In 1992, Oxford English prof Andrew Nuttall wrote the following:
The human capacity to think provisionally, to do thought experiments, to form hypotheses, to imagine what may happen before it happens, is fundamental to our nature and to our spectacular biological success ... The cleverest thing Sir Karl Popper ever said was his remark that our hypotheses ‘die in our stead’. The human race has found a way, if not to abolish, then to defer and diminish the Darwinian treadmill of death. We send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them fall.
That’s the tidiest explanation I’ve seen of our infinite appetites for catastrophe in media and in the imagination.
There’s much to gain from the activity of worrying about responses to some imagined, awful event. Mental rehearsal prepares us. We imagine. We plan. We ruminate. And as the expendable armies fall, over and over, the mind is cluttered. All this automatically, unwillingly, exhaustively.
We might also stop and turn the armies back and inhabit the silence.
(But that’s for another day.)
This is hard
- We’re born experts at doing thought experiments automatically, intuitively, and individually.
- But we’re terrible at doing thought experiments deliberately, or being able to speak or write about them.
- Even worse, we believe we’re equally great at both kinds of thinking.
The bad news
Think of the containers we’re meant to pour our great ideas into:
- Suggestion boxes where ideas go not merely to die but to be forgotten “even by God.”
- Big-design-up-front schemes that admit only a single hypothesis. Hope you picked the right idea at the outset of that multiyear effort.
- Asinine standards for projects like
6x return on investment, which serve only preclude experimentation and prohibit critical thinking. - Initiatives where everyone is discouraged by an early failure and gives up, with the cry of: “we tried that and it didn’t work!”
These containers are bad, and you can find them everywhere.
The good news
The good news is: there are better ways of working and deciding, together.
- Instead of suggestion boxes, create listening systems.
- Do set-based design and allow for new trade-offs and discoveries without blowing the budget.
- Validate ideas through rigorous PDSA, with small, reversible changes.
- Celebrate failure as the thing one can learn from.
All those continuous improvement methods, all the great facilitation approaches, the techniques for self-organization? That’s what they’re for. They’re here, they’re tested, and they’re effective—and they are not easy.
From where I sit, this is the job. Let’s get to it.