By taking our frustrations seriously, we prepare our minds to imagine our way out of them. ACCIDENTS — events or consequences that are incidental or irrelevant to what we are trying to achieve; ANOMALIES — parts of a situation, story or dataset that are out of the ordinary; and ANALOGIES — parallels we notice between concepts or experiences, which suggest new possibilities.
However, for any of these types of surprises to impact us, our minds must be prepared. Plenty of things pass us by every day, but to spark imagination we need to notice them (the cognitive aspect) and care about them (the emotional aspect). If Selim had not cared about reforming finan e, he wouldn’t have started Arabesque. Equally, if he had not noticed how machine learning was impacting other businesses, he would not have had a stock of mental models to draw on in rethinking how an asset management fi m c ould w ork. T he m ore w e c ommit t o caring a nd noticing, the more we create the mental context for encountering imagination-provoking surprise. There are two key manifestations of caring: via aggravations or aspirations. Aggravations or frustrations drive us to change or escape from something, while aspirations drive us to bring something we want or believe in into being. Aggravations and aspirations can enable us to notice things on three levels: by seeing, comprehending and interpreting. Let’s take a closer look at each. STAGE 1: Seeing
Seeing entails taking in new information. If we don’t do this, we won’t encounter any kind of surprise. If we’re stuck doing only routine things every day, not having interesting conversations or exposing ourselves to new social or geographical environments, we get stuck in ‘informational oblivion’. Following are three actions related to seeing that can help you use your imagination more frequently. MAKE TIME FOR REFLECTION. Given the amount of pressure they face, business leaders need to work hard to protect time for reflection. I nspiration f or i magination o ften c omes w hen w e a re reflecting: relaxing, with no pressure from urgent tasks. It may be no accident that people often get inspired in the bath or shower, because they tend to dampen our figh -or-flight nervous system in favour of the ‘rest-and-digest system’. Omar Selim told us that inspiration often happens for him in this context: “I get most of my ideas while showering in the morning. I feel inspired when the temperature around me is just right; I relax and I’m not bothered by anything.” Rotman Management Winter 2022
In the early days of Merrill Lynch, founder Charles Merrill wrote to his business partner Winthrop Smith about the importance of taking time to reflect: “You and George Hyslop [a partner in the fir ] and I should never be so busy that we can’t set aside at least one hour each day to quiet, thoughtful study and discussion of our basic principles, as contrasted with current operations.” Imagination requires blocks of time with low external demands. Warren Buffett famously schedules time for a ‘haircut’ in his diary, which is actually code for him to sit in a room and reflect. We need time to think about our aspirations and aggravations and follow our curiosity rather than a deadline. Some ways to do this include: • Taking a few deep breaths in and a few longer breaths out • Taking time over a meal to rest, mentally digest and reflect • Listening to or playing music • Going for a walk without your phone PAY ATTENTION TO FRUSTRATIONS. If they don’t emotionally overwhelm us, aggravations or frustrations can help us care about what we notice. In 2008, MBA student Shelby Clark was cycling to pick up a Zipcar he had rented. As he told us: “I got stuck in a snowstorm. I was biking through the snow, grumbling the whole way, thinking: ‘Why am I passing all these parked cars, to get to a car? Why can’t I get in that car? Or that car?’” This was the imagination-triggering event for Clark. A row of unused, parked cars wouldn’t surprise most of us. But driven by his frustration, it stood out for him, prompting him to challenge the existing mental model of private transportation and kicking off counterfactual thinking that led him to found Turo, the world’s fi st private-car-sharing company. The idea for genetic testing company 23andMe was also inspired by frustration. Founder Anne Wojcicki had spent 10 years working in healthcare investing. At a conference about insurance reimbursement, she remembers thinking: All these people are here just to figu e out how to optimize billing. “I realized, I’m done. At that moment it became clear that the system is never going to change from within.” This frustration was a potent emotion, but it took a triggering event for Wojcicki to come up with a better alternative. “There was a very specific event where I was at a dinner with a scientist,” she recalled. “We were saying, ‘Theoretically, if you had all the world’s data and genetic information, couldn’t you solve a lot of problems?’ And the conclusion was yes — you could revolutionize healthcare.”