Digital Minds- Blending Minds

The concept of blending things and ideas is one with a long history, of course. It probably started during the stone age as our brains matured. Perhaps then, an enterprising soul deliberately blended cooking meat with some sort of wild berry deriving a new taste sensation that empowered him or her to experiment further.

Likewise now in the age of digital and adoption of innovation-based frameworks for the purposes of discovery and economic development, the ability to blend existing trends, products and movements to derive new insights is paramount to the development of new businesses and society. 

Generating new ideas that can be discovered via an aha! moment or as part of a more structured approach, such as design thinking, does happen and the value of those participating in these endeavors cannot be denied.

Many new innovations come from these sessions that have given rise to companies such as IDEO and Jump Associates, for example. These companies facilitate the creative and discovery process that leads to new ideas, concepts and products.

Blenders have extraordinary and unique skills, however. They are prodigious mixers of facts and intersectional thinking and they do it naturally. For blenders, this capability is as mundane as breathing.

Having worked and been in the trenches of the innovation and creative thinking movement, I can attest that not everyone has these abilities.

Blenders are people that have a distinctive mindset. They can see and find patterns where others don’t and they do it instinctually and with minimal effort.  They seem to have hyper-linked brains that can easily connect disparate experiences and curate them into a new whole. Blenders are supremely informed as they are addicted to news and facts; capabilities that also make them good futurists.

They first use expansive and divergent thinking and stretch their minds to gather relevant facts, ideas and concepts. They then appear to synthesize these disparate collections of concepts and shift their brains to use convergent thinking and to 'synergize' them together in the generation of new concepts.

The beauty of blenders is that they don't reinvent the wheel every time; they don't have to. They simply utilize what has been discovered and create and apply the value from those creations into new frameworks.  Further, their visions in many instances encompass the whole picture - the whole business model - as it were.

Below is a blending exercise illustrative of how a blending mind operates.

The first step is to focus and there is no better way to do so than by issuing a challenge. In my experience the best way to start is by issuing the following statement: “Let us imagine.”

Challenge Statement:

‘Let us imagine big, country-wide projects that could put people to work and that could help our aging infrastructure.’

A blending minds starts to immediately go wide and start handling divergent facts. It will think about the aging trends hitting our nation in both our aging human workforce as well as our infrastructure. It will make a note of that.

It will then think of common denominators that cut across all 50 states; roads, cars, people, drivers.  From there this innately and supremely curious mind will most likely start fuzzing concepts, go wider and start asking questions, searching for the optimal question and central concept.

It will process the latest findings about distracted drivers. Distracted drivers are composed of older and younger drivers sharing roads. Older drivers have a harder time reacting to input and have a harder time seeing. Younger drivers are distracted and inattentive due to mobile communication technologies and texting.

With those facts stored, the blending brain now starts merging social conditions with emerging technologies and could start visualizing ideas to make things safe for all.  Utilizing techniques from design thinking it will concentrate on a couple of concepts where there is friction.

Zeroing in on the word ‘safe’ it will push its definition and consider its meaning and its proximity to the concepts of roads, cars, drivers and lights, street signs, asphalt and traffic lights. All relevant factors, and all applicable and that would have an impact on the development of safer driving conditions.

The last step is simple. It now unleashes its creative and unhindered power and starts dispensing ideas and concepts. At this stage nothing is irrational and out of context. Every idea and insight at this stage is as real as a glass of water when thirsty.

Results: Good ideas.

1.     App Intersections: Synch up traffic lights with smart-phones so that young drivers could get an alert on their devices as to when the light will turn red before it happens; basically traffic lights on an app. We have enough data gathered by Google and their cohorts' to implement a vision close to this one using Google maps.

2.     Backlighted Street Signs: As for the older drivers one idea would be to make all road signs backlighted, making them much easy to see at night.

3.     Install GPS sensors in all cars that could talk to each other and alert of pending accidents. This idea is already being implemented as part of the connected car, in fact.

4.     Smart pavement that can detect speeds and aggressive driving patterns and that can send the data to an analytics engine and predict slow-downs and accidents.

There are many other ideas that arose from this exercise but will keep those on the entrepreneurial box for now.

So there you have it; four ideas from a blending mind that are implementable and that meet the conditions of the challenge.