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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS
Move away from seeing things as they
have traditionally always been, not to
miss the opportunity to truly ‘see’
Where would we be today without WiFi? No more A hunger for failure
hotspots. No cool internet cafés. Our ‘mobile’ devices
would be far less mobile. Or what would life be like with- We have a preconceived cognitive bias that perceives
out the microwave? TV dinners would never be the objects in their traditional sense. This is fueled by our
same. What many of us don’t know, however, is that innate desire to seek success and avoid failure. Alt-
these two technologies were invented ‘by accident’. hough, in so many instances, it is failure that results in
the greatest discoveries.
Similarly, X-rays, one of the most significant discoveries
in medical science, were discovered not through an ex- The irony is that when we are looking for a particular
periment to work out how internal images of the human result, our minds are fixated on finding it. We zoom in
body could be achieved, but rather the observation of on the solution that we want to achieve, perhaps miss-
something that was not being looked for at all. ing the alternative discovery, the thing that we were not
looking for at all.
Like all of these inventions, how can we consistently
move from looking for one thing, only to miraculously Wilhelm Röntgen, inventor of the X-ray, failed to
discover another and have the sense of awareness to achieve the intended specified outcome of his experi-
realize we have stumbled across something powerful ments, but achieved so much more instead. Röntgen
and new? had an open mind and rather than discarding the re-
sults as a failure, he opened up to the possibilities of
The answer – move away from seeing things as they what else could this mean.
have traditionally always been. We need to look for the
anomalies in the ‘white space’. Channelling your inner five-year-old
Many life-changing discoveries are a by-product of sci-
entific exploration. But is it time we combined the deep
8 April 2017 - Marketing Automation & Attribution