Something to be thinking about:how do you recognise a Finnish extrovert?

While you let that incubate, we thought we’d dig a little deeper into the ‘wow’ story. Anyone who has been on one of our workshops will know that at some point or other they will have been asked ‘when was the last time something made you go wow?’ That question tends to be followed by an eerie silence. Wow, on the basis of this (unscientific, we know) experiment at least, doesn’t seem to happen that often.

The question is important, though, because that ‘wow’ reaction forms the very essence of innovation. Although it sounds extremely un-scientific, it turns out to be one of the very best tests of a potential innovation winner. Or rather it does provided we understand how the ‘wow’ reaction operates inside our head.

There seem, then, to be three essential parts to the ‘wow’ story. The first of those three parts is that we notice something different:

‘Hey, That’s Different’

The human brain essentially works by forming patterns. We remember patterns in order to save ourselves time, and also to allow us to make predictions about what is going to happen in the next half second or second. Because of these pattern-remembering modus operandi we are particularly attuned to things that do not fit the patterns we already have stored inside our head. Picture yourself and your daily journey to work. Often you’ll find yourself at your desk at work and not be able to recall a single thing about your journey. This is because that journey to work (assuming you go to the same desk everyday) has become a well established script. Unless something happens on the journey that doesn’t fit the script, your journey will pretty much be done on auto-pilot. Your brain, however, even though you may be operating in automatic mode, is still vigilant and on the look-out for possible dangers, or indeed anything that may in the future require a revision to the journey-to-work pattern.

Let’s say you see this on your journey to work:

Whether you want to or not, you will notice this image because it won’t fit any of your existing patterns. The first thing you’re likely to notice is different (unless you happen to live in Japan) is that ‘hey, there are Japanese people on my journey to work’. The second, even more unusual thing (even if you are in Japan) is that these two people are doing something that doesn’t fit one of your established patterns:

• What is she carrying?
• What is he doing in the middle of the road?

What just happened is we experienced the first part of the ‘wow’ phenomenon. What kind of “wow” it will turn out to be will depend on what happens during the second part of the story: