Activate Your Mind: How to Access Your Deep Learning

Last week I wrote about the power of far-analogies —how a semantically unrelated story can help unlock previously unsolvable challenges. But I've been thinking, "it's all well and good writing a blog post about a French mathematician, but where's the practical application?"

Well this week, during an internal creative workshop, one of my colleagues demonstrated just that.

And here's what happened.

We were having a divergence brainstorm, trying to capture as many points of view around an idea as possible. We were exploring things like:

• what our client did well?
• what shouldn't we say about them?
• what do their audience want to see?
• why is what they have to say interesting?

As this was going on I was frantically writing it all down across two whiteboards.

There's a wonderful scene in See How They Run, where Sam Rockwell's Inspector Stoppard and Saoirse Ronan's Constable Stalker are discussing her incessant note-taking.

"Tell me, do you write everything down in that little notebook?", he asks.

"Only if it’s important, sir" she replies.

He looks puzzled, then asks "how do you know if it’s important?"

Her reply is genius, and sums up my approach to workshopping:

"Well, I’ll just sort of put everything in as we go, and then down the line, when we know what’s important, we’ll know that it’s already in the notebook"

The benefit of this approach, is that as I'm writing things down, it leaves everyone else to free-associate. But by having it on a whiteboard, something very fun happens, the words displayed continue to travel through people's minds even if the discussion has moved onto the next idea.

And that's when my colleague pulled out his phone, did a few quick taps and showed me a Tweet. The Tweet was totally unrelated to our client. It was unrelated to our task. But there was an idea within it that made perfect sense, and unlocked a whole new way of looking at this particular problem.

The idea he shared came from a truly wonderful Twitter account called Visualize Value. Jack Butcher, the artist, creates these incredibly minimalist yet deeply meaningful visual metaphors. By using basic white shapes displayed on a black background a simple concept is elevated.

My colleague has been following this account for some time, but earlier in the week he shared it with me over Teams. "Dunno if you've ever come across these guys but I love it" — he was right.

So later in the week when we had a workshop, his mind had already formed a connection. Then when something was written on the whiteboard it triggered that connection and "boom": successful use of a far-analogy.

So my takeaway on how to make this work again in future:

1. Read widely. Follow random accounts on Social Media. Learn the difference between German genders. Read children's story books.
2. The further outside of your professional-wheelhouse, the better.
3. Share that knowledge with someone.
4. Wait...

So far, in my experience, numbers 2 and 3 seem to be the most important.

We already know from Poincaré and Holyoak that the further outside of your wheelhouse you learn, the greater the impact.

But what isn't explained by Holyoak is the importance of sharing.

Because what seems to be effective in unlocking the potential of a far-analogy is in sharing it with another person.

Studies have shown that writing something in your own words is an excellent tool for information consolidation, as is explaining something you've learned to a different person. So it follows that consolidation of a far-analogy is the secret to getting your brain to access it when you need it most.

This is why I encourage people to share things they've read outside of their job description. Or why it's important to have an ongoing dialogue with your colleagues where you share random stories you've heard. This is also why it's important to regard reading and learning as a part of your job –?not something you do to avoid having to do your job.

To end, here are some things I have learned this week that I'm sharing with you in the hope that they'll be "activated" when I need them most:

• A fascinating deep dive in football manager, Sean Dyche's 4-4-2 set up at Burnley. In particular about how he used to ask his goalie, Pope, to intentionally mix up his delivery between kicking-it long or passing it short, etc?— he would ask Pope to watch what was going on, and that if he saw a pattern being repeated, to intentionally do something different to break the pattern. Nice!
• A long read by Roger Martin focusing on the success of Canadian tennis. I really like the use of the question "What Would Have to be True?" as a way of evaluating if a strategy was working.
• The role of Dead Reckoning and "Pillars in the Sky" (a form of celestial mapping) in early Polynesian navigation. And here I thought "Reckoner" was just a cool title of a Radiohead song.
• My son has two copies of Jack and the Beanstalk. One is the full story, albeit told for a 2 year old. The other is 6 pages long, told across no more than 12 very basic rhyming sentences. Incredibly, the latter does a phenomenal job at telling the story.

And if anyone has any tips on how to better facilitate whilst writing stuff down during a brainstorm, please, please let me know! I'm in need of your help.