Abductive Reasoning is at the heart of Creativity, including Innovation, Design Thinking, and all other methods and visionary goals. The most ground-breaking ideas resulted from looking at a set of seemingly unrelated components.
Abductive reasoning typically begins with an incomplete set of observations and proceeds to the likeliest possible explanation for the set. Abductive reasoning yields the kind of daily decision-making that does its best with the information at hand, which often is incomplete. (Source Link)
Our imaginations follow this type of thinking pattern. It is ideas and thoughts that at first appear absurd and ridiculous. Einstein regularly experimented using this method to explore the world around him.
Action: Using small note cards, write down anything that captures your attention during the course of a week (things, objects, ideas, products/services used, food consumed, tangible, intangible, etc.). At the end of the week, take the inventory of cards and force yourself to find relationships, trends, opportunities and ideas – regardless of how ludicrous that may be.
