The Five Habits Of Great Innovators

• Mental Time Travel - Interview someone who has had a major impact on their industry or the world and bring them back to the early days when they built belief in their cause. Ask them what was going through their mind, and they are likely to take you along a mental time machine that starts at the beginning and then fast-forwards to a desired future. These "outthinkers" are able to hold their minds at that hypothetical moment, exploring everything that would need to be true for their vision to be realized.
• Seeing the Interconnected System - Regardless of how far you are willing to take this--from building a simple map to embracing the Taoist view that everything is connected--it is worth taking a pause before you begin problem-solving to look at the system, looking at what depends on what, building out the web until you see clearly the fronts of your battle, the levers you must turn, to realize your vision.
• Frame-Shifting - Innovative thinkers shift their perspectives more often, drawing from a more diverse set of experiences, than the rest of us. They are able to handle more complexity and ambiguity because they recognize more patterns. Grandmaster chess players, for example, recognize ten times as many situations as expert chess players. By bringing more perspectives to their game they are more likely to see that winning move when their opponent freezes in confusion. I've found that if you can shift a group's perspectives seven times on a single problem, they can produce between four and ten times as many possible solutions to that problem.
• Disruptive Mindset - "Outthinkers" think not just about what customers will want but also about what competitors will not pursue. Understanding both allows them to see the white space, the uncontested territory.
• Influence - I believe great innovators do at least four things differently here--but if there is one thing that stands out more starkly for me it is that "outthinkers" step into the minds they are seeking to change. They speak in the same language, use the same metaphors, appeal to the same values of the people they are seeking to win the support of.  The rest of us do the opposite. Rather than stepping across the line into "enemy" territory, we stand on our side of the line, use our language, metaphors, and values to lure people over to our side.

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