Mike McLaughlin’s Post

Transcript

Have you ever been stuck? Really stuck? There's a particular problem that you need to overcome. You've got to find a solution. This might be in business, it might be in life, it might be sport, it might be personal development, education, whatever. And you sort of think that? There is a solution, there is a way to solve this, I feel it, but I also feel it's just out of my grasp. Well, you're not alone. What could you do? One solution? Talk to someone who's no real idea about your problem, at least not at first glance. To help unpack what I'm talking about, I'm going to access this article from Harvard Business Review titled Sometimes the Best Ideas Come from Outside Your Industry, linking to the description and also I will not. Talk about every part of the article. It's longer than I'm going to cover here, and I would encourage you to read it. It's a really good article. Now, I've had some experiences of people coming up with solutions, insights that I just didn't see, and often from very unexpected sources. I've also found myself able to provide some potential solutions to people in areas where I have no real expertise, and yet they seem to be. Viable options in terms of the way forward O Let's explore. It's a strange thought, the article goes on, but the solution to your businesses innovation problem may be walking around in ahead of someone who applies theatrical makeup for a living, or plays robot soccer, or installs heavy machinery in mind. So does something else as apparently unrelated to the problem you've been struggling with. Bringing in ideas from analogous fields turns out to be a potential source of radical innovation. When you're working on a problem and you pull insights from an analogous areas, you're more likely to get significantly greater novelty in the proposed solutions for two reasons. People versed in analogous fields can draw on different pools of knowledge. And they're not mentally constrained by existing known solutions to the problem in the Target Field. Target Field being the area that you're trying to find the solution in, and. This not being mentally constrained well, that's in my opinion, talking about beliefs sometimes limiting beliefs that the the tram line thinking the well, we've tried everything mentality the the fixed mindset. Potentially the greater the distance between the problem and the analogous field, the greater the novelty of the solutions to get a sense of the value of accessing implementing. Great and implementing knowledge from analogous fields. Consider a recent study in which we recruited hundreds of roofers, carpenters and inline skaters to contribute their insights to the problem of workers reluctance to use safety gear because of discomfort. Other examples from our own industry experience include a company that needed a solution for tracking inventory and borrowed ideas from the sensors on miniature robot soccer players. On an escalator company that borrowed a solution from the mining industry and figuring out how to install escalators in shopping malls and isn't that clever? There are some great examples in industry of creative solutions that arose out of analogous fields. More than a decade ago, three M developed a breakthrough concept preventing infections associated with surgery after getting input from a theatrical makeup specialist who was knowledgeable about preventing. Facial skin infections. I think it's fair to say that if you're looking out for infections and gathering stats and your three M and you're trying to figure a way to reduce the infections associated with surgery you immediately thought isn't ah, I must go and get a theatrical makeup specialist. But it's what a brilliant thought. I would say that in terms of leading ourselves, we need to be open to ideas and we need to be aware of biases when someone comes up with a potential solution and at least be open to it in terms of leadership in business and life in the community, public sector, private sector, wherever. Once more I come back to dialing down the ego. Be curious. Stay curious. I never presume that you know all the answers because. You don't.