In today's competitive environment – one where the world is flat, innovation is constant and change is all around us – some companies appear to have the incredible ability to leapfrog their competitors, find new approaches to old problems and outpace their industry. Is this truly a modern trend? No, says Kaihan Krippendorff. If we look back through history we find individuals in every era and in every field who systematically were able to Outthink the Competition. In the following article Kaihan shares some of the insights from his new book.
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The Five Habits of Outthinkers
How a new generation of strategists sees options other ignore
By Kaihan Krippendorff
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At the heart of outthinking the competition sits one fundamental question: How do some people see and seize strategic options that others overlook?
I've studied some of history's most creative strategists, from Sun Tzu to Napoleon Bonaparte to Mahatma Gandhi, and had the opportunity to get into the minds of some of their modern peers – like the social and business leaders I mention in my most recent book. I've had the opportunity to coach some amazingly creative leaders and train 5,000 people so far on the topic of strategic creativity.
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If we mash all of these experiences together, contrasting the thought processes of outthinkers with the rest of us, we see five key habits that lead outthinkers toward seeing and realizing unorthodox solutions: -
Mental time travel
- Attacking the interconnected system
- Frame-shifting
- Disruptive mind-set
- Perception-shaping
How some people naturally arrive at these habits, I am not sure. But I do know they can be learned. If we strengthen our muscles in these five areas, we begin to see and seize solutions that others overlook. If we can develop these habits in our team and across our company, we start to unlock the inert creative potential of our organizations. We free people to find pathways through challenges that we once thought were unworkable. We can help make the impossible possible every day.
1. Mental time travel
Imagination rules the world. — Napoleon Bonaparte
Ask people who have had a major impact on their industry or some part of the world what they were thinking in the early days, and they are likely to take you into a mental time machine. At the start, they were able to fast-forward in time, imagining a desired future. When most people's minds would wander, these outthinkers were able to hold their minds steady at that moment and paint in all the detail, exploring everything that would need to happen for their vision to be realized.
Cognitive scientists call this ability to visualize a possible future "mental time travel," and they believe it serves as a key distinction between humans and animals. This ability to imagine a possible future and then work backward to make more informed choices is a requisite of everything we call civilization. It is because of this ability that we take the time to build tools, to plant seeds, or to store food for the winter.
2. Attacking the interconnected system
In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes. — Julius Caesar
When Scipio Africanus took on the seemingly impossible task of defeating Hannibal in 205 BC, he resisted the direct assault that other Roman military leaders before him had tried. Instead, he did the exact opposite and turned in the other direction, toward New Carthage. Capturing that city meant he cut Hannibal off from his supply lines. The once indomitable enemy was now severely weakened, and the Romans were finally able to vanquish him.
The critical lesson from this story is not counterintuitive thinking – although that is important – but the fact that Scipio Africanus took in a bigger picture, looking not just at the players but at their interdependencies. By studying the entire interconnected system, he found a masterstroke that would weaken his enemy with minimal effort.
In the West we might call this systems thinking. The Taoists began speaking of this ability five millennia ago, advocating the appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things. This is how outthinkers think. While their competitors focus on the parts of the system (e.g., Hannibal), they look also at the invisible interconnections (e.g., the flow of supplies) and thereby find opportunities to change the system more quickly and more easily.
3. Frame-shifting
I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. — Albert Einstein
My kids were waiting in the garage, all bundled up on a cold morning, bags in hand, ready for school. I was scurrying around the living room looking for the car keys. I had searched everywhere I thought they might be but still no keys, so I got on my knees. I wasn't praying; I just didn't know what else to do, and there, behind a piece of furniture, were the keys. One of my children must have hidden them, probably playing a joke on Dad.
We got to school on time that morning. But we might not have if I hadn't changed my perspective. Sometimes just shifting your point of view can reveal new solutions.
Indeed, research into expertise and expert performance explains how great strategists use mental frames to break cognitive barriers that prevent others from seeing new options. It is not just that experts know more about the problem – in fact they often know less – but they think differently. They restructure, reorganize, and refine their representation of knowledge so as to more efficiently apply knowledge to solve problems.
Specifically, they overcome three limits to human thinking capacity:
- We have a limited ability to concentrate. We cannot perceive and pay attention to all of the stimuli we are exposed to. This means we must constrain what we pay attention to. What distinguishes experts is that they are able to pay attention to and remain aware of the right things more often than novices. Great chess players, for example, fixate on the most relevant squares on a chessboard and therefore make fewer calculations before choosing a move. This gives them a "perceptual head start."
- We struggle with limited working memory capacity. Since we draw inferences only from what is in short-term memory, our ability to solve problems is limited by our capacity to hold information there. Experts seem able to hold more information in short-term memory than novices, although this is not because they actually have larger memory capacity.
- We struggle with limited long-term-memory access. Experts can more effectively access relevant knowledge from their long-term memory at the right time for short-term memory to work on.
Experts are able to overcome these cognitive limits through a process of chunking. That is, they develop a high-order vocabulary to group things into chunks, or patterns. This lets them process information more rapidly and effectively, enabling them to conceive of and implement more complex strategies.
Research into expertise and expert performance has actually been able to measure this. Master chess players recognize twice as many patterns as experts when they look at a game board in play. Grandmaster chess players are able to recognize 10 times as many.
This means your ability to see strategic options that others don't see has little to do with your innate intelligence or how creative you think you are. It is simply a function of the number and variety of frames – or chunks or strategic narratives – you bring to the game.
Similarly, the ability of your team to see unorthodox strategic options is a function of their diversity. The more different their natural repertoires of patterns are, the more innovative their ideas are, provided you facilitate the conversation effectively.
During my strategic-thinking workshop I walk participants through five to seven strategic narratives, encouraging them to shift their frame on their strategic challenge five to seven times. We've found that on average, groups generate 6 to 10 times as many options by shifting their frames on the problem.
4. Disruptive mind-set
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. — Napoleon Bonaparte
Outthinkers recognize that although having a product customers love and having the ability to deliver it are critical, these alone create no more than a flash of success if the idea is one the competition can easily steal from you. They may be creative as heck, but creativity is not sufficient by itself. Truly effective strategies must be disruptive, meaning that they are creative and difficult for competitors to copy.
Just as entropy always increases and water seeks the lowest point, great ideas struggle against a natural, continuous pull of commoditization. As Bruce Greenwald, the Columbia professor known as the guru of value investment gurus, says, "In the long-run, everything becomes a toaster." The goal is to innovate faster than your competition. That means either innovating faster, slowing down your competition, or both.
5. Perception-shaping
My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see. — Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner, founder of Grameen Bank
We often think the job ends when we have come up with the brilliant idea. What is left is simply to execute it. But before you even have something to execute, you must enroll key stakeholders – funders, employees, partners, and so on. This requires shifting their perspectives so that they see the attractiveness of your idea.
Outthinkers change the world because they are skilled at shaping others' perceptions, building buy-in for their ideas. Many of the things we create today – products, services, and companies – are social constructions. They exist because people agree they exist. A dollar is worth a dollar because we all agree it is. Apple is an aspirational company only because enough people say it is. As the expressionist artist Louise Nevelson said, "What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable." This is critical – it puts the ability to shape others' perceptions at the heart of outthinking.
To change the world you need to change reality, and to change reality you need to change perception, which you engineer with creative language. You need to overcome the fundamental challenge of innovation: All innovations begin with a new vision that is inconsistent with current reality. Successful innovators are able to enroll a critical mass of people in that vision so that it actually becomes reality.
Kaihan is an expert consultant on organizational strategy and innovative thinking, and a partner of BlessingWhite. He consults with organizations around the world and runs senior-level working sessions to help revisit and rethink the organization's future. Kaihan has written several books on the topic, including "The Way of Innovation" and "Hide a Dagger Behind a Smile." His most recent book is entitled Outthink the Competition. You can buy a copy now: (http://www.kaihan.net/outthinkthe_competitionbook.html). Book excerpts can be found on Wiley's website: (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118105087,descCd-release_text.html)
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