ALIEN toolkit for our times

Book review of A.L.I.E.N. Thinking: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas

The only true voyage of discovery would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is

—Marcel Proust 

This is an insightful to-do book of Marcel Proust’s prophetic words. It combines brilliantly told case studies within a new framework which is called “Alien Thinking”. ALIEN stands for Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation, and Navigation. Using these case studies, the book shows how unconventional thinkers focus their attention closely and with fresh eyes. At various times, they also step away from the creative process to gain perspective and enrich their understanding, a process dubbed levitation. In addition, unconventional thinkers hone their ability to recognise hard-to-see patterns and to connect seemingly disparate dots. This allows them to imagine  unorthodox combinations and to experiment quickly and smartly. Finally, they learn to  navigate potentially hostile environments outside and within their organisations.

Alien thinking is not sitting in a cupboard waiting to be called upon but is instead something that needs to be internalised as a means for turning ideas into solutions, on the fly. It is meant to help the digital nomad of our age look both deeper and wider using the Proustian fresh eyes. It reminded me of Karl Weick’s “sensemaking” another remarkable way of thinking about the world, decisions, problems and people. It is a nifty “toolkit” to use the lingua franca of our times.

Take the extraordinary case of Billy Fischer, who defying all odds, including threat to his own life, battled Ebola in West Africa. They did everything by the World Health Organisation playbook, but nothing worked, and bodies began piling up. Dr Fischer began by persuading his colleagues to shift their focus from containment to observing the progression of the disease. He followed this up by aggressive IV and fluid resuscitation, with both antimalarials and antibiotics. This sharply brought down the death rate but was nowhere mentioned in the standard medical playbook. Dr Fischer didn’t specialise in the treatment of Ebola, so it was easier for him to quickly course-correct from the prescribed quarantine approach and use fresh eyes to combat it.

A.L.I.E.N. Thinking: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas

Author: Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux & Michael Wade

Publisher: Public Affairs; Price: $28

Perhaps the most interesting case is of Narayana Peesapaty, who found a solution to the groundwater depletion crisis, which lies at the root of the Punjab farmers’ crisis today. Rice is a thirsty crop. “It takes 5,000 liters of water to cultivate one kilo of rice,” Mr Peesapaty observed.  “Ironically, every year, thousands of tons of rice go to waste in warehouses across the nation.”  He quit his comfortable job to do something extraordinarily public spirited and for nine years struggled to find a market for his millet-based edible cutlery as an alternative to rice. Battling enormous personal struggle, he set up a company to manufacture edible cutlery which went viral serendipitously.  Today,with some difficulty, he is seeking corporate funding to scale up the fruits of his hard ALIEN project.

When we turn our attention toward something, we must necessarily turn it away from something else. Because attention is a selective activity, we must choose where and on what to focus. This attention allocation directs how individuals and organisations interact with the external environment. It determines which stimuli they notice and which they overlook. Narayana Peesapaty wasn’t the first person to notice India’s declining groundwater levels. But he was among the first (that we know of) to focus his attention on the driving forces behind those trends. And he was determined enough to do something about it. Another interesting story is that of Teresa Hodge, who set up a startup to help those people who had some form of a police record against them get jobs. Although the US accounts for just 5 per cent of the world’s population, it houses “25 per cent of its prison population. As of 2020, the American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, and 218 immigration detention facilities, as well as military prisons ”. Once their sentences have been served, many of these former prisoners find it extremely difficult to find good jobs, even if they had been booked on some minor charges. Ms Hodge challenged the model of traditional background check companies whose reports consisted entirely of arrest and conviction records, which most people take for granted. She showed both imagination and navigation in the ALIEN framework to come up with a solution and then pivot on it to take advantage of a crisis to mainstream her risk assessment framework. 

Books about frameworks are usually solutions in search of problems, to force-fit a particular thinking  into any problem that they can find convenient. ALIEN Thinking is both fresh and imaginative, actionable and dynamic, which makes it a joy to understand, observe and practice.

The reviewer is an IAS officer. Views are personal. @srivatsakrishna