Thinking Differently Isn’t Natural, but it’s Essential for Progress

Think for a moment about life before the wheel, when moving anything heavy meant lifting or dragging it. Because we are all now so familiar with wheels and what they are for it’s hard to imagine the mental leap that questioned all the dragging and lifting and came up with a better solution.

Looking beyond the norm and thinking differently is difficult. It’s not really how are minds are designed to work.

Edward de Bono talks about how our minds organise our thinking into ‘mental valleys.’ Words and phrases become held together as concepts that seem to have a natural flow in our mind, rather like water being channelled by a valley.

This means that we develop a standard picture of how a task or project will be organised and the sequence in which actions need to take place. When we are very familiar with that concept of what a project is it becomes hard to escape from the mental valley.

Creative Connections

We can cope with so called ‘first order changes’ that improve one part of the concept or process, but which leave the basic idea unchanged. To break out of the mental valley and achieve second order change we need to make ‘creative connections.’ This might be seeing how something is done in a completely different context and applying it to the project or task in question.

If goals and challenges don’t change much, then perhaps it can seem like there is less need to think differently. The problem comes when you encounter an Amazon, Uber or Airbnb that has reimagined the whole of your business model before you ever questioned it.

In the construction sector our challenges are not fixed. Customers expect more for less and pressures from environmental concerns and user expectations call our accepted understanding and methods into question.

Beyond What We Always Do

We will not meet our goals by doing what we always did and thinking the way we always thought. Looking beyond what we always do must be in our approach to everything.

We can approach our next project as ‘just another job’ and stay in our mental valley. Or we can try to think broader and reimagine ways of meeting the project objectives.

Not all possible solutions will work. But if we don’t create the space to explore what those possible solutions might be we’ll never get the chance to find out. And we need to be brave; try, fail, learn leads to change and progress. Sticking with what we know leaves us where we are and vulnerable to anyone who can imagine a way to do it better.

Just like the wheel, great ideas are always blindingly obvious after the event. But this type of creative leap isn’t easy or natural, which means we need to make a conscious effort to think differently. Sometimes you just need to question what you are doing and challenge a few assumptions. Take a look at some of our projects here.