I love solving hard problems. I love thinking about how to solve hard problems: why processes work or fail, why design thinking is so powerful. One thing I truly believe is that to solve really hard problems, you have draw from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. An extreme example: there’s an old story of a computer scientist getting brunch at a dim sum restaurant and inventing a more efficient network optimization algorithm after seeing the ladies push their carts through the restaurant. Solving hard problems means expanding your world, finding things you didn’t know you didn’t know.
Growth mindset underpins a lot of the most effective problem solving frameworks. Being curious as a default first step is critical to coming up with new ideas. I wrote about it here: What is ‘growth thinking’ part I (and by the way, being curious-by-default is also really important for socializing, from having healthy relationships to meeting strangers).
Zero-sum thinking can be dangerous for innovation, but it’s very common to think about the world as a series of zero-sum games. Case in point: game theory is based on an assumption of diametrically opposed parties. But in design, there really are solutions that exist where everyone can win. In a lot of ways, finding those solutions is the job of being a designer.
The way to find those win-win ideas is to break out of your current silo of thought, whatever it may be. It’s hard to recognize your own biases or thought silos; this is (one of the many reasons) why having diverse teams matter. Steve Jobs talks about the most exciting work living at the boundary of multiple domains, not just at the center of a single domain. MIT’s Media Lab takes it farther: it’s not just about combining two or more disciplines (_inter_discplinary), it’s creating something entirely new, something that is more than the sum of it’s parts (_anti_disciplinary). It’s the principle behind the teams that first 3D printed glass, or invented the first touchscreen, or made Guitar Hero, or designed fabrics made out of living organisms.
Lin Wells (quoted in Thomas L. Friedman’s Thank You for Being Late) puts it beautifully:
“It is fanciful to suppose that you can opine about or explain this world by clinging to the inside or outside of any one rigid explanatory box or any single disciplinary silo… [there are] three ways of thinking about a problem: “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.”