I have underestimated “wandering” as a creative problem solving tool and I would wager that you have, too.
As children, we were experts in fearlessly exploring the world around us, but as adults we’ve let the practice atrophy. Rational thinking, thinking logically, or knowing the destination before you start, have taken over as the de facto methods of operating in the adult world.
Intellect and logical explanations carry a lot of value once you get older. Adulthood is confusing enough as it is, but we feel like we should have the answers by now, so we tend to gravitate towards those who have the answers, or seem to have the answers (they might just be “faking it till they make it”).
And yet, some of the most successful people in the world (e.g. Jeff Bezos, James Dyson) seem to take pride in not having all the answers and instead encourage thinking through wandering (suggesting ideas or asking questions without judgement of said ideas or questions)—they just called it by a different name, i.e. “lateral thinking.”
Advertising executive Rory Sutherland explains it in his book "Alchemy," and it’s his explanation I want to dig deeper into because I used it myself, this past week, when I was trying to solve the problem of getting real estate students to take their licensing exams.
For context, this was a presentation I was preparing for a 60-hour real estate fundamentals course. I had just recently passed my exams and thought I would come back to the class and share my advice and experience with current students.
You see, when I attended the course back in June I had learned a few interesting tidbits about the student success rate from our instructor:
1. Most students "chickened out" from taking the course exam and perpetually postponed it
2. The pass rate for the final state & national exams is ~40%
In a more recent conversation, the instructor told me that a few students from my summer cohort had still not taken the tests.
My hope with this presentation was to provide some guidance on how to study for the exam and give my peers some modicum of confidence to take the exams in the first place.
And so, with that mission as the wind in my sails, I booted up Google Slides and took my first crack at crafting the slide deck only to find my enthusiasm quickly waning. My first draft had a "that's nice" feeling to it. It read like a journalist covering the 5Ws of a news story without going into what the characters in the story felt—it covered the facts of what I did but didn't go any deeper. My intuition shouted that the depth was necessary because I had listened to a lot of presentations in my time and the ones that stuck with me did so by connecting on an emotional level. But more specific to my audience to-be, these students likely refrained from taking the test for emotional reasons like fear.
So, to get the creative juices flowing and think outside the box, I tried lateral thinking.
In "Alchemy", Sutherland covers a simple exercise to laterally think through a problem.
He encourages to,
ask a dumb question and [answer it] with an open mind.
To explain through example, let's ask a dumb question:
"Why do people eat at restaurants?"
Sounds like a silly question, yes, but it's not entirely.
Your immediate answer might be "because they're hungry" and you would be right, but the problem is we as adults stop thinking after the first logical answer. Lateral thinkers ask you to keep going, to "wander" through alternative answers without judging them from the onset:
Other reasons people might eat at a restaurant:
To not cook (maybe they feel they're not good at cooking)
To avoid having to wash dishes
To have an excuse to invite a friend (or date) out
To show off to their friends (if it's an expensive restaurant)
To feel pampered (it's nice having someone cook for you)
To support local businesses
To try a cuisine they've never tried before (exploration, adventure)
To try a bottle of wine that's exclusive to the restaurant
To build up the courage to ask the hostess out on a date
To scope the place as a future place of employment
To enjoy the ambiance
To be surrounded by people (they feel lonely at home)
The list goes on...
Some of these answers may not be helpful but others like “to enjoy the ambiance“ might give a restaurant owner something else to think about besides making the food better—and we wouldn’t have gotten that idea if we had simply stopped at the first sensible answer.
Now to attempt this on my own presentation, I asked the dumb question:
"Why are these students choosing to postpone the test?"
And I came up with:
Maybe they're not confident in how ready they are (lacking enough signal that they're ready)
Maybe because they lack the time to prepare
Maybe they're worried what their friends and family will think if they fail (social pressure)
Maybe they're paranoid about the math portions of the exam (past bad experiences)
Maybe tests bring back bad memories of school (past bad experiences)
Almost instantly, I had several new angles I could tackle in my one presentation. Not only would I speak to the tactical side of how to study (e.g. “maybe because they lack the time to prepare“) but also the emotional management side (e.g. “maybe tests bring back bad memories of school”). The outcome of wandering through the answers to a silly question was a presentation that would likely have something for everyone in the class--in contrast to my first draft which spoke to narrower, logical assumptions.
A few days later, I gave the presentation to the Wednesday class and by all accounts it was a success! The instructor had reached out to me some days later and shared that the student loved the presentation and wanted me to come back to answer some of their questions. Word of mouth had also spread to the other cohorts who asked if I could come in and speak for their sessions.
It feels strange to say that wandering and reconnecting with our unpretentious childhood curiosity can be superior to rational thought but this is one example where it helped me produce a better product. And it was fun to boot.
Music I discovered this week
I stumbled on Laufey by wandering through Twitter earlier last week. Love her bio on Spotify: "As a musician, my goal is to bring jazz and classical music to my generation." It’s not often you see an artist with a clear mission statement.
A 50¢ word (aka words that say a lot with less)
Flâner (verb): to wander aimlessly through a city
Definition from the BBC article “The word that encapsulates ‘Frenchness’“ by
.For Your Thoughts
“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”
—Bruce Lee
It’s a little trite to say that we’ve lost sight of asking simple questions as adults but it’s true. I hope today’s post gives you a little courage to ask the “dumb” questions and be willing to wander.
Yours,
-Rahul
P.S. a reminder you can reply directly to oldmanrahul@substack.com, or you can tweet me @oldmanrahul about this edition. Thanks for reading and supporting my writing :)