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Every solution you come up with-no matter how perfect it first appears-carries with it assumptions, leaps of faith and implicit conditions for success. If these are not recognized and attended to, they can turn out to be the Achilles heel in your great idea. So says the former creative advisor to Toyota, in a wide-ranging interview about his latest book, Winning the Brain Game. He presents and describes what he calls 'the seven fatal flaws of thinking': leaping, fixation, over-thinking, satisficing, downgrading, not-invented-here and self-censoring. Using a wide range of real-life examples-from Procter & Gamble to Xerox to Apple-he also shows how to avoid these common thinking flaws.

Great innovation is often born of an ability to harmonize opposing tensions, the author argues. Like the pressure to avoid failure and the need to take risks; or the demands of getting results quickly and the freedom to search for 'the best way'. Unfortunately, all-too-often, the artful balancing of opposing tensions goes by the wayside, and compromises are made that sub-optimize efforts to create value. He introduces a technique that prevents compromise: intentional goal conflict. He provides two examples of this approach, cut from the annals of innovation at Toyota, to illustrate exactly how it works.

At the world's most innovative companies, 'Skunk Works' has become the standard approach for running top secret projects with elite special teams. The hallmarks of a Skunk Works project include high-quality designs in a short time frame with limited resources. The author describes how it all started, at Lockheed Martin in the 1940s, and how the approach has evolved to inspire Apple and other modern innovators.

Throughout history, sudden insights across industries and disciplines have had one thing in common: they tend to come at strange times and places, and they tend to happen after an intense, prolonged struggle with a particular problem, followed by a break. The author describes the importance of the break or 'broken pattern' in our day, showing that it comes in two types: breaks that we make and breaks that we take. In both cases, breaks enable us to think differently - and more resourcefully, and those who aspire to creative thinking should make them a regular habit. He provides three approaches to daily breaks: meditation, 'pulsing' and daydreaming walks, all of which enable you to stop looking for 'the answer' - and find it.

When faced with a problem to solve, most people jump immediately to focusing on solutions, devoting little time to why the problem exists in the first place. This is just one of the 'traps' of traditional thinking that the author describes. Another is pattern recognition, which can lead us to jump to conclusions much too soon. Regardless of the work we do, we must constantly fight the urge to act immediately and 'fill in the blanks' and instead, take the time to observe first and design second. In today's world, this will become increasingly important, he says, for the simple reason that the challenges we face are becoming more complex by the day.

The ancient Eastern concept of Zen represents an entirely different way of looking at the world. When most of us approach problems, we focus on what is there, and what to do, rather than on what isn't there, and what to stop doing. The author argues that by shifting to the Zen perspective, we realize that when it comes to a product, service, strategy or experience--what isn't there can often be as or more powerful than what is. He provides an introduction to the seven key Zen sensibilities and sketches their evolution from and incorporation into art, architecture and commercial and corporate design.