CREATIVITY, CHANGE, AND INNOVATION BLOG
Why Innovation Should Be More like Easter Eggs
Every year, Amy B., a buyer for a large retail chain store, hosts an Easter egg decorating teambuilding party, where she and a bunch of her suppliers spend an entire afternoon coloring and bedazzling boiled eggs. None of them bring their kids—they do this for the sheer pleasure of out-of-the office bonding, creating interesting and attractive objects. The group is always amazed at the creativity of the resulting eggs. (And in case you’re wondering, no, none of them are artists.)
So why, as adults, don’t people exercise their inner child-like creativity more often? And what is it about the Easter egg party that allows them to so freely generate and express such range and diversity of ideas? There are several factors—all of which also apply to innovation.
1. Each egg represents a very low commitment. It is cheap in both time and materials to try any idea they think of, so they try lots of ideas. If one doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter—it’s just one egg.
Similarly, in your innovation work, you need to consider and try out many ideas, to ensure that only the best ones move forward. As innovation projects proceed through a company, they get more expensive—in money, time, and labor—at each successive phase. Developing Fail Fast, Fail Cheap methodologies allows you to try out lots of ideas early on, while it’s still cheap.
2. They leverage not only individual creativity, but also use the power of the group. Someone will think of an idea to try, and then toss it out to the group. Then everyone contributes ideas for how best to accomplish it. No one ever says, “Yes, but that won’t work.” Everyone just thinks of ways to help make it better. The resulting final solutions are nearly always significantly better than what the person would have tried originally.
In many companies, the “Yes, But” phenomenon is all too common, and can be very damaging to creativity and innovation. Most ideas aren’t perfect when they’re first conceived, but teams act like they should be. They point out all the problems in an emerging idea before they ever attempt to find out if there’s anything good about it. For innovation and creative problem solving to thrive, it’s critical to create an environment that nurtures ideas rather than stifles them, so you get the benefit of the best thinking of the entire team.
3. They are willing to start over when something clearly isn’t working. One woman brought eggs that were not naturally white; instead, they were brown. It wasn’t clear that dyeing them would work very well, if at all. And, in fact, the first few attempts didn’t work. So, she scraped off all the color on her unsuccessful eggs several times. But when she chose red, yellow, and orange colors and left them in the dye bath long enough, she got some of the most uniquely rich and vividly colored eggs anyone had ever seen.
Unfortunately, in large organizations, too many innovation projects that aren’t quite hitting the mark proceed too far. It’s important to recognize when an idea isn’t working, and then be willing to start again when you need to.
4. Reframing the goal results in more divergent ideas. The woman with the brown eggs also tried other methods of decorating the eggs, not just coloring them with dye. Once she reframed the problem from coloring eggs to decorating eggs, everyone else also began creating the most innovative and unusual eggs of all.
This reframing of the problem is a critical step in effective problem-solving and innovation. This is because the way a problem is stated affects the potential solutions you will think of. So when addressing any obstacle, it’s a good idea to question the way the challenge or problem is worded, to see if you can reframe it to get to different and better solutions.
So the next time you find yourself with eggs to decorate—or a challenge to meet—keep these tips in mind to help you think more creatively and come up with more innovative solutions.
· Fail fast, fail cheap. Test many possible ideas.
· Leverage individual and group creativity; “Yes, and” instead of “Yes, but”.
· Be willing to start over when the idea isn’t working.
· Reframe the opportunity to expand your thinking.
The Secrets of Visionary Thinkers – Living in Possibility
We tend to believe that famous innovators or other “creative” people have some inherent quality that the rest of us don’t have. But the truth is — they don’t. They’ve simply cracked the code on how to consistently live in a possibility instead of living in obstacles.
Visionary thinkers see possibilities. Always. Most of us mostly see obstacles, most of the time. We move through work, and life, by addressing whatever next obstacle falls into our path. We problem-solve the next issue on a project, we deal with the next customer complaint, and we address the next challenge with our kids. But too rarely do we look up, survey the world, and make a conscious choice to shape our world to be the way we want it to be.
Visionary thinkers make that daily choice - to imagine the possibility of a different world, to hold on to that vision, and to refuse to let the obstacles limit their thinking. They live in possibility.
Visionary thinkers are open-minded, innovative & imaginative, willing to take risks, optimistic, and collaborative – all skills related to creative thinking. They regularly imagine, consider, and pursue new ideas and solutions.
The good news - all of these creative thinking skills are learnable! Anyone can become a more visionary thinker by learning to leverage the creative genius that’s already hidden inside.
One of the primary barriers to living in possibility is the negativity bias, a cognitive bias, or mental shortcut, that all humans share. It’s the phenomenon that negative experiences have a greater impact -- on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors -- than positive experiences do. That seems counter-intuitive, but there’s a wealth of research that proves negative affects us more than positive. As a result, we are much more motivated to avoid negative than to seek positive.
Our brains have evolved to excel at identifying potential negatives, so we can avoid them. It’s a survival mechanism, and it happens in the most primitive part of our brain – the amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for detecting threats and triggering the fight or flight response. It’s laser-focused and lightning-fast at identifying potential problems. This instant identification of negatives is what can trap us into living in obstacles.
Living in possibility requires refusing to let the negativity bias rule our thinking. There are a few steps that can make a significant impact, helping us to manage around this pitfall and transform the way we think.
1. Pinpoint the problem. First, we must be able to spot when the negativity bias is at work. The easiest way to do that is by monitoring one simple phrase we say: “Yes, but….” On the surface, these words seem innocuous. And because we say them and hear them so frequently, they don’t seem like a problem.
However, this short phrase is a massive blockade to creative and visionary thinking. It dismisses any potential positives in an idea or concept, before even identifying what those positives might be. Instead, it focuses the energy and attention of both the speaker and the listeners on all the possible negatives. This can easily overwhelm any idea and immediately kill it.
2. Manage your mind. Once you’ve determined the negativity bias is at work (someone said “yes, but…”), the next step is to make a conscious choice to change your thinking. The key is to FIRST identify the potential positives in any idea, before focusing on the negatives. This sounds easy. But it’s actually quite hard. It’s counter to a basic instinct, so it really does require a conscious choice to think this way, plus very real discipline to put it into practice regularly.
3. Nix the negatives. The next critical step is to refrain from saying the negatives out loud – at least not yet. The truth is, regardless that you’ve consciously chosen to identify the positives first, your brain will subconsciously identify the negatives anyway. It’s instinctive and instant. So even while you’re enumerating positives, your brain will be busy identifying negatives, too. But the simple trick of not saying those negatives out loud will help dramatically. Force yourself to speak out loud, and write down, the positives first.
4. Teach the team. When working with others, ask them to do the same. Help them understand that letting our natural negativity bias dominate the conversation has the potential to immediately kill ANY idea. Let everyone know that, of course, there will be a time to solve the problems in the idea, but the first task is to identify the potential in the idea. If there aren’t enough potential positives, then it’s time to move to a new idea. But if the idea is visionary and can make a real difference, it’s imperative to hold off on the negativity bias momentarily and allow the brilliance of the idea to shine through.
5. Transform the troublesome term. Once the above steps have led you to a potentially winning idea, it’s time to address the problems with the idea. To continue to remain in possibility, you must change the conversation; you cannot return to “yes, but…” language. Instead, articulate the challenges as a “how might we…?” question. So, instead of saying “Yes, but it’s too expensive”, instead say “How might we do it more affordably?” This trick of flipping a problem statement into a problem-solving question is a neuroscience brain hack that will revolutionize your thinking and problem-solving. This process of identifying positive potential first is the ONLY way to find big ideas. Every successful innovation, in any industry or endeavor, is the result of someone, or a team, choosing to live in possibility in this way.
Visionary thinking requires making space for ideas that, at first, seem scary or difficult. It takes some real courage to push past our immediate “yes, but…” response and instead focus the conversation on “what if…?” If we don’t hold ourselves accountable to look for the positives, we’ll never consider nor implement any truly new ideas. Visionary thinkers must master this skill and learn to live in possibility.
The Secrets of Visionary Leaders: 5 Tips to Instantly Become More Innovative
When you have a yen for new ideas or a creative solution to a challenge, using the same tired thinking will simply lead you to the same old ideas you’ve already had or tried before. Instead, do something that will stimulate your brain and shift your perspective. Here are some ways to ensure you (and your team) shake up your thinking to cultivate the fresh ideas you need.
Change your environment. Get outside of your office. Debrief the latest research results or industry report in an art museum. Or take your team to the zoo or a local attraction with the objective of coming back with new ideas. If you can’t physically get out of the office, then find a way to get out metaphorically. Ask people to imagine how they would solve the problem at hand if they lived in another country or if viewed from the perspective of another profession.
Bring outsiders in. Invite other perspectives into your discovery and idea generation processes. For example, when thinking about retirement planning for clients, bring in other people who work with active retirees, such as travel agents or a retirement community manager. Your team will be amazed at the range and diversity of new ideas that come when they are exposed to new perspectives on their challenge. They’ll think of ideas they never would have arrived at on their own— mostly due to their own embedded assumptions about the topic.
Truly engage with your clients. Don’t rely solely on secondhand data to understand your clients’ needs. Talk with them about their lives. Go to their homes or offices to see the problems they need solutions for. All too often, teams looking at new ideas will say, “We already have ‘lots of data.’” This should always make you wary, because it usually means they have numerous reports with reams of statistics about clients. Unfortunately, it rarely means they have discovered any real new insight into clients’ needs. If you’re expecting your team to understand clients by watching a PowerPoint presentation, challenge yourself to find a more engaging and interactive process. It will be far more effective to immerse your team in real client understanding.
Question everything. Do some specific exercises that force people to confront and challenge their subconscious assumptions about the topic. An easy way to do this is to first ask for ideas that the team thinks would solve the problem but they probably couldn’t implement for some reason. Then ask them to reframe each idea by saying, “We might be able to implement this idea if …” What comes behind the “ifs” will help surface a lot of assumptions people have that may or may not actually be barriers. Of course, some of the barriers will turn out to be real, so don’t spend more time on those ideas. But in every case that I’ve ever done this with client teams, they also discover many supposed barriers that they could solve.
Let some crazy in the room. The academic definition of creative thinking is “the process of coming up with new and useful ideas.” The only way to get new ideas is to start with seemingly crazy ideas. Every truly innovative idea seems a little crazy at first. If you only start with ideas that are comfortable or clearly easy to implement, they’re probably not very new. So, encourage people to throw in extremely wild ideas. Then, play “If we could.” Instruct the team to temporarily let go of the problems in the idea and ask, “If we could implement this idea, what would be the benefit(s)?” Once you have identified the benefits of each crazy idea, narrow it down to the most promising few and ask the team to look for viable solutions to the barriers.
A team I worked with was on the verge of killing a truly original idea for a new kids’ cereal because they didn’t know how to create the critical component. However, after “If we could,” they agreed the idea was so interesting and unique that they needed to explore it. The research and development team made a few calls to other experts, and within a few weeks they solved it. This idea resulted in the most successful new product launch in the brand’s history!
It is unfortunately all too easy to simply approach every new challenge using our typical day-to-day thinking. It feels familiar. It’s easy to access that type of thinking, and it works on most daily challenges. So, you subconsciously assume it will work on any challenge. It’s incredibly helpful to do some meta-analysis on your thinking. In other words, think about how you’re thinking. Not every problem will benefit from the same type of thinking. Once you recognize that this new situation needs new thinking, it’s easy to shift to a more productive mode for this particular challenge. Then shift back to the more familiar day-to-day thinking for your daily tasks.
Finding the Hidden Innovators in Your Company
Most people who work in a corporate environment are familiar with some type of personal style indicator — Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, Strengths Finder, DISC profile, and many others. However, there’s a less well-known one that’s particularly relevant and useful in innovation and it is specific to your creative thinking style.
At the heart of creativity and innovation is problem-solving. Since all humans problem-solve, by definition, all humans are creative. However, we each go about our problem-solving in our own preferred style, and society has come to label only one style as being “creative” – the style called “Innovator” on this assessment.
Think of Leonardo da Vinci as an extreme example of that Innovator style. He was an idea machine, constantly jumping around in numerous disciplines—including art, cartography, anatomy, botany, astronomy, geology, and others. Many of his ideas were truly ground-breaking. He conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, a calculator, and concentrated solar power. He even outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics.
Thomas Edison is a great example of a creative thinker with an Adaptive style. He held more than 1,000 US patents. However, many of the products he patented, perfected, and commercialized were not originally conceptualized by him. For example, he did not actually invent the light bulb, he developed a light bulb that was practical. He was able to improve, fix, optimize, and operationalize ideas better than perhaps anyone else in history.
Creativity Style Characteristics
It is important to note that your thinking style is an indicator of preference, not of ability. Any of us can think and behave in another style—and we all do it effectively when we recognize it’s needed. But we go back to our preferred style as soon as we can. It’s where we’re most comfortable and probably where we’re most consistently successful.
The chart below illustrates some key traits of extreme Adaptors and extreme Innovators.
The important question becomes - who should you have running your innovation projects?
Extreme innovators are great at coming up with ideas, and their energy and passion for ideas may get other people excited about them, at least at the beginning. But then their greatest strength – their zest and constant quest for new ideas - becomes a weakness that starts to create problems. In short, they’ll drive everyone on the team crazy and jeopardize the success of the project. So, an extreme Innovator may not be the person you want to run the show. They’re one of the actors, and probably a lead actor, but they shouldn’t be the producer.
So, if it isn’t that person, the next logical conclusion might be that the extreme Adaptors should manage the process. They’re organized, disciplined, and efficient. But similarly, their strengths can also become weaknesses at the extremes. High Adaptors’ discomforts with ambiguity will likely result in attempting to define the scope of projects too early, or kill them altogether if the ambiguity can’t be resolved quickly. And their focus on the stated problem may prevent them from seeing solutions or opportunities outside their day-to-day world.
So now what? If you’ve ruled out extreme Innovators and extreme Adaptors as the best candidates for managing the process, where does that leave you? With everyone else. Here’s the great news: everyone else is most of us. 67% of the population is in the middle of these 2 extremes.
If you want someone who may be naturally inclined to manage an innovation process, pick someone more in the middle, who can be a Bridger. The benefits of a Bridger in this role are numerous because they naturally exhibit moderate traits of both adaption and innovation. So with a Bridger, you get a bit of the best of both.
They “get” the vision of the big idea that the extreme Innovator came up with. They’ll get excited and energized about ideas. They can live with ambiguity for a while. But they also see the need for organization and documentation. They’ll understand the challenges that will have to be solved in order to implement that big idea. They can stay focused and see projects through to the end. They’ll understand group norms and will bridge the communication gap between the high Innovators and the high Adaptors on the team.
The problem may be in getting these people to understand that they are the ones who should be running the innovation process. Since they’re not high Innovators, they haven’t had people telling them their whole lives that they’re creative thinkers. So they may not think of themselves as a good fit for innovation.
The role of those responsible for innovation in your company should be to convince the “everyone elses” in the middle that they’re needed in the innovation process—and help them see how their unique contributions can be incredibly valuable in this arena.
A Quick Creative Thinking Tip
Harvard’s social media manager asked me for a quick creative thinking tip. Here’s a 2 minute video with a thinking tool that will instantly help you generate more creative ideas for any challenge.
How to Sustain Flexible Thinking and Nimble Action that Emerged from the Pandemic
To survive the pandemic, companies were forced to adapt very quickly to radically new circumstances. Even large organizations - where it’s typically difficult to shift directions quickly - managed to accomplish it. Leaders discovered that, when required, their organization could act much more quickly and nimbly than they normally do.
So the obvious questions become:
1) What was different? and;
2) How can we “hardwire” this flexibility into the organization so we continue to be stronger in the future?
What was different?
To understand what was different, we first have to dip our toe into neuroscience. All humans have a set of cognitive biases, which are mental shortcuts that we use for problem solving and decision making.
To be clear, cognitive biases are NOT individual or personal biases. They are a neuroscience phenomenon that all humans share. Meaning, it’s not that I have one and you have another; we all have all of them. It’s also important to understand that they operate subconsciously; we’re not aware when we’re relying on them. So they affect our thinking in ways that we don’t realize.
Cognitive biases grow out of the way our brain functions. We have two different thinking systems, commonly known as System 1 and System 2, sometimes referred to as thinking fast (1) and thinking slow (2).
System 1 is the “intuitive”, quick, and easy thinking that we do most of the time. In fact, it accounts for about 98% of our thinking. It doesn’t require a lot of mental effort; we do it easily, quickly, and without having to think about that fact that we’re thinking.
System 2 thinking is deeper thinking; the kind that’s required for complex problem solving and decision making. This deeper thinking requires more effort and energy; it literally uses more calories. Since it’s less energy efficient, our brain automatically and subconsciously defaults to the easier System 1 thinking whenever it can, to save effort.
Cognitive biases result when our brain tries to stay in System 1 thinking, when perhaps it should be in System 2. The outcome is often poor decision making or sub-optimal solutions. But we don’t realize that we have sub-optimized because all of this has happened subconsciously.
Under normal circumstances, there are a variety of cognitive biases that typically cause us to change slowly, cautiously, and incrementally. Here, we’ll discuss 3 of them.
The Negativity Bias
Negativity Bias is the phenomenon that negative experiences have a greater impact on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors rather than positive experiences. So we are much more highly motivated to avoid negative than we are to seek out positive. The way this manifests in our daily work is that we are much more prone to reject new ideas than to accept them, because rejecting ideas feels like we’re avoiding potential negative. The most common response to any new idea is “yes, but….”, with all the potential problems following the “but”. Our brains are laser focused and lightning fast at identifying potential problems.
The Status Quo Bias
The Status Quo bias is a subconscious preference for the current state of affairs. We use “current” as a mental reference point, and any change from that is perceived as a loss. As a result, we frequently overestimate the risk of a change, and dramatically underestimate the risk of “business as usual.” History is littered with examples of companies that have gone out of business by failing to recognize that change is needed until it was too late.
The Curse of Knowledge
In any subject where we have some expertise, we also have many subconscious assumptions about that subject. Under normal circumstance, this Curse of Knowledge (these latent assumptions) limits our thinking and suppresses our ability to come up with radically new ideas.
The Intersection
In typical circumstances, these three cognitive biases (and likely others) conspire to make us perceive that continuing as we are - with only slower, incremental changes - seems like the best decision. It feels familiar, it feels lower risk, in sum – it feels smarter. Choosing to do nothing different is – very often – simply the default. It often doesn’t even feel like we made a decision; it feels instead like we were really smart for NOT making a potentially risky decision.
But during the pandemic, changing nothing was simply not an option. This particular situation was so unique that our brains didn’t have the choice to stay in short-cut System 1 thinking. System 2 thinking was required. Since our brains were literally working harder -in System 2 - all the cognitive biases weren’t a factor. We couldn’t reject new ideas. We couldn’t maintain the status quo. We had no Curse of Knowledge to limit our thinking.
How to Continue to be More Nimble in the Future
The key to maintaining flexible thinking and nimble behavior is to not allow our brains to fall into the trap of cognitive biases. Obviously, since these are intuitive and subconscious responses, this is not easy task. But there are proven ways that we can better manage our brains. Here are a few ways to start.
1. Short circuit the Negativity Bias. Respond to “yes but…” with “what if…?” This requires a dedicated and conscious mental effort, by everyone on the team, to monitor their own and the team’s response to new ideas. Every time “yes, but…” is uttered, the response needs to be “What if we could solve for that?” This reframing of the problem into a question will trigger our brains to look for solutions, instead of instantly rejecting the idea.
2. Mitigate the Status Quo Bias. When weighing a choice of possible actions, be sure to overtly list “do nothing” as one of the choices, so you are forced to acknowledge it is a choice. Also include “risk” as one of the evaluation criteria and force the team to list all the possible risks. Then comes the difficult part - remind them that their subconscious brain is making them perceive the risks of doing nothing to be lower than the reality, so they should multiply the possibility of each of those risks.
3. Curtail the Curse of Knowledge. Rely on advisors who don’t have the same Curse of Knowledge. In other words, seek out advice from people outside of your industry. When evaluating ideas or actions, these outsiders won’t have the same blinders that you have, so they will likely have a more clear-eyed view of the benefits and risks.
The bad news is that cognitive biases are always going to be a factor in our problem-solving and decision making; they’re hard-wired into us. The good news is that, with some dedicated and continuous mental effort, we can mitigate them and become more nimble in the face of change.
Let Some Crazy In the Room: How to get More Breakthrough Ideas. Interview with Pete Mockaitis of How To Be Awesome At Your Job
Thrilled to be a guest on the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast with Pete Mockaitis! Click the title above to listen.
Market Changers Avoid Blind Spots
My friend and colleague, Mike Maddock, writes about innovation for Forbes magazine. He interviewed me for an article on how to get around some natural limitations we all have on creative thinking.
How Your Own Brain Limits Your Thinking (and What To Do About It)
Why is it that coming up with truly new and different ideas for our business (or our lives) can sometimes seem difficult? The answer is based in neuroscience.
All humans have cognitive biases, or mental shortcuts, that we use for problem solving. These cognitive biases operate unconsciously, so they limit our thinking in ways we’re not aware of.
In his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman describes that our brains have two types of thinking, and we actually can’t utilize them both at the same time. We constantly toggle back and forth between the two.
System 1 (Fast): is the “easier” type of thinking, and we use it whenever we can. It’s intuitive, unconscious, and automatic. It’s also energy-efficient. Our brains store no energy (there are no fat cells in our brains), so we rely on the more energy-efficient System 1 thinking most of the time.
System 2 (Slow): is thinking that requires more deliberation, more focus, more conscious thought—and thus, more energy. So we avoid it whenever we can. System 2 usually just monitors in the background, allowing System 1 to rule most of the time.
Our reliance on System 1 and avoidance of System 2 isn’t conscious; we simply do it without being aware of it.
Here’s an example of how you may have experienced this in your own life. If you’ve ever driven home from work, and realized once you arrived that you had no idea how you got there, you’ve experienced System 1 thinking. Your route home is so familiar that it has become System 1 for you – it’s automatic. You don’t have to think about it very hard. You don’t have to use any energy thinking about it.
However, if you happened to run across a tree that had fallen across the road that required you to find a new way home, your brain would have kicked itself into System 2.
You’d have to expend a bit more energy and effort into figuring out how to get home that day. But you probably wouldn’t have had a conscious thought that “I just went into System 2”. It just happened, automatically, because your brain was forced to find a new solution. And once you got around the roadblock and returned to your familiar route, your brain – again automatically and unconsciously – shifted back to System 1.
System 1 thinking involves associating new information with existing patterns, or thoughts, rather than creating new patterns for each new experience. This has serious implications for innovation and creative thinking. Because we unconsciously and automatically rely on System 1 most of the time, we regularly fall into the trap of relying on several cognitive biases – mental shortcuts – that limit our ideas, and we don’t realize our thinking is being shortchanged.
One result of our unconscious reliance on these cognitive biases is that – whenever we are faced with new information – we use it to simply refine our existing models/beliefs/hypotheses.
Rarely do we assume new data means our existing beliefs might be wrong. Instead, we make the most minimum adjustments possible to our existing beliefs that allows for the new data. There is lots of well-documented evidence of cognitive biases that result in our holding on to our existing assumptions.
Further, the more experience and expertise we have in a particular topic, the more existing assumptions we have about it. We are likely not even aware of all the embedded assumptions we have; many of them are so ingrained in our thinking that it wouldn’t even occur to us to question them. They are presumed to be fact, if we even consciously recognize that we hold this belief.
Obviously, to get disruptive insights and ideas, we must go beyond the incremental thinking of System 1.
To get there, we need to consider the possibility that our view of the world (or the market, or our product category, etc.) might need shaking up. Given that our human tendency is to retain existing models, we need to consciously be doing things to help break ourselves out of this natural limitation on new thinking.
The video above illustrates an easy-to-learn, but very powerful, thinking tool that will help you avoid the Curse of Knowledge, an innovation killing cognitive bias that we all have. The tool, called Presumption Purging™, will result in dramatically new thinking. When you use this tool, the nature of the ideas that emerge will change. That’s because you’re now not limiting your creativity with artificial guardrails that arise from relying on your Curse of Knowledge.
Neuroscience Brain Hack for More Effective Problem Solving
The way we articulate the challenge we’re solving will influence the ideas we come up with. This Framing Bias, a cognitive bias that all humans have, limits our thinking in ways we’re not aware of. So, if you need new ideas to a problem you’ve been wrestling with, you need to ask a new question. Here’s how.
Neuroscience Brain Hack for More Creative Ideas
We all have the Negativity Bias (even though we don’t want to admit it). This cognitive bias all too often results in squashing ideas; both our own and others’. This easy-to-learn brain hack will lead to better ideas and more innovative problem solving.