Category Archives: Innovation

Causal Chains

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The method for Multi-Hypothesis research that Jabe Bloom describes in his Failing Well session is very useful for exploring ideas and gaining new insights to problems.

The main idea is to use ambiguity by presenting factual statements to a group and allowing each person to form their own opinions and conclusions about those facts.

Causal Chains

We ‘unpack’ what thoughts may have led to the original opinions and conclusions, some thoughts will be certainties that the facts are right or wrong and others will be guesses and doubts.

  • Guesses and doubts are then explored to find ways that we can conduct tests or experiments in order to learn – the focus being on the smallest effort we can invest in order to learn something useful, regardless of the test failing or succeeding.
  • Certainties are sometimes worth testing as well – in the picture above, we try to invalidate gravity by throwing a ball – if it did not fall, we would be surprised and have a great opportunity for learning.

This workshop method can be completed in as little as 60 minutes with a small group, 90 minutes is comfortable for a group of about 10 people. It is a great way to get a lot of ideas in a short time and to shed some biases in our thinking by allowing many different points of view.

Obliquity

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Thank you to Dave Snowden for his pointer to this John Kay post in a recent Cognitive Edge blog. It is a long read and I highly recommend making the time to read it.

Building on my recent post about the Gradient of Misinterpretation, we can be better off if we move indirectly towards a goal.

Many Paths to an Outcome

Here is my version of why obliquity can be good.

  • The first path taken is direct and leads us to our expected outcome of a box
  • The two middle paths lead to good and not-so-good outcomes, we are still looking for a box, and we find other things on the way that might be better
  • And the last path takes us under the mountain – sometimes other pathways are not so obvious

So how does this relate to the gradient of misinterpretation? It comes back to ambiguity, if we are a little ambiguous about what we want to achieve and how we describe it, then the pathways we take to understand it can take us to more interesting places.

 

Innovation and Misinterpretation

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Misinterpreting something is often seen as a  bad thing – there is another way to look at it.

It is not possible to know for cetain if we have understood another point of view fully, because we are ourselves and not someone else – so there is always some degree of misinterpretation.  The other extreme is when we get something wrong such as interpreting a red traffic light as ‘go’.  The gradient of states in between could look something like this.

The Gradient of Misinterpretation

Between shared understanding and embarrassment lies the potential for innovation and new ideas.  This is one aspect of what we are trying to leverage when we use brainstorming – someone says one thing that helps us to think of something else.  It also works well on Twitter – the text limit forms a constraint that limits shared understanding.  If we can avoid going too close to embarrassment and wrong, we get a fertile field for new ideas.