At Jump, we often view hybrid thinking as the deliberate mash-up of business strategy, social research and design to tackle highly ambiguous problems for businesses looking to grow. But that doesn't mean hybrid thinkers need to be limited to those fields.

As I noted in my last post, technology analysts at Gartner are currently using hybrid thinking to explore the future of enterprise architecture. And as I discovered earlier this week, a physicist is leading the charge to investigate why our financial markets crashed so precipitously over 20 scary minutes last May. The so called "Flash Crash".

According the to New York Times, the SEC's Flash Crash investigation is under the watch of Gregg E. Berman – a Princeton trained physicist with two decades of Wall Street experience who's now working as a regulator. As the Times notes, he brings a refreshing and much needed set of skills to the table:

"In investigating the crash, Mr. Berman says he finds himself in a position similar to his physics work 20 years ago, when he was collecting huge amounts of data and comparing the competing views of many laboratories on a question dividing particle physics — whether the neutrino, one of the least known and most common elementary particles, actually had mass.

Today he finds himself in familiar territory, sifting through huge amounts of messy and disjointed data, and at the same time reading blogs and e-mails from a wide range of observers, each with a theory about what happened on May 6."

In essence, he's practicing market regulation like a physicist while also leveraging deep experience in trading. And that's hybrid thinking in action. Mr. Berman is tackling a highly ambiguous policy issue in ways that traditional regulators – with legal or financial backgrounds – cannot.