What does it take to create meaningful change in the modern world? A few ideas:
- accept an “outsider’s perspective” to bring fresh ideas to traditional fields.
- Tap deeply into your personal experiences to enlighten and encourage your work.
- Use data and facts to shape behaviors and outcomes.
- Capitalize on the human desire for recognition and competition.
Those are some of the insights from GeekWire’s profiles of six “Uncommon Thinkers”: Seattle-area inventors, scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs transforming industries and have a positive impact on the world.
This editorial series, presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners, was based on the deliberations of a panel of outside judges who chose the Uncommon Thinkers from nominations submitted by GeekWire readers.
Working on these profiles helped us acknowledge the commonalities among our honorees, including their inspirations, mindsets, and approaches. Continue reading for a link to each profile, plus a summary of key takeaways.
You can also hear conversations with several of our Uncommon Thinkers on this week’s GeekWire Podcast, recorded backstage at the GeekWire Gala in Seattle, where we honored them during a reception earlier this week.
Read the six “Uncommon Thinkers” profiles here:
And here are some of the key insights we took away from our interviews.
accept an “outsider’s perspective” for fresh ideas: Shwetak Patel, a University of Washington computer science professor and Google distinguished scientist, doesn’t have a traditional background in medicine or electrical engineering.
However, he benefited from his role as an outsider in coming up with ways to use electrical wiring as a wireless communications network for smart home devices, and smartphones as medical diagnostic devices.
Growing up in Alabama, he gained a wide range of electrical and mechanical encounter fixing air conditioning units, vending machines, and all sorts of other equipment in the motels managed by his family.
That hands-on encounter with the trade, without formal training, was “the thing that helped me ask questions that I don’t think any scientist would have asked, given their scientific training in that space,” he said.
Let your personal experiences enlighten and encourage you to change the world: Patel isn’t the only one of our Uncommon Thinkers whose specific life encounter has heavily influenced his work. In fact, this is one of the strongest commonalities among the honorees.
Prioritize transparency: Use data and facts to shape behavior and outcomes.
- MacDonald champions the use of comprehensive, factual data to enlighten citizens and policymakers, enhancing public discourse and decision-making.
- Hansen uses software from AdaptX, the startup founded by her Seattle Children’s Hospital colleague Dr. Dan Low, to track emissions data from anesthetics, quickly showing the impact of specific decisions.
Capitalize on the human desire for recognition and competition. Hansen took that data transparency a step advance by displaying and sharing the emissions results for her entire team in an easy-to-read plot so that everyone could see how their emissions compared to their peers, and to their own past results.
“That brought out everyone’s natural competitive spirit,” she explained.
She would highlight the lowest emitters from the prior month in her email out to the group. People would ask her how to get highlighted in the next month’s email, creating an opportunity for Hansen to show them the small adjustments in their anesthesiology practices that could significantly impact their results.
Tackle adjacent problems: Rather than just trying to resolve the main problem directly with many solutions, Patel’s approach is to find all the related “adjacent” problems and try to resolve those in parallel.
By solving adjacent problems, he explains, you end up with different ways of solving them that can then be brought back together to resolve the primary problem. This allows him to tackle problems from new angles.
Look for opportunities to say “yes.” Startups are hard, and you hear “no” a lot, so when someone believes in you and says “yes,” you have to appreciate that moment, said Wang, the Boundless CEO.
Speaking to his startup specifically, he said, when you witness the daily struggles of immigrants trying to create better lives for themselves, it’s hard not to say “yes” whenever there’s an opportunity to help them.
“For me, being able to be default ‘yes’ means that you can quiet all your fears of failure, you can encourage hope in others and you can appreciate just how darn fortunate we are to be able to say that word,” he said.
Find your inspiration to change the world for the better: Ultimately, this is the biggest common thread among the six “Uncommon Thinkers”: their recognition of broader societal problems, their fierce desire to resolve those problems, and their ability to find unique solutions in their own expertise and experiences.
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