I’m in Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, as I write this. During the three days I’ve been here I’ve also been in Dubai, another Emirate, passed through the Emirates of Ajman and Fujairah, and left the Emirates for Oman. The experience has jogged my mind for each is different and all hugely different from my previous experience. I find myself thinking new thoughts and considering options that never occurred to me before.

On the interminable 14 hour flight here, lengthened by a 3 hour delay after we boarded, another experience leading to unusual thinking, I read some recent information about the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. It’s now clear that it is much worse than originally disclosed, will linger for decades, and has affected radiation levels around the world.

I juxtapose these two disparate issues because it occurred to me that part of the reason for the terrible response at Fukushima was caused by a lack of significant travel to completely different parts of the world, by those in charge. They lacked the ability to expand their thinking from the concrete and predicable and think the unthinkable…so never even thought about the possibility of such a disaster.

An example of this is that they placed the off site emergency headquarters in case of nuclear disaster 5 kilometers from the plant, and it was not radiation proof. What were they thinking?

As we all have heard, travel broadens the mind. What most have not done is really think about what this means. It’s really not the broadening of the mind that’s important for executives but the broadening of the thinking that this leads to. Travel challenges our pre-conceived ideas and attacks our comfort zone. Travel to places most divergent from our normal reality challenges us the most.

It expands our world and opens up our thinking.

Actually, the last two paragraphs are not always, or perhaps even often, true. While traveling too many rather than allowing new ideas in, work hard to stay within their bubble and float along without being touched and changed. They view but do not see, they are there but do not experience.

If you pop your bubble and allow yourself to be immersed in the experience of the Emirates, or wherever you happen to travel, you will return with new ideas and new ways of attacking old problems. Your thinking will expand and find previous ideas faulty and needing adjustment.

You gain a better ability to think about the unthinkable.

 

Comments are closed.