Monday, 25 April 2022

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Take an actual design problem, find its obvious solution and eliminate it. Now think of an alternative solution. Repeat, and set in motion a chain reaction of ideas. Remember, though, sometimes being creative requires just a small alteration of what’s been done before. Also, the better you understand the problem you want to solve, and the more experience you have in you're field of new ideas, better solutions are likely to emerge. Indeed, carrying erroneous assumptions, or misunderstanding the problem itself, may limit or hinder your ability to ideate and therefore find a solution to the problem. So, ideators, and to evoke the fable of the hedgehog and the fox, should transform themselves to foxes rather than hedgehogs. That is, in Isaiah Berlin's version of the fable, foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea, in contrast to hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea. Or, in Richard Serras' reading of the fable: The hedgehog, being resistant to change, is intellectually dead; the fox's adaptability is the correct strategy for intellectual development and survival.

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