There may be no cheaper creativity tool in the world. No workshop is required. No facilitator. No Post-it notes. No innovation laboratory. No expensive software.
Just two words: What if…?
We use them so casually that we rarely stop to consider what happens cognitively when somebody asks the question seriously.
What if the assumption we have all accepted is wrong?
What if this problem is actually a symptom of something else?
What if the customer doesn’t need what we are trying so hard to improve?
What if this anomaly is not an error?
What if the absurdity everyone has learned to tolerate is trying to tell us something?
The genius of What if…? is not that it magically produces creative ideas. Its power is more fundamental.
“What if…?” opens abductive thinking.
And that may be exactly what many organisations have inadvertently designed themselves to prevent.
We can be extremely intelligent — on the wrong plane
Most of our thinking takes place within what he called a matrix: an established pattern of thought governed by a particular code, set of assumptions or rules.
Within that matrix we can become extraordinarily competent. => We can analyse more data. Optimise processes. Improve quality. Eliminate errors. Benchmark competitors. Refine forecasts. Hold meetings about the meetings required to improve the process for preparing the next meeting.
None of this requires us to leave the matrix.
Koestler distinguished this habitual associative thinking from originality.
Originality occurs when two previously separate matrices meet.
M1 encounters M2. => That is bisociation.
This distinction matters enormously in organisations because we have spent decades talking about creativity as if the primary challenge were somehow to make people more creative.
Perhaps that is the wrong problem. What if perfectly intelligent, curious and imaginative people are working inside systems that continuously pull their thinking back toward M1?
The Battle of Arrows
Gary Klein’s research on insight gives us another way of seeing the problem.
I have visualised his argument as a Battle of Arrows.
One arrow points downward: Reduce errors. Reduce uncertainty. Reduce deviations.
The other points upward: Increase insights. Increase discoveries. Increase new possibilities.
(pic. Ilkka Kakko: “Oasis Way and the Postnormal Era – How Understanding Serendipity Will Lead You to Success” (2014) p. 18, BHV – St.Petersburg)
Organisations understandably love the first arrow.
Errors can be measured. Deviations can be reported. Risks can be entered into registers. Processes can be standardised. Deadlines can be monitored. People can be held accountable.
And much of this is necessary. => I certainly do not want the pilot flying my plane to experiment with a novel landing procedure because she has just attended a creativity workshop.
The problem begins when the logic appropriate for reliability becomes the dominant cognitive logic of the entire organisation.
Klein describes two related dangers: the predictability trap and the perfection trap. Organisations seek predictability and error reduction so aggressively that they can inadvertently suppress insight.
And then we add something modern organisations have become remarkably good at producing: busyness.
Calendars fill. Meetings multiply. Notifications arrive. Deadlines approach. Dashboards demand attention.
The organisation may be full of highly intelligent people, all working extremely hard. But cognitively they are running faster and faster across the same plane. Pathological busyness is not merely a time-management problem.
It is cognitive infrastructure for staying inside M1.
Creative desperation
Klein offers three major pathways to insight: connections, contradictions and creative desperation.
Creative desperation is particularly interesting.
Sometimes we do not abandon an assumption because somebody politely suggests an alternative. We abandon it because we have reached an impasse.
Nothing works.
The obvious alternatives have been exhausted. Trying harder only produces more failure. We become desperate enough to question something we previously treated as fixed.
This is where a problem can become cognitively productive.
The obstacle may not merely be preventing us from finding the solution.
Our conception of the obstacle may be part of what prevents us from seeing another solution.
I have explored creative desperation more deeply elsewhere, because I believe Klein identified something profoundly important: sometimes the inability to move forward is precisely what forces us to question the assumption that has kept us trapped. In my essay Creative Desperation — When Urgent Action Is Needed, I examine what happens when trying harder is no longer an option for survival.
At that moment, the most useful question may not be: How can we solve this?
It may be: What if…?
Two words that change the rules
Consider the difference between three familiar forms of reasoning.
Deduction operates from established premises: if these things are true, what necessarily follows?
Induction works from observations toward patterns or generalisations: what can these observations tell us?
Both are indispensable.
But neither adequately describes the generative leap required when our existing explanation no longer works.
That is where abduction enters.
Abductive reasoning asks us to generate a possible explanation.
Something does not fit. An anomaly appears. The established story cannot adequately explain it.
And instead of immediately correcting the anomaly, dismissing it as noise or forcing it into the existing explanation, we ask:
What if there is another explanation?
That little question changes the cognitive game. It allows us, provisionally, to suspend the code governing M1.
Perhaps there is an M2. Perhaps something that looks irrelevant from inside our existing matrix becomes highly relevant when viewed from another one.
Perhaps two things we have kept intellectually separate actually belong together.
And suddenly Koestler and abduction meet.
One of my favourite historical examples is Johannes Kepler’s famous eight-minute anomaly. The observed orbit of Mars refused to fit the established geometry, and instead of dismissing the discrepancy, Kepler eventually allowed it to challenge the rules themselves. I explored this remarkable episode in The Eight-Minute Epiphany — a beautiful example of how an anomaly can open the door to abductive thinking and, ultimately, bisociation.
I would describe the movement like this: Anomaly → “What if…?” → Abduction → M2 → Bisociation → New pattern → Better story
Of course, What if…? does not guarantee insight. Most hypotheses will be wrong. Many connections will lead nowhere.
That is precisely why this is not deduction. The purpose of the question is not to produce certainty. It creates possibility.
“Think outside the box” tells us almost nothing
This is also why I have become increasingly dissatisfied with one of the most persistent clichés of creativity:
Think outside the box. (… and the 21st-Century Jester immediately asks: “What box?”).
What exactly is a person supposed to do with that instruction? It describes the desired destination without providing transportation.
Worse, we often tell people to think outside the box while surrounding them with organisational mechanisms designed to keep them firmly inside it.
Think outside the box — but the meeting ends at 10:30.
Challenge assumptions — but don’t challenge that assumption.
Experiment — but explain the ROI first.
Take risks — but avoid mistakes.
Be curious — but meet the deadline.
Bring us something genuinely new — but make sure it fits this year’s strategy.
Perhaps we don’t need to tell people to think outside the box.
Perhaps we need to give them a cognitive mechanism for opening it.
What if…?
The organisational value of absurdity
This brings me to something I have become increasingly fascinated by: absurdity — which I regard as a particular form of anomaly.
Organisations are full of absurdities. Processes everybody knows make no sense. Rules whose original purpose nobody remembers. Reports nobody reads. Meetings that exist because they existed last month.
Contradictory targets. Metrics that produce behaviour opposite to what management intended.
And intelligent people become remarkably skilled at adapting to them.
Eventually, the absurd stops looking absurd. It becomes => “That’s just how we do things here.”
But what if absurdity is not merely organisational noise? What if it is a crack in the matrix?
An absurdity may be evidence that the story the organisation tells itself and the reality it encounters no longer fit together.
The instinct of the efficient organisation is to repair the crack. The instinct of the curious mind should sometimes be to look through it.
This is why I would make an important distinction:
Busyness keeps us on one plane.
Absurdity may reveal another.
The problem is that pathological busyness leaves very little attention for asking what the absurdity might mean.
Enter the 21st-Century Jester
This is where one of the archetypes I introduce in my forthcoming book becomes particularly important.
I call it the 21st-Century Jester as Catalyst of Creativity.
The Jester is not necessarily the most creative person in the room. The Jester does not need to possess the brilliant solution. And the Jester certainly does not need to announce:
You are all wrong. I know the answer.
Something subtler — and cognitively more powerful — may be enough.
The Jester notices the contradiction that everyone else has normalised.
The anomaly that has been classified as irrelevant. The absurdity that has become invisible through familiarity. And, with the right timing and sufficient social courage, asks:
What if…?
What if we stopped doing this altogether?
What if the competitor isn’t actually our competitor?
What if the failure is telling us more than the successful cases?
What if the person closest to the problem understands something management doesn’t?
What if what we call resistance is actually information?
What if the question itself is wrong?
The Jester’s function is therefore not necessarily to supply M2.
Sometimes it is simply to keep the crack open long enough for M2 to enter M1. That is the Catalyst of Creativity.
From creativity culture to cognitive infrastructure
And here we reach the organisational issue that interests me most.
For decades, we have tried to make organisations more innovative by focusing on people. Creative personalities. Creative leadership. Creative teams. Creative workshops.
Even extended it to ‘Creative industries’.
Innovation skills. Brainstorming techniques. More recently: psychological safety. => All may have value.
But I think something deeper has received too little attention.
Every organisation already has a cognitive infrastructure.
It determines what receives attention. What gets ignored. What can be questioned. How quickly a question needs an answer. Whether anomalies are explored or corrected.
And the list goes on: Whether an unfinished thought is allowed to remain unfinished. Whether relevance can compete with salience. Whether people have space to wonder.
Whether Chronos — scheduled, measured clock time — completely dominates Kairos, the opportune moment.
Whether What if…? survives long enough to become more than an amusing interruption to the agenda.
The value statement lives on the wall.
The cognitive infrastructure lives in the calendar, the approval chain, the risk register, the workspace, the metrics — and the meeting that must end on time.
That is why I increasingly think organisations don’t primarily have a creativity problem.
They have a cognitive infrastructure problem.
Smile in Mind
This is the territory I call Smile in Mind.
Smile in Mind is not another creativity method. It is not an instruction to brainstorm harder. And it certainly isn’t about putting people into a permanently cheerful mood.
It is an attempt to think about the cognitive infrastructure for emergence.
An organisation obviously needs M1.=> It needs reliability, routines, expertise, standards and execution. Koestler’s associative plane is not an enemy. Without it, very little gets done.
But an organisation aiming for novelty also needs ways of allowing M2 to appear. That requires something quite different from efficiency.
Space for anomalies. Space for contradictions.Space for absurdities. Space for unfinished thoughts. Space for abduction. Space for bisociation. Space for people who notice what others have stopped noticing.
And occasionally, space for somebody to interrupt the beautifully prepared PowerPoint presentation with two very inconvenient words:
What if…?
Perhaps originality starts smaller than we think
We tend to tell hero stories about creativity retrospectively.
Once an insight succeeds, the story acquires inevitability. The brilliant idea appears brilliant. The connection appears obvious. The innovator appears visionary.
But that is not what the beginning necessarily looked like.
> The beginning may have been an irritation — a contradiction.
> An observation that did not fit — an absurdity.A failed attempt.
> An impasse. A half-formed thought that somebody nearly dismissed.
Perhaps originality does not always begin with a brilliant idea. Sometimes it begins when somebody notices something everyone else has learned not to notice.
And instead of immediately explaining it away, they leave the crack open for just a little longer.
Then they ask two very ordinary words:
What if…?
