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BEING RIGHT AT THE END

Vertical thinking, I've pointed out, is sequential and logical.  When you think vertically, you know you're on the right path because you're watching the landmarks along the way. You've been this way before, and you know where the road goes.

Because it's sequential, vertical thinking is very attractive and comforting to most people. That's why we continue to use it, even in situations where it's not working. We want immediate and constant feedback indicating progress, and so we look at the road signs outside the window and we see that they're the same road signs we've seen before, and we don't notice that the road we're traveling on is going nowhere. We get sucked in by the familiar, and wonder why we end up in a ditch.

What I'm suggesting you apply in your Creative Problem Solving sessions is an attitude not of "Great, I know this stretch of highway," but one of "Wait and see." I'm suggesting that, when somebody comes out with a strange idea, you suspend your judgment long enough to find out whether it's in fact (as you suspect) a dead end, or whether it might be a short cut.  You need to do that because following the beaten path is a good idea only if nobody changes the road - and, in business today, the road is changing all the time.

People who are committed to the beaten path, who are continually suspicious of innovation and "quirky" ideas, are being run off the road more and more because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth. It's that you can be wrong every step of the way, and still be right in the end. That's not logical. It doesn't make "sense." But it's a fact.

The two kinds of thinking I'm talking about - the vertical thinking that needs instant, constant reassurance that you're on the "right" path and the lateral thinking that allows for stops and "wrong way" turns - may be likened to two styles of football offense. The "vertical" style of offense is the kind that relies on the Big Play, the seventy-five-yard "bomb" pass, the quick fix that will make everything all right. The "lateral" kind of offense is the kind that doesn't mind losing a yard here or there, as long as you get where you're going in the end. I was always an advocate of the stop-and-start, "lateral thinking" type of offense. Not that I had anything against throwing a seventy-five-yard touchdown pass. But I found out from long experience that the Big Play - the Doug Flutie last-second miracle - is, most of the time, just wishful thinking. What wins football games is not that direct, all-or-nothing approach, but the hard, play-by-play work of a bunch of guys creating possibilities together.  Trying #34 if #206 didn't work, and #67 if #34 falls through, and so on down the field. It's having not to make a TD on every play, but being satisfied if the final score shows you're ahead of the quick-fix artists.

I'll give you one specific football example, for which I'm better known that I ought to be. I've gotten a lot of credit over the years for revolutionizing the business of quarterbacking, because unlike previous quarterbacks, I "left the pocket" behind the center and scrambled all over the field. Very innovative, all the sports commentators said. Innovative, hell: I was just trying to save my ass. In eighteen years of professional football, I never did discover a way to put the ball in a receiver's hands when I was lying under two hundred and fifty pounds of defensive lineman. I started scrambling because I didn't want to get scrambled. Call it innovation if you want. I called it simple survival.

But it was a case of lateral thinking, and I adopted that approach to the game for the same reason that any good manager adopts a "lateral" approach to business problems. He sees that vertical thinking, even though it may mean he's right at every step of the way, is keeping him stuck in the pocket. It's not moving his team down the field. That's why you change quarterbacking styles. That's why you change business styles. That's how you develop Creative Problem Solving.

Of course, scrambling back and around a difficult situation takes more time than sticking to the pocket and going for the TD on every play. Just as it takes more time to discuss options with your team members and arrive at a Consensus rather than a majority vote. There's no denying that if you have to get to the solution now, Creative Problem Solving is not the best business approach.

But let's face it. If you think you have to get there now, chances are you're not going to get there at all anyway. Winning, I've often said, means being unafraid to lose. It means being willing to take a chance on a new, untried route and taking your lumps once in a while because you know that, over the long haul, you win more by taking calculated risks than by playing it safe.

You know the story about the guy who was lost in a thick fog and figured that if he just followed the tail lights of the driver in front of him, eventually he'd find out where he was? This reasonable, logical plan was upset when the car in front stopped short and he plowed right into its rear end. Getting out of his car, the driver who had been following behind started screaming at the person who had stopped. "What the hell did you pull up short like that for?" "Why shouldn't I?" the other driver responded. "I'm in my
own driveway."

A lot of people in business are like that guy in the car behind.  They'd rather play Follow the Leader any day than come up with creative solutions, because Follow the Leader is "safe." In Follow the Leader, you know exactly how everything will turn out, right? As the anecdote illustrates, dead wrong.

I'm assuming you don't have to get there now, and I'm assuming that you're willing to take calculated risks - not the blind certainties of following the leaders - in order to get there.   If these assumptions are correct, then the extra time I'm asking you to spend in developing mutual, creative solutions in team settings will be time well spent. I guarantee it. You might not see the results this quarter. But you will see them. In more fluid cooperation among your team members. In heightened synergy.  In off-the-wall solutions that wouldn't have occurred to you in a hundred seasons if you'd stuck with the "tried and true" methods of decision-making.

If you're in the game for the long run, then you should look at the extra time that Creative Problem Solving takes not so much as time spent, but as time invested in the future. No pain, no gain, like they say in a lot of sports situations. You want instant success or instant failure, fine: keep plugging away at the Big Play. Keep straight-lining it all the way into the dirt. But if you want ongoing motivation and ongoing new ideas and ongoing productivity, you've got to think on your feet. Creative Problem Solving is the best way that I know of to keep that thinking light. Light as in "flexible," "easy to manage," and most of all "illuminating."

Yes, it takes more time. But it accomplishes something that the quick-fix, vertical styles of problem solving can never do.  It gets you where you need to go.

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