February 12th, 2009 by John Williams

What does “impossible” mean?

Filed under General

How do you respond when someone tells you nothing is impossible? Does it help you see limits as mere obstacles to overcome? Does it encourage you to try things you would have never tried before? Does it revitalize your creative spirit and bring you back up?

Maybe you react the other way. It kills your morale. You might feel insulted, or you might immediately begin listing things you know are impossible. And you respond — either directly or within the privacy of your own mind — with anger and bitterness.

I know how I usually responded, and it wasn't positively. But recently things started to change. And I started catching myself being optimistic on occasion. I started thinking, you know, maybe not everything is possible. But maybe more things are possible than I thought.

So what made the impossible seem possible?

I've been thinking more and more about how this might be possible. At first I thought it might have been because I was learning to think more creatively, breaking away from my analytical, technical mindset. And that's partly true. But mostly I think it's because I gained more control.
The more control you have over your resources, the more optimistic you will be. When you have less control, you're going to see less possibility. Lose enough control and you'll become downright pessimistic.

When I challenged the optimists on their claims that "anything was possible" by asking how to solve impossible problems, they'd either respond by making up resources — time, people, or money — or by trying to change the nature of the problem. They assumed they were in control.

What makes the possible impossible?

Unfortunately, in most business environments the people who need to solve problems are rarely the people empowered enough to make changes. By the time they get the problem, the problem has been defined. Resources have been allocated. Timelines have been set. Sometimes those resources don't match the need; sometimes the problem is defined poorly, often the timeline is too aggressive. And these things cannot be changed except by the people who made the decisions.

When you are in such a situation, the last thing you want to hear from the person who can make resource allocations and decisions on problems is something along the lines of "anything is possible if you just put your mind to it."

What that means is you're not getting any help. You're stuck with the wrong tools, someone in charge who won't listen to you, and no authority to make your own decisions. What you are hearing is that the project will fail, and the person who made the decisions plans to put the blame on you for not being a "team player."

Under those circumstances, I've seen even the relatively trivial become genuinely impossible.

How do we fix this?

I said earlier that when my circumstances changed, I started seeing more things as being possible than I used to. I'm still trying to figure out what the differences were, and I think I'll be writing about that a lot.

But it's obvious to me that some of the places where I worked had policies and structures in place that discouraged innovation and creative thinking, inspired cynicism, and set themselves up for failure.

The irony, of course, is that some of these structures were intended to do the exact opposite — just like saying "anything is possible" to a person who is not allowed to make decisions.

Image: The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection, 08022, courtesy of The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. See also: American Memory.

Ken Robinson said in the book “Out of Our Minds” that innovation (overcoming the impossible) comes from five measurable things: 1. Autonomy; 2. Trust; 3. Risk-Taking; 4. Failure; and 5. Culture of Creativity. I can’t disagree, really. Thanks for the nice read.
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Posted by Steven on 02/12/09 at 10:21AM

Speak up.

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