Thinking out of the box

Our suggestion is to begin thinking like the people who are best at innovating and dealing with the unknown — serial entrepreneurs. After all, there is nothing more uncertain than starting a new business from scratch. In the face of the unknown, serial entrepreneurs act.

Read it at Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog
The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation? You.
by Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown

This is what I learned from one of my mentors, a mechanical engineer, MBA, and serial entrepreneur. The basic idea is using heuristics, which is basic to the engineering approach. Act and learn from the feedback instead of sitting around thinking everything through as though this is the way things will actually work out in practice.

Not that planning is not needed. It's acknowledging that the plan is just an initial step to get into action and realizing that along the way the initial plan will likely be altered so much and so often as to hardly be recognizable after a while.