Get Out of Your Cognitive Box to Innovate

"We all need to get out of our cognitive box to understand the content of other's boxes"

Jose Antonio Baldaia wrote an article on www.innovationexcellence.com on the importance of "thinking out-of-the-box to get inside other's boxes". Please visit the following link to read the entire article: http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2012/03/27/get-out-of-your-cognitive-box-to-innovate/

This phase is brilliantly simple, reframing the essence of going beyond your confortable thinking zone and expand your limits with a purpose, giving structure to where its usually misty. It is the link to other's perspectives, or the lack of link, that will encourage teams to find new ways to complement services and develop new ones to disrupt markets. 

Here are some key insights I found of interest to share with you all:

• Outcomes of an experiment made by Kevin Dunbar: (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_accept_defeat/all/1)
• Good team overcomes "almost always" in effectiveness the ability of a very good individual isolated.
• Kevin Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. 
• These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. 
• Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.
• Research indicates that collective intelligence in teams can lead to higher performance:
• We have evidence that speaking in turns by group members, the proportion of females on a team, and especially social sensitivity are all elements that lead to higher team intelligence.
• Research shows that people in power, especially men, speak more and interrupt more.
• Women use, different working and communication styles, which are often more social and communal.
• Social sensitivity is the ability to decode nonverbal cues and read the emotions of others - something that people who are empathetic typically do well. 
• Importance of variety: Although they may arise some problems of communication and understanding in groups where there is great diversity, be it gender, racial, ethnic, or cultural, the teams end up becoming “more social”, because they bring a great variety of perspective, experiences and attitudes to the set.
• The best way for organisations to deal with diversity is learning and integrating the knowledge that the new values and environments transport - connect the boxes!