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.”

  

 

Excellent conversations have topics hanging from many doorknobs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting article by Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History on February 22, 2022 titled Good conversations have lots of doorknobs. He says:

 

“Why did some conversations unfurl and others wilt? One answer. I realized may be the clash of take–and–take vs. give-and-take.

 

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (‘Why won’t he ask me a single question?’) while taker has a lovely time (‘She must really think I’m interesting!’) or gets annoyed (‘My job is boring, why does she keep asking me about it?). 

 

….When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a bit like floating.

 

What matters most then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs (‘I kinda get creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies’) or not (Let me tell you about the plot of the movie Must Love Dogs...). Good taking makes the other side want to take too (‘I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it’s so crazy’ ‘What?? Was there a ceremony?’). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs (‘Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?’) and some don’t (‘How many of your grandparents are still living?’). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking (‘I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has – how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread – and I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can.’).”

 

I found my way to this article from page 252 in a 2024 book by Ellen Hendricksen titled How to Be Enough: Self-acceptance for self-critics and perfectionists. And there is another more recent article by Minda Zetlin at Inc. on March 23, 2025 titled People who excel at starting a conversation always do this, according to a clinical psychologist and subtitled ‘Conversational doorknobs’ can help you build the connections you need for success. She says to do these three things:

 

1) Ask an open-ended question. Then listen.

2) Choose a conversational doorknob.

3) Mention your connection, but don’t overdo it.

 

 

Comparing scales for loudness and temperature

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

On November 23, 2023 I blogged about Five recent articles on using analogies and linked to an article by Miguel Balbin, Khatora Opperman and Tulio Rossi at Animate Your Science on November 7, 2022 which is titled How to write effective analogies for communicating research. They explained that:

 

“An analogy is a descriptive comparison of similarities between two or more different things. Using comparisons helps to explain complex and new ideas by linking them to something familiar.”

 

There is an interesting 2025 book by Walter Murch titled SUDDENLY SOMETHING CLICKED: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design. Chapter 19 in the section on Sound Design is titled ODE TO SPO: The Road to Apocalypse. On page 225, he has a pair of tables first listing loudness of sounds in decibels and then temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. Most of us are very familiar with temperatures between those for water freezing (32^oF) and boiling (212^oF). Walter notes there is a close alignment between the subjective experiences for loudness and temperature, although this just is a fortuitous coincidence. I have tabulated them side by side, as shown above.

 

His discussion of film editing describes working on the 1974 mystery thriller film The Conversation. It was written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. On page 133 there is an image showing how scenes in it were edited. That is shown more clearly in a two-minute Vimeo video titled Conversation: Restructure first 40 minutes.

 

A sesame seed bagel is like a national survey with a random sample

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sampling is an important statistical part of conducting a survey statistically. I was looking for an analogy (simile or metaphor) to explain a national survey with a random sample. As shown above, it is like a sesame seed bagel. Each seed can represent an individual in the sample. They are spread over the entire surface of the bagel, which represents the nation. After time passes the survey gets stale.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, as shown above, there is a margin of error associated with sampling. For a margin of plus or minus three percent a sample size of 1,067 is needed.

 

How about a nonrandom sample? Statistical jargon calls this a convenience sample, for which the Wikipedia page says:    

 

“Convenience sampling (also known as grab sampling, accidental sampling, or opportunity sampling) is a type of non-probability sampling that involves the sample being drawn from that part of the population that is close to hand.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Often that convenient survey sample consists of university students in introductory public speaking or psychology classes at a single university. As shown above, it is like a bagel with just a single pecan. Results from such a sample do not represent a nation.

 

Back on December 20, 2016 I blogged about Bursting the overblown claim that 95% of Americans fear public speaking at some level. A comment on that post by Michelle Mazur warned:

 

“McCroskey & Richmond's research was all based on convenience sampling of undergrads at West Virginia University. To say that is generalizable to the greater population defies all logic and good research practices. Public polling actually uses randomized sampling that is representative of the population. …”

 

The image for margin of error was colored in from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Mitt Romney says Donald Trump is a human gumball machine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In part of an interview on Meet the Press shown onYouTube Mitt Romney said this about Donald Trump:

 

“You know, when I was a kid there was something called a gumball machine. You could put a penny in, and a gumball would come out. It was automatic. There was no filter. Put in the penny, out came the gumball. Donald Trump is kind of a human gumball machine, which is a thought or a notion comes in and it comes out of his mouth. There’s not a lot of filter that goes on. There’s not a lot of what’s the implication. No, he just says whatever. I don’t attach an enormous amount of impact to the particular words that come out and try and evaluate each one of them. I do think you can look at his record as president and particularly in the last month of his presidency and say this is a dangerous approach, it’s an authoritarian approach. That gives me far more concern than him playing to the crowd as he did.”    

 

The story also was reported on December 10, 2023 by Sarah Fortinsky at The Hill in an article titled Romney compares Trump’s ‘dictator’ remark to ‘human gumball machine’ and another article by Kelly Garrity at Politico titled Trump the ‘human gumball machine’ will ‘impose his will’ on the nation if elected, Romney says.

 

The gumball machine cartoon came from Openclipart.

 

Five recent articles on using analogies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found an excellent recent article by Dr. Juan Miguel Balbin, Dr. Khatora Opperman and Dr. Tulio Rossi at AnimateYourScience on November 7, 2022 titled How to write effective analogies for communicating research. It includes the metaphor that Blood vessels are highways in your body (illustrated above). There is another excellent article by Leopold Ajami at Medium on June 7, 2023 titled Are you speaking with analogies?

 

There also is a series of three articles from July 2023 by Anthony Sanni. One on July 3, 2023 is titled Master the Analogy  – a powerful persuasive tool. Another on July 24, 2023 is titled Gain mastery of the analogy II, and a third on July 31, 2023 is titled Master the Analogy III – Mistakes to Avoid.

 

The Tolo highway image came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Explaining something by comparison with the familiar

South of Boise and east of Cole Road, on the sagebrush that will become the Syringa Valley subdivision, I saw an enormous piece of construction equipment that I’d never seen before. It was a Trencor 1660 HDE chain trencher. Just imagine a Ditch Witch on steroids. Did that help? Probably not, unless you’ve already seen one cutting trenches for installing sprinkler pipe or TV cable.

But most people are familiar with chain saws, like the one shown above. Imagine a longer, wider chain saw mounted on a vehicle with wheels or tracks underneath, like the Ditch Witch R300 shown below. That’s a chain trencher.

Wikimedia Commons has a category with 32 images of them. The accompanying text says:

“A chain trencher cuts with a digging chain that is driven around a rounded metal frame (formerly sometimes a rotating wheel at the end of a boom). This type of trencher can cut ground that is too hard to cut with a bucket-type excavator. The angle of the boom can be adjusted to control the depth of the cut. To cut a trench, the boom is held at a fixed angle while the machine creeps slowly. Chain trenchers are used for narrow to wide trenches, especially in rural areas. The excavated material can be removed by conveyor belt to either side of the trench.”

Here’s what that Trencor 1660 HDE looks like. I found a 2000 brochure from Trencor here. The engine is a 750 hp turbocharged Caterpillar V-12 with two 520 gallon fuel tanks. Crawler tracks underneath (from a Caterpillar D8 bulldozer) are 19-1/2 feet long, and the rear overhang is another 12-1/2 feet. It’s 13 feet wide, 12 feet high, and weighs over 107 tons.   

And here is a brief YouTube video of one at work:

Images of a chain saw and a Ditch Witch R300 both came from Wikimedia Commons.

Like trying to fill a dog dish with a firehose

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A good analogy can help your audience to understand something strange or complicated, or both. The metaphor in the title of this post refers to an explanation by the astronomer Antony Stark of why most galaxies, including ours, have sudden periods where stars form (starbursts).

When a highly dense ring of gas is drawn toward the black hole at the center of a galaxy, its mass will exceed the ability of the black hole to consume it. Then the gas will be ejected suddenly in a starburst. Tony explains it in a newspaper story here. He is shown walking to work at his telescope located down at the South Pole in the NOVA TV program Monster of the Milky Way. Look at the beginning of Chapter 7: Fate of the Milky Way.

I recalled that analogy a week ago in describing the new Star Trek movie, which seemed to be trying to cram in way too much stuff into the story, including some black holes. By the way, Tony is my brother-in-law.

A great speech is like a Chicago hot dog

Most speeches are like a hot dog that could have come from any of a thousand food courts in as many malls. There is an opening and closing (two pieces of bun), and a body (the undistinguished meat in the middle). Perhaps there is a tiny bit added of color and flavor (the stripe of yellow mustard). Otherwise there is absolutely nothing to make it exceptional. You probably forgot about it just a few minutes afterwards.

A great speech has a lot more. The extra ingredients make it clear it could only come from one individual: YOU. A great speech is like a Chicago hot dog.

Unlike a plain hot dog, that sandwich has been “dragged through the garden.” It has a wonderful variety of tastes, textures, and colors. Typically the following ingredients are assembled:

Poppy-seed bun (steamed).

Kosher hot dog (typically Vienna beef brand, also steamed).

Stripe of yellow mustard.

Dollop of kryptonite green relish or piccalilli.

Spoonful of chopped onions (white, or maybe red).

Dill pickle wedge.

Pair of red, ripe tomato wedges.

Couple of sport peppers (I usually skip these).

Sprinkling of celery salt (the final magical touch).

Think about what you can add to make your speech individual and memorable.

Exactly what should be in a Chicago style dog has been discussed at some length: here, here, and even here on Wikipedia. (The image by John Fink of Oxford, Ohio shows a Chicago style hot dog meal as served at the Bunny Hutch in Lincolnwood, Illinois). The poppy seed bun is extra tasty, but you probably do need a toothpick afterwards to get those pesky little seeds from between your teeth. Ketchup is NOT ever put on a Chicago hot dog! It may be added to French fries by the customer.

I lived in Chicagoland once for a couple of years. Their hot dogs (particularly Superdawg) are a pleasant memory of the Windy City. By the way, they are not kidding about it being windy there, especially on the Lake Michigan shore.

Other cities have their own variations on hot dogs. If you’re reading this in Atlanta, then you might say a great speech is like a chili slaw dog from the Varsity. If you’re in Cincinnati, you might say a great speech is like a cheese Coney (also covered with onions and mustard, with the unique local chili - perhaps from Skyline or Gold Star).

This post was inspired by finding that my blog feed was on that for Talk of the Tower Chicago Toastmasters, and also linked from Willi Hsung’s Lessons Learned.