Lessons

Lesson Info

When to Use a Lens

When to use a lens. Now on the one hand this is a little tricky 'cause you've only got so far two and a half out of the five, but this is a bigger picture type of thing. And it's basically the concept of how you might be working with these lenses and when they might be useful. 'Cause there's a couple of different ways you can work with Adventurous Thinking. And because it is for every area of what we do, maybe it's handy to just have a look at where some are more appropriate than others. So you know, whoop, no I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna start with all five. So if you have all five lenses, you can use these as a really handy 25 minute insight and understanding exercise. You can use it on your own or you can use it with a team. So for instance, say I've got a team. It doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. This is about understanding and clarity. Say I've got a team of people and we're about to do a new clinical study, all right. Thinking of right now a medical research group th...

at I work with. So a new clinical study, not necessarily looking particularly to do anything different, but to really think about how we're gonna deliver this to a maximum effect and at the very beginning we're gonna sit, perhaps as a group or perhaps individually, and use 25 minutes to look at this concept from all of these different lens perspectives. So consider your clinical study. We'll start with Negative Space. And you'd be looking for what's not happening in this period of time. The study happens say in a 24 hour period. The study might be a couple of hours. What are your subjects doing in the rest of that time? Negative Space will be how do they feel about that study? Is there any negativity? Is there anticipation? Is there something that they're expecting that they may not get? Probably, it's a clinical study. So you need to be aware of that. That's gonna help give you more meaning around what you need to deliver these guys in terms of expectation and satisfaction. Sideways might be you think you know who's gonna be taking this study but are you only looking for people like you? I mean there's that classic thing that up until 1993 nearly every medical study was using men and mainly Caucasian men and women's pain was incredibly underestimated because they weren't featured in any of the studies. And, in fact, women's pain still is. If you check into the emergency as a female with heart attack symptoms, you're 50% less likely to be diagnosed with a heart attack, because we're not as understood. So, if you're looking at this clinical study from a Sideways perspective you're gonna be thinking what biases am I putting onto this? Who am I expecting to be there? Am I only looking for people like me or am I only looking for the type of people I think the study's for? And then who am I not covering? Am I not covering people I can't reach geographically? Am I not covering people who can't afford it? Sideways is gonna give you some perspective on who this study could be for that you haven't thought of yet. And it may give you some really interesting insight on to where, in fact, you should be delivering for better result. Then we go to Rethinking, which we're gonna hit today. So the Rethinking lens is gonna have you understand the core value of that study. What is it you're trying to achieve? What is the purpose? So individually each team member could be doing this or the entire team could be discussing it for five minutes. But either way, you're gonna narrow it down and really get meaning behind what it is this project is about to become. Backwards you're gonna look at a timeframe for this thing and you're gonna make sure that all the functions, all the deliverables balance. So it's a really nice way to deliver a campaign. We're gonna cover Backwards in a separate lesson today. And then Parkour would be that five minutes of everybody going okay, we want to deliver this study. These are the ways we normally do it. Let's invert everything. We're not gonna do this, this and this. We still want to deliver the study. What is it? So by the time you've had 25 minutes, there are two ways this could go. One way would be to say each team member understanding how to use these lenses could individually go out and spend 25 minutes getting these insights. And then one lens at a time, you could share with the group your findings, which will all be completely different, which will give you a massive meaning and understanding perspective that you didn't have before. And the other way might be to just run one 25 minute session with everybody and have five minutes on each lens all in. Obviously we'd have to manage our introverts and our extroverts so everybody spoke but that would be another way to structure this brainstorming. So when I came up with this system it was specifically so I could do an individual brainstorm with all the benefits of multiple perspective but with no one else in the room because I was working on my own and I couldn't afford to pay people to come in. So this works really well, these five, if you want to brainstorm something yourself but force different points of view. But it also works really well with a team at the beginning of a project or, in fact, at any point in the project. So that's the whole set. But what if you just want to do one specific thing and you don't have that much time? Say you want to come up with some snappy new ideas for whatever. You might want to come up with ideas because you're running a workshop. You know you might be trying to train other people and you want to come up with ideas. There's a lot of reasons why you want to come up with ideas. In which case, these lenses are useful. So Negative Space, you need to have something you're already considering. And then you want to look for opportunity for optimization. Ideas will pop up along the way. With Negative Space it is really useful to insert something from outside that routine, like we did in our Negative Space lesson. You could take an activity you love and merely try and insert it into any part of Negative Space because all you're trying to do with ideas is make unexpected connections between what you know and what you've imagined. And what you've imagined is the creative thinking. What you know is gonna cement it into innovation. You're gonna bring this down to here and connect. So these lenses are handy. Sideways is handy for extending market. I don't have my whiteboard, hmm. Could I grab the whiteboard? I'm just gonna draw on it if I may. I'm gonna show you where these things sit in terms of ideas along the innovation quadrant. All right, I'm putting my market and my design in tech. This is the new end, whoo hoo. And this is what we already know and are comfortable with. All right. So, with Negative Space what we're gonna do is find ideas along this, the way we do things. We're gonna try and find opportunities to optimize and it's normally gonna be in the process of doing something. What can we deliver? How can we deliver more value? And we can find ideas along the way. With Sideways, we're actually gonna be looking for ideas along the vertical of people. How can we change our market or how can we deliver something new? So depending on what sort of ideas you're looking for, you know that Negative Space is gonna deliver you some sort of designey thing and Sideways is gonna deliver you some sort of personal human interaction market type of idea. And then Parkour, obviously, is lurking way up here somewhere like a little bird flying away. Parkour is when you invert anything. The beauty of Parkour is you can just take anything you know or don't know and invert it. So if you're looking for quick ideas and if you're in a team and you wanna just have fun, invert anything. You can have a look at the Parkour lesson for more information on that and you will come up with a slew of new ideas. So in terms of ideas, these are the handy lenses. In terms of product development, so Adventurous Thinking is not just about ideation. Ideation is not innovation. Ideation is just come out with ideas and anyone who like me has books and books and books of sketches and ideas knows the idea on its' own is not really worth anything. We all have ideas. In fact, once you start idea sharing you will have so many ideas you don't even start writing them down. Just like throw them out into the universe. But, if you have an idea, you have a product, you have something you already do, you have a career that you already do or you're studying something already, these lenses are an opportunity to optimize and strengthen and make something more robust and more sustainable. So Negative Space again because that's just looking for opportunities with around, ducking in and around the subject. Rethinking we're gonna cover in a lesson today. Rethinking is all about understanding core value and purpose, which is sort of key in everything we do. Core value and purpose. And then backwards is a remarkable lens in that it balances, not only to make things more sustainable, but normally in the balancing things are way more economical and far more robust. So when we learn how to balance something, we can apply this at any point to anything we're developing. There will always be a way to make something more balanced and more robust. So these are the lenses we're gonna go to when we're maybe working them every day. We're not trying to come up with something giant but we want to do work around this area here. We want to work in something we already know. We want to work in improving it and making it better so it's sitting down here on the quadrants. And finally, we have Continuous Improvement. This concept of lean, which is a manufacturing philosophy from Toyota originally but is now applying to businesses all over the place. And it's about continuous improvement, bottom up. It's about pull not push, so it's this whole idea of including everybody in feedback, which is also a huge part of Adventurous Thinking. And so here we're looking for incremental improvement. Again, we're sitting in this side of the quadrant, maybe up here. But we're basically looking for little improvements that move the game forward. They don't have to be messy. They don't have to be costly. We have a whole lesson on frugal innovation, how to make them non-costly. But Negative Space again is fantastic for that. Sideways is fantastic for your insights. Backwards minimizes waste, which is another key part of lean and a key part of Continuous Improvement. We can constantly look to minimize waste in everything that we're doing, whether it's in Human Resources or literally in materials and the way that we get rid of stuff when we're finished with it. And then we have the Team Buildingness of Parkour. So again, Parkour, even though it's a super radical lens, is amazing for team building because it's so much fun. And we had a lesson with Dan Klitz, where he talked about activating people. Adventurous Thinking is all about activation. So there is nothing more rewarding and more optimistic than seeing people actually doing stuff. And this lens is one that can motivate even the most dead in the head person. You know, you might be completely over your job but if you're told to totally invert what you do and then work on it and that inversion is legitimized by your boss for at least five minutes, you can actually develop something from that. You will spring to life 'cause it's fun. 'Cause I like subversive naughtiness. You know, actually taking something you do every day and working out how to fully invert it and then going and I did it on your time and you paid me. Parkour is fantastic for team building. So these basically are the different ways you can use these lenses. If you only have a couple of minutes, remember that you need the five to push through. So time and time again I've reminded you that we need to push past our expert brain. So your first reaction when you invert something you do every day, something you know so well, is gonna be this is ridiculous and I know that'll never work. And you do know that it hasn't ever worked 'cause it's never been done, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen. So imagine if you're studying something right now. You've just finished, Sherry's just finished. Some of the teams here are still studying. Imagine if you're studying something right now and you've been told every way that you would normally deliver this thing in the workplace. And you're gonna write down those four normal ways that you would normally take this out and monetize it and you're gonna fully invert it. You're not gonna change the essence of what you're studying. You're not change the essence of what you want to do, what you want to give to people, but you're gonna change the entire way you do it. That would be Parkour. So never discount that Parkour just 'cause it's absurd. 'Cause, of course, absurdity is fundamentally what creative thinking is about. You gotta embrace the absurd and then twist it, bring a bit of expertise into it to make it the next reality.