Clearly, we need a new level of thinking.
But how do we generate better-quality thinking?
And even if we did improve the quality of our thinking, how could we know that the ideas we generate today are better than the ideas we may create tomorrow.
Is there a way to differentiate the “better” from the “worse” thoughts?
Thinking about thinking is, for many, a challenging thought experiment.
Such investigations are not conceptual niceties. They’re crucial due diligence.
We live in a competitive world. To succeed we need to outthink those around us. If we outthink others we may get promoted, we can drive more growth and potentially be more successful.
In this week’s article I share the first six of 12 ways to tell if you are generating better ideas than you did yesterday. This can help you know if your ideas are better than other people’s ideas:
Better thinking explains more of the available evidence without needing special exceptions or workarounds. Lower-quality thinking may fit some of the facts, but it requires constant patching when new data points emerge.
For example, a leader with years of experience, may attribute a sales team's poor performance to "a lack of motivation." A better thinker, may notice that three or four sales teams, are all having the same struggle. This wider view might lead to the insight that the real problem is poor quality customer metrics and an inability to personalise the company’s product to meet the customers’ needs. The better thinking explains a wider problem, whereas the poor-quality thinking only addressed a single example.
Poor quality thinking doesn't pull its weight intellectually because it doesn’t commit to any outcome. This makes it impossible to test. Better thinking generates testable predictions.
For example, in 1905 Percival Lowell, observing the strange deviations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus and using Newtonian mechanics, suggested there was an undiscovered planet that should be in a certain part of the night sky. In 1930, 15 years after Lowell died, Clyde Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory, discovered that planet and called it Pluto. But the discovery of Pluto was more by chance because Pluto's mass turned out to be far too small to account for the orbital discrepancies.
In contrast, Einstein theory of General Relativity was able to refute the mistaken beliefs of many astronomers in the 19th century who, using Newtonian thinking, were convinced, for several decades, that the variations in Mercury’s orbit were down to a “missing planet” they called Vulcan. Einstein’s better mathematics proved that the orbital wobble of Mercury was explained entirely by the curvature of spacetime near the Sun. The planet everyone had been searching for simply didn't exist. Einstein's theory didn't just predict something new; it dissolved a problem that a lower level of thinking had been unable to solve for decades.
One of the clearest signs of increasing maturity is the ability to differentiate with increasing subtlety. Better thinking notices meaningful differences whereas lower quality thinking often fails to understand the value of the distinction. The precision of such differentiation can be transformational.
For example, when you ask someone how they feel, they often tell you how they think, because they don’t spontaneously understand the difference between a thought and a feeling. Even if they make this distinction, do they know the difference between a feeling and an emotion. Good quality thinkers are always exploring such distinctions because they understand that competitiveness is about fine distinctions and winning often relies on fine margins.
Better thinking doesn’t average multiple data points; it integrates them by finding an underlying principle that unifies separate observations into one coherent whole. If someone needs ten separate rules to describe a phenomenon and another person needs just one, the latter is thinking at a higher level.
For example, there’s an old Rumi poem about four blind men examining an elephant. They all have very different experiences. One feels the trunk and thinks it’s a drainpipe; one feels the ear and thinks it’s a leather blanket; one feels the leg and thinks it’s a tree; and one feels the tail and thinks it’s a rope. All of them are saying very different things. They are all correct, but none could see the elephant in the room.
In my book, Crowdocracy, we described how to make faster and better decisions in complex systems, and we explained how James Surowicki’s ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ book got it wrong. He suggested the 4th condition for wisdom to emerge was “aggregation”. We explained why better-quality thinking doesn’t aggregate it integrates into a unifying whole.
Better quality thinking tends to be fertile. It suggests new directions, analogies, and applications beyond the original problem. Lower-quality thinking is terminal; it closes things down rather than opening them up.
For example, it’s often suggested that the answer to the many customer complaints is to "hire more support staff." Better thinking asks why so many complaints are occurring in the first place. The better-quality analysis of the problem may lead to better product design, which may eliminate an entire category of complaints.
A useful test of quality is to push back hard on an idea and observe what happens to it. A weaker idea collapses, requires heavy qualification, or retreats into vagueness. Stronger thinking can withstand robust challenge or refines itself productively under pressure.
For example, we’ve seen hundreds of corporate strategies over the years. Many of them are quite vague and not very strategic. Often the work that’s described is generic, short-term, or simply operational housekeeping. Such activity may need to happen, but strategy is about creating differentiation that adds significant commercial value and can’t easily be copied by your competitors. We pressure test the thinking behind many companies’ strategy. This often makes the strategy three or four times more powerful, compelling and inspiring. Bringing better quality thinking step changes the confidence of the leadership team and the wider stakeholder group in their strategy.
We can develop the power of our thinking and become a much better thinker. One way to do this is to start thinking better about the difference between high- and low-quality thinking! Better thinking has more reach, it covers more ground, it integrates more creates more subtle distinctions, creates more options and stands up better to real challenge.
Lower-quality thinking is more local and more fragile.
With better thinking we can move faster, be more competitive and succeed more often.