What is ‘Jootsing’?
“It helps to know the tradition of you want to subvert it. That’s why so few dabblers or novices succeed in coming up with anything truly creative. ”
To remain competitive, a company must innovate.
Otherwise, it risks losing market share to newer competitors.
This mentality gives rise to all manner of corporate innovation cliches of which ‘Think outside the box’ is one of the greatest.
It’s a gloriously overused metaphor for reaching beyond the confines of conventional thought.
The problem is most executives don’t understand the box well enough. In other words, to generate breakthrough ideas, you must first deeply understand the existing territory.
For example, if you want to design a revolutionary type of lawnmower, you must first understand everything there is to possibly know about them first.
You have to become an expert in how they work.
Only when you have understood the ‘rules’ governing lawnmower design will you be ready to look outside of them.
And this can take many years or even a lifetime's work.
Famously, the artist Picasso only developed his abstract style of painting once he had mastered conventional artworking techniques.
The researcher Douglas Hofsteder described this process for developing innovative ideas as ‘Jootsing’?
So what does this funny-sounding word ‘Jootsing’ stand for?
The answer is it’s an acronym for “Jumping Out of the System".
You might think of it as an extreme form of thinking outside the box that involves:
1. Developing a deep knowledge of the system, including its ‘rules’
You must understand the status quo and why it works to give you a reference point to generate new ideas. Novel ideas aren’t created in a vacuum.
2. Stepping outside to find something that subverts its rules
Examples of rules of a system are that a car must have four wheels or that you must use a paintbrush to paint. However, three-wheeled cars exist, and many artists use their hands or other instruments to create artwork.
3. Using what you discover to create something new and innovative
Choosing what to subvert will be a process of experimentation which will necessarily involve failure. This is part of the process. There is no shortcut.
What are some examples of ‘Jootsing’?
There are plenty of examples of companies that subverted the rules of their category, creating enormously successful businesses.
For example, until Uber came along, the convention was to have a taxi company you needed to have a fleet of taxis.
Conrad Hilton would have laughed you out of the room if you had told him one day his hotel empire would be threatened by a hotel chain with no rooms, but that’s happened with Airbnb.
Oh, and Blockbuster were sufficiently confident that the concept of a video rental store with no stores was so ridiculous an idea that they turned down the opportunity to buy Netflix, and well, we know how that turned out.
Of course, this isn’t a straightforward process.
The above examples would have sounded like terrible ideas on paper and still required billions of dollars of investment and rounds of experimentation to perfect.
The point here is that creativity requires boundaries or limitations to push against.
True innovation, therefore, is the act of subverting conventions or challenging established norms and rules.
If you want your employees to come up with innovative ideas, you can’t punish them for questioning the existing ways of doing things.
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