[Editor's note: SIT stands for Systematic Inventive Thinking, which is a company name as well as the name of the method developed by the firm to help organizations and individuals be more innovative.]
Our innovation message for companies working on going greener is to focus on finding and tackling their fixedness.
Cognitive fixedness, first defined by psychologist Karl Duncker, prevents individuals and companies from creating new configurations in the systems they manage. This often blocks them from seeing potential efficiencies and material reduction, and breakthrough solutions to problems. SIT tools help break three kinds of cognitive fixedness:
1. Structural – The tendency to view products and systems as a complete gestalt. Many of SIT’s tools help break this particular fixedness. The following water saving toilet (click to check out the cool animation!) was developed by Villeroy-Boch in an SIT workshop. Multiplying the water streams resulted in more pressure in each stream, therefore requiring less water. This product won the ISH Innovation Prize and was chosen by Deutsche Bank in its transformation of its HQ to become one of the most environmentally friendly high-rises in Europe.
2. Functional – Seeing objects as capable only of fulfilling their original function. SIT uses the Task Unification tool to help innovators find new uses for existing resources, thus forcing them find new functions for available objects and tackle functional fixedness. My previous post on the Innovation by SIT blog described several such uses of unexpected resources for generating energy.
3. Relational – The tendency to view relationships and dependencies between variables of a situation as static and permanent. Assif Strategies, our partners in Greener by Design, described the following case study at the conference: A bus company’s emissions were well above calculated expectations. They had 100 old buses and 50 new ones, and 400 drivers. Assif discovered that drivers were allowed to select both their buses and their routes based on seniority. Naturally they chose the easier routes (that had fewer stops and shifts) and the newer buses. The relationship that resulted was that the older buses drove the stop and go routes on three shifts, while the new ones drove more continuously and were parked at night, obviously resulting in much higher emissions than necessary. Breaking this relational fixedness required a major cultural change in the company, and by creating a new relationship within existing available resources, the bus company was able to reduce over 10 percent of its emissions. Along with some other simple changes, it achieved a total reduction of 50 percent.
Watch this short video for a new type of green fixedness…
The challenge of breaking fixedness is threefold. First, the innovators must recognize that they could be suffering from cognitive fixedness, and not seeing the entire potential “playing field." Second, after the innovators recognize certain underlying assumptions in the system in question, they must accept that these can be changed, and not take them for granted, because “this is how we always did it,” or “this is how it must be done.” Lastly, the innovators must be flexible about the structure, functions and relationships between the system’s elements in order to generate new forms that can lead to new thinking and new solutions.
This concept ties in well with the message of the charismatic keynotes in the conference, who all essentially break a critical underlying assumption about our industry or society: from William McDonough (Cradle to Cradle, MDBC) who questions why can’t a building be as smart as a tree, creating oxygen, food and shelter, to Tom Szaky (TerraCycle) who challenges the entire concept of garbage, to the point that he “no longer sees trash, only cash”, and to David de Rothschild, who endeavors to cross the Pacific Ocean on the Plastiki (homage to the Kon Tiki, of course) using the ocean’s most prevalent waste as means of transportation.
