BE MONOMANIACAL

One key technique for refocusing is to use your mental model as a lens through which to view everything you encounter. We can call this “monomania”: a usefully obsessive focus on seeing the world through your new mental model. As mentioned in chapter 3, the inspiration for car-sharing company Turo came about because the founder Shelby Clark drew an analogy with peer-to-peer lending service Kiva.org. This happened because Clark was obsessed with the peer-to-peer model: “Kiva was one of the first places where I got to see the move [in online services] into the offline world. It was the concept of connecting people online and offline that was really powerful to me. So, I was actively considering, ‘In what other ways can this interesting behavior be applied?’ Like housing. That was one area I was thinking a lot about.”⁴

Philosophy of Action

As neuroscientist Walter Freeman described, our theories of how the brain relates to the world have largely derived from one of two models, both of which began in ancient Greece.a On the one hand, there is the tradition of Plato. Here there is no great role for action; Plato focused on using reason to find unchangeable truths about the world. At the beginning of each of Plato’s books, the protagonist Socrates is usually just walking around finding a nice place to sit and think. This is the most action that occurs. When Plato thought about the mind perceiving the sensory world, it was in passive terms. Forms from the world (information) enter our senses and are compared by the mind with ideal forms (pattern recognition). This model broadly informed most of cognitive science up until the last couple of decades.b

On the other hand, there is a tradition derived from Plato’s student Aristotle, which sees action as central to perception and how we relate to the world. As Freeman described, in the Aristotelian view, understanding “requires movement into the world by probing, cutting, and burning in order to learn by manipulation the forms, textures, weights, and appearances of objects.”c This followed from Aristotle’s personal style of engaging with the world. To write his book The History of Animals, Aristotle cut open many animals, like chameleons and bees, to see what was going on. By fiddling around with the world, he was able to encounter surprises—things that, perhaps, no one had ever noticed before: “If a hair is cut, it does not grow at the point of section, but gets longer by growing upwards from below.”d

Aristotle emphasizes that action is intertwined with everything the mind does: the intention of every effort is fundamental because it shapes all that follows.e This model informs more recent cognitive science, particularly “embodied cognition,” which looks at how thinking and perceiving are shaped by how we act in our environment. We know now that when our brain conceives an action, it sends out copies of anticipated motor commands to the sensory cortices—meaning that how we intend to act primes the way we see the world.f

Neither of these two perspectives, however, provide much of a role for imagination. A third view, developed by Thomas Aquinas based on Aristotle’s philosophy, shows the interplay between imagination and action. In Aquinas’s view, we interact with the world, generating sense impressions that he calls “phantasms.” Unlike Plato’s view, and much of cognitive science, Aquinas doesn’t see the senses as simply carrying the forms of things into our mind. Rather, he emphasizes the uniqueness and fleetingness of sense impressions, like light sparkling on water. Each phantasm or moment of experience selects certain models above others that our brain, our imaginatio, generates. As we act in the world, our imagination generates and regenerates the models we use, until they become subtler and richer, closer to the infinite richness and depth of reality, Aquinas argued.g This view is supported by research that shows our brain creates clouds of neuronal activity, or “wave packets,” which are selected by sense data, rather than being built out of sense data.h We might even translate wave packet as an imaginative mental model, being collided with reality, the incoming sense data.

The philosophy of Aquinas can teach us a key lesson. Because the world is complex beyond what any brain can encompass, we create the inner world that works for us, and this inner world develops, and becomes useful, because we act. This point is captured in the medieval Latin word intendere, the root of “intention,” which means both “to push the self into the world,” and “to grow in understanding.” Whether we are making a model more grounded, to navigate how things are, or more ideal, to capture greater possibilities, it is through action—pushing ourselves into the world, stirring up surprises from its many layers—that our models become more subtle, powerful, and useful.

NOTES

a. Walter Freeman, “Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas,” Mind and Matter 6 (2008): 207–234.

b. Walter J. Freeman, “Neurodynamic Models of Brain in Psychiatry,” Neuropsychopharmacology 28 (2003): S54–S63.

c. Ibid.

d. Aristotle, “The History of Animals,” Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.mb.txt.

e. Roger Crisp, Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

f. Freeman, “Neurodynamic Models of Brain in Psychiatry.”

g. Freeman, “Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas.”

h. Freeman, “Neurodynamic Models of Brain in Psychiatry.”

Clark was monomaniacal about this: “I was thinking peer-to-peer everything.” Refocusing his attention in this way eventually led him to a surprise that prompted a new counterfactual mental model: a peer-to-peer business for sharing private cars.

Let’s say you were rethinking what a hospital could be. To practice some useful monomania, you might read a news story about an airline attempting to build trust with customers. This could prompt you to think about building trust with customers around a new kind of gym-hospital business. Or, you might chat with a colleague about going on vacation. This could prompt you to think how your new kind of health company could work with people on vacations. Or, you might be reading a book about the Byzantine Empire. This could prompt you to think about what goes wrong in hospital bureaucracies, and so on. Using your new model as a lens for everything will generate new surprises that will further drive the model’s evolution in your imagination.

CREATE A LEARNING JOURNEY

Another way to collide an emerging idea with the world is to engineer the supply of information that comes into focus. We tend to do this naturally. If we are excited by an idea, we might order a few books or discuss it with colleagues. But you can do this more systematically, creating a “learning journey” for yourself, based on your developing mental model.

Build a curriculum for yourself to learn more deeply about the core areas of your mental model and to encounter more imagination-prompting surprises. First, identify a few core themes of your developing mental model. Then think about the key areas of knowledge that touch on these themes.

For example, imagine you were the leader of the LEGO Group in the days after the invention of the stud-and-tube brick. You might have the following themes in your emerging mental model of the future company: play, plastic, recombination, and continuity (all LEGO products compatible across time). (See figure 5-6.) Based on this, you might pick a few areas of knowledge to dive into, for example, the psychology of play, plastic chemistry, or companies that have built long-lasting, intercompatible systems of products.

You also might push yourself to think more broadly. You could identify a historical precedent that connects in some way with your idea, for example, “toys in ancient China.” You could find a few imaginative creations (art, movies, poems, novels) that touch on your developing idea, for example, children’s stories or a novel about an inventor. You could look to areas of knowledge even further out from your model, where you might find fruitful analogies: bridge engineering, the science of color, or recombination in evolution.

As you refocus on such areas, the goal is not to find immediately applicable knowledge. It is to set up streams of information to collide with your model, in order to spark new rounds of surprise and rethinking.

VISIT A RELEVANT ENVIRONMENT

Often, the people doing the imagining and strategic thinking in a project will not be the ones immersed in the environments where the ideas will play out. Yet it is important to ensure that the people who are doing the imagining do participate directly, rather than having the raw experience filtered through someone else. Such filtering, or summarizing, by other people reduces the possibility of surprise.

In 1963, when BCG was a staff of two inside an office twelve feet by twelve feet, the founder, Bruce Henderson, learned this lesson. One of BCG’s first projects was on “the buying influences and the pattern of use for paper in the office” of a client (as Henderson put it, “we were really hungry”). They conducted some research interviews as part of this, which they delegated. “We subcontracted some of the interviews to freelance professionals. To validate the information we received, we reinterviewed a sample. The requested data had been faithfully provided, but the important insights had been omitted. The client had not asked us for the really important things we learned.”⁵ They had taken the client’s brief and shared that with freelancers, who conducted interviews. The freelancers gave them back information relevant to the brief. But what Henderson’s team missed were moments in interviews that would have led them to rethink the brief—the mental model guiding the whole project. Only when they conducted some interviews themselves did they run into these surprising insights.

Immersion in a new social or geographical environment accelerates the development of mental models. For example, when researchers studied the origins of new products at the Norwegian telecom operator Telenor, they found that many of Telenor’s product concepts came from people immersed in environments outside of the R&D department. One of its most successful services, a mobile payment system in Pakistan called “Easypaisa,” originated from someone who was visiting the field. As the researchers noted, “We saw this in many of Telenor’s ideas—they originate with people who work closely with the market.”⁶

When choosing an environment to spend time in, we should think about colliding our idea with extreme environments: going to where the need for the new thing is the highest, or where the constraints are strongest. For example:

• The CEO of a confectionary company could spend time in environments around the world (cities, suburbs, villages) where chocolate sales have collapsed. He could mull over his ideas about the future direction of the company while observing the environments and kinds of people the company will have to win back to its business.
• An education company with a mission to reform schooling could send its head of product development to sit in on classes in a range of thriving and struggling schools around the country.
• The CEO of an industrial tools manufacturer could visit construction sites, having conversations with people on the ground about the pros and cons of her evolving mental model for 3D-printed, distributed manufacturing of tools.
• The chief technology officer of an airline might have an idea for improving the way its airport lounges operate. They could be sent to spend three days working in a variety of airport lounges, alternately doing normal work and stepping back to reflect on anything that arises relevant to their idea.

PROBE EARLY

The concept of testing a product is familiar. But we should be probing the world long before we get to the point of having a minimally viable product, even before our idea is clear in our own mind. For the goal is not to test a developed idea yet, but to further prompt your own imagination. To return to the example of the car-sharing company Turo, founder Clark initially set out to do a pilot project before he realized there was something he could do right away:

I was going out fundraising to try to do a pilot. And the feedback that I kept getting from investors was, “Cute idea, but nobody’s going to drive my Range Rover.” And so, what I did was I spent $1,000 to launch a really crappy website. At the time, there was no Squarespace or whatever. You actually had to pay an engineer to get a website up. And then, I printed out 10,000 postcards. And I went out onto street corner and handed them out … On this crappy website, there was a little form to sign up your car. It was completely unactionable. There were no next steps. But I got 40 people to sign up their cars. And so, this took us from a random, intangible idea to something very tangible.⁷

The value of doing this was to spur Clark’s imagination, as well as that of investors. By getting out there early and probing the world (in this case, random passers-by), Clark kicked off a cycle of action and rethinking that drove the evolution of his counterfactual mental model.

The lesson from Clark is that we should act early. Rather than being held up by official processes and the expectations of others, figure out what you could do right now, or this week, to collide your emerging idea with the world.

PROBE SELECTIVELY

Another way to probe the world is to bring elements of your mental model to life selectively, either enacting it on a small scale or enacting one part of the model.

For instance, imagine you are the CEO of a real estate company and you want to reimagine your business. You have a tentative idea that real estate agents could become more like event planners for the entire experience of moving house: décor, logistics, and financial planning, in addition to the task of finding the right place. How can you collide this idea with the world? Organizing a large retraining and pilot program would take a long time and would not give you a chance to quickly create a mind-world reimagination loop. Instead, think smaller: contact one imaginative real estate agent in your company you know personally and get them to try out the idea for their next client, while you perhaps accompany them in the background.

While observing, you might think of new services to integrate, consider large-scale customer research you want to commission, or realize that acquiring a furniture moving company might be a way forward. The situation you are looking at is not statistically significant (one customer), but by acting out the imaginative idea in a microcosm, you bring to life some of its multiple interacting dimensions to feed your imagination.

Another example of selective probing comes from the early days of Apple when the company contracted Hartmut Esslinger of frog design to create product prototypes. (See figure 5-7.)

For Apple, the core of its mental model around computers was how the object would look and feel—different from the industry’s dominant mental model oriented around functionality. It wanted a computer to be valuable by being simple. And it wanted to differentiate from the competition not by foregrounding the technology, but presenting relatable objects. Later, Steve Jobs would articulate this mental model as the idea of a “friendly” computer.⁸

The Mathematics of Serendipity

The process of imagining, creating, and reimagining is somewhere between being completely random and completely controllable. It involves a lot of serendipity—a word coined in 1754 by British writer Horace Walpole, who wrote a story, “The Three Princes of Serendip” (a former name for Sri Lanka), the heroes of which “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”a

We know serendipity from experience. However, it also has an underlying mathematical structure. In research published in the journal Nature, the BCG Henderson Institute collaborated with the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences to model the search for valuable combinations of components at differing levels of complexity. For example, we modeled food recipes (varying in complexity, meaning the number of unique components) and ingredients (looking at the average complexity of the dishes they occur in).b

The gastronomy graph shows a range of ingredients ranked vertically by how often they occur in valid recipes. As you move from left to right, the size and complexity of the recipe set increases; oregano, for example, at the bottom, only occurs in more complex recipes. Bell peppers and vinegar are increasingly useful as the set of recipes becomes more complex, whereas cocoa and corn become less useful.

We did the same for software products and the tools used to make them. Google Analytics is near the top of the technology graph: it is part of most products. JavaScript is used with increasing frequency in more complex products.

When you are trying to bump into something new, it turns out that different ingredients will be more or less useful depending on the distribution of complexity of products in the space you are exploring. That is, if you are searching an area where not much has been invented, it pays to focus on simple ingredients to make simple new recipes. If you are searching a high-complexity space, where lots has been discovered already, it pays to try out complex recipes and to collect components that might be useful later. Hopefully, you stumble on the equivalent of vinegar, or JavaScript, which get more and more useful as you explore more complicated, nonobvious dishes or products.

When we are talking about mental models, ideas are components. For example, Shelby Clark of Turo had the idea of peer-to-peer marketplaces stuck in his head. This turned out to be a component like JavaScript: useful in many unpredictable—serendipitous—ways.

We can draw some key lessons from this for imagination. First, as we act in the world, we should expect and look out for serendipity—running into something valuable and novel—because it is a mathematical inevitability. Second, when there are a lot of easy wins in an unexplored area, we should focus on speed: building simple things and rapidly colliding them with the world. Third, most counterintuitively, when the wins are hard to find, it makes sense to collect and hold on to things that have rising utility with complexity, like the idea of peer-to-peer marketplaces, bell peppers, scallions, or JavaScript. In mature innovation spaces in big companies, when the dominant tone is serious, settled, and practical, we should actually seek more things that don’t have an immediate use. We should be more like magpies, collecting shiny, interesting ideas, increasing the likelihood of unusual serendipitous combinations.

NOTES

a. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, 2020.

b. T. M. A. Fink et al., “Serendipity and Strategy in Rapid Innovation,” Nature Communications 8 (2017).

Producing a small, viable prototype laptop in the 1980s would have raised many engineering and manufacturing challenges. It would have been normal to try and solve these first. Instead, Apple began with the one thing it wanted to get right: whether it could make a laptop-like object that looked friendly. It could explore this early and comparatively cheaply by designing, creating, reimagining, and redesigning product shells.

In relation to your own idea, you can ask:

• Is there a way I can try this idea out in microcosm?
• Is there one critical feature, or even a side feature, of this mental model that I can try out now?

We should produce a representative sample, or a minimum viable product, when we want to persuade others, especially others who may be skeptical of our idea. The point of this exercise is not to persuade anyone, but to support our own rethinking loop.

PROBE PLAYFULLY

Another way of probing the world is to act playfully. In play, we are not aiming for a goal or testing a hypothesis. Rather, we have a starting point and improvise based on our imagination from there, driven by a sense of “why not?” (See the sidebar “The Function of Play.”)

Play can help evolve mental models or reveal new models and paths to growth. For example, Play-Doh, originally called Kutol Cleaner, began as a product to clean wallpaper, until business owner Joe McVicker overheard a teacher saying that kids in art class found modeling clay too tough to manipulate. On a whim, McVicker shipped a box of wallpaper cleaner to the school, and the class loved it.⁹ We can suppose McVicker thought something like, “Why not? Might as well try it.” He was acting playfully, improvising. He was then savvy enough to use the surprise result to fully reimagine his business. (See figure 5-8.)

We might feel that play doesn’t, or shouldn’t, happen much in business, except in companies probably much more fun than our own, like Play-Doh. However, the underlying mindset is valuable across all kinds of businesses and organizations.

The story of Google Maps also began with play. In 2004, then CEO of Google Eric Schmidt was in a meeting with his team. Cofounder Sergey Brin was also there but was not paying attention. Instead he was playing around on his laptop with a tool he had discovered, Keyhole, a browsable satellite map of the world. Brin searched for his own house and then looked up the houses of the people next to him in the meeting. As Vox reported:

He’d shown his laptop to a couple people, and people said, “Oh shit, do me, do me.” And this guy doing the presentation was really starting to sweat, and Sergey eventually gets up and unplugs the projector, says “This thing’s cool and we should buy it,” and he plugs his laptop into the projector and shows us Keyhole. And, literally, these executives are shouting out their addresses because they want to zoom in on their houses from space.¹⁰

Google eventually acquired Keyhole, which grew into Google Maps. The journey started, however, with putting the official goal of a meeting on hold to explore something in a playful way. They accelerated their imagination by messing around with something in the world.

PROBE ITERATIVELY

Another key to action that can accelerate imagination is to probe the world iteratively. Colliding a mental model with the world once is rarely enough; rather, you have to set up a dialogue between mind and reality. (See figure 5-9.)

Sometimes, probing iteratively can lead to a transformational surprise, as in Charles Goodyear’s accidental invention of rubber for car tires:

After learning about rubber, he convinced himself he could make his fortune by turning it into useful objects like waterproof shoes. All attempts ended in disaster and his life became a catalog of misery and misfortune. His shoes melted in the summer heat, six of his twelve children died in infancy, and his family had to live in grinding poverty … But Goodyear was determined. When debts landed him in jail, he simply asked his wife to bring him a rolling pin and some rubber and he carried on inventing in his cell. He finally made his big breakthrough when he accidentally dropped a piece of rubber on a hot stove. It cooked and shriveled into a hard black mass that Goodyear immediately spotted as the thing he’d wanted all along. This is how he developed the tough black rubber we use in tires today by a cooking process now known as vulcanization.¹¹

Over multiple iterations, we give ourselves a chance to create as many interesting accidents and anomalies as possible. And in iterating, we don’t just evolve the specific idea; we evolve the mind that is evolving the idea. If the iteration continues over time, we can change many minds and eventually the whole company.

We can see this in the history of the LEGO Group, which began doing carpentry for local houses and churches, but has evolved over time in ways that could not have been predicted. (See figure 5-10.)

It can be surprisingly hard, on an emotional level, to let evolution beat design. It is difficult to let your favorite ideas change. Yet imagination when combined with iterated action can start us on a journey that leads to valuable things that we never expected.

Artist Jane South of the Pratt Institute shares her experience guiding people through the process of imagining, creating, and reimagining:

A sculpture student shows me a drawing and says, “This is what I am going to make.” I say, “All right, go ahead.” Next week I come back and what they’ve made looks nothing like their original drawing. Disappointed, the student says, “Oh my God, I’ve failed! I did not mean to make this …” Yet this is the point at which they are actually creating something. If an artist is determined to stick to their first idea, they miss all the opportunities for the imagination to allow other things they have encountered (all of those experiences recorded somewhere in your being) into play with whatever their initial impetus was. If the process of making is not surprising, it is not creative! It’s not until you actually start making, that you open the door to this, and things manifest in a way you can’t predict.¹²