Escaping the Prison of the Over-Rational

The latest findings in neuro-science have profound implications for business as, in many cases, they overturn long-accepted truths… Truths which can hamper us by limiting our creativity and innovation.

One of the key findings shows how focusing on over rationalised thinking and taking an over processed approach to strategy can trap us in a ‘hall of mirrors’ where we see only the familiar, leading us to explore more about what we know about what we know…

The solution lies in utilising this developing knowledge and its attendant deeper human understanding. We need to understand the place of intuition, particularly in creativity and innovation, and its role in breaking us out of the hall of mirrors. We also need to recognise where a highly rationalised approach is indeed correct, depending on how we want to engage with our audiences, or on what we want or need to create. This approach can provide exciting new answers to business challenges.

Here are a few examples of the practical applications of this approach:

1. Why this matters to market leaders, and how it can be totally  different for challengers
2. Why is it vital to have time away from a problem or task if we wish to intuit a solution – get the “aha!” effect
3. What are the implications for testing and researching experience and how to do that without destroying them
4. Why communications ‘burn out’ and when can that be a positive advantage
5. Why audiences notice information, how they process it and what persuades them to act on and communicate new information

Clearly from a business perspective, we are often more comfortable with approaches that appear more neatly stepwise and extremely rationale. Indeed, it is common that we discount intuition as “guessing” or “gut feel”, but in many cases it can be the only way to break out of the cliched and over familiar and end up somewhere really different.