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Accepting the Unexpected

By Peter Lloyd

Once in a while, creative people struggling with problems, encounter unexpected solutions. Too often they overlook them. The better you prepare yourself to accept unexpected solutions, the more likely you will be to break new creative ground.

Call it the Columbus effect, serendipity, or dumb luck, but some of our greatest, new-to-the-world discoveries drop themselves in the paths of people looking for something else. In the case of the Slinky toy, the “inventor” wasn’t looking for anything. He was just alert enough to recognize a toy in a falling spring.

My Creativity News Updates document the steady march of accidental discoveries crossing disciplines.
All of these cross-disciplinary examples give you good reason to embrace open innovation—invite ideas from inside and from outside your organization. Share your discoveries—if you can’t use it, give it to someone who can. Search for solutions in foreign territory—follow Tom Edison’s advice to “keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully.”

But what about recognizing unexpected solutions that solve the problem at hand?

In the Natural Selection Process of Animal Crackers, Stephen Grossman and I prepare problem solvers for finding unexpected solutions that solve the problem at hand. The key is to recognize and face failure. To help you do this, we ask you to identify all the ways you’ve failed to solve your problem, then, to understand why your failed attempts did not work. Why did they fail? What was missing? What does that tell you?

From the Animal Crackers manual:
By directing your attention to what’s wrong with your method, rather than what’s wrong with the situation, you start to understand what you don’t know. By thinking about why you’ve failed, you step outside of yourself and escape your habitual patterns of thinking. You become more conscious of the way you think. Now it’s easier to shift your perspective. At the same time, you’re allowing the intuitive part of yourself to be heard and to suggest where the answers may lie.
Even though most accidental discoveries, by their nature, tend to solve other problems, you can prepare yourself to recognize surprises that solve yours. Cast off all your expectations. Open yourself and all your senses to novel possibilities. Go back and revisit rejected solutions, not for what you expected from them but for what you failed to appreciate. Actively look for solutions in “forbidden” territory such as other disciplines, cultures, eras of history, and all the domains of nature.

See also:
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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