'The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes," said Proust, though he'd surely have choked on his fancy biscuits to hear the phrase now popular with business gurus to describe this attitude: "vuja dé". This language-violating twist on "déja vu" comes from a George Carlin joke, but now refers, in the words of the design consultant Tom Kelley, to "the sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before". It's the central plank of a new book, Practically Radical, by Bill Taylor, who like many modern management thinkers hails it as the key to creativity. "Think outside the box" has been put back in its box. Vuja dé is in.
Proust, Kelley and Taylor are clearly correct, though: habituation is one of the overarching enemies of happiness. It's why new possessions stop delivering pleasure (the "hedonic treadmill") and why established firms fail to spot opportunities for innovation: they simply don't perceive them. It's also why studies show that airport security staff miss a huge proportion of the weapons that authorities send through x-rays as a test. Commentators act horrified: how could something as incongruous as a gun not stand out? But psychologists know the truth: it's precisely because guns are so rare that screeners don't see them. When bag after bag contains no gun, they become habituated to seeing no gun. They can't see with fresh eyes.
Still, there's a problem for business gurus here. It's one thing to recommend vuja dé, but when they try to explain how, they risk replacing old ways of thinking with slightly newer, ostentatiously "innovative" yet still routine approaches. As the blog LessWrong.com puts it, "This is sometimes referred to as 'thinking outside the box' by people who, for your convenience, will... helpfully point out exactly where 'outside the box' is located." The point of vuja dé is to think outside preworn grooves, but but a book telling you how to think is to some extent by definition a preworn groove.
That doesn't mean there's no useful advice. Reconsidering a problem in a different physical context seems to help, as does picking some specific type of person – a doctor, an astronaut – and imagining what they'd do. The key is to shift perspective as randomly as possible, which explains the appeal of Edward de Bono's "lateral thinking", or of Oblique Strategies (see bit.ly/YUtP), the deck of cards that offers jolting phrases to trigger new outlooks. They combat how bad we are at generating randomness ourselves: in the absence of an external "randomness intervention", our pattern-seeking brains send us off on old paths.
But habituation's always lurking. Cheesy business-creativity exercises – you know, handing people a brick and a jam jar, and telling them to design a forklift truck – work exactly once before they're old. Even Oblique Strategies stops being so useful once you've picked the same cards repeatedly. Ultimately, isn't seeking advice on how to think like nobody's ever thought an oxymoron? The Zen version of "fresh eyes" is "beginner's mind", and experts can't help. As the priest Shunryu Suzuki put it: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few."
• A collection of Oliver Burkeman's columns, Help!: How To Become Slightly Happier And Get A Bit More Done, is published by Canongate at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 (including free UK mainland p&p), go to theguardian.com bookshop, or call 0330 333 6846.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
