The Value of Counterintuitive Thinking

This IDC Perspective explains the benefits and methods for encouraging counterintuitive thinking, along with tools and advice to make it work in almost any environment. Ignoring red flags, deferring to conformity, and misplaced optimism can cause leaders to make bad decisions. To combat that, consider counterintuitive thinking. Counterintuitive thinking has been very successful in the technology realm. It helps break through ingrained assumptions, encourages innovative solutions, and fuels disruptive progress in how problems are solved, products are designed, and organizations are structured. A variety of strategies enable teams to discover solutions that may not emerge from conventional logic. To organize and focus the process, consider deploying one of the dozens of tools available. These tools, which often employ AI to suggest alternative pathways, are quite diverse. Some have cross-functional capabilities, while others tend to focus on a subset of processes."Practicing counterintuitive thinking can be the difference between a run-of-the-mill solution that will provide reasonable results and an innovative solution that will make a big difference in terms of time to market, profitability, customer satisfaction, feature engagement, or anything else that's important to the business," said Karen D. Schwartz, adjunct research advisor with IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP).