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Mindsets of Public Design Bureau: Non-Linear Thinking
What’s the mindset
Non-linear thinking is the creative, connection-driven process of thinking that notices possibilities, identifies ideas and solves problems by bouncing, winding, or dancing from thought to thought, led by intuition or feeling. Non-linear thinking is the other end of the spectrum of linear thinking, which involves thinking in a set of connected steps that end at a specific point. Non-linear thinking often ends in a place you may not have been able to anticipate, and may not even end at just one specific point!
Our lives have a lot of structure and tools to support linear thinking (like calendars, process diagrams, and lists), but encouraging, supporting, and encouraging non-linear thinking in a rigorous way can lead to important places as well.
Why it’s important
Many things we interact with are part of complex systems — especially things that involve people and what they do. When we focus only on a linear approach — step-by-step — to understand these non-linear systems and how people behave within them, it is easy to miss opportunities that may be outside the norm or the average, or to miss the non-linear relationships and associations that actually shape the systems we operate within.
Non-linear thinking can’t and shouldn’t be the only approach, but instead when it is thoughtfully paired with linear thinking in a rigorous process, it can lead to transformative ideas. Linear thinking is a great way to take in information (like data, facts, and observations) and process it in a rational, logical way. This is how we use the scientific method to prove a hypothesis, and is often referred to as analysis. With non-linear thinking as a complement to analysis (often through an iterative process), we can also respond to feelings, impressions, and sensations that emerge. This allows space for following trails and paths of meaning and association that come from the information we’ve gathered — leading to conclusions and directions that may not have been obviously involved before. Read a bit more about this from Osterman, Reio, and Thirunarayanan (Digital Literacy: A Demand for Nonlinear Thinking Styles).
Embracing non-linear thinking in the real world
Non-linear thinking is part of our everyday lives, each time we act on our gut, or have an idea pop into our head that feels inspired. But we are also intuitively pairing this with linear thinking, where we try to gather as much information as we need and make a logical decision. Recently, Liz had to fix a water leak that was causing a plaster wall in her house to get wet every time it rained. While she used linear thinking to assess the potential culprits, gathered information from experts (including many gutter repair people, plasters, and roofers), the actual source emerged after she spent a long time staring at the exposed brick and letting her thoughts wander. Even though linear thinking had allowed her to “rule out” the roof that had been replaced just the year before, she had an intuition, based on everything she’d learned from experts. She got her ladder back out, went up on the roof, and sure enough, found a spot just under the roof surface with a little bit of moss growing. Non-linear thinking allowed her to consider possibilities that seemed impossible or unlikely through methods of analysis.
Embracing non-linear thinking in design
Non-linear thinking is the process that underpins the creativity mindset of design, so when we create a process, we build in space for rigorous non-linear thinking. One of the most common places where we incorporate non-linear thinking is in generating ideas. Non-linear thinking doesn’t just enable new, wild ideas. It allows us to build off of strengths to be inspired for new possibilities. For example, in design research we frequently look for the “lead users” — the people who are able to make a system work for them, even when it wasn’t designed for them. Sometimes, what we learn from those people has a direct opportunity (like “This person is calling friends after they get off work at 5p. It would be way easier for people to get access to this program if you moved the call center open hours later so folks can ask questions after work.”). But often, the opportunity is not a direct line from what we’ve seen or heard. We might learn about a few different motivations or behaviors, and via non-linear thinking we notice those pieces of information fit together as an insight that then inspires how to design a program to really work for that context.
How we cultivate non-linear thinking
- Leave some extra space to wonder. While it’s not always possible to just sit and think, we try to build in some time for just musing about what we’ve observed and heard. Inklings, half-formed thoughts, and just thinking out loud all welcome. An easy way to do this is to ask for some reflections and feedback after a meeting or conversation, such as “What stood out to you about that?” Giving even a few minutes to allow our minds to begin to draw connections can help encourage non-linear thinking to emerge. We also find that having a few longer sessions dedicated to this wondering can help us see what can emerge.
- Tell stories about what we heard and saw to spark insights. In that extra space, it can be helpful to make what we’ve heard and seen more tangible by telling stories. Sharing the details, and drawing connections to other points of data, can help inspire and spark new ideas.
- Warm ourselves up and make a space that feels safe to be creative in. The same process we outlined in creativity as a mindset is what sets the stage for non-linear thinking. Having a little bit of a warm-up (even if it’s just drawing silly pictures or a free association activity) can help move from a linear approach into a non-linear process mindset.
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