Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and
thinking what nobody has thought.
thinking what nobody has thought.
-Anon
When primitive natives in New Guinea saw an aircraft for the first time they called it ‘the big bird’. Birds were familiar to them. Their first step towards comprehending something totally strange or unfamiliar to them was to assume it was an unusual example of something already known to them. We assimilate the strange or unfamiliar by comparing it consciously or unconsciously to what is familiar to us.
With further experience the natives doubtless discovered that in some respects aircraft are like birds and in some respects they are not. In other words, following the ‘big bird’ hypothesis,
noting the point where it begins to break down, is a useful way of exploring and beginning to understand a new phenomenon. Therefore you should use analogy to explore and understand what seems to be strange.
Not so long ago I conducted a seminar on leadership for heads of university departments. Leadership and management – and the difference between them – were quite new concepts for many of the participants. One of them, a professor of chemistry, used the familiar to understand the unfamiliar in this way:
In chemistry a reaction between two compounds that can
react is often put down in notation as follows:
A + B = AB
Many reactions proceed slowly, if at all, without a catalyst. This to my mind is the role of leadership in getting a job done – to catalyse the process. There are various ways in which the analogy could be amplified but if you consider a rough equation of PROBLEM = SOLUTION
management will realize a solution in many instances but leadership will usually catalyse it. There is a little magic involved!
Creative thinking often involves a leap in the dark. You are looking for something new. By definition, if it is really novel, neither you nor anyone else will have had that idea. Often you cannot get there in one jump. If you can hit upon an analogy of what the unknown idea may be like you are halfway there.
The reverse process – making the familiar strange – is equally useful to the creative thinker. Familiarity breeds conformity. Because things, ideas or people are familiar we stop thinking
about them. As Seneca said, ‘Familiarity reduces the greatness of things.’ Seeing them as strange, odd, problematic, unsatisfactory or only half-known restarts the engines of your
minds. Remember the saying that God hides things from us by putting them near to us.
As an exercise in warming up your latent powers of creative thinking you can do no better than to apply this principle of making the familiar strange. Take something that you frequently see or experience, or perhaps an everyday occurrence like the sun rising or the rain falling. Set aside half an hour with some paper and a pen or pencil. Reflect or meditate on the object, concentrating on what you do not know about it.
A member of your family or a friend makes a good subject for this exercise. When we say we know someone we usually mean that we have a hazy notion of their likes and dislikes, together with a rough idea of their personality or temperament. We believe we can predict more or less accurately how the person will react. We think we know when our relative or
friend is deviating from their normal behaviour. But take yourself as an analogy. Does anyone know everything about you? Could you in all honesty say that you fully know yourself ?
‘We do not know people – their concerns, their loves and hates, their thoughts’, said the late novelist Iris Murdoch in a television interview. ‘For me the people I see around me every day are more extraordinary than any characters in my books.’ The implication is that below the surface of familiarity there is a wonderful unknown world to be explored.
KEYPOINTS
1 - The process of understanding anything or anyone unfamiliar, foreign, unnatural, unaccountable – what is not already known, heard or seen – is best begun by relating it by analogy to what we know already. But it should not end there.
2 - The reverse process of making the familiar strange is equally important for creative thinking. We do not think about what we know. Here artists can help us to become aware of the new within the old.
3 - ‘No man really knows about other human beings,’ wrote John Steinbeck, ‘the best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.’
4 - ‘Last night I thought over a thousand plans, but this morning I went my old way’, says the Chinese proverb. Settled habits of thought, over-addiction to the familiar, will smother the dreams and ideas of the night.
5 - This morning you made a cup of tea or coffee and had your breakfast – the same as yesterday. But was it? You will never even brush your teeth in precisely the same way as yesterday. Every minute is unique.
When primitive natives in New Guinea saw an aircraft for the first time they called it ‘the big bird’. Birds were familiar to them. Their first step towards comprehending something totally strange or unfamiliar to them was to assume it was an unusual example of something already known to them. We assimilate the strange or unfamiliar by comparing it consciously or unconsciously to what is familiar to us.
With further experience the natives doubtless discovered that in some respects aircraft are like birds and in some respects they are not. In other words, following the ‘big bird’ hypothesis,
noting the point where it begins to break down, is a useful way of exploring and beginning to understand a new phenomenon. Therefore you should use analogy to explore and understand what seems to be strange.
Not so long ago I conducted a seminar on leadership for heads of university departments. Leadership and management – and the difference between them – were quite new concepts for many of the participants. One of them, a professor of chemistry, used the familiar to understand the unfamiliar in this way:
In chemistry a reaction between two compounds that can
react is often put down in notation as follows:
A + B = AB
Many reactions proceed slowly, if at all, without a catalyst. This to my mind is the role of leadership in getting a job done – to catalyse the process. There are various ways in which the analogy could be amplified but if you consider a rough equation of PROBLEM = SOLUTION
management will realize a solution in many instances but leadership will usually catalyse it. There is a little magic involved!
Creative thinking often involves a leap in the dark. You are looking for something new. By definition, if it is really novel, neither you nor anyone else will have had that idea. Often you cannot get there in one jump. If you can hit upon an analogy of what the unknown idea may be like you are halfway there.
The reverse process – making the familiar strange – is equally useful to the creative thinker. Familiarity breeds conformity. Because things, ideas or people are familiar we stop thinking
about them. As Seneca said, ‘Familiarity reduces the greatness of things.’ Seeing them as strange, odd, problematic, unsatisfactory or only half-known restarts the engines of your
minds. Remember the saying that God hides things from us by putting them near to us.
As an exercise in warming up your latent powers of creative thinking you can do no better than to apply this principle of making the familiar strange. Take something that you frequently see or experience, or perhaps an everyday occurrence like the sun rising or the rain falling. Set aside half an hour with some paper and a pen or pencil. Reflect or meditate on the object, concentrating on what you do not know about it.
A member of your family or a friend makes a good subject for this exercise. When we say we know someone we usually mean that we have a hazy notion of their likes and dislikes, together with a rough idea of their personality or temperament. We believe we can predict more or less accurately how the person will react. We think we know when our relative or
friend is deviating from their normal behaviour. But take yourself as an analogy. Does anyone know everything about you? Could you in all honesty say that you fully know yourself ?
‘We do not know people – their concerns, their loves and hates, their thoughts’, said the late novelist Iris Murdoch in a television interview. ‘For me the people I see around me every day are more extraordinary than any characters in my books.’ The implication is that below the surface of familiarity there is a wonderful unknown world to be explored.
KEYPOINTS
1 - The process of understanding anything or anyone unfamiliar, foreign, unnatural, unaccountable – what is not already known, heard or seen – is best begun by relating it by analogy to what we know already. But it should not end there.
2 - The reverse process of making the familiar strange is equally important for creative thinking. We do not think about what we know. Here artists can help us to become aware of the new within the old.
3 - ‘No man really knows about other human beings,’ wrote John Steinbeck, ‘the best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.’
4 - ‘Last night I thought over a thousand plans, but this morning I went my old way’, says the Chinese proverb. Settled habits of thought, over-addiction to the familiar, will smother the dreams and ideas of the night.
5 - This morning you made a cup of tea or coffee and had your breakfast – the same as yesterday. But was it? You will never even brush your teeth in precisely the same way as yesterday. Every minute is unique.
The essence of the creative act is to see the familiar as
strange.
strange.
-Anon
