U-boats, a barrister and thinking differently

One of my favourite stories about innovation, and thinking differently to create the outcome needed, is from WW2.

In 1941 the German U-boats were sinking a huge number of allied ships carrying supplies across the Atlantic to the UK. 

To try to counter this, the Royal Navy had a Tracking Room. Its job was to track U-boats and warn Allied shipping of their whereabouts. It was right next to the Trade Plot Room, which directed Allied shipping. 

The Tracking Room wasn't run by highly-skilled naval officers. Instead it was staffed by academics, economists and lawyers, led by Rodger Winn, a barrister. They'd all been drafted in because they brought a different kind of thinking and intelligence to the job. And their job was intelligence. If the allied ships knew where the U-boats were, they could avoid them. The Tracking Room did a great job; the kind of intelligence they brought to their intelligence work paid dividends. Between May 1942 and May 1943, 105 out of 174 convoys sailed across the Atlantic without a U-boat attack. Of the 69 sighted by U-boats, 23 escaped with no harm, 30 suffered minor losses and only 16 were badly damaged. 

Back to Winn. He was appointed a naval commander and leapfrogged over others who had naval officer training. Why? He didn't use conventional naval thinking and neither did the rest of his team. He succeeded as a result. 

So what has this got to do with us? A lot. If we want innovation, to solve problems and to see different perspectives, we need different sorts of people involved.

And this can be hard and a potential threat. We may well have the qualifications, the experience, etc. but is our thinking too narrow and are our minds closed to differences? We may also fall back into our unconscious biases. Here are three. Affinity bias - we like people who are like us. Confirmation bias - we look for evidence that confirms our thinking. Status quo bias - that one speaks for itself.   

So we may not be fighting off U-Boats, but the case for embracing different sorts of intelligence is valid. And for that, we need people with different backgrounds, different experiences and different ways of seeing and experiencing the world.