Lateral thinking: How to workshop innovative ideas | Dan Seewald | Big Think

As we get older, it becomes a real benefit to have a long history and tradition, the work that you do. It builds what you might call patterns or rivers of thinking. And the more experience we glean, the more education we acquire. We build deeper and deeper rivers. And those rivers are really valuable. Those patterns are important.

But the challenge is that as those patterns get deeper, we get locked into them. And it becomes hard to change our minds. It becomes hard to do things differently. That's why children are absolutely amazing at their lateral thinking, or the ability to think across different domains within an instant. It's because they haven't built those patterns or gone deep into those rivers yet.

And while a river can be really valuable for you as an expert in an area of neuroscience, let's say, or it can be really useful if you're building a product forecast or doing market research, when you need new ideas, when you need to break with the past, it could be really challenging. Because we know what we know, and it's hard for us to diverge or jump out of those rivers.

But there's good news for it. We can actually practice. We can cultivate this. We can take time to be able to build new patterns of thinking, but only if we're willing and if we have the desire to go and do things different. And that is a really important intrinsic factor — the motivation, the desire, to be able to get out of our normal patterns of thinking.

Think about it this way for a moment. How many times have you gone to work the same exact way, walking across the same city blocks or driving across the same roads? When have you said to yourself, I'm going to go a longer route, I'm going to try something different? Maybe I'll even bike to work. Maybe I could skateboard-- maybe not skateboard.

But you know what I mean, doing things differently. Because when you do things differently, it actually starts to rewire our brain, and it pushes us in a very deliberate way to think what we've never thought before. And there's a lot of different lessons and little secret ingredients that I think that could help prime or set people up to be able to think different.

So one, the battle is usually won or lost before you ever step foot on the battlefield. I think it was George Patton who said that. And it really is true, not just in war or in sports, but in innovation. The reason I say that is that it primes you. It gets you ready. You've already premeditated on the subject.

And while that might put you in a pattern of thinking, it also readies you to come in and to start thinking deeply on a subject. Often, we'll throw out things in the moment, in the instant, to people and hope that miraculously, they'll have a great idea. It requires incubation time, which is a term that's used in neuroscience, where we allow for ideas to percolate before we actually start to try to do something with it.

So preparation is absolutely essential when you want to achieve a big success in any type of workshop or design sprint or ideation session. The second thing that I believe wholeheartedly in is this idea of play. So play is not something new, but it's often frowned upon in most adult working states.

Now, some companies have done an awesome job of trying to change the story, Google, and Apple, and other companies that are a bit more tilted towards the millennials. But us older folk also really like to play. When we were kids, we were all awesome at play. It's something that we did every day.

And I like to bring play and game mechanics back into workshops. Why is that? Because we can simulate what we're going to do through play, in game. And then, after we've done it with no risk, no fear of failure, then we can actually have people do it on serious subjects.

But we've built patterns. We've built a pathway in which people have now played, and they've gone through the steps. And now they're ready to do real and serious work with a little bit more of a playful mindset. And you know what's most important about the play, about play and also about game mechanics? It's that ...