shindar1016

Tool #5   Intergalactic Thinking（星際思考法）

Main Idea

     In most areas, there is a comfort zone of ‘’the known’’. This can be likened to the known galaxy of ideas. Intergalactic thinking means to go outside what’s known about your field and incorporation an idea that comes from a totally unrelated field.

    By introducing ideas or elements that have nothing whatsoever to do with your original concept, whole new realms of creative possibilities are created. You go beyond what is known by virtue of your direct experience or available knowledge to generate some genuinely new ideas. Or more precisely, you can create some new combinations which combine something which is known with something different in an original combination.

Intergalactic thinking literally means to think outside the box or to push the envelope outwards and hopefully upwards.

How Do You Actually Do This??

    There are loads of different ways you can practice intergalactic thinking and intergalactic problems solving:

☆    Have a strict, disciplined approach where you can introduce random ideas deliberately.

☆    Simply be open to new ideas from outside your usual area of competence.

☆    Draw inspiration from things that happen. ( The inventor of TV actually drew inspiration from the lines created when he has tilling a potato field).

☆    Conduct thought experiments. Think about some human activity. Look at what concepts this suggest, and see how those ideas can be integrated into whatever you are working on.

☆    Take one area of activity (like banking for example) and a second (like the music industry). Then consider how the practices and technologies in use in one field can be applied productively in the other to improve the status quo. You can do this for a number of different industries until some original combination comes to mind.

Examples

    The gravel industry has been revolutionized in recent times by taking an idea from the banking industry---ATMs. Nowadays, states-of-the-art gravel pits are being built where the truck drivers drive up, enter a weigh station, insert their ATM-card into a automated ATM-like machine, and select the type of gravel they want.

They then drive over, fill their trucks with the load of gravel themselves, drive back to the weigh station, grab a receipt and leave. The ATM technology allows the gravel pit to operate more efficiently (with less staff required) and truck drivers like the system

because it saves time.

    By taking the technology from one field and applying it in another completely unrelated field---which is the essence of intergalactic thinking--- a win-win solution is developed. The key is not to make intergalactic thinking too much of an intellectual exercise. Take inspiration and use your imagination to take those ideas to their logical conclusion, and see whether that leads somewhere good.