Design Thinking helps achieve disfluency, bringing out more Creative Solutions

Fluent vs Disfluent Thinking 

Fluent Thinking is easy thinking. Disfluent thinking is where you have to work a little harder to make sense of or understand. What does this have to do with creative solutions . Quite a lot actually. It can have a big impact on the quality of the ideas that are generated.

If something feels fluent or familiar to you, you assume you understand it really well. However, that can be a trap. There’s a risk of confirmation bias or of not fully considering the information you’re receiving and jumping to a conclusion too quickly. Adam Alter (author of Drunk Tank Pink, Marketing Prof at Stern Business School) explains in an example below . Here’s a link to a conversation with Adam that goes much deeper into the impacts of fluent vs. disfluent thinking.

“There’s a phenomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth, and the idea is that there are certain things that we assume we understand much better than we do. If you ask someone how well they can explain how a bicycle works on a scale of one to ten, people will be between an eight and a ten out of ten. We’ve ridden bicycles, and we have a basic sense of what the components of a bicycle are. There are a couple of wheels, pedals, handlebars… But then if you press them, and say, “Okay. What can you tell me about how a bicycle works?” It turns out that they quickly realise that they’re not actually sure how the bicycle works. They know about these different components, but not really how they interact. That happens with a whole lot of processes.”

When Filmmakers of “Frozen” got frozen

We are risk averse, as human beings, we'll solve things based on solutions that worked in the past.That's why the Disney method is so powerful, because it pushes to dig deeper and deeper until you put yourselves on the screen. The Disney system forces people to use their emotions to write dialogues for cartoon characters, to infuse real feelings into situations that by definition are unreal and fantastical. This helps filmmakers who get stuck at Disney, which is referred to as “Spinning”. Spinning occurs because you’re in a rut and can’t see your project from different perspectives anymore. You start spinning when your flexibility drops, and it ends up trapping you. This calls for bringing together different perspectives and a shift in the mindset.You get to shake things up, you need disfluency.

Design thinking is a shift in mindset. It pushes people to work against their own natural psychology, which Abbvie's Ruiz calls getting "Comfortably Lost". In this process we can find unexpected ideas, at totally unexpected places.

The differences trigger divergent thinking, the ability to see something new. This is what Disney does the best, disrupting the team dynamics just slightly to stop everyone from Spinning in place. 

This helped the filmmakers of “Frozen” completely change the way they wanted to portray the characters of Anna and Elsa. It was all about true love that didn’t arrive in the rescue - rather, it came from siblings learning to embrace their own strengths. “Frozen” for the writers was something to do with not getting frozen in the roles that are dictated by circumstances beyond your control.

Overcoming Information Blindness

In the past two decades the amount of information embedded in our daily lives has skyrocketed. These ongoing explosions in information often make it harder to decide what is right This inability to take advantage of data as it becomes more plentiful is called “Information Blindness”.

The quality of people’s decisions generally gets better as they receive more relevant information. But then the brain reaches a breaking point when the data becomes too much that leads to ignoring options or making bad choices or stop interacting with information completely.

Humans are exceptionally good at absorbing information- as long we can break data into a series of smaller pieces known as “Winnowing” or “Scaffolding”. Charles Duhigg in his book "Smarter Faster Better " very well explains that Mental scaffolds are the file cabinets filled with ideas that help us store and access information when the need arises. So, when we’re faced with a lot of information, we start arranging it into mental folders and sub folders.

One way to overcome information blindness is to manipulate information by transforming it into a series of questions or by breaking it into smaller pieces. This is referred to as creating disfluency. Experts are distinguished from novices in part by how many folders they carry in their minds. 

This is how an Oenophile will look at a wine list and select from a vast system of folders such as vintage or region, year first and then price , that don’t occur to novices.

When information is made different ,we learn more.Psychologists say learning how to make decisions this way is important and helps to see choices from different perspectives.This is a form of disfluency that helps change the mindset, offset the biases that might otherwise blind us.

Processes such as Design Thinking forces us to search for information and brainstorm potential solutions , to look for different kinds of insights and test various ideas- helps us achieve disfluency by putting experiences in the new frame of reference. They are one of the best ways to help people cast experiences in the new light - that denies our brains the easy options we crave and help in re framing choices.