Think Again: The Hidden Power of Self-Questioning and Growth

I recently read a enlightening HBR article written by Eliot Peper on ‘Why Leaders need to read more Science Fiction’.

For some reason ‘Inception‘, Christopher Nolan’s award winning brilliant sci-fi film came to mind.
Relevance was the key word.
The movie is about a group of thieves that use dream-sharing technology to steal secrets but now get the task to actually plant secrets into minds.

How does the piece though relate back to that?

I found an image about Science Fiction in a children’s’ book:
‘a child with a glass bowl antenna over his head, floating in space where the impossible is possible’.
This images reflects that kids are still simple.
Kids don’t make a lot of assumptions yet.
Innocence is what defines kids.
Kids dream! Kids make believe!

The things they try to teach you at Creative and New wave thinking workshops –
“Think like a child again”.

In the film, Nolan pushes the boundaries in surprising the audience around every turn doing the unexpected in a world where anything might be possible.
He is able to alter the way you potentially will view the future….

Eliot Peper shares the story about how there was tons of horse manure in the streets of New York because of the 150,000 horses ferrying people around Manhattan in the mid nineteenth century.
Urban planners from around the world came together in 1898 to find a solution.
Unfortunately they couldn’t find a solution as they were unable to imagine horseless transportation.
14 years later cars outnumbered horses and the rest is history.

Had these brilliant minds changed the assumptions they believed to surround this challenge, what might have happened already in 1898?

Without assumptions, a lot of what you believe or perceive changes.
Challenging your assumptions re-frames your perspective on the world.

Assumptions are notoriously hard to beat back, and for a very good reason:
They’re useful. Assumptions provide you with cognitive shortcuts for making sense of the world.
Assumptions make you more efficient and productive.
The challenge though is that they fail to update when that world changes, and they stand in your way when you could change the world, says Peper.

Living in a world today of constant change, means no assumptions are safe or potentially relevant even.

Often we don’t even know what the assumptions are we base our life and career goals on.
Working with a coach through coaching will help you define what those are, so that you can break off the path when needed and with intention.

Holidays around the corner – maybe a good idea to get paperback copies of Lord of The Rings or 1984 to see how the sci-fi journey could assist you in altering your reality.

Happy reading