$200,000 a Month for Good Ideas

Just when you thought you knew how to think.

Big companies pay Jump Associates $200,000 to $500,000 a month to come up with solutions to abstract problems or $200,000 a day to train 25 people how to think. David Segal NYTimes.

It must not be what we think it is.

Thinking is not the same as when you were in school. Thinking was thought of as a left brain activity to get the right answers to math, science, and English problems. The difference now is that technology can find right answers.  Business needs new questions and to solve problems that haven’t been considered yet and to challenge what already exists.

School was always about teaching you things already known and brainstorming has always been about getting the right answers through a logical process that builds one right answer on top of one another until the right solutions is reached. That is vertical thinking. A+B=C.  If you can’t find B, the process is stuck.

Innovative thinking in the new era allows for wrong answers and propositions and “what ifs” so as not to stifle the whimsical or silence the reticent.

Innovative thinking has deep roots. In 1948, Alex F. Osborne wrote a book on “Your Creative Power” in which he said we have a creative muscle that has to be exercised and that group think is a great way to come up with ideas.

In the 1960’s, Edward de Bono may have coined the term Lateral Thinking to challenge accepted patterns, assumptions, and results.

In the 1990’s the dot com bust made it clear business could not rely on traditional ideas and that it was necessary to innovate or die. Now we know change is necessary. Keith Sawyer wrote a book “Group Genius” in which he shows all the better innovations have been created in group think.

So why aren’t corporations doing their own thinking?

“Although we like to believe we know what is going on in our brains, we know almost nothing about what is going on inside them,” … “We’re not only blind to certain things, but we’re blind to the fact that we’re blind to them.” Clayton M Christenson, Harvard Business School Professor.

The budding industry of Collective Intelligence is a $250 million a year business and growing at 30% a year. Big business is setting up the software through third party providers to encourage its people to pitch in. Wouldn’t that alert individuals that innovation should now be part of their repertoire and that everyone should begin to learn what innovative thinking means?

Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. …“Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” David Segal

We need to go back to school to learn how we are expected to think now. It’s not the same thinking. Maybe it should be called Modern Thinking. It includes knowing how our brain works in the thinking process. It includes being able to access the left sphere of the neo cortex and right sphere at will and switch back and forth consciously.

It is inducing brain states. It includes understanding how to suspend left brain thinking to access the creative, intuitive, imaginative abilities of right brain and how to access the slower speed Theta waves.

The Theta wave state can be accessed as we enter or come out of a night’s sleep. It can be reached through meditation. It is often reached while doing monotonous exercises like running or walking or gardening. Sometimes we come up with a great idea in the shower.

Our Beta waves of the left brain get over active and cause anxiety which is very anti creative. The side affect of the powerful dopamine becomes adrenaline. Then we are in the practice of suspending the left brain with alcohol or TV to escape. A healthy process would be to reduce stimulus and relax which would invite right brain thinking.

If we are going to move into the new generation of thinkers we need to learn how to improve our life styles in a healthy manner that creates optimum thinking, moods, and temperaments. We need to create our personal environment for cultivating the optimum brain states.

Healthy eating and exercise create the body and mind set that is operating at peak performance. Understanding how to prioritize creativity periods in our schedule is necessary to access right brain and revelation opportunities.

The Modern Thinker understands and utilizes Lateral and Whole Brain Thinking. Then the Modern worker knows how to collaborate with software and fellow workers through advanced Emotional Intelligence. At some point soon, we may be collaborating online with people we have not met. It will be the convergence of the Internet and Social Media.

I can see the continuing trend of reduced office spaces with no cubicles and everyone operating mobile with their I Pads throwing their ideas into the corporate idea pool and working through issues for which the corporation hired us.  Technology will take care of daily activities, but people will be needed for new direction.

Good ideas obviously have value in the market place and job security may be more dependent on the multi tasker who includes creative thinking in their routine.  If technology can replace people to get the right answers and business has to go outside to get people who think, what’s next for today’s employment?

**

Read Edward de Bono’s book on Lateral Thinking

See Jacquelyn Wonder and Whole Brain Thinking

See Robert B. Tucker on Innovation is Everybody’s Business

See Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Get Free Download “Healthy, Lean and Happy Forever”

See Innovative Downsizing for full coverage on all these topics

Ideas for your future brought to you by Kaalm Media Group and its assortment of 7 websites with daily postings, E Books and Newsletters.