Visionary Thinkers (CONT’D FROM PAGE 1)
ideas like: • Salad dressing that you heat in the microwave (not cold). • Dressing for fruit, or for meat (not used on lettuce). • A powder whose full flavor is activated when it contacts the moisture of the lettuce (not liquid). • Salad dressing in the form of a wrap, so you can eat the salad on the go (salad isn’t served on a plate). • Salad dressing in the form of an edible skewer (salad isn’t eaten with a fork). As you can see, the nature of the ideas that arise after crushing the imbedded assumptions is dramatically differ- ent from the ideas that came before. That’s because your brain is no longer limiting your cre- ativity with artificial guardrails that may not actually exist and that you weren’t even consciously aware of. Interest- ingly, the more expertise you have in an area, the more of these limiting assumptions you have subconsciously im- bedded in your thinking. So, as an expert in your field, you likely have MANY im- bedded assumptions that you’re not aware of, but that are likely impeding your creative thinking in a significant way. The Cure: Assumption Crushing™ process Fortunately, there is an antidote to the curse of knowl- edge. Assumption Crushing is a technique that involves consciously surfacing and challenging our hidden as- sumptions. CONTINUED ON PAGE 26
Here’s why incremental ideas tend to be the first, and sometimes the only, kind of ideas to emerge. All humans rely on past knowledge to subconsciously try to shortcut problem-solving. We instantly — and subconsciously — call on every- thing we know from the past to come up with solutions for the new problem. While this ability to call on past learning is an incredibly useful trait in many situations (it’s one of the reasons we're at the top of the food chain), when you're looking for new ideas and solutions, it actually becomes a significant barri- er. It limits your thinking to nothing but slight variations of what already exists. The minute you saw the words "salad dressing,” your brain made a bunch of instantaneous assumptions that you’re likely not aware of. Those assumptions were prob- ably things like: • Salad dressing comes in a bottle. • It’s liquid. • It’s stored in the refrigerator. • It’s used on lettuce. • Salad is eaten from a bowl or plate. • Salad is eaten with a fork. Using the salad dressing challenge again, now assume one of the above “facts” does NOT have to be true. What ideas could you come up with then? You might think of
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