The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

The pattern of the crowd

This tendency to form fixed or habitual thinking patterns also occurs at a group level, in societies, and in corporate cultures. There is a body of received knowledge in every institution—a set of perceived truths about reality—that informs members about what to think, value, and believe. Any information that doesn’t fit with this pattern is automatically resisted or rejected by the community. Recall the way Galileo Galilei and other advocates of heliocentrism were suppressed by the medieval church because their view of the universe was out of sync with religious dogma. It isn’t much different today for those who are brave enough to publish papers that contradict the prevailing scientific or medical consensus, or for courageous executives inside large organizations who suggest some radical departure from the company’s core business or its current economic engine.

Then there are institutional patterns of behavior—explicit rules and regulations, standard operating procedures, codes of conduct, and accepted industry practices, as well as implicit cultural norms and the unwritten rules of organizational politics—which guide, condition or prime members of a given institution in how they should act and interact. These recurring patterns are reinforced across the entire group, so that if one member starts behaving differently the others will reflexively nudge him or her back to the accepted way of doing things. In a recent international survey conducted by learning ...