Certain biases can keep us from solving problems in fresh ways.

Certain conditions with diverse groups can strengthen collaboration and creative insight.

Deliberately seeking ideas outside your field can refresh creative thinking and broaden perspective.

We can get stuck in our thinking. Even if we’ve developed strong habits for focus and productivity, it can feel as if familiar grooves get ingrained in our brains. We can return to the same solutions and even the same teammates for perspective.

One way to get unstuck is to expose ourselves to new ways of thinking and new collaborators through cross-pollination.

Clarence Birdseye discovered this more than 100 years ago. He traveled among the Canadian Inuit in 1915 to trade fur. He returned with a revolutionary way to freeze fish. He noticed that his Inuit guides instantly deep-froze their freshly caught fish in -40°C water, and the fish retained its texture after thawing. He translated that observation from one culture into an entirely different context by inventing the quick-freezing process. Frozen food would never be the same.(1)

Birdseye became, in essence, what IDEO cofounder Tom Kelley calls a cross-pollinator: someone who “can create something new and better through the unexpected juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts.”

Cross-pollination is a psychological strategy for interrupting stale thinking.

Cross-Pollination and Busting Biases

Creative cross-pollination is a varied process in which two or more people from different backgrounds, disciplines, or/and industries collaborate or share ideas on a common challenge.

In psychology, cross-pollination disrupts a couple of common cognitive biases. You might notice how often you keep returning to the same assumptions. Psychologists call this familiarity bias. Familiarity bias, as its name implies, points to the fact that most of us choose........

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