29 Impossible Thinking

Thinking about How to Accomplish the Impossible

We've looked at thinking outside the box and abductive thinking. For a tool to really take your mind beyond boundaries, look no further than impossible thinking. You take your headscratcher and expand it so that it's impossible to solve. Then you ask the question: If you had to solve this problem—if it were necessary to solve or if you would die if you didn't solve it—what would you do?

A few things happen when you have an impossible conversation. First, it's a ridiculous conversation, so you acknowledge that everything said or suggested—the whole conversation—is stupid. As a result, quiet folks with great ideas start to speak up, because nothing discussed can be incorrect. Even more exciting, the ridiculous ideas normally shot down are now acceptable. Because the whole conversation is impossible, every idea is a good one, no matter how impossible. Even more amazing, because it's an impossible conversation, your brain can't make the determination that a thought isn't important, so it no longer discards ideas.

This simple exercise will demonstrate impossible thinking. Remember the nine dots exercise in “Outside-the-Box Thinking,” in which you had to connect the dots using four lines without lifting pen from paper? Now do it with one line. (Try it before reading the next sentence.) In our workshops, someone usually shouts within 5 to 10 seconds, “Use a thick marker!” Nobody makes that suggestion when it's possible to do so while thinking outside the box, but because this problem is impossible, someone makes the suggestion very quickly. Why is that? Impossible conversations have no constraints and no reality, so anything goes. You no longer throw away ideas because they're silly; instead, you vet those ideas.

Some of our clients are in the pharmaceutical industry. In our company's innovation workshops, I ask how long it takes from the moment a lab scientist says, “Gee, a cure for disease X” to when a drug hits the market. The response I usually get is 10, 12, or even 15 years. When I ask what it would take to accomplish that in an average of nine years, I get responses such as “A lot of red tape would have to be cut” or “Not going to happen.” Then I ask if the whole process could take six months, and I nearly get thrown out of the room. That goal is unilaterally considered completely and utterly impossible. Then I frame the following scenario: suppose there's a virus called Q1X5, and it's highly contagious—so contagious that merely walking by a carrier would cause you to contract this killer. If you are infected with Q1X5, there's a 50 percent chance you will die within a year. As a result, a high percentage of Earth's population would die in less than three years. Clearly, this is a bad situation. Now enter a lab scientist who looks closely at his experiment and says, “Gee, look at this, a vaccine for Q1X5.” I ask the class, “How long do you think it would take to get that drug into the marketplace?” The participants in the class shout answers—weeks, maybe a month or two. “What?” I inquire. “You thought nine years was tough, and you almost threw me out of the room when I asked for six months. What's changed here?” They respond that the necessity would make them able to eliminate lab testing and go straight to humans; they could go to the front of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) line and skip clinical trials, and the FDA would lift the requirements for studying side effects. Of course, many of the solutions raised in this workshop were ridiculous and impractical, but trying to solve the impossible surfaced a number of initiatives that could be accomplished. Although they won't solve the impossible, the initiatives would make a huge difference in getting the time down to 9 years from 10 or 12.

Getting Started with Impossible Thinking

Here are a few places to consider using impossible thinking:

• When you're running low on ideas to solve a headscratcher, when traditional or outside-the-box ideas are coming close but not providing adequate solutions: Say you've got a plan that increases sales by 7 percent, but you need to get to 10 percent. The room is quiet, and no one is bringing new ideas forth. Challenge the group to grow sales by 50 percent, or everyone is fired. (You had no alternative but to do this.) You won't get to 50 percent, but the very act of setting an overwhelming goal will generate new ideas, and that extra 3 percent you seek will appear easy to achieve by comparison.
• When everyone says it can't be done: You're working on a project estimated to take 18 months. Someone asks if it can be done in 16, and everyone immediately says no way. Now is the time to ask for it to be done in six months. If you had to get it done in six months, or the competition would eat your lunch, and you'd be left in the dust with fewer people, no revenue, and no customers—what would you do?
• When you want to have fun solving a difficult problem: Impossible conversations are fun. Everything goes, and some ideas are so wacky they're laughable. Others are so ingenious you'll chuckle at why it took an impossible conversation to expose them.
• When the possible isn't going to cut it: When the problem is so deep that ordinary solutions won't work. Think about companies teetering near collapse because of tardy response to technology or market changes. They are, or were, in a nearly impossible situation. Regular, outside-the-box, and abductive thinking won't get them out of a seemingly impossible issue; they need impossible thinking to have a shot. If you're a brick-and-mortar retail shop selling goods available from dozens of online retailers, and your store traffic is plummeting, you need some impossible thinking. For example, what would you do if you had to get 10 times as much foot traffic into your store tomorrow as you did today, or you would go out of business?