The significance of “design thinking” to innovation and collaboration could not be better demonstrated than in it is here, in Tom Wujec’s TED talk. Tom presents his research using “the marshmallow tower.” This simple exercise reveals profound (and amusing) truths about how people think, and how that thinking can kill – or cultivate – creativity.
It is not easy to change our natural inclination to seek out similarity. The process starts with moving away from the unconscious urge to seek for likeness and toward the conscious acceptance of dissimilarity. In addition to finding team members who differ from you in terms of education, ethnicity, geographic origin, etc., try to also find team members among people that are multidimensional and cross-trained in different areas. These folks possess ‘associative fluency,’ a quality that allows them to make connections about ideas and applications, rather that “tunneling” into specific domains when a wider view is needed.