Dinosaur Hall, Fort Worth Museum of Science and History
“The problem is never how to get more innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.”
- Dee Hock, founder, Visa, Inc.
“…you can’t truly hope to
beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol. This necessary shift in outlook generally
happens as a result of ‘hitting rock bottom,’ which is AA-speak for when things
get so bad that you’re no longer able to fool yourself.”
-
Oliver Burkemann, Four Thousand Weeks:
Time Management for Mortals (2021)
Dry January began in 2013
with Alcohol Change UK both as a public health campaign and to inspire thinking
about drinking addiction. The first of
the famous Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Steps reads “We admitted we were powerless
over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” Only when the addict can admit that drinking
makes any decent life impossible can the reality of addiction be faced at last—so
that steps can at last be taken to devise a life that has a chance of working.
Giving up on what is unsustainable doesn’t just apply
to destructive drinking. It is the
foundation of an approach to problem-solving that begins with the destruction
of what is not working.
For AA members, the “admission statement” is designed to
initiate what psychotherapists call a second-order change: a shift in
perception (sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual) that results in a totally new appreciation
of a situation or problem. The second-order
perception then allows for an entire range of solutions that were not even
visible under the first-order viewpoint. It is from this newfound range that
entirely new solutions can then be allowed to emerge.
This is why “idea extinction” is so important: it is the destructive act necessary to
ridding ourselves of the delusion that the old idea can somehow be forced to become
effective. Nothing short of total
annihilation can move the mind forward and away from what has proven a failed
idea. This is the “rock bottom” that’s
as good as an education about maladaptive thinking.
Creative problem-solving consultant Steve Grossman explains
why, for better ideas to be born and nurtured, worse ideas must be put to rest:
not gently, but terminally and for good.
Once this occurs, the old ways of thinking can be buried. Now when the problem is reopened and fresh, the
technique of reversing assumptions can be applied. Assumption Reversal exposes the unconscious
assumptions supporting old solutions—which can then be examined and discarded. The outcome: prospecting for value in
completely new territory. AR builds from a reopened base: a redefined concept
of the problem to be solved. This
entirely refreshed way of looking at the situation then can expose new potentials
the newly opened mind can take full advantage of.
Like a light suddenly switched on, old ways of
resolving the problem are extinguished. This act creates the potential to turn
products and services to unexpected and more successful uses and directions. (See
his article “Extinction: A Power Tool to
Source New Ideas” (2019), www.creativityjournal.net.) He explains that “In
helping businesses solve difficult and persistent problems, I have discovered
that it is not any lack of ideas that prevents even very bright people from
finding solutions. Instead, one of the biggest roadblocks to new and creative
solutions is not conjuring new ideas but in ridding the brain of those already
embedded.”
Examples of second-order thinking are the hallmark of
invention and innovation. Computers were
assumed to be for scientists only, working in labs, and used to crunch numbers. The total demand was projected at 100,000,
worldwide, all scientists. But the
current computer as mass media in every home show what happens when they are
programmed for words and images rather than calculation. On the road, vans and off-road vehicles were
for commercial and sporting purposes only before the minivan. In 1983 Lee Iacocca saw the potential for a
family vehicle with cargo and passenger space, saving Chrysler and shaping all
car design into the future—and now making a comeback in sales. (He also noted that focus groups are not the pathway
to new concepts.)
In education, before World War II, college-bound
students were scholars, bound for academic careers in teaching and research,
not the general public. College is now
an expected achievement of an extended learning curve. Amusement parks were sketchy places far from
family life and middle-class taste; their redesign as theme parks left Disney as
the world’s top entertainment brand. All
of these major innovations in the information, transportation, education, and entertainment
fields have transformed life. They all
involved a major rethinking about their purposes and possibilities. Add the 3D printing of body parts, the space
station, interstellar exploration, smart watches, Alexa, and even discount
brokers (as everyone becomes a stock-market investor) to that list.
Failed products and initiatives suffer from an
“optimism bias,” the conviction that every megaproject, ad campaign, or
invention has a good chance of making it in the marketplace. In reality, few building megaprojects meet
their objectives of cost or demand, and 90% of all new products fail. A short list of these projects includes
Afghanistan (unmanageable starting with Britain’s invasion in 1830), the Segway
(which didn’t replace walking), the Orkut social network (too early to reach
critical mass), Disney’s America (the infrastructure politics went wild), the
metric system, Prohibition, Kmart, the 2004 Athens Olympics (leading to
Greece’s debt trap), the Chunnel (an ongoing net loss to the UK, along with Denmark’s
Great Belt Tunnel), and Enron (too good to be true).
These cases became caught up in a downward spiral of
cost overruns and benefit shortfalls they couldn’t recover from to prove
themselves viable. A perennial problem in project management is failure to look
deeply at their assumptions at the front end, the far cheaper alternative to
launching and then making expensive fixes as things fall apart. The analysis of how people actually will use
these things, and the conditions needed to make their use possible, is far more
desirable at the fuzzy front end than putting out fires in a system doomed to
fail. Many times, proposals on the table
need to be prematurely, permanently sunk to save millions or billions, so that proposals
better conceived and designed could use that same funding to launch and
succeed.
