Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called Functional Fixedness and while you probably won't need to build a fort during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from it and it is impacting your work. How can I be so sure? Well ... you're human, right?
Like the Curse of Knowledge I've written about before, Functional Fixedness is a well-known cognitive bias. I'm actually glad it exists because if it didn't, my industry probably wouldn't exist. Clients often hire Open Innovation companies like ours when their research and development teams can't get past — or maybe over is a better word — the way they have always looked, and where they have always looked for solutions.
To read the original article: The Cognitive Bias Keeping Us from Innovating - Andy Zynga - Harvard Business Review
