Unsafe Thinking

Unsafe Thinking: the ability to meet challengers with a willingness to depart from standard operating procedures; to confront anxiety, tolerate criticisms, take intelligent risks, and refute conventional wisdom — especially one’s one views — in order to achive breakthroughs.

The Problem with “Experts”

A need to project authority and surety instead of admitting they need to ask more questions, an involuntary drift toward conformity when working in groups, and a knack for internalizing conventional wisdom until it appears to be out own gut instinct are but a few of the tendencies that prevent us from forging and then sticking to new paths.

Expertise can be a terrible trap. Recent study shows that believing we’re experts on a subject makes us more prone to basic factual errors. Given that, how can we both build up and draw on expertise and yet not let it blind us to any novel possibilities we should entertain?

Four Key Components in Boosting Creativity

• We are driven from within to solve a problem
• We have developed deep knowledge relevant to the problem we’re working on. To avoid hitting constant dead ends, we need to know what’s been tried before, what’s worked, and what’s failed.
• We approach the problem through creative workstyle, meaning that we are willing to break old habits, to entertain unfamiliar ideas, and even to break rules.
• The social environment in which we work is conducive to creativity. A management focus on mitigating rish, overly rigid procedures, and politics that pit colleagues against one another can easily squash creativity.

Components of Unsafe Thinking

• Courage explores the role of discomfort, and sometimes outright fear, plays in trapping us in safe thinking.
• Motivation looks at the energy we need to sustain experimentation with new and uncomfortable approaches to out work, even in the face of setbacks.
• Learning untangles the seeming paradox that while we need expertise to do successful creative work, we often suffer a decline in learning and performance once we become experts.
• Flexibility provides insights into the power and limits of intuition and the advantages of generating ideas
• Morality looks at the challenging notion that a strong commitment to do the “right”

The breakthroughs of unsafe thinkers often lie in using all the tools available. Rationality and creativity, intuition and analysis, intrinsic and extrinsic drive, expert and beginner mind-sets, these are all essential aspects of human thinking.

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Courage

Why we stick to our guns and we know we shouldn’t.

The Safe Thinking Cycle

Key Takeaways

Seek moments of low arousal

• Even in times of crisis, we need to give ourselves breaks to allow our minds to explore new possibilities and move beyond stereotypical thinking.

Accept anxiety as part of the journey

• Steeling yourself in discomfort or avoiding situations that induce it will likely create even more anxiety. Seek situations that push you beyond your comfort zone.
• Note feelings as you experience them. By carefully observing your responses, you’ll likely find these experiences to be more valuable and even perhaps enjoyable than comfortable, familiar ones.

Reimagine fear as fuel for creativity

• When you feel fear, remind yourself that it might indicate that you’re on the edge of a creative breakthrough. That’s not wishful thinking. That’s science.

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Motivation

How do you energize yourself and others to stay on the edge

Key Takeaways

Use motivational synergy to stay energized

You need both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to keep you going.

• Intrinsic motivation - or love of what you’re doing.
  • That’s where your deepest sources of creative energy comes from.
• Extrinsic motivation - or tangible rewards like salary raise
  • as long as they don’t feel manipulative or coercive, can help you and those you lead get through the inevitable slog that comes with creation.

When it’s time to dream big and imagine, keep the extrinsic incentive away. When it’s time to refine and grind out an execution, a little friendly competition, low-level prizes, and creative rewards can work wonders.

Put yourself in flow

Flow occurs when

• We know what we’re trying to achieve
• Our skills a up to or just below our level of challenge
• We’re getting regular feedback

Make distraction work for you

• Mindless distraction is one of the most powerful creative killers that we confront
• A distraction that’s quite related to your work and maintaining a soft focus can work wonders
• Be mindful of distrations that pulls you out of concentration and craetive a “cone of focus” to protect yourself.

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Learning

How to pursue expertise without falling into the expert’s trap

Key Takeaways

Spend time doing things that make you a beginner again

• Engaging in just about anything that challenges you creates a cognitive flexibility

Don’t bother trying to look like an expert

• The more we project an air of expertise, the more often we’re wrong and the slower we are to learn.
• Research shows that people prefer humble leaders

Put off important decisions as long as possible

• The more urgent the situation, the more likely we are to “seize” on an obvious solutuon and then “freeze” on it, blinding ourselves to evidence that we’re on the wrong track.