Loose Thinking

The Jakarta Post, Features, 12 August 2007
Published as "Freshen Up Your Thinking to Seek Solution"
Kayee Man and Dewi Susanti

Dewi once saw a child, who, upon coming into a room and seeing assorted color papers on the floor, immediately jumped onto the "pool" of paper and started "swimming" with excitement and joy.

We know a child who was the Queen of the Land of Solian, in which lived a monster called Sak-Din-Doong. If you want to see the monster, you would need a passport to enter (which she also designed). What a fresh way to look at the world around us!

We don't think our little friends' brains were sprayed with air freshener. Rather, we think they have a system going on inside that enables them to circulate the stale air within.

The circulation system is what we would call "loose thinking": "Loose" as in spontaneous, free association, letting go of the brakes on your imagination and on what's possible.

It's not so much installing a circulation system as ridding our brains of a clogged filter. Our brain naturally has such a circulation system, but over time, the more trained our brains are through education and social norms, the more clogged our brains become with the way things are or the way things should be.

But why is it important, you may wonder.

Loose thinking is important because it brings us fresh perspectives in looking into the problems we face in our everyday lives, in finding solutions and new ideas for products or services or a completely new way of conducting business altogether.

For a simple or major breakthrough, we need to loosen up our thinking.

The Polaroid camera is an example of the fresh angles naivet‚ can bring.

After posing for some photographs, Jennifer Land, aged 3, asked her father how long it would be until she could see them. Her father, inventor Edwin Herbert Land, followed up on her question and invented the Polaroid camera.

While being naive has its merits for fresh thinking, we wouldn't want to remain in a naive state forever -- knowledge and know-how also have their merits.

After seeing something with a fresh mind, it takes knowledge and know-how to develop and refine an idea into something useful or effective.

'Thinking something different'

While most of us would throw out a moldy dish as a knee-jerk reaction, Alexander Fleming observed that the bacteria around the mold growing in a lab dish had died, and thereby discovered penicillin.

From this initial discovery in 1928, it took more than a decade and much more researchers' tinkering before penicillin was first used as a drug for medical treatment in 1941.

As Hungarian-U.S. biochemist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 -1986) observed: "Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different."

Thus we said to our 12-year-old friend Calvin, who still looks at the world with a fresh mind in the midst of being educated and asked him: Without having to give up our accumulation of knowledge (which is obviously very useful), how can we maintain a fresh mind with which to question the world around us or to get new ideas?

So what tips did we get in maintaining freshness in our thinking?

• Sit around and observe your surroundings. What questions do you have?
• Get bored, that will get you started with your thinking.
• Wake up with a question, especially if you have just had a dream.
• Observe children without interfering with their interactions and learn from how they see the world.
• When you see an everyday object, try to see the object in a different way. Calvin used the sofa as an example. We normally think of a sofa as on object to sit on, but we can also think of a sofa as something to jump on because of its springs and the soft landing it provides.

Our experience in working with children tells us that they are invaluable resources when a new perspective is needed. Our experience with children enabled us to see (and use) garden lamps as stoves to fry eggs on, to discuss the possibility of converting body fat into an alternative source of energy and in exploring engineering possibilities for dams on the beach.

Thus, we also suggest the following:

• Give children objects or pictures they have never seen before (this will be very helpful to you if the object of picture is a product you need to develop or improve) and ask them what they think it is; what they think it does; how they think it works and what their opinions are of the object.
• When you happen to be with children, don't talk down to them. Have a "proper" conversation with them and learn how children see the world or their environment.

Both of these suggestions also work with people from different age groups, cultures, backgrounds or professional training.

Austen, aged 7, suggested to laminate cars in response to the question of how to preserve them. This may also be an idea a tukang laminating might come up with.

A doctor may suggest an anti-aging injection and a funeral director may suggest the use of formalin to preserve cars. If you don't have access to such a diversity of people, imagining yourself to be someone else and asking what would this person think of may bring you the freshness you need in your thinking.

Let your imagination run free

W.W. Gordon and G. M. Prince, co-developers of a problem-solving technique called Synectics, described the process of "fresh" thinking as "making the familiar strange". This means breaking existing mental connections to see things in a new way.

In synectics, analogy is the mechanism used by people to deliberately make the familiar strange.

Without having to go through the whole process of synectics, G.A. Davis, in his book Creativity is for Forever, suggested that we stimulate our analogical thinking by asking the following questions:

• What else is like this?
  
• What have others done?
• What could we copy?
• What has worked before?

When we ask these questions to think of ways of how related problems have been solved (direct analogy), Davis suggested that examples from nature are effective triggers for generative thinking.

For example, in finding a solution to packaging potato chips without breaking them and to reduce shipping costs, Pringles Potato Chips copied the example of wet leaves from nature -- wet leaves pack snugly together without breaking.

We can also use personal analogy, imagining ourselves to be part of the problem we are trying to solve.

Einstein imagined himself to be traveling on a sunbeam, which inspired his theory of relativity. Oka, our co-worker, has a beloved Vespa (with an attitude) that had a rear lamp that did not work.

Imagining himself to be his feisty Vespa ("Don't do anything funny with me, don't even think about it!"), Oka conceded defeat and found his solution in hanging a light in a tube around his neck that dangles on his back when he takes his Vespa out.

The simplest thing we can do to stimulate the freshening of our minds is literally to think twice about something.

Kayee is staring at a dictionary that is on her desk at the moment; in pushing herself to think twice about the dictionary, she no longer sees a book filled with words and their explanations, but a fan in the form of a ball of flapping papers.

We can deliberately freshen up our thinking by being around imaginative people (young or old), freeing up our minds to imagine and being curious about our surroundings.

We can imagine ourselves to be other people -- part of the problem we are trying to solve or look for examples in nature for inspiration.

Imagination is our mental freshener, make sure you have yours handy.