Think what No-one Else Thinks

The Thinker

How can you think of things that no-one else thinks of? The answer is by deliberately taking a different approach to the issue from everyone else. There are dominant ideas in every field. The brilliant thinker purposefully challenges those dominant ideas in order to think innovatively.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who discovered Vitamin C, said, ‘Genius is seeing what everyone else sees and thinking what no-one else has thought.’ If you can identify the standard viewpoint then survey the situation from a different viewpoint you have an excellent chance of gaining a new insight. When Jonas Salk was asked how he invented the vaccine for polio he replied, ‘I imagined myself as a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.’

Ford Motor Corporation asked Edward de Bono, who originated the concept of lateral thinking for some advice on how they could clearly differentiate themselves from their many competitors in car manufacturing. De Bono gave them a very innovative idea. Ford had approached the problem of competing from the point of view of a car manufacturer and asked the question, “How can we make our cars more attractive to consumers?” De Bono approached the problem from another direction and asked the question, “How can we make the whole driving experience better for Ford customers?” His advice was that Ford should buy up car parks in all the major city centers and make them available for Ford cars only. His remarkable idea was too radical for Ford who saw themselves as an automobile manufacturer with no interest in the car parks business.

In 1954 the British Government held an auction for commercial television regions. Many companies were interested in bidding for the franchises. They analysed the demographics of the regions to identify which were the wealthiest regions that would produce the most advertising revenues. The result was that they focused on London and the South-East of England. Sydney Bernstein was Managing Director of a small chain of cinemas, Granada cinemas. He wanted to compete in the auction. He told his people, ‘Don’t look for the richest region, look for the wettest. Find me the region with highest rainfall.’ This turned out to be the North-West of England. Granada bid for this and won it. Bernstein’s idea was that it was better to have a region where it rained so much that people stayed in and watched TV. He succeeded by approaching the problem from a different point of view. He thought what no-one else thought. Granada went on to produce many innovative programmes - including Coronation Street and World in Action.

How can you force ourselves to take a different view of a situation? Instead of looking at the scene from your view try looking at it from the perspective of a customer, a product, a supplier, a child, an alien, a lunatic, a comedian, a dictator, an anarchist, an architect, Salvador Dali, Leonardo da Vinci and so on. Challenge all the common assumptions. If everyone else is looking for the richest region, look for the wettest.

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Paul Sloane