Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. —WOODROW WILSON

Particularly revolutionary ideas can be too much change for people to handle. Innovations often need to be explained in terms of the status quo. Think about metaphor as a way to use cultural imprinting to provide useful explanations that will aid adoption, which might explain why automobiles are rated in horsepower and electric lights in candlepowe

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them. —MALCO

I caution you against putting a lot of people in a room to test a product, because one person’s vocal expression of delight or criticism can infect others, and you end up getting biased opinions. This is something that Daniel Kahneman advises against. The possibility of groupthink can cause you to get unreliable feedback.

“I tend to be anti-focus group because people answer questions with what you want to know, which is not helpful,” says Genevieve Bell, Intel’s resident anthropologist.

Recognition of this theory played a part in P&G’s decision to simplify its range of Head & Shoulders shampoos from 26 to 15, which resulted in a 10 percent increase in sales, according to Sheena Iyengar.

Ask tough questions. Am I wrong? Has someone else thought of this? Where can I take this idea? What do I need to find out to take it further? Was this an easy, emotional way out of something uncertain? Can I tilt this information in another direction and find a deeper truth, one that is bigger and more exciting?

Okay, so people are inventive. You’re inventive. That’s not the issue; money is.

In business and marketing, insight is more a thing than it is a process. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”