At Anthesis, we seek to collaborate with like-minded organisations that can support our clients in addressing their sustainability plans. We recently met with innovation specialists Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), whose unique approach focuses on ‘inside the box’ thinking, i.e. working within, and indeed embracing, existing constraints, and taking better advantage of the resources you already have – all as part of an approach to find genuinely transformative and useful ideas. This is music to the ears for anyone involved in the sustainability arena! In this blog, Carey Conway at SIT-UK explores how our natural cognitive ‘fixedness’ can limit our ability to get more from less.

Have you ever wondered why men and women’s shirts button-up on different sides? The general belief is that this dates back to mid-Victorian times when women within wealthy families had maids to dress them and, as most maids would have been right handed, it was easier for them if the buttons were on the left hand side of garments. Any lady wearing clothing that buttoned on the left would be presumed wealthy; this became fashionable for obvious reasons and over time was adopted more widely, until eventually all ladies buttoned clothes came to follow this design. An interesting story perhaps; but isn’t the more perplexing question, why have we been willing to put up with the extra burden from a manufacturing and design detail perspective for over 150 years, and long after the practice of dressing by maids ceased?

Odd? Not really. As the fields of behavioural psychology and neuroscience progress apace, we are all becoming increasingly aware of what complicated creatures humans are. We are subject to all sorts of cognitive biases that drive our behaviour (Wikipedia lists well over 150 types at the last count!). Some of these are extremely helpful in aiding survival and providing us with the mental shortcuts required to make rapid judgements and to take decisions – acting on ‘instinct’, one might say. Essentially, for reasons of efficiency, we are ‘wired’ to recognise and reapply patterns that have worked in our past (a simple example would be ‘automatically’ hitting our brakes when we see brake lights come on in the car in front of us). Unfortunately, like any strength, our biases are also at times a weakness as they have a limiting effect on our ability to behave rationally and logically, even when evidence to do so is in plain sight; hence the button story.

Karl Dunker first identified the cognitive bias Functional Fixedness in the 1930s, defining it as a ‘mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem’. Another bias, Structural Fixedness, identified by the Gestalt School of Psychology around the same time, describes our difficultly in seeing an object as anything other than its overall shape or form. For example, it is easier for us to see a candle as a candle, rather than some wax which can be either liquid or solid and some interwoven fibrous strands twisted into a wick. However, once we see objects as individual components, it becomes much easier to imagine new uses for each component, doesn’t it?

Upon first blush, these may not seem significant psychological or neurological discoveries, yet, throughout time, much has been lost because of humans’ failure to break their fixedness. Take the Titanic for example; given it took several hours for the boat to fully sink, how differently might things have turned out if the numerous objects on board that floated had been seen as potential lifesavers, in addition to the designated lifeboats? And what about the iceberg itself? What creative solutions could have been found quickly by ‘thinking inside the box’?

Historically in more affluent societies, fixedness has not been much of a barrier overall – we have simply tended to waste resources, or to jettison them when they are no longer needed for their original purpose. There is now a more than convincing body of evidence proving that, to live sustainably, the human race must not continue to simply follow the patterns learned over the last three centuries. As we embrace the notion of the Circular Economy, individuals, communities, mankind as a whole, have to learn how to behave sustainably, i.e. to use less of our limited material resources and harness more of the limitless ones. Wouldn’t it help speed up our progress towards this new end state if we better understood the particular biases that hinder us from finding genuinely creative and innovative solutions, and embraced these to help us learn to think and act differently to the past. At SIT, we call this ‘breaking fixedness’.

Perhaps we need to learn a thing or two from asset-poor societies (or indeed young children), where finding creative uses for what is already available within the constraints that exist comes more easily. Think of the playground roundabouts in sub-Saharan Africa that double up as water pumps, for example. Here, all sorts of fixedness are broken. The roundabout is given an extra job as a pump handle, and children’s natural inclination to play is seen as a resource; they take on the task of rotating the pump – no electricity supply needed! In short, we need to learn to ‘think inside the box’; to use whatever is at our disposal in much more innovative ways.

‘Easier said than done’, I hear you cry. Well possibly, but what if you knew that researchers found that just 5 patterns explain the majority of innovations throughout time and all around us today? And what if you could apply these patterns, sort of like the “DNA” of innovation, to think and act differently? For thousands of years, everyday innovators have used these patterns, often without knowing it, to create new products, services, processes, structures and strategies.

As the old adage goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’; the necessity to behave in a sustainable way offers a huge opportunity for us to find new, innovative solutions that will work for a better future, especially if we are prepared to break our fixedness, to think and act differently in a useful way, and innovate.

Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) provides individuals looking to produce better results through innovation, with the how. At the heart of the company is a simple yet compelling truth: given the right tools, everyone can produce transformational innovation. SIT are dedicated to helping organisations learn the best ways to uncover new and feasible ideas that create value. For more information, please contact Carey Conway (carey@sitsite.com, + 44 (0)7976 383 289) or Greg Stadler (greg@sitsite.com, + 44 (0)7768 143 718).