The last language-oriented Thinkie is contrarianism in action.
Pattern: Someone begins a sentence with, “Obviously…”
Transformation: Ask yourself what is true if they are wrong. What happens if you make the opposite assumption.
Example: “Obviously, bigger organizations [ed: I almost wrote “bitter organizations”] go slower.” Why is this the assumption? I mean, it seems to be empirically true, but it also seems like an excuse to not even try. What if you say I know we’re bigger but how much of our speed can we retain?
I hope you’re getting the pattern. Match/transform/evaluate. Most times the reason things are obvious is because they are true. Every once in a while obvious things turn out to be used-to-be-true, or mostly-true. If you can spot one of those cases, your idea will tend to be:
Unusual (what folks seem to mean by “creative”)
Valuable
Try this Thinkie out. Comment with your experiences. If you want to share it, please share it in your own words.
I consistently challenge the "obviously", which stands as a cornerstone of creativity. Many times, this approach proves effective because individuals often unquestioningly defer to authorities, disregarding necessary prerequisites for relevance, and being laden with biases.
I love it! Would it be wrong to say that it relates the the Laughter thinkie? Personal example:
Long time ago I was an engineer in an R&D Dev tools organization. Some people on this team were interested in deploying ability to use a probabilistic programming language (PPL) in production. To them, it was “obvious” that they needed to modify the HHVM language and runtime to support new primitives before anyone could try it. That sounded like a complex surgery on core company infrastructure just to see if people would use it. So, instead I proposed and implemented (in about 2 weeks) a much simpler and a lot less elegant solution by enabling an open source PPL through embedded strings + glue code + external to HHVM service. This allowed a few other teams to try the functionality of a PPL at much lower cost.