THE TWO SYSTEMS IN OUR BRAIN— AND THEIR ROLE IN IDEA GENERATION
Discovering the truth behind the two incredible systems making your mind tick — and how to harness your team’s ideas through silence.
We’ve all had recourse to say ‘what is going on in their head?’ — Or you may even have been told your mind works in strange ways.
Well, we’ve got news for you. All of our brains work oddly. And we all have the same systems governing how we think…
Psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West originally proposed the terms System 1 and System 2 to describe the constituent parts of the mind, and in his seminal Thinking Fast, Slow Psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes at length about their role in our day-to-day decision making.
· System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
This part of the brain creates an abundance of ideas. This is where our innate understanding resides and operates. This is the animal part of the brain, our emotional responses, knee-jerk reactions, the easy connections in the mind.
· System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
Kahneman writes that “when we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. (There are also) circumstances in which System 2 takes over, overruling the freewheeling impulses and associations of System 1.”
HOW THE TWO SYSTEMS CONTROL OUR THOUGHT*
· Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake.
· System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged.
· System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly (which is most of the time) System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine — usually.
· System 1 cannot be turned off. If you are shown a word on the screen in a language you know, you will read it — unless your attention is totally focused elsewhere.
· System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.
· You have a limited budget of attention to allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. For example, you could not compute the product of 17 x 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic — and you probably shouldn’t try.
· System 1 has biases & is prone to make systematic errors in specified circumstances. Sometimes it answers easier questions than the one it has asked, and it has little understanding of logic and statistics. This can create conflict between the two systems when they don’t agree.
· As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. Talent has similar effects.
· Highly intelligent individuals need less effort to solve the same problems, as indicated by both pupil size and brain activity. A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. If there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
TWO SYSTEMS IN CONFLICT
Try the following exercise. It’s a great way to feel the pull of the two ‘systems’, forced into conflict.
First, go down both columns, calling out whether each word is printed in lowercase or in uppercase. Then, go down both columns again, saying whether each word is printed to the left or the right by saying (or whispering to yourself) “LEFT” or “RIGHT.”
USING THE SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT IN IDEA GENERATION
For our purposes, System 1 is what creates ideas. Our innate, un-thinking response to things. It is System 1’s abundance that needs to be harvested in a brainstorming session.
System 2 provides a rational perspective, organising these ideas, selecting the best, and creating plans of action. Clearly this is a crucial part of the creative process but is not useful for the initial part: idea generation.
THE SILENT BRAINSTORM
We’ve all been in those meetings dominated by the few, or even just the one. And clearly there will be members of your team who are more comfortable popcorning ideas, the ones who are less concerned –- if at all — about other people’s perceptions. There are also those members of your team for whom shyness and fear stand in the way of the machine-gun capabilities of their System 1. This is what needs to be unlocked to access their unique insights.
With Ideaflip everyone has their input, sparking and building off each other’s ideas, gathering and distilling the best ones to achieve consensus in half the time. We do this through the SILENT BRAINSTORM.
We can’t overstate how important this phase is. The democracy of ideas is one of Ideaflip’s founding principles, and the silent idea generation phase is crucial in allowing EVERY member the opportunity to get their ideas down before presenting them to the rest of the group.
Combining elements of brainstorming & brainwriting, the Ideaflip Brainstorm PROCESS is also perfect for both online and at-work collaboration. It democratises the workplace, creating a platform for everyone to have their ideas heard — inspiring PEOPLE to participate through PLAY — and helps discover and harness everyone’s latent creativity.
USING THE SYSTEMS
What you don’t want is to let System 2 take over too quickly. Don’t waste brain power by judging/screening ideas before presenting them — just get em out.
What’s also vital is suspending judgement when people are presenting their ideas. There are no such things as bad ideas. At this stage it’s quantity over quality, the wackier the better. Even the wildest suggestions can trigger thoughts that could lead to great insights and ideas. MINE YOUR SYSTEM 1's!
What you want to do is facilitate a climate of fun with no judgement and no fear or shyness. The silent brainstorm will help you achieve this.
Ideaflip is an ingenious tool for the remote-working era, providing the perfect, online space for all your team to connect, interact and create — wherever in the world they are.
The Ideaflip Brainstorm PROCESS is also perfect for at-work collaboration. It democratises the workplace, creating a platform for everyone to have their ideas heard — inspiring PEOPLE to participate through PLAY — and helps discover and harness everyone’s latent creativity.
