Paul Sloane shows how flipping assumptions generates radical ideas. Wikipedia beat Britannica by being free and crowd-sourced. The Body Shop used cheap plastic bottles instead of glass. Linux won by open-sourcing code when everyone else kept it secret.
Chapters
Hi, Paul Sloane here. Today I want to share with you one simple but very powerful question. But first, I'd like you to imagine you're in a brainstorm meeting in the offices of Encyclopedia Britannica in, say, 1990. One of the people in the meeting makes a suggestion. He or she says, we're assuming that people want information which is gathered by experts, curated by experts, edited by experts, and they're prepared to pay a lot of money for it. But what if the opposite were true? What if people were prepared to accept information provided by almost anybody with a little bit of editing for free? I'll bet that idea would have been shot down, would have been ridiculed. It might have been a career-ending moment for the individual that came up with it because it was just too radical for them. And yet the opposite did become true. That's what happened when Wikipedia came along and effectively destroyed Encyclopedia Britannica. The question is, what if the opposite were true? Anita Roddick founded The Body Shop in Brighton in the 1970s, and she looked at existing perfumeries and cosmetic shops, and she saw that they packaged all of their perfumes and cosmetics in very expensive glass fancy packaging. She asked, what if the opposite were true? What if people would accept simple plastic sample bottles for their perfumes and cosmetics, and that's what she used, and it was a big success. I worked in the software industry for many years, and most of the companies there, like Oracle or Apple or Microsoft, keep their proprietary information a closely guarded secret. It's their intellectual property, their IP, the crown jewels, and they guard it very, very closely. But a man called Linus Torvalds asked this question: what if the opposite were true? What if we made the source code available to everybody, that anybody could tinker with it. And he created Linux and the whole open source movement, which has taken over and been such a powerful force in the software industry. So here's the suggestion. Look at the assumptions in your life, in your organization, in your business, and ask this one question: what if the opposite were true? Just imagine it. And it's a lateral thinking technique which will lead to really radical and fresh ideas.
