The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking - Hardcover

Cabane, Olivia Fox; Pollack, Judah

 
9781591847199: The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1591847192 ISBN 13: 9781591847199
Verlag: Portfolio, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane offered a groundbreaking approach to becoming more charismatic. Now she teams up with Judah Pollack to reveal how anyone can train their brain to have more eureka insights.

The creative mode in your brain is like a butterfly. It's beautiful and erratic, hard to catch and highly valued as a result. If you want to capture it, you need a net. Enter the executive mode, the task-oriented network in your brain that help you tie your shoes, run a meeting, or pitch a client. To succeed, you need both modes to work together--your inner butterfly to be active and free, but your inner net to be ready to spring at the right time and create that "aha!" moment. But is there any way to trigger these insights, beyond dumb luck?

Thanks to recent neuroscience discoveries, we can now explain these breakthrough moments--and also induce them through a series of specific practices. It turns out there's a hidden pattern to all these seemingly random breakthrough ideas. From Achimedes' iconic moment in the bathtub to designer Adam Cheyer's idea for Siri, accidental breakthroughs throughout history share a common origin story. In this book, you will learn to master the skills that will transform your brain into a consistent generator of insights.

Drawing on their extensive coaching and training practice with top Silicon Valley firms, Cabane and Pollack provide a step-by-step process for accessing the part of the brain that produces breakthroughs and systematically removing internal blocks. Their tactics range from simple to zany, such as:

· Imagine an alternate universe where gravity doesn’t exist, and the social and legal rules that govern it.
· Map Disney’s Pocahontas story onto James Cameron’s Avatar.
· Rid yourself of imposter syndrome through mental exercises.
· Literally change your perspective by climbing a tree.
· Stimulate your butterfly mode by watching a foreign film without subtitles.

By trying the exercises in this book, readers will emerge with a powerful new capacity for breakthrough thinking.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Olivia Fox Cabane is the former Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford StartX and the bestselling author of The Charisma Myth. In addition to being a keynote speaker and executive coach to the leadership of Fortune 500 companies such as Google, MGM, and Deloitte, she lectures at Harvard, Yale, MIT, and the United Nations.
 
Judah Pollack is a former faculty member of Stanford StartX and current lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. As a speaker and strategic advisor in the art of leadership, he works regularly with the US Army Special Forces and Red Team University, as well civilian clients such as the Plexus Institute, Airbnb, IDEO.org, and The North Face.

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Chapter 1

The Four Wings

All About Breakthroughs

Yet another drop of ink leaked from his fountain pen onto the page, and L‡szl— B’r— threw down his pen in disgust. A Hungarian newspaper editor who earned his salary by writing, he was frustrated with the tools of his trade. He seemed to spend his time either filling up his fountain pens, or then cleaning up the smudges they made.

Of course he was grateful for the invention of the fountain pen: it was a vast improvement over feather quills. But it still meant ink splotches and ruined pages that had to be written all over again.

Why couldn't the ink from his fountain be more like the ink used to print his newspaper? B’r— already knew the answer: newspaper ink was much too thick for his fountain pen. Right ink, wrong pen. Deciding to use the newspaper ink was a good idea. But it wasn't a breakthrough.

The breakthrough came with a new way to deliver the ink. Rather than trying to get the thick ink to flow through a nib, B’r— and his brother figured out how to set a metal ball in a socket and let the thick ink roll out from behind the ball.

Now let's be clear-ballpoint pens had been attempted before. They just hadn't worked until then. Early ballpoints did not deliver the ink evenly; overflow and clogging were just two of the many issues that made them impractical. The breakthrough came when B’r— made the ballpoint pen viable.

In business, a breakthrough is often described as an idea that solves a problem or satisfies a need in an entirely new way. Although there is no single definition of breakthroughs, we define them quite simply as the moment when you break through something that was previously limiting you, whether it's a specific problem you couldn't find a solution to, a situation you couldn't understand, or simply an old way of doing or seeing things.

Sociologist and author Martha Beck describes the experience of breakthrough as "a shift in your understanding of the world, because the lens through which you view the world has been suddenly, gloriously changed. And boy, do breakthroughs feel amazing." A breakthrough is a sudden advance in your knowledge or understanding that moves you past a barrier and makes you see things, understand things in a new way. Although all breakthroughs come from the same process in the brain, not all breakthroughs come in the same way.

There are two main kinds of breakthroughs: intentional and unintentional. You'll face some of the same obstacles with both, but these obstacles will play out in different ways. Fear, for instance, impedes both intentional and unintentional breakthroughs-but it rears its ugly head at different stages of the breakthrough experience. For intentional breakthroughs, fear interferes before the breakthrough, bringing up the possibility of failure.

Fear seeps in after unintentional breakthroughs, and it centers on the oncoming challenges of implementing a solution. For instance, you suddenly realize (breakthrough) that you need a divorce. Anxiety might arise as you foresee the unpleasantness that all too often accompanies the process (implementation) of divorcing.

Or perhaps you suddenly realize (breakthrough) you've fallen in love with a close friend. You could fear being rejected after making your new feelings known (implementation), or, confusingly, fear success and the life changes it would entail.

For unintentional breakthroughs, landing on a solution isn't the end goal: you need to act on it. As Beck says, "Having breakthroughs isn't the point. Living them is. Seeing in a new way is only the beginning." Fear is a powerful saboteur of this process.

Although all breakthroughs come from the same process in the brain, not all breakthroughs come in the same way. We have identified four different types: eureka breakthrough, metaphorical breakthrough, intuitive breakthrough, and paradigm breakthrough. Understanding the different kinds of breakthroughs will help you spot them so you don't miss a single one. It will also help you discover the style, or styles, that are most natural to you so you can learn to focus on the way that works best for you.

The key is to understand that no style of breakthrough is better or more productive than another. It is simply best to understand which style or styles come most naturally to you.

Eureka Breakthrough

Eureka translates from the Greek as "I've got it" or "That's it." In popular culture, it has come to describe the moment when someone experiences a sudden, unexpected realization.

Archimedes, the original "Eureka!" shouter, was a Greek mathematician and scientist living in ancient Sicily in the third century b.c. One day, he was asked by King Hero, ruler of the city-state, to determine whether a crown was made of real gold. Since gold had a known density, all he had to do was measure the density of the crown and see whether it matched up.

The first part of measuring density was easy: determine the crown's weight. But the second part required measuring the crown's exact volume. Now, measuring the volume of an object like a cube is simple. But how do you determine the volume of an object as irregularly shaped as a crown?

Archimedes puzzled on the problem until one day while taking a bath. As he stepped into the bathtub, he watched the water rise, displaced by his leg. He realized that, just as the water had risen to accommodate the new volume of his leg, it would rise in response to the volume of the crown. So he could submerge the crown and measure the amount of water displaced to know the crown's volume, and thus calculate its density. He cried "Eureka!" and jumped out of his bath and ran through the streets of Syracuse stark naked, shouting all the way.

We tend to have eureka insights when we've been mulling over a problem for some time. Take, for example, the time two helicopter mechanics in the Army Reserve saved the army tens of millions of dollars because of their shared love of NASCAR.

During the Iraq War, desert sand and dust were damaging helicopter windshields faster than the army could replace them, and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. Lexan, the shatter-resistant plastic the windshields were made of, tended to scratch easily.

As it happens, Lexan is also used to make NASCAR windshields. But to solve the scratching problem, NASCAR drivers had learned to cover their windshields with thin sheets of transparent Mylar film they called "tearaways." At the end of each race, the used Mylar sheet is torn off, and the Lexan windshield underneath is left without a scratch.

Two national guardsmen on a helicopter maintenance crew in Virginia happened to be big NASCAR fans. As they surveyed the extent of the damage done to their helicopters' Lexan windshields, they were hit with the possibility that NASCAR's solution could offer in solving the army's problem. Creatively reapplying an existing solution is a common type of eureka insight. In fact, NASCAR first borrowed the Mylar technique from motorcycle racers protecting their helmets.

When eureka breakthroughs happen, they happen fast. They are the proverbial lightning bolt over the head. Many people report the sensation of receiving information from a location "above." And this...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1591847192
ISBN 13 
9781591847199
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

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