Better Odds: The Origins of Obvious
The squares we're supposed to think outside of
I’m going to talk about the role of obviousness in creativity and strategy from a few different angles. If obviousness is going to be a problem then, like any good strategist, we will want to learn about its causes.
For fans of neuroscience and behavioural psychology, it shouldn’t be too radical a notion that we are active participants in creating the universe we experience. It’s pretty commonly understood these days, for example, that our attention is selective. We see what we expect to see, we notice things we’ve been primed to notice, etc. That’s a big part of how brand familiarity does its thing for businesses.
Most people probably conceive of this as people walking around the same universe just noticing and not-noticing different things. We might think of two friends, one who’s been house-hunting for a few months and one who hasn’t. They’re having coffee and a bus drives past with an ad for mortgage rates on the side. One notices the ad and the other doesn’t. Not many people would describe this as each friend being in a different universe from the other – the bus existing for one and not existing for the other.
But we can increase those differences. Imagine two friends – one grew up speaking English and the other grew up speaking Japanese. Two buses drive past, one green and one blue. Well, that’s what the English-speaking friend sees. The Japanese friend sees two buses drive past, different shades of the same colour: 青 or aoi. This is actually very common in languages. (English-speaking) linguists created a term for it: grue.
Now, keep in mind that the Japanese person wouldn’t tell her friend, “I use the same word for both of those two colours.” Language shapes experience. The Japanese speaker saw two buses of the same colour, the English speaker saw two different coloured buses. It’s meaningless to talk about what the “actual colour(s)” was/were and try to describe one of the friends as being more correct than the other.
For a bigger difference again, try to imagine how the world must be to someone who has been blind from birth. Their world is not just yours except black all over. There’s no concept of blackness for someone who has never experienced the contrast between light and dark or experienced colour. Their world is sound and touch and smell, and even then, when I use those words, I’m thinking of what “sound” and “touch” and “smell” are to me. In other words, I actually can’t imagine – because even in trying to imagine, I’m imagining in a sighted-me-kind-of-way.
At this point, maybe it doesn’t sound so crazy to describe different people as living in different universes. Note that the point here is that it’s not just different people noticing or believing different things about the identical experiences they’re having of the same universe. The differences from one person to another shape the framework of meanings upon which experiences, thoughts and beliefs depend for their fundamental meaning.
The philosopher Heidegger described these as “horizons of disclosure”. These horizons of disclosure are shaped by biology, culture, language, personal history, all kinds of things. The metaphor he used was of standing in a clearing in a forest. You can see within the clearing, but the trees obscure anything outside of that clearing.
Importantly, these elements all come as a package deal. You can’t see without a clearing, you can’t have a clearing without trees surrounding it, and you can’t see through the trees. To paraphrase Heidegger, every revealing is simultaneously also a concealing.
I’ll say that again in a different way. The same framework that makes experiencing some things possible makes experiencing other things impossible. The same framework that makes thinking some thoughts possible makes thinking other thoughts impossible.
I’m going to push the point home one more time. We’re not talking about people experiencing things and then deciding to ignore them. We’re not talking about people thinking thoughts and then deciding to dismiss them. We’re talking about experiences and thoughts which are rendered unthinkable in the first place by the framework within which the person thinks.
We all operate within horizons of disclosure. That’s not an incidental limitation on thinking, it is a function inherent to the nature of thinking itself. Our challenge is not to eliminate that fact, but rather to recognise it and work with it.
Some aspects of our worldviews are more fixed than others. Our biology and neurology are mostly fixed. Personally, I have a condition called aphantasia, so I can’t picture things in my mind’s eye and I have only a vague idea of what it might be like to do so. Our cultural and linguistic frameworks are less fixed, but can change only slowly over time. Personal experiences can bring about more significant shifts in our worldview, but even then, because we tend to experience what we expect to experience, our personal experiences often merely reinforce the way we already see things.
It’s against this backdrop that we face challenges in strategy and creativity. Our various contexts, from biology through to personal experience and career expertise, all set the scene for how we think about problems, opportunities and how we have ideas. At any given time, the way we see the world (and see a problem or challenge) renders some ideas obvious and other ideas unthinkable.
And that is a problem. If you’re thinking the same way as everyone else, you’ll come up with the same ideas as everyone else. That’s a bigger problem for some people than it is for others.
In creative marketing, almost every idea has to be novel – if it’s been done before, you can’t do it.
In competitive business strategy, sustainable competitive advantage comes from doing things differently from your competitors – if a good idea has been had before1, it becomes best practice and merely competitive parity.
In significant collective challenges that no one has yet solved, having the same ideas as others have had before adds no value at all.
So, with that bit of theory and context, we can get back to answering the question: how do we increase the odds of good and great ideas, by decreasing the (relative) volume of obvious and average ideas?
And doesn’t depend on rare inimitable resources or a difficult-to-imitate combination of multiple choices, etc., etc., yes, yes, I know.