It was the celebrated American industrialist Henry Ford who is mistakenly quoted as having said, “If you only do what you’ve always done, then you’ll only get what you’ve always got.”

Regardless of its provenance, the saying does capture the inertia that can exist in many organisations.

To my mind the solution to the problem lies not with the simplistic notion of ‘doing’ something different. The rallying cry to simply do something different leads to manic and disjointed activity too easily ignored by those who remain wedded to the comfort of the past and the safety of the present.

So if I may, I’d like to offer an alternative version of Ford’s saying, which reads:

“If you only look as you’ve always looked, then you’ll only see what you’ve always seen.”

My point is that we are all, without exception, trapped by the default perspectives we adopt when looking at a problem or a task. In fact if we are only looking at something as we’ve always done we may not even see it to be a problem.

Add to that singular perspective the ‘power of crowds’ and you create a dynamic from which it takes real courage to escape.

Yet no less a person than Albert Einstein recognised the importance of stepping back and trying to escape from the simple perspective, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

What Einstein was able to do was to be able to look at problems through a different frame of reference than his peers, and as a consequence he generated alternative questions which led to new and innovative solutions.

Being able to question and shift your frame of reference is an important key to enhancing your imagination because it reveals completely different insights. Mastering the ability to reframe problems is an important tool for increasing our imagination because it unlocks a vast array of solutions.

So if reframing a problem lies at the heart of innovation how can we help leaders and their colleagues to escape from their default view of the world?

Now there is a tendency at this point for leaders to engage in a review of practice by establishing working groups to generate new ideas. However, we forget that our own employees have been conditioned by their own experience and that their own ideas are limited by the short chain which anchors them to what they have known.

So what are these techniques which we might employ to reframe our world? Quite simply it is to begin playing with alternative points of view. The reason I say ‘playing’ is quite deliberate, for it is only by engaging in a relatively safe space of trying and testing out perspectives that we can begin to step beyond ourselves. Yet the idea of playing seems far too frivolous for many of us who have spent our career in a serious and high stakes business. Unfortunately that reluctance to play simply confirms the general trepidation we have towards exploring ‘real’ change.

One of the things which can help here is to use the power of metaphor. From working with leaders from many differing fields we have found the remarkable shift that can come about through using the seven leadership lenses of the Ceannas Index  to help people escape from their own particular default positions.

It’s quite remarkable to witness the shift in people when they are freed up to inhabit another point of view, and from there begin to shape an alternative vision that differs quite radically from the one generated from their normal window on the world.