Sensemaking Part 2: Insights, humor, conspiracies and thinking outside the box

John Cage was an experimental composer born in 1912. He was a leading figure of the post-war, Avant-garde movement. Like many artists, he constantly challenged his understanding, his own expertise. He questioned the very nature of what music was or what it could be. He said of himself in his book Silence, "I'm trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing."

In essence, John was tapping into a child’s mindset of imagination and a fascination with the world, where metaphors can be easily be made.

For those of us who try to imagine possible futures, this ability to break free from the prevailing narratives and norms of the world helps us see how things might be, how new associations might form and give us a new perspective to look on the way of things.

In part one of this series, I discussed how children and visionary leaders see the world in similar ways, looking at how children form patterns through associative thinking and metaphor as they play with context to create understanding of the world.

I’ll repeat here what information scientist Don R. Swanson said: “A metaphor is a peremptory invitation to discovery. What is discoverable are the various allusive ties, or common attributes, between the metaphor and the underlying truth to which it points.”

It’s through the allusive ties, the common attributes that we discover new connections and associations. Our insights emerge when these synthesize into a whole picture, an elegant form. This is the process of creativity as well as innovation.

Here, in part two of this series, I’ll dig deeper into breaking the chains that limit our vision, unlearning and finally the importance of aesthetics in synthesizing the whole, in the forming of new insights and visions. This part is less about children’s learning than about how we think and problem solve.

John Cage’s statement in the opening is about becoming unprepared, about unlearning. It’s about setting aside our biases and preconceptions in order to open our minds to possibility, to be able to see the world with new colors in it.

Once we’ve become unprepared, we’re then receptive to recognizing new patterns and having new insights. We’ve learned to open our minds.

Thinking outside the box and insight problem solving

In the 1960s and 1970s, management consultants and business strategists used a popular puzzle to demonstrate the value of non-linear thinking, which led to the overused business cliché “thinking outside the box.”

The nine-dot puzzle featured three rows of three dots. Puzzle solvers were asked to draw four straight lines that would connect all the dots without lifting their pencils. All the possible solutions required drawing past the imaginary square box formed by the nine dots. The solution was referred to as “thinking outside the box,” which took a non-linear process to solve. One had to break from the constraints of the context and framing of the problem to find the solution.[1]

This led to an increasing interest in creativity and associative thinking as part of business strategy over the last 50 years. The best ideas might not be immediately recognizable and can sometimes be discovered by going against convention and common thinking.

Breaking from literalness

Part of the process of solving the nine-dot problem is related to understanding metaphors and drawing associations between things or ideas. It begins with breaking away from the logical connection or long-standing convention that has been formed in our minds about something. In this case, we automatically form the nine dots into a square (box) shape and that frames our approach to solving the problem and it limits us.

So, the first step is to break away from our existing understanding. This is also the case with metaphors and other types of associations. To understand a metaphor, we have to let go of the literal meaning of something. For example, we all understand what the phrase, “It’s raining cats and dogs” means, but we have to set aside the literal meaning of cats and dogs to do so.

Humor, Associations and Literalness

Humor often draws on associative thinking, as we tie two ideas together. Humor can play on multiple meanings of a word or a metaphor. As we make the associative connection, we understand the joke.

Puns play on our associative thinking. For example: “A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.” We almost instantly associate the word “poetry” to the phrase, not in place of “poultry” but in addition to it, which makes the phrase funny, which echoes a common phrase we may have heard previously, “Poetry in motion,” which was used to brand poetry displayed on the New York City subway system.

We can actually train ourselves to improve our associative thinking abilities. There are certain problem types that require us to break convention or logic or literalness to understand and solve.

One type of these are called insight problems. Some insight problems list three seemingly unrelated words and the problem solver is asked to find a word that connects them.

For example: pie, crab, sauce[2]

Often, the solution just comes to the problem solver. He can’t identify the process or steps it took to realize the solution. They call this the Aha! Moment (or Eureka! Moment). The solution appears as a light bulb being turned on.

The same thing happens when people see the solution for the nine-dot puzzle for the first time. A new connection and an understanding about meaning is made. Actually, we don’t have to solve the problem ourselves to have the Aha! Moment. It’s a moment when we reorganize our understanding of things, when we discover a new pattern, when an epiphany emerges. Solving the problem or even just being given the solution leads us to that new understanding.

Insights Light up our Brains

Creativity and brain scientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman have used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines to look at the brains of subjects doing insight problems. They found that the temporal lobes of the brain light up significantly more when people are solving insight problems as opposed to using analytical problem-solving skills.

In their book, The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, they said the difference for someone in an insightful frame of mind is that "everything is up for consideration." They continued, "Nothing is off the table. Any idea--every idea, no matter the source--is considered a potential solution. That's why both the left and right temporal lobes light up like a Christmas tree when a person adopts an insight mind-set. It's the neural manifestation of openness..."

Aha! Moments also create dopamine in our brains, so an insight creates an actual feeling of pleasure. An insight makes us feel good, and we may even unintentionally express that good feeling aloud, “Aha!”

Synthesis and Aesthetics

The brain seems wired to recognize or create elegant connections and associations and seems to have the ability to differentiate the elegant from the non-elegant. Researchers have discovered that an elegant mathematical formula triggers the same parts of the brain as music in functional magnetic resonance imaging machines (fMRI machines).

As an aside, I’ll mention Albert Einstein. Einstein’s e=mc2 is perhaps the most famous example of an elegant mathematical formula. American philosopher John Dewey said of Einstein: "I suppose anyone who knows Mr. Einstein at present would say that he had quite as genuine and esthetic an experience from his mathematical calculations and their results that would mean nothing to us as he does from playing the violin."

Making sense is about creating an order in the world around us, which depends on creating an elegant narrative about that world.

Narratives are the same as what mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot called "Becauses."

Part of a good narrative is the aesthetic element. Does it seem to fit the facts easily? Does it explain “why” with ease and simplicity? The more it fits the bits of data and information we have about things, the more elegant it will generally be and the more it will stand out for us.

Synthesis Depends on Elegance

American philosopher John Dewey says we experience a childlike sense of innocence in the aesthetic moment. When we synthesize a pattern, we feel the wholeness of it. We experience harmony or kalos. Our awareness is not defined by the rational, by analysis, but by a complete, emotional and intuitive understanding. This is the moment of insight, of having a vision, of recognizing truth. This is sensing.

This can occur on a grand scale (when Einstein had a vision for relativity) or on a small scale (seeing a candy bar wrapper on the floor and dog throw-up nearby).

Art and new creations of any type are often appreciated because they compel us to see the world or ideas in new ways. They can push us to consider a new narrative. Like the insight problems, they get us to form new associations that resonate in a meaningful or significant way and generate aesthetic harmony. And like the insight problems, they can get us to reorganize our understanding of the world.

This speaks to our ability to dream up new ideas and find or realize elegance where it wasn’t recognized before.

We can experiment and create and find new associations and interpretations of the world. We can also do this with problem solving and being drawn to solutions that seem more elegant than other solutions. We are drawn to elegant narratives. Every one of us, to a certain degree, sees the world and universe with a sense of elegance and through a lens that creates an elegant narrative and meaning out of (or within) the chaos and noise of our observations.

How does Synthesis Happen?

It begins with something novel or new, which may appear from just about anywhere. Oftentimes, it's something small or non-consequential on its own, but when taken together with other bits of information, it creates a new pattern, something that stands out in some sort of novel way.

When sensing, we're typically not looking at the whole. We're looking at many small bits of disassociated information. Within that information we recognize patterns, many patterns. When we have an epiphany, usually there's some small bit of new information, a last puzzle piece, that brings everything into alignment.

Until that moment, we don't even know what puzzle pieces will end up being part of the reconfigured pattern, the vision. Remember our brains lighting up like a Christmas tree in Kounios and Beeman's analogy. Our minds are working on the entire puzzle at once and eventually, it comes together all at once. It's not a linear step-by-step process. It's a synthesis of the whole.

The catalyst is often a missing puzzle piece. Some small bit of information gets thrown into the blenders of our brains and emulsifies the mixture into the pattern. So, where can we look for this missing puzzle piece?

We can't know or at least we can't know exactly. There are some likely hiding places that we can routinely check (this topic requires its own article). Sometimes the puzzle piece will be found in one of them and sometimes it will appear from somewhere we had never thought to check. So, we have to be open to gathering information from just about any source.

It’s the range and diversity of experiences that increases our odds more than anything else. If it’s a team, it’ll be the entire breadth of the team’s vast diversity of experiences, not necessarily the depth of talent.

The Santa Fe Institute accidentally stumbled upon this phenomenon when it was created in the 1980s to explore complexity. It found that if you bring together people from across disciplines, physicists or biologists might speak in a way and provide a view that would create a catalyst for an economist to see their problems from a new perspective. And vice versa. They trailblazed the practice of cross-disciplinary thinking and that non-experts can sometimes illuminate the big picture where experts might be blind by tradition and routine to possibility.

Elegant Narratives: A Window to Truth or the Seduction of Falsehoods

Synthesis means understanding, but we should approach simplicity and elegant narratives with some caution.

Well-known author Nassim Taleb reminded us in The Black Swan and some of his other works that elegant narratives can be deceiving. Just like we believed the narrative of the snake to explain the data of the stick (an example in Part 1 of this series), we also have a human tendency to believe any elegant narrative, even narratives that are loosely tied to the facts. Taleb warns us to beware of narratives from expert story tellers (financial advisors, political pundits, economists, sports analysts). Each of them is an expert at laying out an elegant (simplistic) narrative over a complex system, where narratives are to be taken with a heavy grain of salt.

Yet, we want to find simple and elegant explanations for everything, for our business problems, for why some individuals or companies succeed, for why things happened one way or another, for why an industry or job disappeared. We also look for elegance in our search for new patterns.

This is partly why we are attracted to Silver Bullet solutions or why we gravitate toward politicians who speak in overly simplistic ideals (black and white frameworks). Simplicity breeds feel-good harmony. These narratives, like an insight or even a piece of music, make us feel good. We feel the elegance of them, which creates a sense of order and meaning, even if they are disconnected from fact.

Mathematics of Roughness

Benoit Mandelbrot, who was mentioned earlier in this article, was a Jewish mathematician whose family lived in a Warsaw ghetto. During the Depression, his father's business collapsed and his family moved to Paris, taking a padlocked train across Nazi Germany. When Paris fell to the Germans in WWII. Mandelbrot was 14. He fled to Vichy and then Lyon with fake papers about his ancestry.  Following the war, he studied in Paris at Ecole Polytechnique, and later at the California Institute of Technology.

Mandelbrot is considered one of the fathers of Chaos theory and he invented fractal geometry (the mathematics of roughness). We've all seen colorful pieces of fractal artwork based on his theory. Fractals also occur in nature. Picture a snowflake. Or the British coastline from space. Or a cauliflower floret.

He saw simplicity and beauty where others saw chaos and messiness. He relied on visual insight as a means to understand the way of things.

In talking about turbulent markets in his book, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets: A fractal view of risk, ruin and reward, Mandelbrot said people think that if they study and analyze enough of data, they will better be able to predict outcomes. The reason: We believe in the word, "Because." Thus, we think we can predict outcomes. If we know why something happened (cause and effect), we can assess risk and forecast events.

Just like we mistake "uncertainty" for "risk," we also mistake "correlation" for "cause and effect."

The problem, said Mandelbrot, is that causes are usually obscure. "Critical information is often unknown or unknowable."

Despite the information gaps, Mandelbrot says, we have a "human need to find patterns in the patternless."

Conspiracy Theories: The Dark Side of Connecting the Dots

Futurists train themselves to be receptive to possibility, to connect the dots in unusual and new ways.

Conspiracy theories use associative thinking in a similar way, but often toward closing the mind around a particular narrative as opposed to opening the mind. Conspiracy theories aren’t new. They’ve been around a long time, if not since the beginning of complex language.

All of us have an ability to connect the dots in novel ways. It’s part of our imagination and foundational to our creativity. Noam Shpancer, a professor of psychology at Otterbein College in Columbus, Ohio, echoed Mandelbrot.

“(O)ur brain,” said Shpancer, “came to specialize in meaning-making and pattern-finding.”

Yet, there’s a question whether people who tend to believe in conspiracy theories are more susceptible to making loose associations stretch beyond rationality and beyond fact.

The fundamental attribution error (a cognitive bias) suggests we have a tendency to prefer dispositional reasons over situational ones, meaning we’re more likely to want to attribute intent and motive to an event, rather than circumstance and coincidence. This is Mandelbrot’s “Becauses.” We seek meaning in the world, perhaps as a means of psychological stability and we have a want to believe in human intention. It’s partly why CEOs get more credit for success and more blame for failure than they likely deserve.

Shpancer said our brains not only seek patterns in the external world, but also in the interpersonal realm. “We have evolved to speculate the intentions of others,” he wrote in Psychology Today, “and pay particular attention to their perceived hostile intentions, since the cost of missing such intentions is higher than the costs of a ‘false alarm.’”

He adds, “Believing falsely that you’re plotting to kill me will not get me killed. But failing to notice your murderous intents will.”

Shpancer’s point echoes the example of the snake and the stick as a metaphor that I discussed in part 1.

The metaphor occurs because we substitute one thing (a snake) for something else (a stick) in our minds and make that conclusion with almost no analysis or revving up the mind’s engine to do the hard work of decision making, which by the time we’ve made a decision, we’d be dead if it was a snake.

We recognize the pattern of a snake in the few data points we observe in a fraction of a second in the stick. In that split second, we react. It takes a longer amount of time to analyze the data closer and determine that it wasn't a snake after all. Even though that lag may only be a couple seconds, it was the difference between life and death for primitive man.

Our survival has always depended on oversimplifying our observations of the world and interpreting potential danger easily.

These acts of sensing patterns that lead to conspiracy theories also explain the phenomenon of people seeing faces (e.g. Jesus) in everyday artifacts (e.g. tortilla, tree bark, toast). This is call Pareidolia, which is derived from the Greek words para, meaning “something faulty, wrong, instead of,” and the noun eidōlon, meaning “image, form or shape.” People with Pareidolia are essentially interpreting meaning in loosely affiliated associations, seeing enough of a similarity to apply a meaning.

Some people are more inclined toward conspiracy theories. People who are disenfranchised and feel a sense of powerlessness or who feel anxiety or stress are more likely to gravitate toward a conspiracy theory that provides a reason and attributes anthropomorphized blame toward an external group.

Conspiracy thinking, interestingly, works in an opposite way to futurist (or scenarios) thinking, by connecting the dots in a way to close the mind around a particular elegant narrative, as opposed to opening it to broader possibility. In recent years, we’ve seen some politicians incorporate conspiracy theories into their own elegant narratives.

Futurist thinking is about opening the mind, not closing it

We live in an age of big data and machine learning to find meaning that data. The truth is that machine learning, at best, can only expose correlations in data and draw conclusions. It cannot provide actual big-picture insight. That requires perspective and human experience.

Thinking as a futurist is more than just connecting dots; it’s about having a range of diversity of experiences to open yourself and find possible tangible meaning in making connections. It’s also knowing that as we think about the future, we’re not forecasting and predicting outcomes. We’re preparing ourselves for possibilities. We’re opening our minds, not closing them by connecting dots in a certain or prescribed way to fit a particular theory or mindset, as conspiracy theorists might.

Famous Royal Dutch Shell scenario planner Arie de Geus said we’re making memories of possible futures.

The thing about futurist thinking or becoming visionary is that the patterns we recognize and use to explore possibility are highly speculative and uncertain. This is not about data analysis. This is about opening up to possibility. This is about synthesizing the whole as John Dewey noted.

Nonetheless, we can get better at recognizing patterns and exploring possibility. We just need to keep in mind that what we may deem to be the truth in our observations today may not be true tomorrow.

Truth as a Final Thought

I’ll leave this parting thought: Truth has both an absolute wholeness about it and still is transitory, as our perspectives and understanding change. As we look into the future (or assess the forest in front of us), there are many truths and possibilities. Some will come to pass and others will fade and dissipate.

Futurists tend not to become attached to a particular view or vision (to close their minds around it), but to engage in the process of remaining open and even marveling at the possibility within their insights like an artist or child might. John Cage attributed this process to unlearning, to adopting a beginner’s mind, to learning to see the world through a fresh lens. Children, artists and futurists alike look at possibility with openness and curiosity.

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[1] Solution

[2] The answer is apple.