"The basket is tyranny!" said the project leader from IDEO in charge with the team that was featured in an ABC show two decades ago. If you did not see the show it’s well worth 20 minutes. You can watch it online (part 1, part 2, part 3) or you can download it.
The show was entitled "The deep dive" and it tried to give an idea of what innovation is made of inside the IDEO company. The show centers around a simple task with a small challenge on top: IDEO should reinvent the shopping cart. And it should do it in five days. Rather radical, but sure enough, after five days a prototype was proposed that well deserved the "reinvented" label.
There were several new ideas in the proposed prototype, but the most surprising one (at least at the time) was that the shopping cart had no built-in basket. Instead, it had a frame on which multiple removable baskets would fit. This solution presented a double advantage: first, it allowed buyers to place the basket in one place and to shop only with a smaller carry-on basket, and second, a basket-less shopping cart had no value, and thus it presented significantly lower risks of being stolen.
"The basket is tyranny!" said the project leader. The basket represents what gets established in our mind as a given, what we consider as mandatory, what we are stuck with. It represents the obvious thing that stands right in our face and that we just do not question. It represents the prepackaged idea we just don’t know how to disassemble.
We all have our own point of view, and we tend to perceive it as being right. This is a rather crucial mechanism for being able to act. If we would be in doubt all the time we would not be able to do anything.
While it is necessary to choose from the multitude of possibilities, we might also be lead to think that what we end up choosing is the only correct or most appropriate point of view. Even if we believe we choose what’s best, it is most often not quite that valid, and it certainly is not the only reasonable one either. In fact, it turns out that many times we choose the first thing that looks reasonable (see Source of Power by Gary Klein).
"The basket is tyranny!". Excellent metaphor. How do we escape from this tyranny? Through the democracy of points of view.
The basic problem of every dictatorship is the premise that one’s point of view is more right than everyone else’s. Democracy, while not at all a perfect system, does come with a built in mechanism for fighting the very threat of a mighty point of view.
It is not easy to question ourselves, but I believe the choice belongs to each of us. Before refuting a new angle on a problem, we should remember that even a simple thing like a shopping basket can carry an unexpected and unwanted bias.
That said, I wish for the new year to bring you happy new points of view!
Comments
I always thought that everyday life at every steps is full of micro-decisions, which we don’t really care about and deal only through habits and lazziness (like, how do I set up my breakfast in the morning, where to sit in the subway, should I pass on the left or the right of the incoming pedestrian ?)
On the other hand, this leaves plenty of room for the cartesian part of our brain to think about what we think is important, or what is unusual. I guess it’s not really different when it comes to work: we used learned habits to quickly dispose of some tasks and never thought about them.