Orthogonal Thinking & Doing

September 25, 2014 4 Comments

“You have to remember that any boundary is a useful fiction.”

-Buckminster Fuller

Diversity

Photo by Fady Habib

 

As the story is told, a crucial element in the breaking of the genetic code was when physicists moved into the field of biology. These scientists, including Max Delbruck, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Erwin Schrodinger, brought with them a new perspective and new methods that changed genetic research. As Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi note in A System View of Life, it was Schrodinger in particular who suggested that “the gene could be viewed as an information carrier whose physical structure corresponds to a succession of elements in a hereditary code script.” This story illustrates how innovation and evolution occur at the meeting of fields. This is the promise of orthogonal thinking.

Orthogonal thinking draws from a variety of, and perhaps seemingly unrelated, perspectives to achieve new insights.  It is the even momentary blurring of boundaries to see what might emerge. A while back I provided a portrait of a “facilitative leader,” neurophysiologist Erich Jarvis, who understands the power of thinking and doing orthogonally and has used this to create research breakthroughs around avian vocalizations and human speech. Another relevant story is WaterCredit, a model that has developed to address the needs of the nearly 1 billion people on the planet without access to safe drinking water. Through WaterCredit, micro-finance institutions provide micro-loans to individuals to finance their own water and sanitation solutions.  The program resulted from the intentional pulling together of diverse private sector, public sector, and financing institutions.

The benefits of orthogonal thinking speak to the importance of diversity in supporting collective intelligence and resilience. A recent Scientific American article by Kathleen Phillips of Columbia University highlights a number of studies showing how racial diversity creates greater complexity in and broadness of thinking.  The same holds true for gender and ideological diversity.  As Phillips notes:

Being with similar people makes us think we all hold the same data and perspective, which stops us from processing and fully sharing information.

Bottom line: it may behoove us in our social change work to create spaces in which people and ideas that might not otherwise bump into one another, can interact.  Are you getting orthogonal enough?

4 Comments

  • ADITYA GUPTA says:

    Does lectureship has the scope for orthogonal thinking except for MIT which is perhaps advertising for early career graduate with such thinking to join its academia ??

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