Unconventional Wisdom

A conundrum...
Ask a random selection of colleagues if they like PowerPoint presentations, and what do you think they’ll say? Chances are they’ll give you the thumbs down. But do they use PowerPoint themselves? The answer is probably ‘yes’.

Let’s be clear about this – they don’t like being on the receiving end of PowerPoint presentations but they use them themselves. Isn’t this somewhat odd and inconsistent? True, there’s nothing intrinsically bad about PowerPoint, but the way most people use it has turned it into the grey suit of business communications; ubiquitous, boring and predictable.

Perhaps the solution to the conundrum is that your colleagues plan to use PowerPoint in a new and creative way? Nice thought, but the answer is most likely ‘no’. So why do most people continue to use PowerPoint in the same old way – particularly when using it like this is guaranteed to put audiences to sleep?

It’s a circular argument but most people use PowerPoint because PowerPoint is what most people use. PowerPoint is just the way business presentations are done – end of story. If it’s good enough for most people then it’s certainly good enough for the likes of you and me. What’s more, there’s a widely held belief that if you don’t use it, your presentation will appear unprofessional.

Conventional wisdom
Another way of explaining this behaviour is to say that conventional wisdom dictates that PowerPoint is the right and proper medium for presentations. And where would we be without conventional wisdom? It’s our constant companion, telling us what current ideas, explanations and ways of doing things are true and right. It’s difficult to imagine life without it. Even the simplest of tasks would have to be reinvented on a daily basis – it would take an age just to get out of bed each morning.

But conventional wisdom also has a downside: it behaves like an overprotective parent. It never doubts that it knows what’s best for us. It carefully monitors everything we do because it is determined to protect us from the pain of repeating past mistakes. But like all neurotic parents it risks stifling our creativity under a suffocating blanket of solicitude.

And when it comes to taking on board new ideas or alternative ways of doing things, conventional wisdom is extremely resistant to change. What’s more, because most of us find change difficult, conventional wisdom’s inertia can be very appealing and can easily seduce us into holding tight to the status quo.

Change
So how does change happen, given conventional wisdom’s stranglehold on the way we think? Well, even though it feels like it’s been around forever, the term ‘conventional wisdom’ was coined as recently as 1958 by the economist J K Galbraith. In his book, ‘The Affluent Society’, Galbraith tackles the question of how change comes about despite the intractability of conventional wisdom. He argues that “the enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.” In other words, when our ideas about reality no longer adequately describe or explain that reality, conventional wisdom is eventually forced to abandon them in favour of ideas that do.

Galbraith’s approach is reassuringly practical. Let’s take a look at it in action in a context close to my heart: the kitchen. Until quite recently conventional wisdom dictated that it was necessary to sear meat – i.e. cook it quickly at a high heat – before stewing or roasting it, to seal in all the meat’s juices. Cooks diligently passed on this idea from generation to generation without giving it much thought. Eventually experiments demonstrated quite clearly that the idea was wrong. In fact, both seared and unseared meat lose roughly the same weight during cooking. (If searing really sealed in the juices, seared meat would be significantly heavier than unseared meat at the end of the cooking process.)

But why was the idea called into question after so many years? Was it knocked off its perch by a better idea about cooking meat? Following Galbraith, I think the reason for change was probably altogether much simpler and more practical than this.

It was probably triggered by a head-on collision between an idea – – if I don’t seal meat, it’ll dry out – and a contradictory experience – today I’ve slightly overcooked this steak and it’s as dry as a bone. The collision gives rise to a contradictory experience because according to the idea of searing meat, it shouldn’t be possible to dry out a well-done steak because the searing should seal in its juices.

A creative opportunity
This inconsistency between an idea and an experience that apparently contradicts it is the seedbed of change. We usually ignore this kind of inconsistency but, like the irritant grain of sand in the oyster, over time it gets bigger and more and more irritating until we feel compelled to do something about it.

Our everyday work lives are filled with many such irritating grains of sand, and each one cries out for a creative and innovative response from us. Conventional wisdom tells us we do things this way because everyone else does them this way, and anyway they’ve always been done like this. It’s easier to stick with the conventional way of doing things, but when the irritant becomes too much, it’s time to act creatively and strike out against conventional wisdom.

So next time you notice a mismatch between the way you’ve always done something and the practical results you’re getting, don’t hide behind the blindfold of conventional wisdom. Instead, be courageous and remind yourself that this could be a chance to find a better way of doing things. Think oyster, and never lose sight of the fact that every new irritant is potentially the birth of a creative pearl!

© 2006 Martin Shovel CreativityWorks



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