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Organizational Self-Delusion Syndrome
OSDS, or Organizational Self-Delusion Syndrome, can affect any group. It’s a product of entrenched thinking patterns which cause same idea cycles. A common symptom is the elevation of an incremental idea, a variation, to the level of genuine innovation.
Thinking patterns are self-baiting traps of sameness. When confronted with a new situation, challenge, problem or opportunity, we naturally compare the new stimuli to a recognizable pattern. What can we associate this new input with as a benchmark for comprehension? 
Once matched to an existing category, we make conclusions which are also variations on existing ideas. The fault with this thinking pattern is that any solution is tragically limited by the assumption that the problem is a variation of a known category.
A breakthrough solution requires the following actions:
1 Challenge the location of the starting point – the question to be solved. Intentionally avoid interpretation which compares it to anything recognizable. Or, craft the question in several different ways, each to be addressed by different groups.
2 Approach the solution to the question laterally, avoiding standard thinking patterns with lateral thinking patterns. This provokes unrelated associations to identify totally illogical possibilities.
There is value in being wrong. In our normal processes, we evaluate alternatives as right or wrong. Wrong, illogical answers are eliminated. Right answers are explored further. This system eliminates the possibility that a very wrong answer could trigger a very different, very right solution. Violating existing patterns, going in an opposite or illogical direction, will reveal alternatives from radically different perspectives. In retrospect, a these breakthrough ideas appear to be logical conclusions. But in foresight, traditional thinking would never consider the possibility as a viable alternative.
The brain interprets everything through the filter of past experience. Creating a new category is like asking the IT department to add a field to a data base. It’s impossible. How can you justify the investment? Even if it’s possible, it probably won’t work, so why bother? Everything is better off if we modify an existing field. Homogenized problem solving produces the illusion of change, but nothing is really different.
Provoking the brain to sidestep its usual, established data fields is easier than dealing with IT. Lateral Thinking tools and techniques circumvent established patterns to generate multiple alternatives.
That does not guarantee great solutions. But a radically different starting point and a non-standard thinking pattern will produce non-standard alternatives. Crazy ideas can be tempered or pulled back into reality and still be genuinely innovative. Traditional thinking patterns will produce variations on historic solutions which are only incrementally different at best.
The Organizational Self-Delusion Syndrome favors incremental change. From a fixed point anchored in established processes, any variation is viewed as a significant change. But from the outside, the real world, the customer view, incremental change is uneventful, unnoteworthy, unbelievably insignificant.
Change is a form of busywork. It requires time and effort to achieve minimal return. Innovation is a form of risk with proportional rewards. Change will never differentiate significantly. Innovation always does.
For additional information on Parallel and Lateral Thinking, see Six Thinking Hats course.
Chas Martin
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