An intriguing 2026 book by Gerald Zaltman about daring to think differently

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an intriguing 2026 book by Gerald Zaltman titled Dare to Think Differently: How open-mindedness creates exceptional decision making. A preview of the first eighteen pages is at Google Books.

 

This book has nine chapters and two appendices titled as follows:

 

ONE What is a mind anyway?  1

AND WHAT IS IT FOR?

 

TWO Serious Playfulness  25

WHY YOU NEED CONSTRUCTIVE MISCHIEF

 

THREE Befriending Ignorance  47

MAKING ‘I DON’T KNOW’ AN ALLY

 

FOUR The Power of Surprising Yourself  69

ASKING THE RIGHT DISCOVERY QUESTIONS

 

FIVE The Art of Being Curious  87

CHASING YOUR CURIOSITY

 

SIX Panoramic Thinking  105

TRANSITIONING FROM HEDGEHOG TO FOX

 

SEVEN Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark  123

USING THE ‘VOYAGER OUTLOOK TO EMBRACE AMBIGUITY

 

EIGHT Being Smart Isn’t Enough  143

HAVING AN OPEN MIND MATTERS MORE

 

NINE Fluid Thinking, a Reprise  155

LEVERAGING THE POWER OF BEING CONSCIOUSLY UNCONSCIOUS

 

APPENDIX 1 Aha! Spas  165

CREATING PERSONAL SPACE FOR SERIOUS PLAY

 

APPENDIX 2 The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Techniques (ZMET)  173

A TOOL FOR SURFACING UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS

 

There is a very interesting discussion on pages 156 and 157:

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"AN INNER VOICE

 

From time to time I’ve referenced an inner voice, a kind, wise conscience that prompts you with strategic and tactical Am I? and Are we? questions. Everyone has an inner voice, but not everyone listens to it. We are reminded of this whenever we hear the voice of hindsight singing, ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda.’

 

Figure 9.1 [shown above in my colorized version] represents the salient features of fluid thinking and its waypoints such as memory and intuition. One or more open mind actions like befriending ignorance, panoramic thinking, and so on are likely to be engaged at each waypoint. Your inner voice plays an important role in orchestrating this process. It guides your involvement at each waypoint and your decision to revisit earlier waypoints. In other words, the entire process is a complex, adaptive system.

 

OVERVIEW OF THE DECISION CONTEXT

 

The six open-mind actions drive your use of your conscious and unconscious knowledge stored in your internal and external sources of memory. (and yes, even relying on AI involves your unconscious use of someone else’s assumptions.) The knowledge produced provides judgments or intuitions, which are augmented by imagination to yield insights. Analogical thinking and the use of metaphor are especially prominent here. Insights stimulate improvisation in the form of planned or actual behaviors. These behaviors provide constructive feedback, which may lead to changing or adapting initial actions. Feedback may be either instantaneous, as re rapidly contemplate our plans, or delayed, as we wait for results after putting a plan into action. In either case, feedback provides learning that updates or alters prior knowledge. These updates become stored memories available for future use.

 

What makes this system adaptive is that each waypoint can receive direct feedback from any other waypoint. Moreover, each waypoint is an adaptive system in and of itself making creative use of the system of the six actions. Think of your mind as a kind of dance hall, in which the conscious and unconscious operations involved in the various actions meet up and introduce themselves through overt and covert signals to the conscious and unconscious operations of each waypoint. The architecture for this becomes our mental models or theory-in-use.”