You’re out walking one morning and you reach a field of tall grass. Your destination is on the other side but you can’t see a way through. So you wade in, pushing through the tall stems until you emerge on the other side, leaving a path in your wake.
On the next day’s morning perambulation you encounter the same field. Do you beat a new path — or take the one you made yesterday?
Of course, you follow the path. It’s easier. It’s the path of least resistance.
And so it is when we develop ideas in response to a design brief. Beating a path through a sheaf of requirements takes effort. But once we have made that mental path, our brains prefer to follow it again.
Why do the extra work of cutting a new route?
This is cognitive ease at work: our brains tend to prefer the options they’ve already figured out over ones they haven’t figured out yet.
There is no reason the first idea should be the best one. But cognitive ease makes it stick. So if we want better ideas, we need to resource ourselves to build beat a new path each morning.