Innovation for the Fatigued by Alf Rehn

Author:Alf Rehn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2019-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Thinking, fast and slow and deep

To understand imagination, then, is not to make out how a closed mode of thinking works, but rather to grasp how layered human thought is. Daniel Kahneman famously, in his bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow3 delineated a System 1 and a System 2 for thinking. The former is fast, based on instincts and immediate responses, whilst the latter is more deliberate and logical. One way to think about imagination is to start from here but then to go considerably deeper. I like to picture this as a digging down, going from the easily shifted topsoil of our instinctive mind, all the way down to the hard-to-reach sedimentary rock of imagination. This is so as to turn our usual perception of imagination as fluffy and easy on its head – not least because for organizations, imagination can often be the hardest thing of all. Just ask Blockbuster.

Most thinking, in organizations and amongst individuals, is organized by routines, learnt patterns and behaviours that have worked decently well before and which people as a consequence often resort to even when faced with a new problem. This is the kind of thinking that is easiest for us to turn to, as we can just use preprogrammed heuristics. If morning, get coffee. Socks before shoes. If a customer complains, blame the IT system. This kind of thinking is very important, as it helps us get through the day and handle well-known and well-understood situations. We use this mode of thinking so often and so without reflection that we don’t even necessarily see how this might also lead to problems. This is Kahneman’s System 1 thinking, and just as he details, it can bring in a plethora of biases, where our shortcuts and heuristics can make us act in quite irrational ways. Still, it is important to note that this is always (always!) our brain’s go-to system for dealing with issues. No matter whether it is a new problem to be solved or ideas to be brainstormed, the first things out of our system of thinking will be routine solutions – the easiest, most comfortable ideas we can think of.

When faced with more complex problems, we start engaging what Kahneman would call System 2. This is a more analytic mode of thinking, one that tries to combat the biases of the instinctive System 1. We might call this the level of logic, where we strive to stick to rules of thinking we already know but in a more conscious and considered manner. Here, we assess the data we have, think through the various processes we’ve previously tested for dealing with the problem, and pick the one we feel will be most suited to the task. As we’re normally equipped with quite a few thinking tools, this kind of logical pick-and-mix comes naturally to us. Analytics, however, also suffers from a specific limitation. Logic is good for dealing with things that are relatively well known, or at least reminiscent of earlier problems. IF this, THEN that, assuming both this and that are known.

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