By Mr Mark Edwards
“Here’s to the crazy ones,” begins Apple’s famous Think Different ad campaign of the mid-1990s, “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers”. It’s a celebration of history’s most creative people, drawing an interesting parallel between them: innovators from Mr Albert Einstein to Sir Richard Branson and Mr Pablo Picasso have all taken a rather interpretative approach to the status quo.
There’s a peculiar alchemy to the creative process that many of us would love to feel more comfortable with. But Mr Jonah Sachs, author of Unsafe Thinking – a new book intended to help you be “creative and bold when you need it the most” – says that playing it safe isn’t the answer. “So much creativity comes from when people break the rules,” he says. “There’s a huge value in interrupting people’s expectations and surprising them.”
But what does it actually mean to think “unsafely”? In Mr Sachs’ book, we are essentially encouraged to try doing the opposite of what we are told – or, more accurately, what we think we are being told. It’s a behaviour that Mr Sachs refers to as “productive dissent”. And yes, it can be applied in the workplace. However, before you start ignoring everything your boss asks you to do, consider why you could sometimes benefit from doing so – and how you’ll explain yourself afterwards. “Most importantly, you should be honest about why [you dissented]”, says Mr Sachs, “Say how, and why, you did what you did – why you did it for the good of the group, for instance, or so the company could meet its larger objectives.”
Unsafe thinking isn’t simply about disobedience, however. It’s about encouraging your brain to see the world – and itself – differently. And that means embracing your weaknesses. “Go outside your area of expertise. The more we try to make ourselves look like experts, the more error-prone we become,” says Mr Sachs, “Do something you suck at. The masters of any field focus their practice on what they’re not good at. The mediocre repeatedly do things they already do well.”
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a few examples of unsafe thinking to get you started.
Embrace discomfort
By the 1930s, Mr Mahatma Gandhi was giving speeches to crowds that even the most experienced orator would find intimidating. Which is all the more impressive when you consider the fact that he suffered from acute anxiety. The solution was counterintuitive. Instead of trying to battle it, Mr Gandhi welcomed his anxiety, viewing it as an opportunity to grow stronger. One particular night, having been kicked off a train in the middle of nowhere, the approach to anxiety inspired the idea for which he became most well-known: “satyagraha” (non-violent protest). He called the evening “the most creative night of his life”.
Adjust your focus
If you look at problems from a different angle, you’ll see different answers. Take, for instance, Mr Abraham Wald – a mathematician who was celebrated for his work for the US Navy in the 1940s. Unable to figure out why so many planes were being shot down, the Navy had turned to statisticians such as Mr Wald to solve the issue. The existing strategy was to armour-plate the areas of the returning bombers that were clustered with the largest number of bullet holes – the wings, nose and tail. Mr Wald immediately saw a flaw. These were the bombers that had returned relatively intact. It was those that had been shot down that should inform the areas they should be reinforcing. Thanks to Mr Wald, the Navy instead chose to place armour around the cockpit, where the pilots sat – saving untold lives and giving the allies a critical airborne advantage.
Utilise humour
Bogota, Colombia, 1994. A dangerous place to be a pedestrian. Thanks to most drivers’ complete disregard for road laws, or each other, simply walking down the street was a life-threatening activity. So how to tackle the problem and improve the relationship between drivers and pedestrians? Bogota’s new mayor, Mr Antanas Mockus, addressed the problem without a single police officer. The solution, instead, was comedy. He employed hundreds of mimes to walk the streets, mocking examples of bad driving. Unbelievably, it knocked some sense into the city’s drivers. Nobody likes to be laughed at, after all.
Disregard the rules (sometimes)
Gmail has wound itself so tightly into the fabric of our lives that it’s hard to remember a time before it. But, in 2004, Google had no real solution to how their new email service was going to pay for itself. One engineer, however – Mr Paul Buchheit – was on to something. What if Gmail could read your emails, and serve you up relevant advertising next to them? Ms Marissa Mayer, then a product manager, hated the idea – expressly ordering Mr Buchheit to drop it entirely. Luckily for Google, he had other plans. When Ms Mayer opened her email the next day, she found an advert for hiking boots alongside an invite to go hiking from a friend. To her surprise – it was actually useful. Mr Larry Page and Mr Sergey Brin agreed. The rest is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend.
Feature Image Illustration by Mr Patrick Ledger
