Some years ago I saw a particularly interesting story in the What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? film. It was about how native americans were not able to see Columbus' ships, when he first arrived to the new world. They couldn't see them, or maybe they did but decided to ignore them anyway, because those ships were very different to anything they knew.
For them, a floating device should be similar to a canoe, and nothing else. The problem was that those new things were definitely not shaped as canoes. Of course, eventually they recognized Columbus' ships and their true function, but the morale of the story is that, most of the time, "we only see what we believe is possible, we tend to match patterns that already exist within ourselves".
I'm telling this story because a similar situation happened to me these last weeks. I prepared an initial proposal for a combination of ideas that could be interesting for my current work, and I decided to present them to people working in two different domains. The responses I got from each group were totally (totally!) different. It's not that one of these groups is necessarily right or wrong, it just proves that the way you look at things depends a lot on your previous experience and knowledge, your existing patterns. Like I've said in previous posts, it's difficult to see things with a different perspective, but we should never stop trying!.
Anyway, in the following weeks I'll have the opportunity to discuss these ideas both with like-minded colleagues and with people with a much more different perspective than mine, we'll see how it goes =):.
And in between,
it’s never as it seems.
