Here’s interesting insight into how entrenched ‘mental models’ block innovation in an organisation.

Take a look at any world map. We are used to seeing it in a certain way. If you are from India, it is a safe bet that the world map you are used to seeing will have India at the centre. If you’re from the UK, the world map will have the UK at the centre. And if you are from the US, the entire world map will have just the US in it. That is a pattern we are used to in the countries we come from. We are also used to a certain orientation with the Arctic at the top and the Antarctic at the bottom. Turn the map 180 degrees so that the Arctic is at the bottom, and the Antarctic is at the top and the map suddenly feels uncomfortable. We feel disoriented and the immediate reaction is that the map is ‘upside down’ and we need to turn it the ‘right way up’ again.

But if you think about it, a map is just a piece of information. {quotes}There is no ‘right way’ or ‘wrong way’ to it. There is no ‘upside down’ either. However, the reality is that if you look at a piece of information long enough, it becomes a mental model—and anything that seems to deviate from that mental model is very uncomfortable and disorienting.{/quotes}

These mental models are the biggest blocks to innovation. When you work in an organisation or an industry long enough, the orientation of the industry—the way it works, becomes the ONLY way. We get trapped within the processes, beliefs and orientations of the industry. They become the map that defines the route to success in that industry. Every industry has its own maps—and that is why innovations very often stay incremental—within the industry’s orbit. To truly shift orbits, you need to throw away the old maps and create new ones.

Take the banking industry. The prevailing mental model of the banking industry was that customers are ‘savers’. And the entire business model was around creating savings instruments and portfolios. Organisations that saw customers differently created completely new products and services—mutual funds, for example. These organisations saw customers as ‘investors’, and not as savers. Today banks have started mutual funds too, but the edge has passed to those from outside the industry. Banks just did not see customers as investors. Their map did not permit them to look at customers any differently.

Think about an R&D department. The frame around R&D has typically been: secretive, in-house and expensive. Ask the pharma industry. The whole rationale behind expensive drugs is that drug development is expensive. But Eli Lily challenged that frame. Instead of being secretive, they made their R&D open. Instead of being in-house and limited to a handful of researchers, they leveraged the hundreds of thousands of researchers across the planet through their InnoCentive website, where they posted R&D challenges and invited people from across the planet to solve them for a cash reward. R&D costs crashed.