Day 5: Analogy drag

What we are good at, is what we tend to do, which makes us better at it and so the story goes. Enough has been said about the 10000 hour rule. The cost of this specialization seems to be less well known. As Michael Michalko (what is it with the Michael's?) says: "People who know more see less, and people who know less, see more."
As always the Germans have such a wonderful word for this: "Fachblind".. blinded by your subject or even better "fachidiot" and idiot who sees everything through one lens.

The stronger our mental models are that have in the past successfully explained the world to us, the stronger they influence how we accept and process new information. Ultimately this makes us blind to evolutionary shifts and disruptive newcomers.
A wonderful perspective that makes the new Booz study on innovation doubly interesting. In "Why culture is key" they unpack how an innovation culture trumps R&D for driving business growth and new product success. It seems that companies that place more emphasis on everyone being delighted and surprised by the world out there, do better than the ones who overly rely on "the experts in R&D." I suppose this is also why people are so slow to adopt new ideas; the analogy drag of our established mental models, ego props and securities hold us back and down like excess ballast.

(Talking of analogy, kudos to IDEO. I think Booz have made a wonderful adaptation of your "Desirability/Viability/Feasibility" model by calling it "Need seekers/Market readers/Technology drivers.")

How I read this is that a company is a community of people, gathered around a common intent (which may or may not be clear to everyone (-: ). The more distributed the responsibility of being alive and curious on the job is, the more vital and profitable the company will be. Where people become alienated from their curiosity (and search and discovery is left to "experts"), a company falls behind in serving its purpose.