious mind to throw those crazy ideas out that
can be the answer.
At Google, they have nap rooms. It’s dark and you can take a nap
or lie and look into space. They have a gym where you can go. It’s good
sometimes to take a little physical effort to keep you from focusing mentally
on something and relax your mind, and then things pop into your mind when
you’re on the treadmill. A company that says, “Leonard, get off the couch
and get back to your desk,” is bad. A company that constrains you and is too
focused on traditional ways of operating can discourage that kind of thinking.
Knowledge@Wharton: Do
you think more companies should embrace elastic thinking?
Mlodinow: The companies that
don’t change the way of doing things are not going to be efficient enough or
even have a product that people want because we’re in a time of complete
disruptive change, which is why this new thinking is demanded. You have to have
some analytical thinking to guide your elastic thinking, but you really need to
be able to face the change and go with it, not resist it.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/flexible-thinking/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2018-04-19
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