Break Down Barriers of Thought to Build Towers of Innovation

Yonason Goldson
Thu, 22 Jan 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

Did you hear the one about the vascular surgeon who walked into a plumbers' convention?

Actually, it's not a joke. It also wasn't a convention. But it is a most intriguing story from the world of mastermind groups — the coaching collaboratives designed to provide support and advice among professional peers.

A mastermind group typically comprises members from a single profession, whether writers or lawyers, accountants or manufacturers, surgeons or plumbers. However, an alternative school of thought argues that more can be accomplished by mixing together people from different, but not totally disconnected, disciplines.
Updated: Fri Jan 23, 2026

Did you hear the one about the vascular surgeon who walked into a plumbers' convention?

Actually, it's not a joke. It also wasn't a convention. But it is a most intriguing story from the world of mastermind groups — the coaching collaboratives designed to provide support and advice among professional peers.

A mastermind group typically comprises members from a single profession, whether writers or lawyers, accountants or manufacturers, surgeons or plumbers. However, an alternative school of thought argues that more can be accomplished by mixing together people from different, but not totally disconnected, disciplines.

At first glance, the fields of plumbing and vascular surgery seem as incongruous as bowling and parasailing. But take a closer look: both deal with flow through confined space under pressure. By engaging with practitioners from an entirely distinct but parallel profession, members of each group came away with a deeper understanding and insights about their own.

Which brings us to our current addition to the Ethical Lexicon:

Orthogonal thinking (or*thog*o*nal*think*ng/ awr-thog-uh-nl think-ing) noun

The practice of exploring diverse and seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge to produce unpredictable revelations about work and life.

This is hardly intuitive. Many of us have learned the hard way that a lack of focus often leads to intellectual flailing. That being said, the occasional blurring of boundaries can reveal new perspectives and unanticipated insights.

One dramatic example is what happened when a group of scientists crossed over the line separating physics and biology, two fields that appear to have little in common. The meeting of minds among Max Delbruck, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Erwin Schrodinger generated the first steps toward breaking the genetic code and eventually mapping the human genome.

In another instance, representatives from the private sector, public sector and financing institutions came together to consider the plight of a billion people without access to safe drinking water. The result was WaterCredit, through which micro-lending organizations provide resources for individuals to finance innovative water and sanitation solutions.

Recognizing the benefits of orthogonal thinking, Steve Jobs famously placed the restrooms in the central atrium of the new Pixar offices in 1986. Although employees initially grumbled about the longer walk, they soon discovered that chatting with colleagues from different departments sometimes gave rise to new ideas. It also made for happier employees.

And Jobs wasn't the only visionary. Former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer says that people are "more collaborative and innovative when they're together. Some of the best ideas come from (combining) two different ideas."

Here again, we find that the benefit of cultural diversity extends beyond identity; the ultimate payoff comes with diversity of thought. People from different backgrounds, different reference points and different disciplines broaden and deepen their collective knowledge and wisdom through brainstorming and even casual conversation.

Indeed, a crossover mindset has contributed to innovation in music, art, theater, cinema and literature, tantalizing our imaginations and enriching our lives. In business as well, widening our perspective can reveal insights we might never have noticed had we remained too narrowly focused.

This is no less true in technology than in any other field. As senior Google AI researcher Aekta Shah writes, "exposing ourselves to a wide range of ideas beyond what is immediately in front of us day to day is our responsibility to the world — we need to understand the fullness of the world and not just be constrained to our narrow tech-spheres."

I replied that we can act ethically only if we're thinking logically, that we can think logically only once we have adequate information and that we can be confident in the information we have only after we've investigated all the angles.

That's why both breadth and depth of knowledge are essential to acquiring wisdom, which goes hand in hand with ethical thinking.

Your mission — if you decide to accept it — is to go out and find people as far away as possible from your specialty — and your ideology. If surgeons and plumbers can learn from each other, imagine the revelations and insights available to the moment you begin to broaden your horizons.

See more by Yonason Goldson and features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists; visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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