After reading this page, if you only remember one thing, make it this:
We all have hidden bias that we’re not aware of. Having a diverse (in terms of thought processes and experiences, not just sex or skin colour) reveals these bias ways of thinking so we don’t make mistakes and have better ideas.
Buried in an idea hole
Design or Idea Fixation and Group Think… how to avoid being trapped in one way of thinking
Fixation is an extremely common problem and often a key factor in why ideas are not as innovative and bold as they could be, or why a team spends far too much time on a dead-end train of thought.
Causes and tell-tale signs you might be suffering from design fixation:
Unhappy with criticism? If you can’t handle feedback that your ‘baby’ might be a little bit ugly, then you might be suffering from an early symptom of design fixation… Just because it was your idea, your ‘baby’, doesn’t mean it’s the best. Part of the contract of idea generation and the tenet that quantity will lead to quality, by definition, means most of the ideas created will be chucked. That’s how it works. Don’t be possessive.
Rushed deadlines can mean the first idea is chosen not because it’s any good but because it ‘saves’ time. Until you discover later that it’s not very good and have to redo everything.
Blame cultures where if something goes wrong it must be someone’s fault will restrict your creative output and lateral thinking. You’ll end up with the same solution you always had, no one wants to be the one who rocks the boat.
Exposing yourself to previous solutions can give you a huge head start in terms of project progress, but may (if you don’t handle it carefully) limit your creativity and result in a similar me-too solution or only a marginal improvement.
It’s tempting to settle on the first half decent idea or design you think of and then convince yourself you’ll be able to improve it enough to be fully decent by the end. If you don’t have the quantity and variety of ideas to begin with, how do you have any confidence what you’re doing is right? It feels like laziness rather than talent.
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one we have.
Emile Chartier Alain
Getting yourself out of trouble
Ways to check if you’re suffering from a case of idea fixation and what medicine you can take:
Share, Talk and Show… have you been working alone on this? Has anyone else seen what you’re doing? Does anyone else agree with your direction and choices? Just as important if not more important if you’re working in a group. It’s often a false reassurance that because you’re not working on something alone you won’t suffer from fixation. The reality is that ‘group think’ and group fixation can be even more dangerous because whilst just as common as the individual sort, you convince yourself that because you’re in a group it’s impossible. Share, talk about and show your (or your team’s) work and your ideas to as many people as you can.
Use a creative method that forces you to consider other options; SCAMPER or morphological charts can be good such approaches.
Speak about ‘Hunches’ rather than ‘ideas’. The very word ‘idea’ conjures up issues of possessiveness in many people. Especially for those not familiar with creative practise, or who do it only infrequently. This is why I use the word hunches in the first stage of my Fuzzy to Finished design method. Hunches are disposable, likely to be wrong and easy to change or dismiss without attachment. But for many ideas (no matter how early and implausible) are something valuable. So change the language you use in the easy phases of any creative process. The thinking behind the psychological impact of changing the language came from my friend Paul in a TRIZ design consultancy in Bristol.
Have a diverse project team with a wide variety of experiences and backgrounds…
“You can’t have a new idea ‘til you’ve got rid of an old one.”
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson
Diversity
How having variety and difference is the best cure for group think and idea fixation.
A diverse team is a sure way of improving your chances of avoiding the more easily found fixation traps. This could be diversity in backgrounds, experiences, cultures, education and ability as well as any physical differences that might be relevant for a product design project such as size, strength and sex.
The variety gives a fresh perspective on your endeavours and will hopefully lead to a more effective and appealing solution outside of your narrow perspective.
Lets see an example of a lack of diversity from the car industry
Cars have been designed by men for a long time (since 1888 in fact). Even though many women buy and drive cars (an early land speed record in 1905 was by a women) and in 2002 GM’s market research discovered that women influenced 85% of car purchasing decisions. This lack of diversity in design can have very serious implications for safety.
Lets take the fact that cars tend to be designed around the average size and weight of a man, because this is the way it’s always been done, 8 out of 10 car designers are men and crash test dummies (for which the manufacturer needs to get a good score) is an average man.
The problem with designing for the average man, is that the average man is just that, a man. He’s not also the average women. By only considering the average man, we’ve accidentally designed a product that is much more dangerous for the average women.
Taken from Caroline Criado Perez’s fabulous book “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” (which should be compulsory reading for everyone) and a great Guardian article by her on the subject:
“When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.
Women tend to sit further forward when driving… Women are “out of position” drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.
Women are also at higher risk in rear-end collisions. We have less muscle on our necks and upper torso, which make us more vulnerable to whiplash (by up to three times), and car design has amplified this vulnerability. Swedish research has shown that modern seats are too firm to protect women against whiplash injuries: the seats throw women forward faster than men because the back of the seat doesn’t give way for women’s on average lighter bodies.
The reason this has been allowed to happen is very simple: cars have been designed using car crash-test dummies based on the “average” male.”
“Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.”
Malcolm Forbes
Having a diverse view point is an advantage, so when constructing a team to tackle a specific problem, try to get diversity in aspects that are important to the job.
We can imagine any challenge has a mental space around it, lets call it the ‘problem space’. The perfect solution to our problem is hiding somewhere in this space, we just need the right team to find it.
The creative ability of someone lies inside that space, it is very unlikely they will encompass the whole problem space so we can represent them as a circle within the space.
A manager who picks people with the same of very similar experiences, knowledge and backgrounds to themselves have created an unintelligent team. There’s no diversity in this setup and most of the problem space remains uncovered.
A team of individuals with a diverse knowledge and experience base covers a much wider area and is therefore much more likely to discover the ideal solution.
A diverse team but with an overly dominant leader who won’t let them express their own opinions makes them not diverse at all. People need safety and freedom to add constructively to any project and to bring their perspectives to bear. In some ways this is worse than having a team of clones. As Malcolm Forbes said “Diversity is the art of thinking independently together.”
Another simple trap is thinking that you need to be as diverse as possible to be the best. This isn’t the case if the problem space is defined. But it may be helpful at the start of a project in discovering the right problem to solve and then to pick a new team to execute on that idea.