Dare to Think Differently: How Open-Mindedness Creates Exceptional Decision-Making

A Harvard Business School professor’s guide to thinking about thinking, using the creative power of the unconscious.

Gerald Zaltman’s pioneering research methods for understanding the unconscious desires of customers are used by companies around the world. Dare to Think Differently draws on the same groundbreaking methods to explain the deep and innovative thinking used by highly successful executives. Reflecting emerging viewpoints in neuroscience, Zaltman contends that multiple forces, not just a brain, collaborate to produce a mind. Highly effective decision-makers are able and willing to go beyond their conscious thinking and surface powerful, creative, unconscious thoughts and feelings. They candidly ask whether what they feel they ＂know＂ is actually warranted, opening their minds to new alternatives.

With this book, Zaltman presents six techniques to tap into the creative power of the unconscious: serious playfulness, befriending ignorance, asking the right discovery questions, chasing your curiosity, panoramic thinking, and using the ＂voyager outlook.＂ These research-based techniques improve decision-making and go beyond the existing literature on ＂thinking smarter.＂ This book’s insights emerge from a large number of one-on-one in-depth interviews with senior leaders around the globe, reinforced with research findings from scientific literatures.

Mirroring Zaltman’s Harvard Business School classroom practice, each chapter opens with a practical-thinking exercise that helps readers surface the mental processes and biases that unconsciously close minds and constrict thinking. This creative surfacing is the crucial foundation for any leader operating in a complex, uncertain environment, who needs unconventional solutions to challenging problems.

Gerald Zaltman is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, and a former member of the Executive Committee of Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. Zaltman pioneered the use of tools and insights from cognitive neuroscience, metaphor, art therapy, and linguistics to understand subconscious customer thoughts and feelings.