ALIEN Thinking: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough Ideas
Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux & Michael Wade
304 pages, PublicAffairs, 2021
ALIEN thinking is a new model for innovative thinking and problem solving. For the past decade, we—three professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School—have studied “aliens”—people who have made leaps of creativity borne of viewing a problem with new eyes—inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists—and found that there are five patterns of thinking that help them develop new, creative, out-of-this-world ideas.
Unconventional thinkers focus their attention closely and with fresh eyes. At various times, they also step back and/or step away from the creative process to gain perspective and enrich their understanding, a process we have dubbed levitation. In addition, unconventional thinkers hone their ability to recognize hard-to-see patterns and to connect seemingly disparate dots. This allows them to imagine unorthodox combinations and to experiment quickly and smartly. Finally, they learn to navigate potentially hostile environments outside and within their organizations. This enables them to safely incubate their ideas and recruit powerful allies, so their ideas aren’t shot down during the embryonic stage.—Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux & Michael Wade
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Back in 2012, Teresa Hodge was sitting at her computer, filling out an application for a work-at-home job, when she encountered a question that sent a jolt of fear through her body. She paused, took a deep breath, and typed, “Yes.”
The screen went blank.
Then a message she’d been dreading appeared on the screen: “We’re sorry, but your response to one of the questions indicates that you are not qualified for this job. Thank you for your time.”
Teresa was saddened, but not surprised or confused. She knew why the process had so abruptly ended. She was one of the millions of US job applicants who are automatically rejected for employment each year when they answer “yes” to the question “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”1
Although the US accounts for just 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses 25 percent of its prison population. As of 2020, the American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, and 218 immigration detention facilities, as well as military prisons and other facilities.2 Once their sentences have been served, many of these former prisoners find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find good jobs.
Eight out of ten employers now run criminal background checks on job candidates, and if someone has an arrest or conviction record, it typically triggers an automatic rejection. Small wonder, then, that of the six hundred thousand–plus people who leave prison every year, more than half are still unemployed twelve months later, and 70 percent eventually end up back in prison, according to Hodge. To make matters worse, the high rate of incarceration and unemployment affects not only the former prisoners but also their spouses, children, other family members, and entire communities, locking them into a never-ending cycle of imprisonment, recidivism, and poverty. Hodge dubs this the “invisible life sentence.”3
Ironically, Hodge was in the midst of attacking this systemic problem when her employment application was rejected. She was applying for a job to pay some bills while she laid the foundations for a nonprofit organization called Mission: Launch, which aimed to help people with arrest and conviction records to access loans and start businesses.
During her incarceration, Hodge was far from idle. She continued to develop her business skills by reading books on entrepreneurship, and reviewing business plans for friends and fellow inmates. She also read articles about the plight of inmates like herself. For example, she learned that 25 percent of children in the US had an incarcerated parent, and that three in ten of those children would wind up in prison themselves.
She also had plenty of time to worry.
I sat in prison with a sinking feeling, knowing that technology was transforming the world, while I was left behind. I arrived in prison on January 3, 2007. Six days later, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, stood on a stage and presented the first generation iPhone.4
In addition to reading, Hodge filled her days by talking with fellow inmates to learn their stories. What were their dreams? What crimes had they committed, and why? What kinds of family backgrounds did they have? One of her key observations was that many of the women who were released quickly ended up back in prison. She wanted to know why. The answers were usually the same: the women had no family, or had unsupportive family, and were unable to find a job after release.
As time passed, Hodge internalized these inmate narratives about crime cycles, inescapable poverty, and the hunger for new opportunities. She came to understand why so many people were coming back to prison. She came to understand that “if you can’t get a job, you can’t get on your feet.”5
Going to prison turned out to be the easy part. Coming home was much harder.
“When lying on my bunk in prison, I dreamt of being able to launch a business; my goal was to empower not only me but so many formerly incarcerated women.”6 So she started thinking: “What will I and others need?” “What are the right services” to help former prisoners “reconnect back to society in a meaningful way?”7
Hodge realized that making a tangible impact on the lives of former prisoners would require pioneering efforts outside of the conventional public policy framework. So she and her daughter created Mission: Launch. As a former entrepreneur, Hodge proposed solutions that focused on business development and entrepreneurship, helping people who couldn’t find suitable jobs turn their skills (e.g., catering) into a business.
This entrepreneurial focus was less a choice than a necessity for people who couldn’t get hired. It was also a creative way of bypassing the problem of reemployment by helping those with arrests or convictions become self-employed. Beyond this reentry strategy, Mission: Launch also teamed with government, the private sector, and community development financial institutions (CDFIs) to champion social-good technology and civic innovation.
In the process, the mother-daughter team did the unprecedented: they connected a diverse group of criminal justice stakeholders (from civil servants and private companies, to lawyers, former prisoners, and activists) to rethink criminal justice policies. Mission: Launch sponsored and developed several initiatives—from Fair Chance Employment (enforcing fair-hiring legislation) to Clean Slate DC (sealing criminal records). The organization also initiated a series of two-day hackathons, where programmers and data scientists, entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, and policy makers could create fast solutions to the challenge of Rebuilding Reentry. In 2015, Mission: Launch began a sixteen-week “entrepreneurship boot camp,” and its start-up accelerator won a $50,000 prize from the US Small Business Association, which helped attract matching funds from other foundations and companies.
Hodge became good at cultivating allies and raising the profile of her organization by serving as a frequent panelist and speaker (her speeches include a 2016 TEDx Talk), and leveraging her firsthand experience of prison to win support. On the strength of that exposure, she forged a partnership with singer-songwriter John Legend and his FreeAmerica initiative, and another with Bank of America.
Going Digital
Another major turning point for Hodge came in 2016, when she received a request from a community-oriented bank to vet a loan candidate with a criminal record. Hodge and her daughter decided to create a list of factors that a lender should consider before granting or denying a loan to someone with a criminal record.
With that insight, she decided there might be a market for a new technology platform that could perform such an analysis for customers, much the way employers, banks, and others use outside vendors to run credit checks on applicants. The result was R3 Score, a risk assessment tool powered by an algorithm that assesses a person’s criminal history, along with volunteer work, education, credit history, employment experience, and information self-reported by individuals to de-risk decisions for prospective employers, banks, and landlords.
R3’s software produced a numeric score that predicts future trends. The scores, which deliberately mimicked the FICO scores credit bureaus use to rate people’s credit histories, ranged from 300 to 850. The higher the number, the less risky the person.
By providing employers, landlords, and financial institutions with a more nuanced, data-driven risk evaluation from a third party, Hodge hoped that she could enable them to make more intelligent decisions about whether someone posed a good credit, housing, and employment risk.8 R3 Score was an alternative to the reports delivered by traditional background companies, which are composed entirely of criminal records. “While it’s important that we discontinue the practice of disqualifying applicants for simply having criminal records, it’s also imperative that HR professionals have access to other criteria they need to determine a candidate’s eligibility,” said Hodge.
It’s still early, but R3 Score has the potential to become a real game changer by improving social outcomes for the marginalized—for the millions of people living with criminal histories.
So what can we learn from this story?
The ALIEN Mind
Looking at the case of Teresa Hodge, we can tease out three key traits common to ALIEN thinkers.
Rebels With a Cause
ALIEN thinkers question what others take for granted. Hodge challenged the model of traditional background check companies whose reports consisted entirely of arrest and conviction records. But she didn’t defy conventions just for the sake of it. She disrupted the established order to tackle a cause that matters. ALIEN thinkers are unconventional, but they’re also respectful of the broader purpose that motivates their search for progress. They are committed to the idea of creating meaningful change in business and society. They fully understand the danger of being misperceived as renegades or loose cannons. Hodge maintained a very clear focus on what she was trying to do and on those she sought to serve.
Curious Integrators
ALIEN thinkers are people-centered, trying to understand what drives others and to make sense of their worlds. Hodge learned by taking an interest in individual cases and interacting with people who were struggling. But she was also system-minded and able to take into account the larger issues and multiple stakeholders involved. Hodge rethought the whole approach of risk evaluation vis-à-vis former prison inmates. She then created an easy-to-understand score for ex-inmates—one modeled on the FICO score with which institutions were already familiar and that many were already using to assess candidates for loans and employment.
Ingenious Analysts
ALIEN thinkers combine their creative intelligence with whatever analytic tools they have at their disposal. Hodge embraced technology to quantify people’s personal and institutional histories, and to do predictive work. She used technology to augment her innovation capabilities and develop original solutions to the seemingly intractable problems afflicting the American justice system.
To improve our ability to imagine how things can change, we must adjust our lenses to see as an alien would see.