What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine

Love this great line from The Innovation Killer by Cynthia Barton Rabe, a former strategist at Intel:

“What we know limits what we can imagine.” Many organizations, she argues, struggle with a ‘paradox of expertise’ in which deep knowledge of what exists in a marketplace or a product category makes it harder to consider what-if strategies that challenge long-held assumptions. “When it comes to innovation,” she writes, “the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it.”