Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times

Be ever-curious
- Natural human biases in decision making, including confirmation, availability, and anchoring biases, often cause us to shut down the range of solutions too early.
Tolerate ambiguity—and stay humble!
- Recent research shows that we are better at solving problems when we think in terms of odds rather than certainties.
Take a dragonfly-eye view
- The secret to developing a dragonfly-eye view is to “anchor outside” rather than inside when faced with problems of uncertainty and opportunity.
Pursue occurrent behavior
- Risk-embracing problem solvers find a solution path by constantly experimenting.
- Your own experiments allow you to generate your own data; this gives you insights that others don’t have.
Tap into collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowd
- In an ever-changing world where conditions can evolve unpredictably, crowdsourcing invites the smartest people in the world to work with you.
- The broader the circles of information you access, the more likely it is that your solutions will be novel and creative.
Show and tell to drive action
- Present the argument emotionally as well as logically, and show why the preferred action offers an attractive balance between risks and rewards.

Hunter-gatherer networks accelerated human evolution

The researchers mapped the social networks of present-day hunter-gatherers in the Philippines and simulated the discovery of a medicinal plant product.
People shared their knowledge of medicinal plants with every encounter and combined this knowledge to develop better remedies.
An average of 250 (woodland camps) to 500 (coastal camps) rounds of social interactions were required for the medicinal product to emerge.
Human interaction accelerates innovation

Latinx founder numbers are growing at a faster rate than any other group and we’re expected to yield $1.4 Trillion in US GDP.

The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.
After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words.
Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said.
“And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”