THE RIGHT TO EXPLORE, TO LEARN, TO ACHIEVE

By 2.5, my daughter was daytime potty-trained, fully capable of handling her business on her own. One night as we sat down for dinner, however, she decided that she wanted assistance in going to the bathroom. “No,” I told her, “We’re having dinner; you can do it yourself.” She did not like that. Initially, her protests were just repetitions of her request. Then, she upped the ante by claiming that she needed assistance … because her legs didn’t work. She demonstrated by tumbling out of her chair and stumbling around the dining room, then falling prostrate on the floor. Quite the performance; she did not break character.

Until, we saw a little shimmy. Now she really needed to go and you could see the alarm in her eyes. She absolutely did not want to wet herself. But the idea of giving in was equally abhorrent. She was stuck, no way out of her predicament. And, the shimmying got more dramatic.

But then it stopped, as did the begging and whimpering. In fact, it was eerily silent. Abruptly, the panic slid off my daughter’s face, replaced by total calm. She headed towards the hallway – army crawling, her legs still didn’t work – and rounded the corner to the bedrooms and bathroom. I couldn’t see her anymore, but I heard some shuffling noises. Some sliding, some banging, some scraping. What I absolutely did not hear was toilet flushing. But she marched back into the dining room, plopped down at the table and dug into her meal. Not a shimmy to be seen.

After the table was cleared, with the kids off playing, my investigation began. I confirmed that the toilet was not used and I didn’t find any puddles or wet blankets. What I did find, in the trash, was a freshly soiled pullup. While Adelaide was daytime potty-trained, she still used pullups at night. So, she had crawled herself into her room, removed her pants and underwear, put on a clean pullup, done her business, discarded the dirty pullup, re-dressed herself and resumed dinner. She found a third way. She neither wet herself nor acquiesced to using the bathroom without help. She was totally trapped with no suitable options. Until she wasn’t.

Adelaide refused to accept her constraints, to give in to conventional wisdom, added a substantial dose of creativity and made the impossible possible. She sat in her discomfort – literally – until she found a better solution. She tapped into the Power of Possibility and achieved something magnificent … by the standards of a 2 year-old anyway.

The Rewards of Possibility

What happens when it’s not a toddler tapping into the Power of Possibility, but an adult? Or a collection of adults? Or a whole organization?

For Organizations

Possibility is the centerpiece of change, of innovation. Without possibility, there is no sustainable competitive advantage. Because anything you do that is successful will be copied at first opportunity, you must keep reaching for the next possibility. Without possibility, there is limited growth and adaptation; lack of responsiveness to circumstances curbs our ability to grip new opportunities or mitigate disruptions. A McKinsey study found that the best innovators – those that are most effective at harnessing the Power of Possibility – generate about 2.5 times as much profit as their less imaginative peers.

For Teams

Increased productivity, opportunities for learning, and enhanced group fulfillment all seem like pretty obvious connections. A less obvious one is inclusivity. Embracing possibility is synonymous with opening oneself to alternate points of view. We first must let go of the idea that we know something is true and that it is true for everyone. Being able to do that is fundamental to truly creating inclusive environments, where everyone can feel valued, respected, and heard. If we are closed off to possibility, we are, by definition, closed off to perspectives that differ from our own. And that can never be an inclusive environment.

For Individuals

Individuals benefit, too. I certainly have. Possibility has been the unifying theme of my professional journey – a career path that might charitably be described as meandering. I started as a chemist. Then I went to McKinsey, a destination no one in my circle knew anything about, but promised to get me out of the lab. Even at McKinsey, a place known for its ruthless “up-or-out” policy, I took a circuitous route, jumping off the beaten path to lead the global Strategy Practice for a few years before returning as the Firm’s most tenured team lead. Then, to a corporate executive role at Ecolab, CEO of a medical device startup, part-time faculty at the University of Minnesota, founder of my own management consulting company and now facilitator and public speaker. In not one case did I know how to do the thing I was signing up for. I didn’t make any of those moves because I knew I’d be successful. The bar was a lot lower than that: I only knew that it seemed possible I’d be successful and certain that I’d learn something useful.

In fact, I have failed. Many times! If I hadn’t left, I would’ve stagnated at Ecolab. I didn’t fit, was deemed too pushy and impatient and had made an enemy of one of the two candidates for next CEO. Similarly, my departure from McKinsey wasn’t just tiring of the consulting lifestyle, but also seeing the writing on the wall that I wasn’t going to make Partner. And I wasn’t a very good chemist; I have published exactly zero first-author papers, the most important benchmark for research academics. Yet not one of these things feels like a failure to me. I have no shame writing about them. Because in each case I took away critical, person-altering lessons. I am who I am today because I did these things, because I failed at these things. Take any of them away and I don’t look like myself, and I wouldn’t have the experience of my subsequent successes. The Power of Possibility gives me the right to explore, to fail shamelessly, to integrate learnings and move on to the next possibility.

Why is it so Hard?

I confess to being a big geek about behavioral economics, a relatively new field of study that acknowledges that, as humans, our decision-making capabilities kind of suck. Our brains spent millennia evolving to keep our lanky, weak, slow selves from being devoured on the savannah. They are hard-wired for situations that we rarely encounter anymore. When we apply those eon-old capabilities to the realities of today, we often make some terrible decisions.

For example, our brains experience fear hard and fast and big. We will do a lot to avoid that feeling; we’re incredibly cautious and tend to assume the worst. We are drawn to the known and flee from uncertainty. Don’t go into the dark cave! Stay away from the tall grass! Watch out for the shadowy copse of trees! Even when we know there’s a strong possibility of something great – maybe a patch of delicious mushrooms in the trees, – we’ll avoid checking it out because we just don’t know. When the downside of stepping into the unknown was literal death – when deciding to search for mushrooms could be the last decision you ever made – an abundance of caution made sense. But not anymore.

How often are you facing an actual life-or-death decision? Once a day? A year? A decade? Our decisions almost never carry that kind of downside. Instead, we live another day and, even when things go wrong, we get to learn. That’s what the Power of Possibility is all about: sometimes we find mushrooms, all the rest of the time we learn something about where mushrooms are (and aren’t) that gives us a better chance of finding them next time.

A second human decision-making flaw is confirmation bias. This is the tendency to see only what we want to see, to be aware of the information that aligns with our preexisting beliefs and unconsciously discard that which conflicts. This bias isn’t, itself, a survival mechanism, but an unfortunate byproduct of one. On the savannah, we had to make decisions fast. Quick, run away from the predator! Or, less dramatic, but equally life threatening: take the path to the left with fewer rocks, less likelihood of breaking an ankle, being unable to move, becoming a huge burden on my tribe and killing us all. Our brains are incredible machines, taking in tons of sensory input, making sense of most of it without us even knowing, and spitting out decisions. To process and prioritize large amounts of information quickly, we have filtering processes that rely on personal experience and preferences. And it’s all unconscious; scientists estimate 95% of what our brain does occurs without us knowing about it. The side-effect of that unconscious filtering is we flat-out miss most of the Possibility around us. It’s awfully hard to tap into the Power of something when we don’t know it’s there.

Finally, making room for Possibility takes time and effort. It’s vastly easier to do what we’ve always done than to change course. Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. And one at rest tends to stay at rest. Changing the trajectory requires the application of force. We’re dealing with the fundamental laws of the universe here! Inertia is the default. Tapping into the Power of Possibility requires force.

What to Do About It?

• Be choosy. It does take effort to do things differently, so pick the areas where it’s really going to matter. Better to make a dedicated effort in one or two things than get nowhere on twelve.

• Start … at the end. Of course, we’re always inclined to start at the beginning. But that anchors us on where we are and where we’ve been. It leads to incremental thinking and moderation. If you want to tap into the Power of Possibly, spend your time defining the dream, the wish, the perfect end state. You can always pare it back later.

• Separate exploration from decision-making. We curb ourselves far too quickly when we think we’re signing up for something. We start to hold ourselves accountable for what isn’t even there yet. At work, you can literally schedule separate meetings where only ideas, not decisions, not even prioritization or preferences, will be entertained.

• Refrain from asking if something “can” be done and start asking “how” it can be done. Make a swear jar for the “can” word. Watch your own language, even your internal dialogue. Mindset follows language. Live in the “how,” not the “can.”

• Confront risk, rather than avoid it. As we’ve learned, we’re hard-wired to loathe it. Know that you’re not alone when uncertainty makes your stomach turn into knots. There’s nothing wrong with you. But rather than run from it, look it straight in the eye. Characterize the uncertainty. There are different types. Few things are truly “black swan,” blind-siding, out-of-the-blue surprises; most have some degree of “know-ability.” Some are forks in the road; we don’t know what will happen, but it will be either left or right. Some are a range of options; we know outcomes will probably fall between two outliers. Create a language for how you talk about risk; some companies adopt a risk framework so their entire organization can work through the stomach churning together.

• Take small steps, not in what you dream is possible, but in how you act on it. Do experiments and pilots. Learn about the edge cases that keep you up at night. Allow yourself to fail and, because you’re learning, know that it is a success.

When my son learned to stand up in his crib, we caught an incredible video of him celebrating his accomplishment. I shared it far and wide. One of my friends marveled that he, “probably thinks he can do anything, that he’ll be able to fly someday!” She explained: with the pace at which infants pick up new skills – seeing, hearing, holding up their heads, reaching, touching, rolling over, grabbing toys, eating those toys, babbling, recognizing faces, sitting, crawling, on and on – they probably think anything is possible. Babies get the Power of Possibility. Then we lose it somewhere along the way.

My now teenager and I recently took a trip to Washington, DC, specifically to see the National Air and Space Museum. I captured a wonderful photo of him in front of the original Wright Flyer. When my friend said, “he probably thinks he can fly,” she meant it as a ridiculous example of something he obviously won’t do. But she was wrong. People do fly. And all because a couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio believed it was possible.