Find Innovation Where You Least Expect It

When the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sunk, only 705 of its 2,200 passengers and crew, floating in 16 lifeboats, were saved. Imagine how many more might have lived if crew members had thought of the iceberg as not just the cause of the disaster but a lifesaving solution.

The iceberg rose high above the water and stretched nearly 400 feet in length. The lifeboats, or the Titanic itself, might have been able to pull close enough to the iceberg for people to scramble on.

Regardless of whether this could actually have worked, it’s an intriguing idea—yet surprisingly difficult to envision. That’s because a cognitive bias called “functional fixedness” limits people to seeing objects only in the way in which they’re traditionally used. In a nautical context, an iceberg is a hazard to be avoided; it’s very hard to see it any other way.

When it comes to innovation, businesses are constantly hampered by functional fixedness and other cognitive biases that cause people to overlook elegant solutions hidden in plain sight.

We can overcome this bias—and similar biases about an object’s design and purpose—by changing how we describe the object and how we think about its component parts.

This article also presents techniques and tools to help managers think in innovative ways—a process the authors call “brainswarming”—about common business problems, whether it be conceiving new products, finding novel applications for existing products, or anticipating competitive threats.