What does it take to create meaningful change in the modern world? A few ideas:
- Embrace an “outsider’s perspective” to bring fresh ideas to traditional fields.
- Tap deeply into your personal experiences to inform and inspire your work.
- Use data and facts to shape behaviors and outcomes.
- Capitalize on the human desire for recognition and competition.
Those are some of the insights from GeekWire’s profiles of six “Uncommon Thinkers”: Seattle-area inventors, scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs transforming industries and have a positive impact on the world.
This editorial series, presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners, was based on the deliberations of a panel of outside judges who chose the Uncommon Thinkers from nominations submitted by GeekWire readers.
Working on these profiles helped us identify the commonalities among our honorees, including their inspirations, mindsets, and approaches. Continue reading for a link to each profile, plus a summary of key takeaways.
You can also hear conversations with several of our Uncommon Thinkers on this week’s GeekWire Podcast, recorded backstage at the GeekWire Gala in Seattle, where we honored them during a reception earlier this week.
Read the six “Uncommon Thinkers” profiles here:
- UW prof and entrepreneur Shwetak Patel has a rare ‘creative brilliance’
- Elizabeth Hansen uses her job as an anesthesiologist to cut carbon emissions
- Boundless CEO Xiao Wang on his quest to fix the immigration process
- For USAFacts’ Poppy MacDonald, ‘facts are paramount’ for democracy
- Blake Resnick finds a larger purpose in tech, making drones for public safety
- MagniX CTO Riona Armesmith geeks out over electric aviation
And here are some of the key insights we took away from our interviews.
Embrace an “outsider’s perspective” for fresh ideas: Shwetak Patel, a University of Washington computer science professor and Google distinguished scientist, doesn’t have a traditional background in medicine or electrical engineering.
However, he benefited from his role as an outsider in coming up with ways to use electrical wiring as a wireless communications network for smart home devices, and smartphones as medical diagnostic devices.
Growing up in Alabama, he gained a wide range of electrical and mechanical experience fixing air conditioning units, vending machines, and all sorts of other equipment in the motels managed by his family.
That hands-on experience with the trade, without formal training, was “the thing that helped me ask questions that I don’t think any scientist would have asked, given their scientific training in that space,” he said.
Let your personal experiences inform and inspire you to change the world: Patel isn’t the only one of our Uncommon Thinkers whose specific life experience has heavily influenced his work. In fact, this is one of the strongest commonalities among the honorees.
- Boundless CEO Xiao Wang’s personal challenges during his family’s immigration process inspired him to simplify the immigration system, making it more accessible and transparent as CEO of the Seattle startup.
- Dr. Elizabeth Hansen, an attending anesthesiologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital, was motivated by her concern for the future health of children to implement environmental initiatives in healthcare, reducing emissions.
- Poppy MacDonald’s experience as a media executive and belief in the importance of informed citizenship inspired her to lead the team at USAFacts providing insights into government spending and operations.
- Blake Resnick’s decision to start his drone company, Brinc, was significantly influenced by the deadly mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in his hometown of Las Vegas.
- Riona Armesmith’s vision for electric aviation drives her to overcome technical barriers and push the boundaries of what is currently possible in aircraft propulsion as CTO at electric aviation company magniX.
Prioritize transparency: Use data and facts to shape behavior and outcomes.
- MacDonald champions the use of comprehensive, factual data to inform citizens and policymakers, enhancing public discourse and decision-making.
- Hansen uses software from AdaptX, the startup founded by her Seattle Children’s Hospital colleague Dr. Dan Low, to track emissions data from anesthetics, quickly showing the impact of specific decisions.
Capitalize on the human desire for recognition and competition. Hansen took that data transparency a step further by displaying and sharing the emissions results for her entire team in an easy-to-read plot so that everyone could see how their emissions compared to their peers, and to their own past results.
“That brought out everyone’s natural competitive spirit,” she explained.
She would highlight the lowest emitters from the prior month in her email out to the group. People would ask her how to get highlighted in the next month’s email, creating an opportunity for Hansen to show them the small adjustments in their anesthesiology practices that could significantly impact their results.
Tackle adjacent problems: Rather than just trying to solve the main problem directly with many solutions, Patel’s approach is to find all the related “adjacent” problems and try to solve those in parallel.
By solving adjacent problems, he explains, you end up with different ways of solving them that can then be brought back together to solve the primary problem. This allows him to tackle problems from new angles.
Look for opportunities to say “yes.” Startups are hard, and you hear “no” a lot, so when someone believes in you and says “yes,” you have to appreciate that moment, said Wang, the Boundless CEO.
Speaking to his startup specifically, he said, when you witness the daily struggles of immigrants trying to create better lives for themselves, it’s hard not to say “yes” whenever there’s an opportunity to help them.
“For me, being able to be default ‘yes’ means that you can quiet all your fears of failure, you can inspire hope in others and you can appreciate just how darn fortunate we are to be able to say that word,” he said.
Find your inspiration to change the world for the better: Ultimately, this is the biggest common thread among the six “Uncommon Thinkers”: their recognition of broader societal problems, their fierce desire to solve those problems, and their ability to find unique solutions in their own expertise and experiences.
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