Rituals that kill new thinking, and how to subvert them

Recently I ran a full-day workshop for two dozen leaders inside a global industrial company, to help them make plans to subvert their own thought-rituals and do more of what we all aim to do here at Neue Geo: "new thinking together."

Here’s what we did. What would you do?

Working with Fear

Their deepest fear is that even though they are a giant corporation with annual revenues north of $20 billion, they might be overtaken – maybe even made irrelevant – by new entrants who seem to grow faster, do things differently, and somehow understand better how the world works now.

We talked frankly about that fear. They already have many formal mechanisms, like an annual strategic review, to do big thinking on a regular basis. So why don't those rituals alleviate their anxiety?

If you also lead inside a large corporation, maybe you will relate to some of the on-the-ground realities we frankly talked about. Box-ticking exercises that don’t challenge people’s patterned behaviours. Copy-pasting bullet points from last year's template into this year's, because they have no time to think afresh.

Thought-rituals like these comprise the proverbial “box” that we all want to think outside of.

Subverting Rituals

How can you helpfully mess with people’s patterned thinking? Our own subversive plan comprised two Parts:

• Part One was about naming unsettling questions. For Neue Geo, as a society of free thinkers and explorers, we aim to ask questions that are literally unsettling. The question itself implies that We cannot stay here or We cannot stay on this path we’re now on.
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  ​(I’ve learned that people already know most of the “elephants in the room.” They may not feel comfortable voicing them, however. So a large part of the work here is psychological: creating space where colleagues feel safe to name sensitive issues and disturbing ideas.)​
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• Part Two was about bringing those questions back into your team, your community, your organization.
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  ​How do you earn people’s participation? How do you helpfully create a problem, cause a conflict, or challenge norms? Unsettling questions, if they’re worthy of the title, do all those things.
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  And who do you bring together? A very clear way to signal that this time we are going to think different is to bring different people into the room.

One of the conceptual tools that Neue Geo deploys to bring diverse Members together around a topic is blunt stakeholder mapping. Let's be frank about which perspectives we are getting and which ones we’re missing. (See this article from Neue Geo’s Map Room for more on the topic.)

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For Society Members:

Watch the members-only video "Can We Make Group Thinking A Good Thing?" It gives an overview of blunt stakeholder mapping plus two other frameworks to help you bring together a fresh mix of perspectives to break mediocrity. And please do share “What would you do?” in our Collective Journal. How can we make “Group Thinking” good again? Let’s develop that guide for all of us…