Thinking Wrong: How to Trick our Brains into Being More Innovative

Once we’ve learned how to do something, we become “unconsciously competent” at it. In order to break with the predictable path and move forward, what my good friend and colleague, Greg Galle, suggests is that we need to “think wrong.” That means opening our minds to new possibilities. In a recent session he led for Columbia Executive Education for Genentech, he elaborates.

Leaving the predictable path

As Greg pointed out to the class, there are synaptic connections that are forged when we learn something. It creates a neural pathway that is quite functional. It allows our brains to conserve energy and thinking power once something has become a routine. For instance, consider the experience of arriving at home after a routine drive without consciously remembering the journey! This is often called “unconscious competence” and is the final destination of a learning journey. This is functional from the point of view of conserving energy for what we might need to pay attention to — threats in the environment, for instance.

The problem, however, is when we need to come up with a novel solution or an innovation, we need to leave the predictable path and journey on to what Greg calls the “bold path.” That means we need to trick our brains into sparking a novel reaction…