What does it mean to ‘think fully’?

Do you think of yourself or others as a certain type of thinker? Working on the front line of organisational issues and applying psychology insights to real world change and innovation challenges for the past two decades, I've seen just how tempting this belief can be. But it's limiting too.

I've come to understand that if teams and organisations are given permission and knowledge to think for themselves in different ways, they are better equipped to grapple with complex issues, adapt to change and make important breakthroughs. This starts with an understanding that our thinking is underpinned by four deep truths about the brain: i) our brains love efficiency, ii) our brains love to make new connections iii) our brains love order, and yet iv) our brains love to wander.

Our brains love efficiency

A fire department commander arrives at a fire at the back of a single-story house in Cleveland. He leads his crew into the rear of the burning house, to the kitchen, the apparent heart of the fire. They begin dousing the flames with water. The water has no effect.

Moments later the commander orders his crew to immediately evacuate. It is a timely decision. Within a minute, the floor on which the firefighters had been standing collapses. Had the firefighters remained inside the house, they would inevitably have plunged into the blazing basement beneath them.

What led the fire commander to give the order to evacuate? Even he didn't know. He could only put it down to some sort of sixth sense.

In his 1999 book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, the psychologist Gary Klein lifted the lid on Expert Thinking and explains why the firefighter acted as he did that day. Due to his expertise, the commander was able to unconsciously pick up on the fact that the fire wasn't responding the way a typical fire should: it was too quiet, too hot. Later, it would emerge that the fire actually originated in the basement beneath the kitchen, explaining why the sound was muffled and the heat was rising.

This points to a core truth about our brains that helps explain how we think and make sense of the world. Our brains love efficiency. We have an ability to synthesise vast amounts of information. Our experiences shape our neural pathways, giving us the ability to spot patterns and tune into subtle cues we've seen before; all unconsciously. This explains how it's possible to make sense of the world without logic, reason, analysis, or evaluation.

Expert Thinking is fantastic for rapid, intuitive and in-the-moment thinking which is enabled through our past relevant experiences. However, we can get caught in tunnel vision; stuck when the past doesn't predict the future; and, thrown off the scent by our over-confidence.

Because our brains love efficiency so much, we can find ourselves responding on the basis of our gut responses in all situations, life-threatening or not. It's not a simple case of deciding not to think in this way. Instead, it's probably more practical to work with how our brains work.

One technique I have used to great effect with many teams across varied organisations is a simple one – 'Write first, chat later'. It begins by inviting everyone to take 60 seconds to personally write down their immediate gut responses to the relevant challenge or question. Each person then shares their responses. Not only does it encourage the full diversity of the team's views to be quickly unearthed without the risk of groupthink, but it also enables reflection over how useful or valuable the gut responses are. Since confidence is not a good predictor of how much notice to take of gut responses, the better question is, 'How relevant is my past experience?' If the answer is 'not very', then it's wiser to hold gut responses lightly, if 'highly relevant', it makes more sense to give greater weight to the gut responses.

Our brains love to make new connections

As the neuroscientist David Eagleman highlights:

'A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighbouring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means that there are as many connections in a single cubic centimetre of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.' (Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, 2016)

We have an unrivalled ability to come up with seemingly limitless possibilities in a highly resourceful way, especially with a willingness to cross-pollinate ideas across disciplines.

Consider the story of how engineer Eliji Nakatsu solved the problem of high-speed Japanese Bullet trains creating sonic booms when exiting tunnels, due to the change in air pressure. Nakatsu also happened to be an avid bird watcher. He recognised that the Kingfisher hunts for fish by diving from the air (low resistance) into water (high resistance), all with a near splash-less entry into the water. He redesigned the bullet train's nose into to a 50-foot-long steel 'beak', forming the design we see today.

Breakthrough ideas can happen by taking ideas from one area of life and linking them to another. Link Thinking is a conscious and deliberate thinking strategy which links together previously unconnected ideas; great for getting out of a thinking rut.

I've seen how easily teams and organisations get siloed in their thinking, looking at close-to-home examples and ideas. Simply asking 'Where else have I seen this problem?' can prompt people to branch out across disciplines and interests. Another real-world example is Atul Gawande, Surgeon, and Professor at Harvard Medical School, asked by the World Health Organization to help reduce the number of deaths from surgery. Rather than speaking to medical experts, he went to the aviation industry for ideas, ultimately cutting deaths by 40 per cent across 8 different countries.

Using analogy really helps here – reflecting on what the challenge we are facing is like helps get to the essence of the problem, shortcutting to new possible solutions from different domains.

However, because our brains love to make new connections it does mean we can be prone to a bit of over-excitement as we can easily make less helpful connections and become overwhelmed with the sheer range of possible ideas. This is where we need the help of a different thinking strategy – Depth Thinking.

Our brains love order

Depth Thinking is systematic, logical, and led by reason. It oozes diligence and reassurance but can weigh us down with its effortfulness and slowness.

Major advances in life have been made possible through our incredible ability to find order in apparent chaos. Take the famous physician John Snow, who systematically plotted all the cases of cholera in London Soho's 1850's outbreak, ultimately overthrowing the deeply held belief that cholera was transmitted through bad air and odour, when in fact it's transmitted through water.

This thinking strategy is brilliant when the evidence used is of high quality and relevance; when the past is expected to predict the future; and, when we have the time and energy necessary to undertake it. But in less idyllic conditions, scary thinking traps can trip us up in many ways.

This 'curse of knowledge' was demonstrated by researchers at the Universities of Geneva and Bourgogne France-Comte, when they found that high-level mathematicians were unable to solve school-level maths problems because their expertise simply got in the way, so intent were they on looking for more complicated solutions. Never mind that it's also in our nature to dismiss contradictory information that challenges existing assumptions, mistake meaningless patterns as valid and important, or get lost in the noise of too much information.

Thankfully, there are practical techniques that help overcome the pitfalls associated with Depth Thinking. One is based on the pre-mortem technique, which imagines a future scenario. It's a technique I've used with teams to fully evaluate an idea, and anyone can use it either personally, or with others. It's called 'Fail – and then fly'. It begins by imagining that what you're looking to implement or achieve has been a catastrophic and spectacular fail. It's important that the failure has been epic as it pushes the idea to the extreme, which helps to see things more clearly. And by imagining all the reasons for the epic failure it encourages us to seek multiple reasons, rather than risk being side-tracked by any main one. Once all possible reasons are unearthed, the idea then is to step back and prioritise the most relevant ones - in recognition that not all ideas are equal. Finally, it's time to take the priority reasons for failure and turn them around to make the idea fly – not only mitigating for the weaknesses but exploring fresh opportunities. It has the added benefit if undertaken as a team, of allowing potentially controversial ideas to be explored freely, in a safe and non-threatening way. Voila!

Our brains love to wander

The final truth which helps us understand the thinking strategies we use, is that our brains like to wander; so much so that we can continue to think when we are neither deliberately nor consciously trying.

One Sunday in 2003, after a particularly tough and lengthy stint in surgery, Martin Elliott, as medical director of Britain's largest children's hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital, left the operating theatre where he'd been operating for hours and entered the common room. He slumped before the TV, where he happened to see a Formula One race unfold. He was exhausted and not trying to think of anything in particular, yet in a flash he recognised the striking similarities between what happens in pitstops and what his team does in surgery around patient handovers. The need to improve surgery outcomes wasn't new, but it was while watching the 20-member crew switch the car tyres, adjust the front wing, clean the air vents and send the car roaring off within seven seconds, that he realised that hospital handovers were downright clunky by comparison. As a result (according to a Wall Street Journal article in 2006), they applied learnings from F1 and reduced errors in surgery by over 40 per cent.

Intriguingly, one day we may be able to predict when someone is likely to have a flash of inspiration. Psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya and colleagues reported in a 2009 article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that posterior beta and anterior gamma oscillations predict cognitive insight – up to eight seconds before the idea actually arrives in their conscious mind! It seems the unconscious brain is clicking the final piece of the puzzle into place.

While this Click Thinking can't happen on demand – it's usually when we let our minds wander – we can stack the odds. One way to work with how our brains work best is to take breaks and to use sleep more strategically. Sleep helps us integrate information, tidies up ideas, and makes sense of potential connections. Neuroscientist Russell Foster suggests that sleep increases our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems threefold. It's during sleep that important connections are strengthened, and less important connections fade away.

If we can recognise for ourselves or prompt others to consider when an idea or decision is important, we can take a decision to debate and discuss an issue and then to sleep on it. Like high intensity training, the more we can intensely work the problem beforehand and then take a break or sleep on it, the better. It's then possible to reflect and see what ideas are in mind the next morning. It challenges us to ask what can be discussed or grappled with today and decided on tomorrow.

Think differently, think fully

These thinking strategies are likely to feel familiar, and each has been well researched. But how often do you actually hold them together? Using the full diversity of our thinking strategies protects against the pitfalls each can bring and enables us to benefit from the brilliance of each. By seeing these as a collective, I hope you can address the tug of war that often exists in meetings about whether to respond with the gut or follow the evidence; whether to value fast or slow thinking, or even whether to think at all, or just 'get on and do'. It frees up our thinking by dropping the rope.

I've seen the value of encouraging people and teams to use all their thinking strategies, whether that's bringing their Expert Thinking to the fore when they have past relevant experience; drawing on their Link Thinking abilities to break out of narrow thinking by asking where else they've seen solutions in other areas of life; using their Depth Thinking to systematically process and work up ideas; or priming for Click Thinking by encouraging time for reflection to be built into working practices and work flow.

After all, it's not what you think – it's how you think that makes the difference.