You learn from the time you are born, or perhaps even before. You learn the vocabulary that shapes your thinking, the customs of your culture, the beliefs of your caregivers, and the aesthetics that delight or repel you. If you go on to acquire specialized knowledge to pursue a career or profession, even more baggage is loaded onto your already weighty mental cart. Although all that freight is necessary to excel, carrying such a load has a negative side. When someone has too much information to see clearly, we call that ?educated incapacity.? To thrive - indeed, to survive - on the fast paced journey into the 21st century, you need to selectively (but accurately) shed this baggage of accumulated knowledge that makes you incapable of change.
Four thinking techniques described below are most helpful in allowing you to overcome educated incapacity. Taken together, they can allow for a whole new interpretation not only of what is, but also of what is possible.
1. Looking through alien eyes - For any business, seeing things from a fresh reality is one of the most powerful lessons. We need to look at things the way a visiting alien or a child would. Start now. Once a month, have your team at work explicitly state an assumption your business makes about its people or its customers and test whether that assumption is really the rule or a large exception to the rule.
When someone makes a statement about the marketplace, ask, ?What if it were the reverse image of that assumption?? So, if the perceived market were children, then grandparents could be a major target market. Switch your perspective and you could greatly increase your chances of success in the future.
2. Trend/countertrend - In the world of human activity, every trend creates its opposite, or counter trend. For example, the developed world is entering the 21st century as the most secular (nonreligious) civilization in recorded history. Yet, it is because of this growing secularism that, in the past several decades, so many in the world have turned to religion and spirituality.
Trends and countertrends lay down many paths by which we travel toward tomorrow. The important thing to remember is that each presents opportunities for profit. At the fork in the road, business people should not merely ask which is the best road. We should also ask how our assets and competencies can be used to our advantage on either or both roads. The founders of Southwest Airlines did this in the face of the trend toward airlines neglecting local routes in favor of hubbing. Countertrends can make money. Ignoring them means leaving the opportunity to the competition.
3. Substituting the spiral for the pendulum - It's true that history advances in cycles. The cyclical motion is usually described as a pendulum. If you look through alien eyes, however, you can see clearly that things cannot possibly retrace their path back to where they have been because nothing is exactly the same as it was before. The better model is a spiral. Things spiral up or down because the original point of departure is no longer there.
When there seems to be a ?return? to some former time or condition, make an effort to figure out what has changed in the intervening months and years - the social, political, technological, environmental, demographic, and economic events and circumstances that are true now but weren?t true then. Then, and only then, will you begin to get the cycle right.
4. The extremes form the middle - From religion to politics to purchases, it is exposure to the extremes that moves the middle. For example, in the pro-life/pro-choice debate, only the most hide-bound proponents are exactly where they were at the beginning of the issue. Many feminists now believe that abortions should not be done after the fifth month of pregnancy unless the mother's health is at issue, and many Catholics, including nuns, have come out in favor of women controlling their own bodies.
You must appreciate the extremes to understand and anticipate the future because that will be where the middle goes. The problem is that most of us find one extreme more appealing, so we reject, even ignore, the other. By accepting the fact that both extremes offer some validity or value, it becomes easier to reduce your bias and set about figuring out which aspects of the extreme are valid enough, pleasing enough, powerful enough to change the ever-evolving middle. Free you mind from the trap of one-sided bias, and you will manage your business better, see new opportunities, and be happier in your personal life.
Excerpted from Future Think - How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change by futurists Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown. Ms. Wiener, president of Weiner Edrich Brown, Inc., will be leading the Afternoon General Session at WLE New York on November 3rd. To learn more about the book, visit www.weineredrichbrown.com/books.html.
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