Sensemaking: Curiosity, Learning and the Beginner's Mind

Children, futurists, innovators and visionary leaders jointly share a particular attribute, which is to see the world with wide open eyes and a sense of wonder and curiosity. Even underneath that, they share a disposition of being receptive to how things might be connected, to possibility.

Most of us, as we age, refine our sense of how the world works, how things are connected. As we transition from childhood, our many biases start to develop and those biases increasingly steer how we learn and interpret meaning in the world, as well as how we make decisions. We become subconsciously selective in what information we pay attention to.

Children develop language and understanding by experimenting with context. This process involves play with possibility and imagination. It’s not hard to recognize the exploration going on as a toddler sees the similarities between a hat and a pot and then puts a pot on her head. The imagination runs with possibility because the norms of society and context and meaning haven’t yet been formed.

Much of this starts with associative thinking or recognizing patterns in a non-linear way and forming those associations and connections into a synthesis of the whole, in an elegant and simple picture of what might or could be.

Becoming Uncomfortable

For children, this happens naturally because their context is wide open, leaving them receptive to making interesting and unusual associations. For the futurist, innovator and visionary leader, it’s learning how to let go of his or her conceptions, biases and expertise that have built up over a lifetime.

Or rather, she learns how to set aside those biases and preconceptions intentionally. It’s learning to unlearn, to see the world with fresh eyes. It’s to open the mind to possibility and become receptive to it. This process leads to adopting a beginner’s mind, which in turn establishes a learning mindset.

A child's creative play is often driven by experiments with metaphors.

Some people will automatically assume that because children are so easily able to be receptive that this is just child’s play, that it’s easy.

It’s not easy at all. It’s difficult to recognize our own biases and preconceptions and then choose to step away from ourselves and challenge our own views. We can make it easier by pursuing new experiences that take us out of our routines and normal lives and that make us uncomfortable.

Let’s start by looking at how associative thinking works, how kids create context and understanding through imaginary play and wonderment and how the scientific method narrows our perspective as we age.

What is Associative Thinking?

Generally, associative thinking is a term that we use to talk about non-linear thinking. Cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman explain that our brains are wired to make decisions on very little information. They called it, "Type 1 thinking," by which we're wired to make associative connections and quick decisions, with little analysis. Kahneman won a Nobel prize in economics for their joint work in decision making and cognitive biases. Unfortunately, Tversky died in 1996 and was unable to share the honor.

Kahneman refers to Type 1 thinking as our lazy mode of thinking or thinking fast. According to Kahneman, this so-called “fast thinking” is our de facto thought system and helps us survive in an unforgiving world. He also explains that the other type of thinking, “thinking slow,” (Type 2 thinking) takes a lot more focus and hard work and is based on making decisions by slow methodical analysis.

Man’s Survival: Metaphor and the Science of Being Wrong

Associative thinking uses a form of metaphor to make quick connections. For example, we may jump at the peripheral sight of a stick and do so repeatedly, as we associate the stick with a snake. This hard wiring has caused us to look stupid and waste energy every time we jump, 99 times out of 100. But the 100th time we jump, when it turns out to be a snake, we’ve avoided being bitten.

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.

A metaphor is inherently a false statement. It is a narrative, which ultimately is a substitute for reality and fact.

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.

This mode of thinking is a key piece of our survival wiring and isn’t exclusive to humans. Many animals carry this same reflexive-like trait.

Our Limitless Ability to Recognize Patterns

In today’s world, we use this trait without thought to make quick decisions all the time without doing any sort of deeper analysis. This can lead to making bad decisions over and over, and these decisions can make us look just as foolish as when we jumped at the sight of a harmless stick.

The pattern we recognize is a narrative of all the data we gather and the sense we make of it. In the case of the snake and the stick, the narrative is wrong, but we're alive because of it. It’s helped in man’s evolutionary survival.

Associative thinking is an undirected process of recognizing connections and links between things; it's a process of discovering new metaphors and creating new narratives. We begin life with an unharnessed creative ability to make new connections.

We have an almost limitless ability to discover new patterns, to create new metaphors and to create relationships among things to alter our perspective and understanding of the world.

This, of course, can lead to unimaginable innovations and works of human creativity.

As we age, however, we become attached to certain narratives and find it harder to break free.

Metaphors and the Path Toward Discovery

A metaphor is inherently a false statement. It is a narrative, which ultimately is a substitute for reality and fact.

"The appeal of the metaphoric act lies both in its resemblance to the truth and in the presence of error."

Don R. Swanson

This narrative, the metaphor, points us toward an underlying truth and propels us on a creative journey to discover truth.

Don R. Swanson, born in 1924, was an information scientist and a former dean of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. He received a PhD in theoretical physics at U.C. Berkeley and recognized the idea that the discovery (or innovation) process lies in finding links between distinct areas of knowledge and fields, which he called finding "undiscovered public knowledge."

This method prefaced aspects of complexity theory that draws connections or insights from interdisciplinary thinking, such as between theoretical physics and economics, to approach problems or develop theories from broader and more open perspectives.

Swanson was also interested in the process of metaphor as an exploration toward inquiry and understanding.

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."

The more associations and allusions the metaphor packs into a single word or short phrase or symbol, the stronger its narrative will be. Imagine all the data points connecting the idea of a snake to a stick. Additionally, the quicker we are to grasp all these associations, the stronger the metaphor.

Child’s Play: To Invent is to Understand

"The appeal of the metaphoric act," said Swanson, "lies both in its resemblance to the truth and in the presence of error."

The narratives we use to make sense of the world, the patterns we recognize, are, at the core, just metaphors. They are associations that we link together in and through understanding.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget famously said, "To understand is to invent."

Swanson turned Piaget's statement around. He said, "To invent is to understand." To connect associations together is to invent, to go on a conjectural journey toward an underlying truth or understanding.

The narrative we create about the world for ourselves is our invention, but it also provides our understanding. It’s the basis for learning.

As we age, the narrative (fantasy) blends in with reality and we forget that it is a narrative.

A child's creative play is often driven by experiments with metaphors. He picks up a stick and calls it a sword; she puts a pot on her head and calls it a hat; he wears dad’s shoes and calls them moonboots. The child lives through a creative narrative of the world, a fantasy.

“A child is a small scientist who tries out all kinds of ways of using the world,” said Swanson.

The Scientific Method: Growing Up

As we age, our metaphors of the world become refined. We even lose sight of them. The narrative (fantasy) blends in with reality and we forget that it is a narrative. We become fully attached to it. This happens due to the scientific method. Our brains are constantly processing and refining our understanding.

The scientific method is this refining process. We develop hypotheses about the world and against those hypotheses, we compare our observations and subsequently make adjustments to our views. This back and forth process is ongoing and over time, we refine our understanding. The real world clashes with our understanding of it and we discard erroneous ideas (hypotheses) along the way.

As we grow up and even as we continue to age, we reshape our ideas about the world over and over. Our understanding often narrows and becomes more precise and more ingrained. And if it becomes more ingrained, it likely becomes more simplistic. We can become set in our ways and see the world through a fairly narrow lens.

Through this calculus of understanding, we develop what we perhaps think of as an objective perspective on reality. Reality has to hold water for us. At the same time, we should be cognizant that reality is a subjective and fluid state. Objectivity doesn’t exist.

The norms of society are built on agreed-upon realities. But, as science has shown us, we’re continuously revising and honing our belief systems as we develop and test new hypotheses about the world. This refinement as we grow up provides a sense of stability in our understanding of things. But every once in a while, some new bit of information changes our perspective significantly. These might be called Aha! Moments, when the organization of our understanding restructures itself.

Your brain has been trained to think in certain ways and it’s not easy to get it to think differently.

Insights are moments when we are able to break from a previous understanding and arrive at a new understanding. One narrative is destroyed as a new one is created by forming associative links between our thoughts in a new pattern. I won’t delve too deeply into innovation here, but oftentimes, innovation is recognizing a new use for an existing or slightly modified technology to solve a novel problem. For a basic example, a screwdriver is primarily used to drive screws into wood or other materials. But it also can be used to pry something open or as a chisel or even to dig a hole. For an in-depth view on this topic, take a look at W. Brian Arthur’s book, The Nature of Technology.

Just Because Children Can Do It Doesn’t Make It Easy

For futurists, innovators and visionary leaders, this ability to break free from the prevailing narratives and norms of the world leads to a secondary ability to see how things might be and how new associations might form and provide a new perspective to look on the way of things. This is how children play with associations toward creating context and understanding.

When we read articles and books on creativity that suggest we emulate the discovery processes that young children go through, we can easily underestimate the seriousness and challenge of that process.

Looking into the future is a process and commitment to question our assumptions repeatedly.

We might dismiss child’s play as overly simplistic.

It might seem easy to adopt a child’s playfulness and openness to the world. But it’s not necessarily so.

You have a lifetime of biases and beliefs that have built up and made you into the person you are. Your brain has been trained to think in certain ways and it’s not easy to get it to think differently. You have refined your understanding of the world over years and decades.

Looking into the future or becoming visionary is a process and commitment to question our assumptions repeatedly. To open our minds, we have to want to adopt a mindset of change and be open to where it might lead us.

Metaphor and Play: One Futurist’s Experiments and Workshops with Play

I recently talked to futurist Yesim Kunter, who runs workshops on play and creativity for adults in the UK. She used to be a futurist at Hasbro and then built a consulting practice in helping executives and others to learn to experiment with play as a means to see the world and possibility differently, to break closed mindsets.

She takes people from a range of backgrounds and they become equals and leave behind their roles, positions and professional personas in her workshops.

“You want to break their understanding of certain things so that they can actually creatively become more open for the next project,” said Kunter. “We give them a whole day play workshop, starting with really simple things doodling and playing with colors or making up stories, and slowly creating these metaphoric worlds. That’s what I call it, metaphors, where they can actually play and be in a completely unknown territory.”  

She continued: “They look at abstractions and they give meaning to them because for them, everything is new. It’s like they are trying to make meaning and sensemaking and they’re playing for us, but they’re serious. They’re working actually.”

In some ways, we’re returning them to childhood when context and meaning were more open and they have to go through a process of reorienting to the environment.

Too often, we try to appear as if we know everything in our professional lives instead of embracing a position of questioning or of not knowing.

This process of taking someone out of their comfortable offices, stripping away their professional identity and role and putting them into an entirely new situation and environment, where they may feel uncomfortable, does remarkable things in helping a person break from some of the biases and behaviors of their day-to-day lives.

In Kunter’s workshops, this is built around play and experimentation. There are other ways to provide this sort of shock and reorienting of someone’s mindset.

Shedding Our Clothes and Becoming Uncomfortable: Vision Quests, Travel, Volunteering

In the 1970s, vision quests and other rituals drew upon the journey of leaving society behind, going into the woods and experiencing an awakening process. Some authors and books on these ideas and practices became bestsellers, such as Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker goes on this same journey.

Similarly, Outward Bound became popular for putting teenagers in touch with nature through individual and team building exercises away from the norms of the classroom.

When we travel or move to a new locale, we likewise adopt this open-minded persona to be receptive to possibility and change.

Executives who spend time volunteering at a local homeless shelter or other volunteer activity can leave their status and professional roles behind and adopt a beginner’s mind and learn to see the world from different perspectives. It strips away the positions and roles of the workplace and they are able to reconnect with that person inside themselves, underneath it all.

In all these instances, we’re shedding the clothes we may have been wearing for years.

Breaking Patterns

It’s possible that some people may be more adaptable and have greater neural plasticity in the way their brains work.

For example, people who have a strong sense of empathy are more easily able to step outside of their biases and see the world from other people’s points of view. They are more receptive to the experiences and emotions in other people.

Buddhists train to become detached from the self, to let go of their attachments to the body, to the material world, to their thoughts, to existence.

To consider another perspective, some people go to therapy to unlearn behaviors that have become destructive to them, or to rebuild a perspective on the world after going through grief or loss.

Buddhists train to become detached from the self, to let go of their attachments to the body, to the material world, to their thoughts, to existence. The process of unlearning is not different. It’s about learning to break our attachments to some of our beliefs and biases in order to open our minds to possibility.

Sensemaking with a Beginner’s Mind

All these approaches share a particular method of leaving our professional roles behind and entering a new environment that’s foreign to us, where we are forced to learn again, to engage in new ways and see things from a fresh perspective. And we emerge from that experience changed in some way, with perhaps some muscle memory in being able to adopt a beginner’s mindset when facing a problem or thinking about the possible.

Joseph Campbell might call this a version of the Hero’s Journey, where we engage in a quest and are forced to reckon with our inner selves in order to change (through death and rebirth) and come out the other side to return to the world anew.

If someone asked me how they could become better at sensemaking, I’d suggest they seek out an experience in an environment they’ve never experienced before, where the comfortable clothing of their daily lives will be shed and they can learn to embrace a new perspective. This creates the context for a beginner’s mind, which triggers their learning mindset.

What futurists, innovators, visionaries and children share is this ability to be open, to approach the world as beginners and be unafraid to do so.

Too often, we try to appear as if we know everything in our professional lives instead of embracing a position of questioning or of not knowing. After all, we feel the pressure of our positions. If we are Senior VPs, we feel we should have the answers, that we should know more than the Associate VPs. But perhaps not. Perhaps it’s more important to know how to be flexible and receptive, to experiment as a means to gain new insights.

For myself, I’m eternally curious and ever appreciate what I don’t know and still have an opportunity to learn.

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In Part Two of this series, I’ll dig deeper into how insights happen, how we can improve our ability to draw insights, how to unlearn, how to adapt a child’s perspective of wonder in order to open the mind to possibility, how conspiracy theories work, and why we’re attracted to elegant solutions.

Please leave comments below. Also, if you feel inclined, please follow me and keep an eye out for Part Two of this series or my other articles. Feel free to connect and message me if you have questions or feedback. I primarily talk about innovation, creativity, strategy, scenarios, humanity, values and capitalism.

Tags: #behavioraleconomics #insight #associativethinking #creativity #metaphor #futurism #futurist #learningmindset #beginnersmind #sensemaking

Old Version:

Discovering the Future: the Art and Science of Being Wrong

Children and visionary leaders share an affinity to see the world with wide open eyes and a sense of wonder. Even underneath that, they share an ability of be receptive to how things might be connected, to possibility.

Most of us, as we age, refine our sense of how the world works, how things are connected. On top of that, as we transition from childhood, our many biases start to develop and those biases increasingly steer how we learn and interpret meaning in the world, as well as how we make decisions.

Children develop language and understanding by experimenting with context. This process involves play with possibility and imagination. It’s not hard to recognize the exploration going on as a child sees the similarities between a hat and a pot and then puts a pot on their head. The imagination runs with possibility because the norms of society and context and meaning haven’t yet been formed.

Much of this starts with associative thinking, or recognizing patterns in a non-linear way and forming those associations and connections into a synthesis of the whole, in an elegant and simple picture of what might be. 

A child's creative play is often driven by experiments with metaphors.

For children, this happens naturally because their context is wide open, leaving them receptive to making interesting and unusual associations. For the visionary leader, it’s learning how to let go of his or her conceptions, biases and expertise that have built up over a lifetime. It’s learning to unlearn, to see the world with fresh eyes. It’s to open the mind to possibility and become receptive to it.

Let’s start by looking at how associative thinking works, how kids create context and understanding through imaginary play and wonderment and how the scientific method narrows our perspective as we age (unless we continuously work to broaden our views and question our assumptions).

What is Associative Thinking?

Generally, associative thinking is a term that we use to talk about non-linear thinking. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize in economics for work in decision making and cognitive biases, explain that our brains are wired to make associative decisions on very little information. They called it, "Type 1 thinking," by which we're wired to make associative connections and quick decisions, with little analysis.

Kahneman refers to this as our lazy mode of thinking, or thinking fast. According to Kahneman, this so-called “fast thinking” is our de facto thought system and helps us survive in an unforgiving world. He also explains that the other type of thinking, “thinking slow,” (Type 2 thinking) takes a lot more focus and hard work and is based on making decisions by slow methodical analysis.

Man’s Survival: Metaphor and the Science of Being Wrong

Associative thinking uses a form of metaphor to make quick connections. For example, we may jump at the peripheral sight of a stick and do so repeatedly, as we associate the stick with a snake. This hard wiring has caused us to look stupid and waste energy every time we jump, 99 times out of 100. But the 100th time we jump, when it turns out to be a snake, we’ve avoided being bitten.

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.

This mode of thinking is a key piece of our survival wiring and isn’t exclusive to humans. Many animals carry this same reflexive-like trait and it has led to the survival of their species, as it has for us.

In today’s world, we use this trait without thought to make quick decisions all the time with very little information and without doing any sort of deeper analysis. This can lead to making bad decisions over and over, and these decisions can make us look just as foolish as when we jumped at the sight of a harmless stick.

The pattern we recognize is a narrative of all the data we gather and the sense we make of it. In the case of the snake and the stick, the narrative is wrong, but we're alive because of it. It’s helped in man’s evolutionary survival.

Our Limitless Ability to Recognize Patterns

We developed this tool as a means to survive, but we’ve learned to use it in other ways.

Even though people often spend most of their time making decisions in this lazy mode of thinking, it can be used productively to approach a problem from a new angle or to exercise creativity.

This ability to connect associatively enables us to create great works of art, imagine, explore ideas, try new things and find new connections between unrelated ideas or artifacts in the world. We have an almost limitless ability to discover new patterns, to create new metaphors and to create relationships among things to alter our perspective and understanding of the world.

This, of course, can lead to unimaginable innovations and works of human creativity.

Metaphors, Narratives and Child’s Play

A metaphor is inherently a false statement. It is a narrative, which ultimately is a substitute for reality and fact.

This narrative, the metaphor, points us toward an underlying truth and propels us on a creative journey to discover truth.

"The appeal of the metaphoric act lies both in its resemblance to the truth and in the presence of error."

Don R. Swanson

Don R. Swanson, born in 1924, was an information scientist and a former dean of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. He received a PhD in theoretical physics at U.C. Berkeley and recognized the idea that the discovery (or innovation) process lies in finding links between distinct areas of knowledge and fields, which he called finding "undiscovered public knowledge."

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."

The more associations and allusions the metaphor packs into a single word or short phrase, the stronger its narrative will be. Imagine all the data points connecting the idea of a snake to a stick. Additionally, the quicker we are to grasp all these associations, the stronger the metaphor.

“To Understand is to Invent”

The narratives we use to make sense of the world, the patterns we recognize, are, at the core, just metaphors. They are associations that we link together in and through understanding.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget famously said, "To understand is to invent."

Swanson turned Piaget's statement around. He said, "To invent is to understand." To connect associations together, this process of invention and innovation, is the process of understanding and likewise, is the process of the metaphor.

The narrative we create about the world for ourselves is our invention, our understanding.

As we age, the narrative (fantasy) blends in with reality and we forget that it is a narrative.

A child's creative play is often driven by experiments with metaphors. He picks up a stick and calls it a gun; he puts a pot on his head and calls it a hat; he wears dad’s shoes and calls them moonboots. He lives through a creative narrative of the world, a fantasy.

"The appeal of the metaphoric act," says Swanson, "lies both in its resemblance to the truth and in the presence of error."

The Problem with Growing Up: The Scientific Method

As we age, our metaphors of the world become refined. We even lose sight of them. The narrative (fantasy) blends in with reality and we forget that it is a narrative. We become fully attached to it. This happens due to the scientific method. Our brains are constantly processing and refining our understanding.

The scientific method is this refining process. The real world clashes with our understanding of it and we discard erroneous ideas (various hypotheses) along the way. Through this process, we reshape our ideas about the world over and over again. Our understanding narrows and becomes more precise.

Through this calculus of understanding, we might approach an objective perspective on reality, but we can never achieve full and complete understanding.

Associative thinking is an undirected process of recognizing connections and links between things; it's a process of discovering new metaphors and creating new narratives. We begin life with an unharnessed creative ability to make new connections. As we age, we become attached to certain narratives and find it harder to break free.

Insights are moments when we are able to break free from a previous understanding and arrive at a new understanding. One narrative is destroyed as a new one is created by forming associative links between things in a new pattern.

Visionary Leaders and Children: The Path Toward Discovery

For visionary leaders, this ability to break free from the prevailing narratives and norms of the world gives them an ability to see how things might be and how new associations might form and provide a new perspective to look on the way of things. This is how children play with associations toward creating context and understanding.

These skills aren’t hard to develop. We’re already hardwired to recognize patterns easily. The challenge is acknowledging that we’re often wrong. This is okay if we’re not using them for simplistic forecasting, but instead for exploring possible futures and how transformation might play out. This is the essence of being visionary, of exploring the future.

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