Is ‘functional fixedness’ impeding your leadership decision-making?

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits our ability to see novel uses for tools or objects we’re already familiar with. Over our lifetime, we acquire knowledge about the world around us and the functions of objects. This understanding of objects and their conventional uses helps us navigate daily life, but it can also hinder us from thinking creatively about alternative uses. This tendency to mentally ‘fix’ an object’s function to its familiar use is what we call functional fixedness.

Functional fixedness is not a bad thing. It is good and strongly needed for us to survive. Imagine that you need to learn the use of a chair every day when you choose to sit on it? Or what is a car for? It is much more efficient, and evolutionarily beneficial, once learned, to know these things and not to use our brain energy daily to discover it anew.

While this efficiency is useful, it also comes at a cost: we often stop questioning whether an object, behaviour, or tool could be used in new ways. As we learn the functions of things and frameworks, we forget to think about them beyond their intended purpose. We forget to consider new applications for existing objects, behaviors, or tools.

While functional fixedness helps us navigate daily life efficiently, it also limits our ability to innovate. When faced with a challenge, we instinctively rely on what we already know. But if that knowledge doesn’t lead to a solution, we risk getting stuck in a mental block – unsure of what to try next. To foster innovation, we must first recognise this cognitive limitation and learn how to break free from it.

When and how do we get ‘infected’ by functional fixedness?

To better understand how to overcome functional fixedness, we first need to explore when and how it takes root in our thinking.

Research shows that functional fixedness starts to appear in humans around the age of six and intensifies as we grow, with older children showing greater fixedness than younger ones. This pattern mirrors the results of Land’s creativity test, which demonstrated how creative potential diminishes with age, suggesting that as functional fixedness strengthens, creativity tends to weaken.

This flexibility in young age is likely due to children’s limited experience with each object, meaning that the mental associations they form are not yet deeply ingrained. As experience with specific functions of objects becomes more firmly rooted, it restricts our flexibility in seeing alternative uses. Interestingly, how we learn an object’s function, whether through a video, picture or real-life experience, does not affect whether we develop functional fixedness. No matter how we learn, we still form fixed associations with objects. When solving a problem, we are more likely to break free from functional fixedness if we see it visually, rather than just hearing about it. Perhaps that’s why I instinctively sketch problems when I hear them; it helps me see the structure more clearly. Research shows that images and videos help reduce fixed thinking more effectively than audio alone. So, do sketch and draw when you get blocked.