Looking-Glass Thinking for Innovators

The productivity paradox.

The faster we squeeze, the less juice we bottle.

I’m personally excited by AI, not least because I’ve loved synthetic / intelligent music-making tools for decades. But I am noticing how much bias there is towards convergence, not divergence. We humans shirk cognitive load, we’re risk averse, so it does make perfect sense.

But in innovation, that’s a problem.

Staying relevant takes foresight as well as insight. Yet we tend to prioritise the short-term; today’s needs not tomorrow’s. We’re primarily inward-looking, we focus on the centre, the norm, not the edges. We measure what’s easy, not what matters. Corporate myopia is structurally enshrined through processes, structures, incentives and culture that prioritise these things.

Enter Alice.

Her journey is a trippy tale that challenges and reframes rationality. In Wonderland things swap places, words become unstable, people and objects shrink and grow, mirrors abound. Through the looking glass normal rules are suspended, challenged or subverted, and alternate realities glimpsed, albeit fleetingly.

I think our inner worlds are a lot like this – feelings are rarely reasonable or rational. We’re just taught how to channel and conceal them. And then there are dreams, those manifestations of desire and delirium. Tapping into both, I’d argue, is a wellspring of both understanding and inspiration. A kaleidoscope of future experiences.?

Presenting the Alice Code.

In our innovation practice, building with people not just for them, our co-creators (consumers and clients) both have embedded assumptions about what’s permissible (to share) and what’s possible (to change), we need tools, techniques and ‘thinking spaces’ that facilitate dreaming, wonder and imagination.

The Alice Code is a grammar of imagining / reimagining. A way to systematically deconstruct and reconstruct ideas for new products, services, experiences. A generative tool for turning banal working into wonderland

This isn’t fantasy so much as a healthy approach to anticipating societal, economic and technological changes (where today’s reality is an unhelpful starting point). It’s a way of thinking and collaborating that has inspired new oral care devices, the McDonald’s restaurant of the future, Spotify’s mood search, new Samsung switching apps and much more besides.

For innovators Alice helps remind us that transformations are more than simply physical changes – moving from MAGNUM to MAGNUM Mini required a reframing of the core brand idea, magnum as intensity not scale. Just as, when Alice shrinks or grows, she gains a new perspective.

Ned Colville and I have just celebrated the publication of our article “Looking-Glass Thinking for innovators” in Alice Through the Looking Glass: A Companion (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2024), available to purchase here (for a 30% discount use the code PLALG30).

So let’s take a quick spin through the 3 layers of innovation practice we’ve codified.

Level 1: Method

The overall arc of Alice’s adventures is a helpful metaphor for innovators because, at its heart, it reflects the creative problem-solving process: a succession of ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ waves.

The boundary of the business is the equivalent of the looking-glass. Piercing that boundary, entering a new space, helps us to diverge: to defamiliarise the familiar, disassemble the bonds of meaning and current logic, so that we can reassemble them, to glimpse new ‘adjacent possibilities’. To avoid the “black hat” mode of thinking. The journey back allows us to take stock, reflect, rebuild, so we can then put the black hat back on. ?

To take a small example, when we had to reinvent Christmas for a major UK retailer, in July, we hired a professional Santa, got the company Christmas tree and tinsel out of storage, built a fireplace, cranked up “jingle bells”, and turned our team into elves. We needed a dedicated play-space, and it needed to feel different from the moment you walked in. We needed a day through the looking-glass: method mixed with madness, a game-like process of exploration that suspended normal rules for long enough to envisage the new.

And yes, on Day 2, we got to make sense of it all, to sift, sort and structure.

Level 2: Mindset

Carrollian characters exemplify many of the best innovation mindsets, lessons in how to correct the narratives, beliefs and behaviours that, in corporate life, can suffocate creativity.

1.???? Open to curious connections, like the Gnat. The ability to ask “what if?”. In the “looking-glass insects” chapter, we meet creatures that echo, and subvert, “normal” insects: a Rocking-horse-fly, Snap-dragon-fly and Bread-and-butter-fly.

2.???? Up for serious play, like Humpty-Dumpty. What can feel wilfully obtuse – words meaning whatever you want - is actually common sense in the innovation process. We need to be open to possibility, to embrace the “slow hunch”, view failure as an opportunity. Asking “why not?!!’

3.???? Comfortable with ambiguity, like the Red Queen. The idea of ‘impossible thoughts before breakfast’, a barb hurled at Alice by the Red Queen, is an excellent divergent thinking practice. It’s decoupling “as is” and “could be” for as long as needed. In fact we need to luxuriate in ambiguity and counter-factuals. It’s about being fluent in “let’s see!”

Level 3: Moves

Looking-glass characters and moves made by pieces on a chessboard can also inspire the ideas behind business moves. We’ve been using these for 20+ years now and they’re our constant companion, enshrined in what we call the C Space Way.

So let’s take a quick look at just 5 of the 55 methods we use, organised here in Looking-Glass binaries:

01

Through the looking-glass... things appear & disappear at will, so we use this World Without approach, for example removing people’s phones for 5 weeks to find out what they really miss (what’s know as a deprivation experiment), leading to SmartSwitch, a simpler IOS-to-Android migration tool.

02

Through the looking-glass... rules are systematically inverted, topsy-turvy, so we love a good Reverse Brainstorm. If you want to think about stopping COVID, start by thinking how best to spread it. Or what about business models based on inversion, like IKEA, where you the customer do the assembly. ??

03

Through the looking-glass... feeling & logic are exuberantly combined. Where society often rewards emotional containment, we reward emotional incontinence. We stage Tantrums (like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee) where people can rant without filters. If you travel on Virgin Atlantic Upper class, the happy socks came from one of these rants. ?

04

Through the looking-glass... things connect in unexpected ways, get wobbly, change places, so we use Brand Swap – For Colgate we worked with sex toy designers to help traditional device manufacturers think differently about ‘brushing pleasure’ through powering, materials, experience.

05

Through the looking-glass... dreaming & waking are intermingled, so we use Creative Visualisation (a guided meditation) to explore future hopes beyond boring constraints of today. This helped Tesco spruce up its large stores to create more of a natural, organic, feel. ?

Looking forward to GIF

If you want to know more, we’ll be running a 30 minute Looking-Glass session at Global Innovation Forum in London, November 20-21st.

We’ll be recapping our approach and running rapid try-outs on business challenges with delegates.

Hope to see you there!