H James Wilson’s HBR Blog Make the Internet of Things More Human-Friendly triggered me to write what I have been thinking off, of late. The need to usher in the age of synthesis after we have done enough analysis. I will focus on the first point in the article that the things need to talk to each other rather than the user talking individually to them and synchronizing his or her actions for them. While the author makes a case for making devices talk to each other and release a lot of mental bandwidth of the user free, I take this argument further and say that our engineers, designers and creators need to start thinking in a way that synthesis things rather than analysing them.
When our thinking is based on synthesis, we link multiple things rather than breaking them up into smaller pieces.We study the impact of each of the actions on other things in the vicinity and on human being who will use it. As we keep increasing the impact of synthesis, we would be able to see the impact of our innovations on a larger set of people and on more number of things as opposed to the analysis approach that makes us think narrower and narrower. By thinking about the impact of our work beyond the first touch point, we would be able to fine tune our work so that it works for a larger set of people or larger set of problems.
People would say that you need a combination of divergent and convergent thinking, which works well for problem solving scenarios. For next generation innovations we would need to think in terms of how the things impact each other, how each action reverberates through the eco-system.
In the coming days, ability to synthesize ideas from various verticals would gain currency as our current generations are quite used to thinking in terms of breaking the problem.
