Success: A Wall of Context
By Peter LloydThis is the last in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Success.
Success is 99-percent failure.Just as all attempts at order ultimately end up futile, all success flees us. Take a step further, in the context of problem solving, the sweet smell of success stinks. Success discourages us from finding even better ways to do things.
—Soichiro Honda
Remember the last time you mislaid your keys. How did you go about finding them? Most of us begin looking in the spot we expect our keys to be. Then we look in the other places we usually put them. Then we look around those usual places. Eventually we do something that illustrates one of the reasons we are not as creative as we’d like to be. We go back and look again in the places we’ve already searched.
The human brain loves patterns. Nature programmed it to find successful ways of thinking and to repeat them. For this reason, we must make an effort to break these patterns when solving our more challenging problems. Our thinking patterns can be mighty tenacious, though. That's why we keep looking in the same spot for our missing keys. Not until we give up and admit we’ve failed will our brain say, "Okay, look in the clothes hamper."
How difficult for a brain, programmed to know and remember, to admit failure. But when the problem is unusually perplexing—when your two-year-old has dropped your keys into the boots you gave to Goodwill—there's no other way.
Unless we try new ideas, we never know if they'll work. Typically we try to find a reason why the radical idea won't work. This reason usually finds support from past patterns of success. "That's not the way we do things," kills idea after idea in organizations. It can also limit your personal success.
Failure typically precedes success. Often because it takes failure to force us to out of our successful habits, even when our successful habits fail. No matter how many times a boxing trainer yells, "Keep your guard up!" it never really sinks in until the first time the boxer gets punched in the nose.
There's nothing wrong with honest mistakes, unless you keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Mistakes teach us what not to do again. Scientists look at mistakes as steps, the most valuable part of the process of elimination—identifying dead ends.
The most creative people you'll ever meet will be the ones who make the most mistakes. One way to encourage innovation is to allow for and even reward error. And if you're really serious about developing your creativity, you might to adopt the mantra, "If you're not making mistakes, you're just not trying hard enough."
In order to escape the cage of success, continually question the solutions currently in effect. If it ain't broke, break it. Or at least take it apart and improve it.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.