"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
--Howard Aiken
Now, I don't want to disparage the general level of receptivity to great ideas among the common herd--oops! I mean general populace--but I confess I love this quote by Howard Aiken, who was an early pioneer in computing back in the days before most people even thought computers were possible. Aiken's words capture, in a wry and wily kind of way, the challenge that Possibility People face. I quote him here as a gentle advisory: If you accept the first two principles of the Possibility Paradigm (below), you may find yourself with a boatload of fresh, good ideas--and you may run into the phenomenon Aiken describes. Not to worry, there's a solution for that, and I'll discuss it in a later column. For now, let me present the two Possibility Principles that form the basis of the Possibility Paradigm. They're all you'll need to get started playing the Possibility Game for yourself.
Possibility Principle No. 1, a.k.a. "The Possibility Principle"
Anything is possible.
Quite simply, the first Possibility Principle asserts that anything is possible. It's self-explanatory; it means what it says: Anything is possible. Not almost anything is possible, not lots of things you've never thought of are possible, not most everything you can possibly imagine is possible. No. It means anything is possible. No qualifiers. I know that's a whopper for some of you to swallow (see Aiken quote, above), so please proceed to Possibility Principle No. 2, for a bit of throat-ramming.
Possibility Principle No. 2, a.k.a. "The Paradigm Principle"
Part A: If something isn't possible from within your paradigm, change your paradigm.
Part B: Keep changing paradigms until you find one from which that thing is possible.
Simple, right? Actually, it can be.
Here's how I got started on this idea: Years ago, I read a scholarly article by Donald Schön, then on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Chris Argyris of the Harvard Business School. They were highly respected researchers and consultants to government agencies, big corporations, and other organizations. In that article, they talked about the power of reframing. They gave some examples about how, by changing the metaphors you use to think about a problem, you could come up with solutions--when no solutions seemed possible from within your previous problem-solving framework.
I dimly remember a couple of examples. One involved the design of a high-functioning paintbrush. The designers couldn't get the paintbrush to do what they wanted until they abandoned their notion of it as a brush and started to think of it as a pump. Then they immediately knew how to design it to be able to "pump" the paint in a way that had never been done before with a paintbrush. Another example had to do with solving the problem of urban blight. When social planners changed their metaphors for how they thought about "the housing problem," they stopped designing big monstrosities of low-income housing (e.g. the now-demolished Cabrini Green in Chicago) and began to create livable communities that worked.
This is what I mean by Keep changing paradigms until you find one from which that thing you want becomes possible--that thing you want to do or that problem you want to solve. Those paintbrush designers had to play with Possibility for awhile before they found their new paradigm. They kept trying different metaphors until they hit upon one that gave them an elegant solution.
In my previous post I wrote: "The Possibility Paradigm is a perceptual and conceptual framework that releases a hidden power within us: the power to play in possibility and choose the options and potentials we prefer." The paintbrush and housing examples are exactly that. Painters prefer a brush that reduces the time needed to complete the job. Low-income housing residents, and the cities that house them, prefer affordable housing that works.
As for more about anything is possible--as opposed to almost anything is possible--that will have to wait for next time since I've run out of room. For now, please ask yourself this:
"What if the Possibility Principles are useful?"
Don't worry yet whether or not they're true. If you just pretend for a moment--act as if--they're true, what new things become possible for you?
