1. The Right Answer

Life can be like a big noisy party with people talking, music playing, and glasses clinking. But even with all of this noise, it’s possible for us to understand the person across from us. Or the one thirty feet away. That’s because our attention is selective—we can tune in certain things and tune out others.

See for yourself. Take a look around where you’re sitting and find four things that have “red” in them. Go ahead and do it. With a “red” mindset, you’ll find that red jumps right out at you: a red telephone book, red in the blister on your index finger, red in the wallpaper, and so on. Similarly, whenever you learn a new word, you hear it eight times in the next three days. In like fashion, you’ve probably noticed that after you get a new car, you see that make everywhere. That’s because people find what they’re looking for. If we look for beauty, we’ll find beauty. If we look for conspiracies, we’ll find conspiracies. It’s all a matter of setting our mental channel.

Where do we learn how to set our mental channels? One important source is our formal education. There we learn what’s appropriate and what’s not. We learn many of the questions we use to probe our surroundings. We learn where to search for information, which ideas to pay attention to, and how to think about these ideas. Our educational training gives us many of the concepts we use to order and understand the world.

Speaking of education, how did you do on the exercise on the previous page? If you chose figure B, congratulations! You’ve picked the right answer. Figure B is the only one that has all straight lines. Give yourself a pat on the back!

Some of you, however, may have chosen figure C because it’s the only one that is asymmetrical. And you’re also right! C is the right answer. A case can also be made for figure A: it’s the only one with no points. Therefore, A is the right answer. What about D? It is the only one that has both a straight line and a curved line. So, D is the right answer too. And E? Among other things, E is the only one that looks like a projection of a non-Euclidean triangle into Euclidean space. It is also the right answer. In other words, they are all right depending on your point of view.

But you won’t find this exercise in school. Much of our educational system is geared toward teaching people to find “the right answer.” By the time the average person finishes college, he or she will have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes, and exams — many similar to the one you just took. The “right answer” approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This may be fine for some mathematical problems where there is in fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life isn’t this way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers — all depending on what you are looking for. But if you think there’s only one right answer, then you’ll stop looking as soon as you find one.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher put a small chalk dot like the one below on the blackboard.

She asked the class what it was. A few seconds passed and then someone said, “A chalk dot on the blackboard.” The rest of the class seemed relieved that the obvious had been stated, and no one else had anything more to say. “I’m surprised at you,” the teacher told the class. “I did the same exercise yesterday with a group of kindergartners, and they thought of fifty different things it could be: an owl’s eye, a cigar butt, the top of a telephone pole, a star, a pebble, a squashed bug, a rotten egg, and so on. They had their imaginations in high gear.” In the ten year period between kindergarten and high school, not only had we learned how to find the right answer, we had also lost the ability to look for more than one right answer. We had learned how to be specific, but we had lost much of our imaginative power.

An elementary school teacher told me this story about a colleague who had given her first graders a coloring assignment:

The instructions said: “On this sheet of paper, you will find an outline of a house, flowers, clouds, and sky. Please color each with the appropriate colors.”

One of the students, Patty, put a lot of work into her drawing. When she got it back, she was surprised to find a big black “X” on it. She asked the teacher for an explanation. “I gave you an ‘X’ because you didn’t follow the instructions. Grass is green not gray. The sky should be blue, not yellow as you have drawn it. Why didn’t you use the normal colors, Patty?”

Patty answered, “Because that’s how it looks to me when I get up early to watch the sunrise.”

The teacher had assumed there was only one right answer.

“I’m not coming back until you fix it,” bandleader Count Basie told a nightclub owner whose piano was always out of tune. A month later, Basie got a call that everything was fine. When he returned, the piano was still out of tune. “You said you fixed it!” an irate Basie exclaimed. “I did,” came the reply. “I had it painted.”

The practice of looking for the “one right answer” can have serious consequences in the way we think about and deal with problems. Most people don’t like problems, and when they encounter them, they usually react by taking the first way out they can find—even if they solve the wrong problem like the nightclub owner in the above story. I can’t overstate the danger in this. If you have only one idea, you have only one course of action open to you, and this is quite risky in a world where flexibility is a requirement for survival.

An idea is like a musical note. In the same way that a musical note can only be understood in relation to other notes (either as a part of a melody or a chord), an idea is best understood in the context of other ideas. If you have only one idea, you don’t have anything to compare it to. You don’t know its strengths and weaknesses. I believe that the French philosopher Émile Chartier hit the nail squarely on the head when he said:

For more effective thinking, we need different points of view. Otherwise, we’ll get stuck looking at the same things and miss seeing things outside our focus.

A leading business school did a study that showed that its graduates performed well at first, but in ten years, they were overtaken by a more streetwise, pragmatic group. The reason according to the professor who ran the study: “We taught them how to solve problems, not recognize opportunities. When opportunity knocked, they put out their ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs.”

Not long ago I did a series of creative thinking workshops for the executive staff of a large computer company. The president had called me in because he was concerned about the stagnant thinking environment at the top. It seemed that whenever his subordinates would make a proposal, that’s all they’d make—just one. They wouldn’t offer any alternative ideas. Since they had been trained to look for the right answer, they usually didn’t go beyond the first one they found.

The president knew that it was easier to make good decisions if he had a variety of ideas from which to choose. He was also concerned with how conservative this “one-idea” tendency had made his people’s thinking. If a person were presenting only one idea, he would generally propose the “sure thing” rather than take a chance on a less likely off-beat idea.

This state of affairs created a less than ideal climate for generating innovative ideas. I told them that one way to be more creative is to:

Often, it is the second right answer which, although offbeat or unusual, is exactly what you need to solve a problem in an innovative way.

One technique for finding the second right answer is to change the questions you use to probe a problem. For example, how many times have you heard someone say, “What is the answer?” or “What is the meaning of this?” or “What is the result?” These people are looking for the answer, and the meaning, and the result. And that’s all they’ll find—just one. If you train yourself to ask questions that solicit plural answers like “What are the answers?” or “What are the meanings?” or “What are the results?” you will find that people will think a little more deeply and offer more than one idea. As the Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling put it:

“The best way to get a good
idea is to get a lot of ideas.”

You may not be able to use all of them, but out of the number you generate you may find a few that are worthwhile. This is why professional photographers take so many pictures when shooting an important subject. They may take twenty, sixty, or a hundred shots. They’ll change the exposure, the lighting, the filters, and so on. That’s because they know that out of all the pictures they take, there may be only a few that capture what they’re looking for. It’s similar with creative thinking: you need to generate a lot of ideas in order get some good ones.

Inventor Ray Dolby (the man who took “hiss” out of recorded music) has a similar philosophy. He says:

Inventing is a skill that some people have and some people don’t. But you can learn how to invent. You have to have the will not to jump at the first solution, because the really elegant solution might be right around the corner. An inventor is someone who says, “Yes, that’s one way to do it, but it doesn’t seem to be an optimum solution.” Then he keeps on thinking.

When you look for more than one right answer, you allow your imagination to open up. For example: How do you keep a fish from smelling? Cook it as soon as you catch it. Freeze it. Wrap it in paper. Leave it in the water. Switch to chicken. Keep a cat around. Burn incense. Cut its nose off.

One technique for finding more answers is to change the wording in your questions. If an architect looks at an opening between two rooms and thinks, “What type of door should I use to connect these rooms?” that’s what she’ll design—a door. But if she thinks, “What sort of passageway should I put here?” she may design something different like a “hallway,” a “tunnel,” or perhaps a “courtyard.” Different words bring in different assumptions and lead your thinking in different directions.

Here’s how such a strategy can work. Many centuries ago, a curious but deadly plague struck a small village in Lithuania. What was curious about this disease was its grip on its victim; as soon as a person contracted it, he’d go into a deep, almost deathlike coma. Most victims died within a day, though occasionally a hardy soul would miraculously return to health. The problem was that since eighteenth century medical technology wasn’t very advanced, the unafflicted had quite a difficult time telling whether a victim was dead or alive. But since most of the victims were dead, this wasn’t a major problem.

Then one day it was discovered that someone had been buried alive. This alarmed the townspeople, so they called a town meeting to decide what should be done to prevent such a situation from happening again. After much debate, the majority voted to put food and water in every coffin. They would even put an air hole from the casket up to the earth’s surface. This would be expensive but it would save lives. Another group proposed a cheaper solution: implant a stake in every coffin lid directly over the victim’s heart. When the lid was closed, all doubts about the victim’s condition would be laid to rest. What differentiated the solutions were the questions used to find them. Whereas the first group asked, “What if we bury somebody alive?” the second group asked, “How can we make sure everyone we bury is dead?”

In 546 BC, Croesus, the last ruler of the Lydian Empire, consulted the Delphic Oracle for ideas on how to deal with the Persians. He received this prophecy: “If you attack, a great empire will be destroyed.” Croesus took this as a positive sign, and led his army against the Persians assuming that he’d destroy their empire. Instead, he was soundly defeated, and it was his empire that was lost.

Croesus’ demise illustrates what can happen when we stop with the first right answer—especially if it’s the one we assumed we’d find. As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus put it,

Heraclitus is on to something here. Hidden meanings and deception are all around us. In nature, animals camouflage themselves for protection against predators, and predators disguise their intentions in order to trap their prey. In war, military leaders feign weakness to lure an enemy into battle or fake strength to prevent an enemy attack. In sports, teams disguise one play as another to confuse their opponents.

Puzzle-makers delude would-be puzzle-solvers with confusing clues. And politicans lead their constituents astray with ambiguous pronouncements.

We get misled in our interpretation of these situations because our own assumptions work so well for us. As I said in the opening chapter, our minds are filled with ready-made answers. When we encounter situations similar to ones we’ve experienced before, we assume they will have a similar result (Croesus had attacked other enemies and had destroyed them).

One way to work around our assumptions is to ignore or “forget” the initial right answers that come to mind when we’re faced with a problem we’ve seen before. We can then seek out other right answers. As the novelist Henry Miller put it:

Indeed, forgetting what we know—at the appropriate time—can be an important means for gaining insight. Here’s an example. A seminar exercise I like to do involves making paper airplanes. This is how it works: I assign the participants to different teams and give each team fifty sheets of paper. Then I draw a line at the back of the room. Each team has five minutes to see how many airplanes it can make that can fly past the line, and the one with the most is the winner. The most common approach is to fold the sheets into conventional paper airplane shapes. But the winning design, more often than not, is a sheet of paper that has been crumpled into a ball. The crumpled balls of paper invariably “fly” past the line—the only criterion that has to be satisfied in the exercise. And the losing teams immediately grasp that what had most hobbled their thinking were their assumptions about what a paper airplane is supposed to look like. The winning teams also had these same assumptions initially, but then conveniently forgot them.

Another example is the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras. One day on his regular walk past the local blacksmith’s workshop on the island of Samos, Pythagoras temporarily forgot that the banging sounds produced by the smith’s hammering of iron bars were “noise”—his usual reaction—and instead heard them as “information.” He soon discovered that the banging sounds had a second right answer, namely, that musical pitch is a function of the length of the material being struck—and this became his first principle of mathematical physics.

This idea of forgetting one’s assumptions to discover other answers is captured in this wonderful epigram by Heraclitus:

I’d like to conclude this “right answer” chapter with one of my favorite Sufi stories.

Two men had an argument. To settle the matter, they went to a Sufi judge for arbitration. The plaintiff made his case. He was very persuasive in his reasoning. When he finished, the judge nodded in approval and said, “That’s right.”

On hearing this, the defendant jumped up and said, “Wait a second, judge, you haven’t even heard my side of the case yet.” So the judge told the defendant to state his case. He, too, was very persuasive. When he finished, the judge said, “That’s right.”

When the clerk of court heard this, he jumped up and said, “Judge, they both can’t be right.” The judge looked at the clerk and said, “That’s right.”

Moral: Truth is all around you; what matters is where you place your focus.

Much of our educational system has taught us to look for the one right answer. This approach is fine for some situations, but many of us have a tendency to stop looking for alternative right answers after the first right answer has been found. This is unfortunate because often it’s the second, or third, or tenth right answer which is what we need to solve a problem in an innovative way.

There are many ways to find the second right answer—asking “what if,” playing the fool, reversing the problem, breaking the rules, etc. Indeed, that’s what much of this book is about. The important thing, however, is to look for the second right answer, because unless you do, you won’t find it.

Tip: The answers you get depend on the questions you ask. Play with your wording to get different answers. One technique is to solicit plural answers. Another is to ask questions that whack people’s thinking. One woman told me that she had a manager who would keep her mind on its toes by asking questions such as: “What are three things you feel totally neutral about?” and “Which parts of your problem do you associate with tax returns and which parts with poetry?”

Tip: What conventional wisdom are you relying upon? What would happen if you forgot the obvious answers that spring to mind and searched for new ones?

Much of our educational system has taught us to look for the one right answer. This approach is fi ne for some situations, but many of us have a tendency to stop looking for alternative right answers after the fi rst right answer has been found. This is unfortunate because often it’s the second, or third, or tenth right answer which is what we need to solve a problem in an innovative way.

There are many ways to fi nd the second right answer—asking “what if,” playing the fool, reversing the problem, breaking the rules, etc. Indeed, that’s what much of this book is about. The important thing, however, is to look for the second right answer, because unless you do, you won’t fi nd it.

Tip: The answers you get depend on the questions you ask. Play with your wording to get different answers. One technique is to solicit plural answers. Another is to ask questions that whack people’s thinking. One woman told me that she had a manager who would keep her mind on its toes by asking questions such as: “What are three things you feel totally neutral about?” and “Which parts of your problem do you associate with tax returns and which parts with poetry?”

Tip: What conventional wisdom are you relying upon? What would happen if you forgot the obvious answers that spring to mind and searched for new ones?

Copyright © 1983, 1990, 1998, 2008 by Roger von Oech