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Affinity: A Cage of Context

By Peter Lloyd

This is the second in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Affinity.
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
—Albert Einstein
If you had been born in the Soviet Union between 1920 and 1950, you'd probably have joined the Young Pioneers and grown to be an avid communist. I don't care if you're the president of General Motors or the Daughters of the American Revolution. We all believe a good deal of what we believe according to what we were taught at a very early age.

We believe because we need to belong. Another principal survival mechanism, not just for humans but for most primates, mammals, and other animals—even insects. Just like the birds and the bees, the bears and the chimpanzees, we gather around and stick with those who look like they belong to our gang.

In the Right Brain Workout titled Conformity, I described how a group of people, dressed as extras for the movie The Public Eye, chose to sit with other extras who were dressed in similar outfits. Maybe because it gave them something to talk about but also because we all need to belong.

Once we belong, we embrace our sameness and reinforce it with regular activities, which we call traditions. Our traditions offer a ready platform on which people with creative possibilities can readily perform. Whose first stage appearance wasn't some tradition-based school pageant? Just get Uncle Louie into his Santa outfit and he's suddenly transformed into an actor. What clowns we make of ourselves on Halloween!

Humans are curious creatures. We change and we stay the same. The part that stays the same thrives on tradition. The part that must change, often in order to survive, needs to challenge authority and break with tradition. But our best traditions—the ones that remain—are built to withstand our defiance.

They're meant to show us how to act, not what to do. Follow them mindlessly and they lose their meaning. Put them to the test of skepticism even our cynicism, and we crack their code. Only then can we decide to embrace them or forget them all together.

In order to achieve creative breakthroughs, we sometimes need to break with our group and dismiss our conventional way of thinking. At least while we're solving problems. For each of us, this means thinking outside our prescribed affiliations of gender, nationality, race, religion, politics, or whatever other cage of affinity is holding us back.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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