Whose choice?
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) Most of us are susceptible to distorted thinking in the way we make choices.
We’re conditioned to believe our decisions are either binary (“either I do this, or I do that”) or we engage in a form of multiple-choice answers (“I can only do one of the following things”).
Both hinge on an important assumption: that the choices in front of us are the only ones possible. And more often than not, those options in front of you have been pre-picked by somebody else.
Think about what happens when you go to a restaurant and find yourself looking at the menu, unable to make up your mind. Here, your decision making has been framed for you: pick only from the following choices.
What if what you really wanted was the chicken but with a different side order? Maybe you just want some cheese, cold cuts, olives and veggies to go with that wine. Granted, there are plenty of restaurants that can’t—or won’t—accommodate. But many will. Sometimes you just have to ask (but don’t be a jerk about it).
And yet most of us don’t even try. We assume that’s breaking the rules.
My point: who is framing your choices?
That’s a question we need to ask ourselves much more often than we typically do.
This is especially important if you want to be more creative in how solve problems in your work and in your life.
I like to way that 1930s Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky (what a great name!) looked at choices. Using what he called morphological boxes (what a bad name!), he showed how new things can be created by combining the attributes of existing things. He applied that method to conceive of some of the earliest forms of jet engines, among other things. You can use this too.
In essence, Zwicky taught us to be wary of how we frame our choices.
Do not assume that solutions are found just in a narrow list of options put in front of you, picked by someone else.
Creativity is the act of connecting things in unexpected ways. You are responsible for the unexpected. That’s what Pixar’s Ed Catmull is getting at in his book Creativity Inc. (https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012) , when he says: “Craft is where we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”
Think for yourself: invention begins at the point where you recognize your own assumptions.
Very best, Patrick
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