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Yes, There Is No Vanilla

A genius thinker looks at what everyone else has
looked at and sees something new.

Innovation begins with a need — whether it's the next-generation high-speed switch, a change in corporate culture, the design for a flagship product, or finishing a book on deadline. Throughout our lives we are met with challenges to create something that isn't already there. We can either do decent work and make something that, at the very least, does the job, or we can come up with something that is simply brilliant.

In many ways, the choice is yours. A great many people get by with doing a pedestrian job of it. But many of us would like to create something that truly reflects our potential. Certainly, if we're consultants trying to make a living by being the smartest person on the block, brilliant work helps our bottom line. And for the rest of us — those of us working in organizations, researching in science, struggling for a PhD, or just pursuing our dreams — knowing how to think brilliantly could make all the difference in how we experience our lives.

The process we're about to explore has lifted a great number of people to function at their genius level. This process has generated books that not only have fulfilled the lives of a lot of authors but also have transformed the world's largest organizations. In helping draw brilliance from a few, this process has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

Here's the structure of the Endleofon: We start by recognizing that you have work to do, an idea to be developed, a problem to be solved, a notion that needs to be ferreted out and developed. We'll start at the beginning, with what real thinking is, and then I'm going to lead you through all kinds of interesting and even challenging processes, until not only are your ideas fully developed but also your work will be aligned with your life's goals. Successful development of your ideas will mean that what you create also helps fulfill your life. This is true too for people working in teams. Your team will get to the truth of your values as a group and as members of a larger organization, and your work will be aligned with what you want to do as individuals, as a team, and as part of that organization.

Since genius thinking requires integrities of vision, mission, and self-knowledge, we must accept that not all individuals, teams, or organizations are going to easily achieve the alignment required to do great work. If fundamental disagreements about values exist either within a team or between the team and the larger organization, success may require that some people leave this particular effort. If as you work through the Endleofon process, disagreements surface that cannot be resolved, don't attempt to paper them over.

Defining Your Point of Departure

The first step in the process of discovery is stating what it is we're trying to do. Throughout this book you'll find lots of examples and stories that we'll examine once and not revisit. But I thought it might be worthwhile to create three examples that repeat throughout the book to show how the eleven steps can bring robust innovation. The three examples that we will return to repeatedly are designing an eco-friendly toaster, finding the best way to educate children, and developing a way to stem the flow of talented people leaving our organization.

With each of these projects, we need to make sure that we're stating the root of what we're trying to do, and not just addressing a symptom. Let's take the ecofriendly toaster. We need to ask what problem an ecofriendly toaster will solve. Do we want to reduce the total carbon impact of our toasters, from manufacture, to fuel consumption, to recycling? Or are we simply trying to create this toaster to appeal to a customer who would like to believe that buying an eco-friendly toaster would be a good thing to do for the earth? Depending on the answer, we might come up with significantly different solutions.

How about the desire to discover the "best way" to educate children? We will need to decide what age group we're going to focus on. And we're going to need to figure out what we mean by "best way," by defining a specific series of measures that will let us see differences between one way and another.

In our effort to find a way to stem the flow of talented people from our organization, our first challenge might be to find the reason why talented people are leaving the organization. Then we can begin to develop possible solutions.

When we state our challenge, we must define our time constraints. Do we have one week or five years to develop our solution? A realistic budget for time will help us decide when to end the divergence part of our work — the phase when we look at all kinds of possibilities and directions — and when we will need to begin narrowing our options.

We must also, as individuals or as a group, describe what success will look like in a number of time frames: in one year, three years, five years.

Thinking is Making Distinctions

To a surprising extent, thinking is a matter of making distinctions. If we do not see the differences among various kinds of lettuce, for instance, our understanding of a salad will be limited to the perception that it's just a bunch of green stuff in a bowl. But if you were a truck farmer in Ohio specializing in growing boutique greens for the New York and Chicago restaurant markets, you would be familiar with dozens of lettuces. You would know their growing preferences, their pests, their various flavors at different stages of growth. You would know when to pick them, how to pack them, how to ship them, and how to price them.

Take a moment to think about "white." Without making distinctions, one might say that white is simply white. But take a piece of white paper, or gaze at a white wall for a moment. What do you really see when you look at white? On my desk, my white sheet of paper is resting on a yellow legal pad. When I raise or lower the white sheet, I can see the yellow cast from below and even some faint green lines. If I let my eyes rest on the whitest part of the white sheet, I see lots of dancing blue areas and considerable gray blotchiness moving around. Then it dawns on me that movement is the most prominent aspect of seeing white. For a moment I recollect being a child, looking at a perfect blue sky (a rarity in Cleveland, so when it happened, you took the time to stare), and wondering if everyone else saw a million dancing little objects in what was supposed to be just flat blue. After contemplating the effect for several years, I began to realize that the pointillism I was seeing was more...