This week’s provocation: Perspective blindness, and using AI to challenge your thinking
‘20 years after my own graduation I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper more serious idea. Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience’
David Foster Wallace, from his fabulous ‘This is Water’commencement speech
Back in June I wrote about why cognitive diversity on teams is such a superpower, particularly when it’s combined with psychological safety. A paucity of diverse perspectives or the environment in which people can easily express those views can easily lead to team-wide perspective blindness, the tendency we all have to be unaware of our blind spots.
This week I read a thought-provoking post from the neuroscientist Chantel Prat, talking about how our experiences can hard wire our brains into habitual thought patterns, and how we barely notice how these filter our perception of reality. We need, she says, to be more aware of how our inputs shape the way that we think, and more deliberate in thinking beyond our perceived limits.
It made me think about perspective blindness at the individual level. In his book ‘Rebel Ideas’, Matthew Syed says that ‘we perceive and interpret the world through frames of reference but we do not see the frames of reference themselves’. This, he notes, means that we tend to underestimate the extent to which we can learn from people with different points of view.
I keep wondering about the role that AI can play in undermining this kind of perspective blindness. Right now, most GenAI use seems to be pretty executional - focused on time saving or efficiency. Largely this is helping us get to places that we probably would have got to anyway, but just making it considerably easier or faster. But what if we can use AI to really challenge our thinking, or to change our frame of reference entirely, or understand a totally different point of view?
I’ve been playing around with prompts to see if I can use AI in a more substantive way to open up new ideas and thinking. There’s still much progress to be made but I thought it may be useful to list some of the ways that I’ve found most useful to do this.
Norm switching: here you can prompt the GenAI tool to explore the norms of a particular situation or context and then get it to apply those norms to a completely unrelated context. One example that I’ve used is exploring the norms, practices, and innovations in one sector (Formula One racing) and then prompting the AI to apply those to another sector (Banking).
Perspective role reversal: You can flip the script by getting the AI to imagine how someone with a drastically different perspective would approach a particular problem or situation.
Metaphor exploration: I use metaphors a lot in presentations, so you can use a ‘If X was Y’ approach to reframe your thinking. For example: ‘If the process of launching a new product were like planning a rock concert, what would be the equivalent of the 'headline act,' 'venue selection,' and 'ticket sales'?’
Constraints-Driven Creativity: Introducing specific constraints or extreme scenarios to stimulate different thinking. Constraints can force different thinking (my favourite example of this is Audi at Le Mans). So as an example you might get the AI to imagine that it had to redesign something using only 5% of the current budget, and ask what would that look like.
Counterfactual and ‘What-If’ Thinking: AI can be used to explore hypothetical scenarios. An example: ‘What if our industry had to operate entirely without digital tools? How might companies adapt and thrive?’
Reverse Engineering Success: the tools can be used to analyse successful outcomes in unrelated fields or industries (randomly I quite like doing sports examples), and then reverse-engineer how they were achieved. These lessons can then be applied to a different scenario, business or sector.
What would nature do? Nature often provides elegant solutions to complex problems. So you can ask the AI to consider how lessons and principles from natural systems (anything from weather, to animal herds, to fungi, to Starling murmurations) can be appled to another context. For example: ‘How might a forest ecosystem's principles for resource sharing and interdependence inspire a new way to structure partnerships in X sector?’
Combining Unrelated Concepts: creativity is combinatorial, so asking an AI to deliberately collide two unconnected ideas can sometimes uncover surprising connections.
There’s aways a bit of back of forth involved after the initial answer but the opportunity here is to take one or more aspects of what has been suggested and to dive deeper to get to really interesting ideas. This has definitely taken me to places that I probably wouldn’t have got to by myself, and I think has been really valuable in getting beyond the perspective blindness that we’re all susceptible to.
