First, please read the brief article here.

Have you ever gone into a quiz or exam or class discussion where you knew you would be called upon, without preparing for it?  Where you don’t know the material?  How did you feel?

You are, as we all were in school, addicted to being right, knowing right answers.  This is what education has done to you.  Always knowing the right answers in a class is far more important than learning.

Beyond a classroom, what are the right answers?

Well, as in education, that depends in large part on the people upon whom you depend.  If your supervisor at work believes there is a right way to do things, those become your right answers.  In this case, as in schooling, there is a person who controls the things you want from your work.  A grade.  A salary.  Promotion.  Responsibility.  Power.  To attain those things, their right answers become your own.

Many would suggest that a worst case is where a friend, even life partner, strongly believes there is a right way to do things.  A right way for everyone, for you, to do things.  And therein lies the problem with right answers:  they do not allow for much flexibility, negotiation, and playful experimentation.  In essence, they rule out new possibilities for learning.

As the Quinn article suggests, there really aren’t any right answers outside of one’s own experiences, values, and beliefs.  Others who share our beliefs are usually seen as being right.  Those who don’t, must be wrong.  The closer we look, the more we realize what a shaky foundation that is.

Think of all the things that you once believed were right, and then they turned out to be wrong.  Our parents told us many things that simply were not true.  Most of the time, those omissions or outright falsehoods were meant to protect us from what parents perceive as a tough world.  Ever trust a person who then, through betrayal, proved to be unworthy of your trust?  Have you ever believed strongly in something and then, as you learned more about it – even came in direct contact with it – you changed your mind about it completely?  Ever developed a crush on someone, later to find out this was not someone you’d ever want to be with?

Think of all of those out there who have a stake in what we consider to be right or wrong.  Any person or company selling products or services, any politician, any person with whom we work or come in contact with, who wants to hold on to what they have, has a stake in how you see things.  It is highly likely that once you get a full-time job, you will become one of those people.  The one with answers you need everyone to believe are right because your job depends on it.

We come to accept that right answers are what we need to solve problems.  We rarely see how often knowing and seeking right answers is a huge problem by itself.  And this problem runs so deep, we aren’t aware of the massive role it plays in our lives.

You are driving and come to two roads that intersect.  What is the safest method for controlling traffic at that intersection?  Four-way stop signs, yes?  Actually, no.  It’s the roundabout / rotary.  The traffic pattern that most drivers hate because it creates too much anxiety.  And that is exactly why they are safer.  Intersections with stop signs or traffic lights provide right answers.  Every driver knows what to do and, more important, what others will do (although sometimes they don’t follow those rules, usually because of the mindlessness routine procedures create).  With roundabouts, no one knows for sure what the other drivers will do.

Anything that causes drivers to lapse into routine threatens safety.  Conversely, drivers are at their best when they are at high alert, full attention.  There are certainly guidelines for a roundabout, but the guidelines are always dependent on what the other drivers – those in the circle as well as those approaching it – are doing.  So we simply must pay attention.  Which makes roundabouts much safer.

We might say then that, when there are no right answers we must give more attention, more care, more thought to those situations.  Aha!  That leads to the first general principle for our playbook:  Get rid of your right answers.  Wait, whaaaaaaaat?

i don’t mean get rid of them, you can’t just easily throw them out, and you shouldn’t.  i mean suspend them.

A huge problem with our right answers is that, once we have them about an issue, there is no longer any reason to study that particular issue.  The issue arises, we know the answer, we state our answer and, if someone else has a different one, we’re likely to start arguing for our case.  While simultaneously ignoring the other’s argument.  If we do return to study the issue, psychologists tell us we most likely will engage in confirmation bias.  In other words, our right answers act as reality filters: it is as if we don’t even see things that are inconsistent with them.

If your job ever expects you to go out and find answers to a specific problem, you want to ensure that the answers you find are ones that solve the problem.  That requires you to step outside of your right answers.  That is what i mean by suspending them.  The idea of suspending our right answers is quite simple.  We adopt the view of Quinn’s “Martian anthropologist.”  We assume we do not know the answer, which means we have to engage in a very different strategy than automatic confirmation bias.  We need one that seeks the strongest arguments for all sides of the issue.  We need questions instead of answers.  In other words, we play; the kind of play we always do when we explore, when we seek new possibilities.

In essence, this is the process creative people use for discovering new opportunities as well as better ways of solving problems.  Suspending assumptions is part of a process called reframing.  We’ll discuss reframing further in class as it relates to mindset and, of course, we will practice reframing continuously throughout the semester.

Dualities, or the black-vs.-white game

Alan Watts describes this game as something we learn – as we do the ABCs – but without really knowing it; certainly, without knowing its impact on how we understand the world.  In essence, we learn that everything has its opposite:  hot/cold, good/bad, active/passive, love/hate.  Black/white.  And while every duality involves a spectrum – shades of gray – we think of them in the extreme.

However, a major problem lies in the impact this has on our thinking in two important ways.  First, we tend to see our choices and decisions in terms of either / or.  Either we adopt a strategy of closing 40 stores in the northeast, or we invest in more marketing to increase their profitability.  Close / Not close.  We lock ourselves into a reality that allows for only two options.

Second, in our dualities we tend to see things in terms of black versus white, as opposed to black and white.  In other words, one of the extremes is always good, the other is its direct opposite, is always bad.  So not only do we tend to see things as black and white, we have a strong preference for one versus the other.  The overall impact is that we restrict our options when facing decisions or seeking new possibilities.

To understand how restrictive this can be, think about this in terms of learning.  In education, as well as throughout Western society, we learn that success is always good, while failure is always bad.  However, if you have ever committed to a sport you know that you’ve learned as much from failure as from success.  When developing a new skill or practice, no one ever does it exactly right the first time.  In fact, the more we fail early on – and use those failures to improve our performance – the sooner we will attain success.  Failure is even more important at a time when society faces increasingly complex problems with no apparent solutions.  However, when organizations continually reward successes, and punish failures, it severely limits our overall ability to attain success – improvement – in the long run.

No better example of the impact of the black-versus-white game currently is the American political landscape.  Two sides – whether republican/democrat, liberal/conservative, white supremacist/#BlackLivesMatter – have become so polarized, very few pay any attention to the impact of our actions on the nation – or globe – as a whole.  Finding alternatives that seek common ground, compromise, shades of gray, simply do not exist.  And while global political dynamics are a great illustration of the black-versus-white game, we find its impact everywhere.

A challenge we must then embrace in this class involves learning how to step outside the forced choice way of problem solving and opportunity seeking.  Thus, our second general principle is: Reject either/or thinking!  Always seek alternatives.