reading

Introduction: Anyone Could Have Done It

Part One: What’s Stopping You? Hang-ups and Hurdles

You Know More Than You Think

Our Insights are Only as Good as Our Questions

The Myth of the Innovation Epiphany

The Genius Trap

Ideas are Overrated

Chasing Unicorns

The Enemy of Insight

Waist High and Elbow Deep

Putting It into Practice

Part Two: From Everyday Insights to Groundbreaking Ideas

The Role of Intuition

Signs and Signals

It Takes Practice

From A to Beyond

A Mindset Shift

Ordinary Genius

What We See is Not All There Is

Ideas vs Opportunities

Groundbreaking Ideas Don’t Start with Ideas

Emotional Intelligence

Sense Making

Where Ideas Begin

The Birth of a Hunch

Part Three: The Who, the What and the How

Embracing Curiosity

Case Studies in Curiosity

Tapping into Empathy

Case Studies in Empathy

Firing Imagination

Case Studies in Imagination

Conclusion

Hunch Log

Sources and Resources

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Introduction

Anyone Could Have Done It

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

– Jonas Salk

Like many boys his age, nine-year-old Richard Turere had chores to do at home. Unlike many boys his age, Richard’s contribution to family life had consequences that reached beyond those of stacking the dishwasher or picking up socks from his bedroom floor. As a Maasai boy, he was responsible for safeguarding his family’s most valuable asset – their cows.

Richard was born in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Over 3 million people share the metropolis with the wildlife of Nairobi National Park, which occupies 16 per cent of it. The park is fenced to the north, but open and linked to a wider ecosystem to the south. Wild animals, including lions, roam freely and make seasonal migrations. This made Richard’s job even harder as, over time, many of his herd were lost to lion attacks. This uneasy coexistence between man and beast often resulted in lions being killed by warriors anxious to protect the community and its livestock.

The problem is prevalent throughout the continent, and its impact on the wider population of both lions and humans has been significant. In the 1960s, Africa was home to 200,000 lions. That number has dwindled to just 25,000 and is predicted to halve again within twenty years. Millions of dollars have been spent on lion conservation over the past few decades, but this hasn’t halted the decline in their numbers. Lions are Kenya’s number-one tourist attraction and tourism generates a substantial amount of the country’s revenue. But, inevitably, conflict with the indigenous population is threatening that resource. According to the Kenyan Wildlife Service, there were 2,749 lions in Kenya in 2002; within seven years that number had dropped by almost a third to just 2,000. Education and conservation programmes have had little impact.

For two years, Richard had a tense relationship with the lions. They were his enemies. He continued to do his best to guard his family’s herd, but losses to the lions that roamed the savannah at night were inevitable. It was not uncommon for Richard to find a dead cow in the shed when he woke in the morning. He had tried to solve the problem in a number of ways over those two years, using everything he could think of from fire to scarecrows, with little success. Then came a breakthrough. One night Richard stood guard, moving around the cowshed with a torch in hand. The lions stayed away. Putting two and two together, the young boy realized that the lions were afraid to approach the moving light because it indicated that people were up and about, keeping watch.

Richard had been curious about electronics and how things worked from a very young age; he spent hours in his room taking things apart (including, to his mum’s dismay, her new radio). His years of tinkering were about to pay off. Richard got an old car battery, a motorcycle indicator assembly, a bulb from a broken torch and a switch. He connected his makeshift blinking light system to the solar-powered electricity supply in the shed. In the dark, it created the illusion that someone was walking around the cowshed.

Richard’s ‘Lion Lights’ solved the lion attack problem overnight. His family’s herd have been safe ever since and he’s gone on to install the system in neighbouring farms. Lion Lights have been so effective that they are now used to scare away other predators across Kenya, saving cows, wildlife and money.

As a result of his invention, Richard was offered a scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in Kenya and invited to tell his story on the main stage at TED in 2013:

One year ago I was just a boy in the savannah grassland herding my father’s cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I’ll be there inside. And here I am today, I got a chance to come by plane for my first time for TED. So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up. I used to hate lions, but now because my invention is saving my father’s cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict.

Anyone could have done it, but it took a curious and determined eleven-year-old boy to begin to solve a problem that a whole community and countless officials had wrestled with for years.

When it comes to thinking and talking about winning ideas, culturally we have two distinct and opposing narratives: ‘Anyone could have done it’ and, paradoxically, ‘Only they could have done it’. Good ideas are often either dismissed as obvious or, as author Charles Leadbeater says, destined only to be had by ‘special people in special places’ – often at elite institutions and start-up incubators facilitated by PhDs, whiteboards, angel investors, or a stash of coloured sticky notes. These opposing narratives that we cling to subconsciously influence our ability to be objective about the potential or impact our own ideas might have.

Think about how quick we are on the one hand to dismiss the simplicity of successful ideas as obvious, with the benefit of hindsight. The cat’s-eye road marker, the hashtag, car cup holders, screw-in football boot studs, sticky notes, muesli bars and karaoke. Creative projects, inventions and innovations that required imagination and creative courage to bring them to life are somehow devalued by the phrase ‘I could have done that myself,’ as if brilliance is reserved for something we don’t believe we ourselves could do.

We covet groundbreaking ideas and we celebrate the people who have them. We believe in superstars and visionaries, in the power of Eureka! moments and special circumstances that set great ideas and their creators apart. Thousands of column inches are devoted to the singular genius of entrepreneurs like Sara Blakely, Richard Branson, John Lasseter, Elon Musk, James Dyson, Anita Roddick, Steve Jobs and Arianna Huffington. Those who see and act on what others miss – the entrepreneurial pioneers who recognize opportunity as a hunch long before the world proclaims it as revolutionary. The supposed exceptions – not the rule.

This is one reason why ‘entrepreneur’ has become the sexiest job description in the world. We all secretly want to be the exception – not the rule.fn1

When we dig deeper, we find that the secret of these visionaries isn’t necessarily their pioneering nature, but rather that they intuitively made connections others overlooked. Dollar Shave Club, the start-up that disrupted the men’s grooming industry by selling quality razors direct to consumers at a cheaper price point, didn’t pioneer the invention of the disposable razor, and they weren’t the first company to use an ecommerce platform to reach customers. The CEO Michael Dubin’s role was to make the unexpected connections between the industry’s existing business model and a customer experience that left a lot to be desired – to create a brand that people would trust and become loyal to. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent online social networks. Anita Roddick wasn’t the first to create a skincare company. James Dyson didn’t patent the first vacuum cleaner. Arianna Huffington didn’t launch the first online news website. Someone else was there with the ideas first, but the people we celebrate and want to emulate had an inkling about how to breathe new life into those products by making them meaningful to those who would use them.

It’s possible to become that kind of person intentionally.

In my work as a business advisor, I help entrepreneurs and business leaders to deconstruct what makes ideas fly. Together we seek a deeper understanding about the context in which those ideas will be embraced by and become meaningful to their clients, customers or users. This is how I enable my clients to discover the untapped potential of their innovations, ideas or stories.

When it comes to making ideas take off, often the hope is that marketing will help people to understand why they need the product or service and thus make them want it. The truth is, the best marketing in the world can’t save an idea that hasn’t been developed with an understanding of who it’s for and why it will matter to those people. This is why the innovation and product development phase of any project is so important. It’s clearly better to put your energy into making something people want in the incubation phase than to try to make people want something when you’re done.

Through my work and previous books, I’ve taken people on a journey that leads them from telling the story of their ideas to understanding what makes ideas fly. This book goes one step further. It tells the story of people who have practised using what they know and questioning what they don’t. Those successful entrepreneurs, creatives and innovators – people just like you – who have harnessed their curiosity, empathy and imagination, seeking out opportunities to invent, create and serve. Every day is filled with those opportunities either seized or missed, ours for the taking if only we can learn to listen for them. Every breakthrough idea starts not with knowing for sure but by understanding why it might be important to try.

This book is a road map that invites you to learn from the successes of those who have gone before you – giving you the tools to notice more and to understand how to recognize opportunities that others miss and create something the world is waiting for. There are hundreds of books that can help you with the process of making ideas happen. This is the one you need before you get to the execution stage. It’s an invitation to pay attention to your hunches, reawaken skills you’ve neglected or forgotten, and develop new capabilities you need. It’s your guided practice to a new way of seeing the world and embracing your unique potential on the road to uncovering groundbreaking ideas. Intuition alone won’t tell you exactly where ‘X’ marks the spot, but it can give powerful clues as to where you might begin to dig. This is the book you need if you’re ready to begin finding them.

You Know More Than You Think

I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.

– Albert Einstein

It doesn’t seem that long ago since encyclopaedia salesmen came door-knocking on the street where I grew up. They offered flexible payment terms in order to sell thick, leather-bound volumes to working-class parents who couldn’t always understand their contents, never mind afford the payments. Even as a nine-year-old, I was sceptical about the wisdom of deferring to our new Encyclopaedia Britannica for every answer. How could the information about world population printed on the page in 1975 still be accurate as I read it from the weighty book on my lap a whole year later? How could these facts, that my parents hadn’t yet finished paying for the privilege of owning, possibly be accurate?

Fast-forward forty years. The iPhone has been in existence for only ten years and has changed everything. Thanks to the internet and digital media, Wikipedia and Google, we have more up-to-the-minute information at our fingertips than we can ever consume.

We could be forgiven for thinking that facts, figures and findings communicate the whole truth and hold the keys to unlocking the value in every future opportunity. New digital tools and technologies not only give us more information about the world around us and the other people in it, but also help us to know more about ourselves. We can literally monitor every step we take and every calorie we consume. The great hope is that if we can gather enough data, we will have the power to change the things we want to change – and that we can do it without having to face the fear of uncertainty.

Data – that which we can easily measure – is supposed to make us smarter, and maybe it can, but I’d argue that it doesn’t always make us wiser. Many of our actions and reactions can be observed and quantified, but that data doesn’t always expose the truth about why we take or have them. If it did, we would have found a way to stop people smoking cigarettes, overeating, gambling and drinking to excess. All of the health data that scientists use to persuade us to change our behaviour doesn’t necessarily have any effect. Hard facts tell only part of the story.

Things are no different when it comes to evaluating the potential of ideas. Where was the data that predicted the need for and subsequent success of Google, Facebook and the iPhone, or the decline of Kodak, BlackBerry and orange juice? Which analyst forecast the 250 per cent increase in almond milk sales in the US over the past five years? Who anticipated that yoga pants would unseat jeans in popular culture, to spawn an active-wear revolution that will help the sports-apparel market be worth a predicted $178 billion globally by 2019? And what about colouring books for adults, with an estimated 12 million sold in 2015 in the US alone – who saw that juggernaut coming? When it comes to making predictions about which ideas will fly, we tend to forget that we can only use the information we have at hand about the past or the present to make a judgement call, or prediction about the future. We don’t (or can’t) know the significance of things we have no information about, or haven’t yet thought to measure, and can’t possibly know for sure.

And yet we crave certainty, so we keep amassing and putting our faith in data. That faith has been fractured and then shattered by recent political events. According to Steve Lohr and Natasha Singer of The New York Times, all the data (and there was a lot of it) put Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the 2016 US presidential election at between 70 and 99 per cent. As we know, these forecasts made by experts who had pored over every single possible data point turned out to be far from reliable. Lohr and Singer report ‘a far-reaching change across industries that have increasingly become obsessed with data, the value of it and the potential to mine it for cost-saving and profit-making insights’. However, they also remind us that ‘data science is a technology advance with trade-offs. It can see things as never before, but also can be a blunt instrument, missing context and nuance.’ This proved to be true in the case of the 2016 presidential election. It was easy to measure how people said they would vote, but far harder to gauge what was in people’s hearts.

Because we love to measure and quantify things, Western schooling is awash with standardized tests that profess to establish the truth about intelligence and future potential – concrete data about who is likely to sink or swim. We are rewarded for knowing the right answers from a young age. So we learn to give them, because repeatedly coming up with the wrong, or unexpected, answers can put you at a distinct disadvantage both in school and beyond. In a world where those with the highest test scores get the best grades, go to the better colleges, get the top jobs and have the nicest lives, you’d better be certain of the facts. The result is that we have fallen into the trap of being unwilling to utter the three hardest words in the English language – ‘I don’t know.’

Couple such educational training with the ‘Only they could have done it’ cultural narrative discussed earlier, and we have another obstacle to exploration and discovery: if we don’t trust ourselves to come up with or evaluate good ideas, and we think creativity and brilliance are reserved for others, we’ll be tempted to lean on data even more.

The obvious problem here is that we can never be 100 per cent certain of anything, so we need to learn to act even in the face of uncertainty. The not-so-obvious problem is that the more we defer to hard data alone to shine a light on the truth, the more we neglect opportunities to nurture our inherent curiosity, develop emotional intelligence and cultivate imagination.

It turns out that knowledge and wisdom are not necessarily the same things at all. If, as Francis Bacon is thought to have said, ‘knowledge is power’, then how we question, learn from, interpret and act on what we find to be true – our understanding and resulting choices and actions – is what makes us powerful beyond all measure. In our data-saturated (and data-obsessed) world, facts and logic are king and intuition gets a bad rap. Author Michael Lewis describes the ‘powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms’ that came about as a result of the work of scientists in the field of behavioural economics, pioneered by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their groundbreaking research exposed the flaws in human judgement as it relates to decision-making. The scientific evidence has subsequently led us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to dismiss the important role intuition plays in igniting discovery and innovation. Even in the scientific community, intuition helps to formulate hypotheses that are subsequently tested in experimental methods. In addition, as Cathy O’Neil says in her book Weapons of Math Destruction (Penguin, 2016), the popularity of algorithms ‘relies on the notion they are objective, but the algorithms that power the data economy are based on choices made by fallible human beings’. In spite of this we still question the need to trust the facts far less than we question the insights we glean from our observations and experience. We are in danger of becoming a generation of plugged-in, look-it-uppers who are more ready to take things at face value and less willing to enquire or explore. More satisfied with proof and less open to discovery. More inclined to consume rather than create. More fearful of uncertainty than open to possibility.

What we need to remember is that not all of the useful information we can gather can be precisely measured and carefully graphed. What we observe in the everyday about what’s working and what’s not, why this is chosen and that is rejected, and how the world still turns when people say one thing and do another, can lead to the seemingly insignificant insights that change everything. When we are creating ideas that will exist in the world, we must take that world into account – all of it, not just a logical, thin-sliced or convenient view of it. In 1929 Einstein astonished his peers in the scientific community when he said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge,’ but as physicist S. James Gates points out, having mulled over Einstein’s words for many years, the reason they ring true is because ‘imagination turns out to be the vehicle by which we increase knowledge. And so if you don’t have imagination, you’re not going to get more knowledgeable.’

The good news is that we instinctively understand more than we give ourselves credit for and we didn’t learn it all from Britannica, Wikipedia or Google. Every day, we have access to vast amounts of information that we unconsciously collect. While this other kind of data is subjective, it’s still useful and it can – it must – be put to work. If we train ourselves to become more observant, if we pay attention – to our surroundings, to other people, to what’s happening that shouldn’t be, or what’s not happening that should be – our most mundane experiences can fuel our boldest and most brilliant ideas.

Bernadette Jiwa

HUNCH

Turn your everyday insights into THE Next Big Thing

PORTFOLIO PENGUIN

Contents

Introduction

Anyone Could Have Done It

Part One

WHAT’S STOPPING YOU? HANG-UPS AND HURDLES

You Know More Than You Think