Everett Rogers, a communication studies professor, identified innovation attributes in his book Diffusion of Innovations: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability.
Tag: Mental Models
Your Innovator’s Toolkit: The map is not the territory
During November, we explore four mental models related to transformation and change. By the end of this month, you will have strengthened your innovator’s toolkit with these new principles and ideas. Today we look at the map is not the territory.
Your Innovator’s Toolkit: The Law of Diminishing Returns
During November, we explore four mental models related to transformation and change. By the end of this month, you will have strengthened your innovator’s toolkit with these new principles and ideas. The law of diminishing returns is the first mental model for us to get our teeth into.
5 Essential Mental Models for Boosting Your Creativity
Hello there! Welcome to the Dialogic Learning Weekly. It’s Friday, February 20. I’m Tom, writing to you from Melbourne, Australia. Thanks for spending part of your day with me. Reach out with comments, questions and feedback at tom@dialogiclearning.com or on Twitter at @tombarrett. If someone forwarded you this email, subscribe to get the Dialogic Learning Weekly sent straight to your inbox.
In our last issue, we explored the notion of innate creative thinking. Today, we look at mental models associated with ideas, creativity, and originality.
- Divergent Thinking
- Convergent Thinking
- The Innovation Jolt Model
- The Creative Habit Model
- The Creative Process Model
Regardless of the model, we use to understand creativity, at its heart is a desire and an intention to be creative. Our focus will be: how we can create the right intention to be more creative.
Divergent Thinking
Divergent thinking involves exploring lots of possible solutions to a problem. At the same time, convergent thinking looks for the correct answer to a specific problem.
Culturally, we are trained to think in ‘right or wrong’ terms and that the only way to be creative is to come up with new ‘right’ answers. When we feel like this, it is impossible to be genuinely innovative.
I often describe Divergent Thinking as a mode when we generate lots of different options. It is an expansive and open mode of thinking.
Convergent Thinking
We narrow down the options in convergent thinking, finding a smaller selection of possibilities.
Convergent thinking is often described as a more analytical and closed mode. Usually, this is done by filtering or voting on collections of ideas or datasets.
When we think in convergent thinking mode, we are not open to new ideas because we attempt to make decisions.
Example questions to encourage convergent thinking:
- Which five ideas have the most potential?
- Which of the questions sums up your current challenge?
- Put a sticker on the three words that resonate with you the most?
- Of all the places we could start, what feels like the most appropriate?
Sometimes there can be a clash of people thinking in opposite modes. Which explains much of the conflict and idea squashing that can happen. This is a dynamic to look out for and facilitate with care.
The Innovation Jolt Model
The analogy is that the moment you get a great idea is like getting hit with a large jolt of electricity — your mind becomes excited and can’t wait to get started.
When looking for ideas, this is the feeling you want, so if it doesn’t happen right away, don’t worry. Keep asking questions until the jolt happens.
The more you can get in touch with your feelings of excitement about an idea, the closer you are to being creative.
The Creative Habit Model
According to this model, creativity is a habit that requires dedication and effort. This means while great ideas may come naturally to some people, they can also be developed by anybody who knows how to practice regularly.
By practising our creative thinking every day, we gradually retrain our brains to think in new ways, increasing our ability for originality and increasing the number of ideas we can develop.
A simple exercise you can use every day is to ask "What if…" and to follow with any question you feel inspired to ask. Some examples:
> What if I didn't have to work?
> What if we didn't have to travel?
> What if the students chose when to learn?
> What if we could harness energy from the wind?
> What if we create an app that makes it easy for people to water their gardens?
The Creative Process Model
This model suggests that creativity isn’t only about understanding when and how to be creative and learning the correct type of thinking for a given situation.
Thinking of creativity and idea generation as a process also helps us manage and understand what we are doing and where we want to go.
We need to learn how to apply different types of thinking to different situations.
Your Talking Points
- How can you use these models to bring out greater creativity in yourself and other people you communicate with?
- What specific practices can you do daily to increase creativity in your life/work/studies, etc.?
🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole
Complement this issue with my Atomic Essays: Solution Siren Call, Walt Disney Creative Strategy, Feedback is Oxygen For Your Ideas, Willful Blindness, Counter Wooden Headedness.
Thanks for taking a moment to join me this week — drop me an email at tom@dialogiclearning.com to connect and say hi. Or you can connect with me on Twitter > @tombarrett
Reverse The Polarity Of Your Ideas
Last time out, we had a look together at three mental models to improve your thinking and educational innovation. Today I share the opposite ideas or at least guide you to stand in a different place and consider the three mental models from a different perspective.
Of course, you did the pre-reading of last week’s issue, right?! But if you didn’t, here is a quick primer. After all, we need these to be points of comparison:
- Critical mass – the threshold of a large enough number or proportion that triggers a change.
- Reciprocity – when people tend to treat others the way they are treated.
- Leverage – the action or process of using an advantage to multiply force.
So, what are the other ways of looking at these three models if we reverse the polarity? What counterpoints or alternative concepts do we need to be aware of? If we commit to these three mental models as part of our educational innovation, what are the biases that emerge?
Social Proof
Critical mass describes a threshold, a number of people that represents a tipping point in a group. Social proof is a mental model that suggests people are more likely to do something if they see others doing it.
So if critical mass is the line to reach, social proof is a mechanism to help us achieve that point. Social proof is something we can leverage when we design new projects and implement innovations.
Social proof is a powerful bias we have to keep in mind. The tendency can be harmful and positive, and it fuels the way we see trends, fashion, commerce and why many people are likely to follow the crowd.
Critical mass and social proof are two sides of the same coin. They’re both about alignment, an idea of community and public validation.
Social Debt
When we explored reciprocity in educational leadership and innovation last week, we emphasised the links to relationships and collaboration.
The mental model of reciprocity is a valuable provocation as it challenges us to think about how our actions influence others and the expectations we frame as a result.
An alternative way to consider reciprocity is to think of ‘goal setting’ as a behaviour change strategy to make a public, discrete and shared commitment. In contrast, reciprocity is an internal mechanism or exchange, an implied obligation.
Social debt is another way to frame the reciprocity mental model. An important element to add to our understanding because
people who feel indebted tend to experience more negative emotions and feel stressed rather than uplifted, because they are worried about repayment.
How to Say Thanks Without Feeling Indebted
When we have built our social capital through positive reciprocal interactions with others in learning networks and communities, it becomes an asset to leverage for future action.
The Bias of Permanent Multipliers
What are the biases associated with leverage?
Think of leverage through the idea of multiplication (i.e. by using the advantage, we multiply the force). Then, once again, our human bias is that this multiplier will not disappear or change.
The bias of permanent multipliers is to see something as fixed when it is not. The way to challenge this bias is by considering shifts in your context and the fluid nature of change over time.
For example, you leverage the support and advocacy of senior members of your team to kick off a new project. When you consider this initial influence dissipates over time and is not fixed, we are more likely to lead a sustainable innovation.
Reverse The Polarity
This study of opposites is a strategy you can use in any of your projects. By looking at the opposites or counterpoints, we have reversed the polarity, a creative thinking technique that Marty Neumeier uses.
Related to reversing the polarity is to start from a different place, and the work helps us practice this creative routine.
When you grab for the “correct” solution, brilliant solutions will elude you. You’ll get stuck in the tar pits of knowledge, unable to free your mind of what you already know. The easiest way to escape this trap is by rejecting the correct solution—at least temporarily—in favor of the “wrong” solution. While the worst idea can never be the best idea, it will take your imagination to a different starting place.
Marty Neumeier
Take this idea into your workflow by going to a place opposite to how you usually think or start. If your thinking is generally linear and sequential, go for a spiral instead. If you typically jump in with an answer, try a question this time around.
Your Talking Points
- What do you struggle with in terms of creativity and innovation at the moment, and how might these mental models help to shape your response?
- How can you challenge your thinking about the assumptions of permanent multipliers?
- Where else might we experience this bias in education and beyond?
- On reflection, what would you add? What other advantages and ideas do we need to consider in our practice to reduce these biases before they emerge?
My weekly email helps educators and innovation leaders enhance their practice by sharing provocations, ideas and mental models. Join today, and get your copy this week.