Thinking
Today the google alert man dropped home a awesome present!
http://www.mindtree.com/blogs/thinking
A awesome outline post by someone I really admire. I know Kalyan Kumar Banarjee needs no introduction. He is one of the outstanding personalities I have interacted with during my time with Mindtree. The post is a nice collation of the different types of thinking and also a brief intro on why “systematic” is not just a buzz word be it any fiend breathing! to running to thinking . I am going to take the liberty to copy and paste it for prosperity’s sake
1. Lateral thinking (Edward de Bono) – encourages thinking up multiple alternatives, not just going into depth on one – and suggests techniques to do it.
2. Six Thinking Hats (again, de Bono) – helps separate emotional responses from objective ones or distinguish inspired thinking from critical thinking. It also leads to parallel thinking (rather than adversarial thinking) where all criticize together or seek opportunities in a new idea together.
3. Nine Windows – helps us think of super-systems and sub-systems, and thus broaden our perspective. For example, if we are designing a pen, it tells us to think of people who will use our pen, the shop that displays our pen, or the crates that will ship our pens (all examples of super-systems). Useful when we need to focus on multiple stakeholder perspectives, or to understand the customer’s customer. Using this tool, we also focus on the system in the past, and how it could be in the future. Focusing on the past helps us understand why things are the way they are.
4. Systems Thinking – leads to realizing that we are part of a larger system, and the complex interrelationships between causes and consequences, Often, cause and effect are far removed in time and space, so learning from consequences does not always come naturally.
5. Ideal Final Result – helps us think on the ideal result we must aim for, and how we can get there.
6. Resources – triggers us to look for unused and probably free resources, to achieve our goals.
7. Personal Mastery – spiritual leaders and management gurus, all teach this. Covey dwells in depth on this, so does Senge.
8. Disruptive Innovation (Christensen) – well researched theories from the Harvard professor explain the success factor of innovative ideas; predicts when a startup will succeed with certain ideas, and when the incumbent is more likely to succeed.
9. Learning from Unusual Sources – a MindTree initiative, stemming from the belief we can learn from any situation, from anybody, or from any industry. We need to develop the capability to connect experiences in one situation to another scenario where we are looking for answers.
In terms of all thinking leading to innovation, I feel it depends both on the nature of the problem and how you define innovation and hence to expect magic to happen every time is pointless.
But there is one thing that bothers me about the whole concept which is put in perspective by what Peter Senge talks about a fad. The problem with systematic thinking that I have seen is that for most people already in the industry, there are too stuck in their motion already that its hard for them to stop and change their shoes. When they do come in touch with something like this, its more like someone throwing water to clean the shoes while they are running. It goes back to its old dirty self in time. Its hard for it to stick.
I know this rant can be quite generalized to anything new and put into better words with something like “You cant straighten a dog’s tail” but I think this is particularly important in the case of systematic innovation. The gains that systematic innovation can give in a real life scenario is quite intangible. Unless someone comes with with the next google or twitter during a TRIZ or a 6 Hat session, its possible that the incremental gains wont even get noticed, which brings us to the problem of keeping the interest levels up.
This is something I feel most organizations need to address along with trying to introducing systematic thinking and probably what will decide whether the initiative fails or succeed.
