What are you thinking?

Henry Ford said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

Design Thinking is a buzzword in many organizations today to solve problems and discover new opportunities. Design Thinking values empathy with users, and emphasizes on companies to bring a solution quickly to market by using an elaborate process and techniques.

However, has 'Design Thinking' produced enough results? Bruce Nussbaum published this article a while ago on why Design Thinking has produced far more failures than successes. He specifically mentions how Design Thinking was packaged as process to be implemented like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes to deliver creativity. He further elaborates that Design Thinking fails as "Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation. Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change.

From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.” Design Thinking focuses on understanding user's problems and rapid-prototyping 'faster horses'.

Whereas 'Art Thinking' focuses on 'Creativity' and more importantly 'Failure' and asking 'Messy' questions. As this article by Tim Brown mentions 'Art Thinking' is right there with the Wright brothers as they crash-land, figuring out whether flight is even possible. He further mentions "Although the design process can be full of “eureka!” moments and true contributions to how we all live, what it misses from art thinking is a comfort with the possibility of failure. In design thinking, you implicitly believe a solution is possible. In art thinking, you are leading from questions--trying to ask the biggest, messiest, most important questions, even if you are not sure you can answer them.

Accepting that you might fail actually frees you to fumble inelegantly, to learn, even to waste time. Even if you move forward unpredictably in fits and starts, you stand a greater chance of the brilliant breakthroughs that create rather than meet demand. Art thinking created the first iPhone; design thinking made it a manufacturable, cultural phenomenon”. As 'Art Thinking' is focused on possibility of failure, are organizations convinced to invest time and money which do not assure success at the beginning?

'Art Thinking' and 'Design Thinking' can compliment each other. While 'Art Thinking' focuses on making original solutions without the constraints of 'productivity', Design Thinking can focus on making the 'invented' product better, usable, culturally acceptable and manufacturable!

Ask a lot of questions

The power of moonshot thinking

Moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. Pursuing a moonshot puts you in a different league—and often an entirely different game—from that of your competitors, making the established plays and routines largely irrelevant. Some moonshots are too impractical to materialize in the near future—if ever. But you don’t need all your moonshots to take flight. As long as your portfolio of ideas is balanced—and you’re not betting your future on a single moonshot—one big success will compensate for the ideas better left to novels and movies.

The business of moonshots

Shocking the brain through moonshot thinking doesn’t mean we stop considering practicalities. Once we have our wacky ideas, we can collide them with reality by switching from divergent to convergent thinking—from idealism to pragmatism. This is where it is vital to ask the practical questions that allow you to work out what is achievable and potentially profitable.

What’s missing

If you focus on what’s right in front of you, you’ll miss everything that’s just out of view. Ask yourself, “What’s missing?” When you think you’ve exhausted all possibilities, keep asking, “What else?” Make a deliberate effort to repeatedly turn your head and check your blind spot.

Eight fundamental principles to get you started.

Ask a lot of questions.
Channel your inner six-year-old.
Say “I don’t know” more often
Explore bad ideas.
Stress test all opinions, including yours.
Learn to dance with criticism.
Pay attention to things that don’t make sense.
Embrace failure.

Too afraid to fail

Humans are wired to fear failure. To ward off the bogeyman of failure, we keep a safe distance from it. But this natural tendency to avoid failure is a recipe for failing. Behind every rocket unlaunched, every canvas unpainted, every goal unattempted, every book unwritten, and every song unsung is the looming fear of failure.

The much-quoted mantra “failure is not an option” is misleading. Doing anything ground breaking means taking risks, and taking risks means you’re going to fail, at least some of the time. A moratorium on failure is a moratorium on progress.

This is not an endorsement of failure for the sake of failure. Failure, by itself, isn’t enough. You must reflect on it, learn from it, and improve on your next attempt.

What have you failed at this week?

Answers serve as a launch pad to discovery

First principles thinking

First principles thinking drives complex problem solving and workplace innovation through reverse engineering. Companies that employ first principles thinking are one step ahead as they plan and build for the future.

First principles thinking requires embracing a new mindset that identifies when our old way of doing things is obsolete. A shift in thinking that discards conventional wisdom, cuts through the dogma and questions our own beliefs.

Traditional thinking: How do we typically think?

Starts with limitations
Iteration and improvement of an existing path
Explore available solutions in the form of variations of what exists without true knowledge
Look back in time and then determine what to build
Question the path taken to reach a certain goal

First principles thinking: How we should think?

Starts with the possibilities
Define and explore a completely new path
Create a new recipe from the fundamental truth
Look into the future and its needs
Ask the question - “What’s the goal?”

First principles thinking requires breaking down a problem into its fundamental building blocks, its essential elements, asking powerful questions, getting down to the basic truth, separating facts from assumptions and then constructing a view from the grounds up.

It requires understanding that our experience may be different from reality and true knowledge can be attained by learning to integrate different ideas together. It fills the gap between the incremental mindset to opening ourselves to the beautiful world of possibilities.

Companies that succeed do not ask “What exists”. They ask “What’s possible” and then determine how to get there. In a quest to create a better version, they do not limit themselves to iteration on what exists. They are not trapped in how things are done traditionally. Rather they apply first principles thinking and break the mental barriers to determine what it is that must be done, even if that means starting from scratch.

Such companies understand that the truth of yesterday may not be the reality today. They look at the world through a new lens everyday, go back and question assumptions and explore new possibilities.

Answers simply serve as a launch pad to discovery. They’re the beginning, not the end. Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

Asking the right questions is an art.

Think clearly, go beyond our biases, explore other perspectives.

Asking the right questions is an art. It’s what enables us to think clearly, go beyond our biases, explore other perspectives and build relationships by showing a curiosity to learn from others. When we ask questions that solicit a yes or no response, we do not give an opportunity to the other person to engage in deliberate thinking, share their experience or find connection through a meaningful conversation.

Open ended questions are packed with curiosity. They are asked with the intent to gain deeper insight about the problem, inquire our own thoughts and explore a different perspective. It encourages open mindedness to gather relevant data, learn new information, refine our beliefs and shift our approach to how we view the world and people in it

Great leaders should be the optimal blend of creative and analytical. They should represent a constant balance between the right and left brain. They should take great pride in trying something new knowing that there is risk but also great reward. An Art Thinking mindset doesn’t mean abandoning the analytical side; it just dares you to think beyond immediate metrics and traditional practices – it allows freedom of thought.

Art thinking stakes out more space for the unknown, the untested, and the not yet commercialized as read in the two following examples.

Pablo Picasso

Demolishing the traditional conception of pictorial space, Picasso and Braque painted objects as facets of an analysis, rather than as unified objects; they wanted to paint as they thought, not as they saw. This period of their work is called Analytical Cubism, and Picasso's work in this style formed a kind of progression over the years. What we see is the logical development of a single, powerful idea, pushed as far as Picasso could take it.

Cubism's next innovation–again, a joint effort between Picasso and Braque–was Synthetic Cubism. Here, the defining characteristic was collage, a technique never before used in fine art. This new method allowed Picasso to play with the bits and pieces of modern life, the handbills and the newspapers and other such detritus of the metropolis, which had never before been satisfactorily incorporated into the visual arts.

Elon Musk

In 2002, Musk began his quest to send the first rocket to Mars—an idea that would eventually become the aerospace company SpaceX. He ran into a major challenge right off the bat. After visiting a number of aerospace manufacturers around the world, Musk discovered the cost of purchasing a rocket was astronomical—up to $65 million. Given the high price, he began to rethink the problem.

“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”

Instead of buying a finished rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to create his own company, purchase the raw materials for cheap, and build the rockets himself. SpaceX was born. Within a few years, SpaceX had cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while still making a profit. Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more effective solution.