I drive to work most days. I always take the same route. On my commute I listen to audio books and don’t concentrate much on the road or the traffic. I’m on autopilot for most of the way. Everything is muscle memory. My brain is so used to the drive that it has decided my consciousness doesn’t need to be there for a great part of the trip. It’s only when something unusual happens that my brain requests my input on how we deal with a situation, usually quite urgently with a good dose of adrenalin just to keep things real.
My inability to concentrate for the entire drive to work has led me to conclude that most traffic fines must be given to people who aren’t paying enough attention to what they’re doing while they’re driving. Traffic fines are driving attention-deficit taxes.
Most days, when I get to work, I remember little of the drive itself. I can tell you the details regarding novel I’m listening to, and maybe that the traffic around the airport was soul suckingly horrendous. But for the rest, there isn’t much I’ve taken in.
It’s a bit like brushing my teeth. There are mornings when I’m so lost in thought that I don’t recall if I’d brushed the upper row or not. So I do them again, I think, but never assume.
So, you’re a shitty driver, who cares?
I’m not going to go into a whole spiel about reading Daniel Kahneman or Dan Ariely (you should). Instead, I’m going to tell you about my days.
I spend a lot of time in meetings. And I work with some of the smartest people I know. We’re talking somewhere between gifted and genius in most cases. And in these meetings, we are expected to make decisions, surface and evaluate ideas, and find ways to solve problems.
And, as you’d expect, have our fair share of corporate speak. We will sometimes double-click into a problem (this one is relatively new to me and I fucking hate it). We also take things off-line, breakdown silos and are forever in the hunt for those rarest of prizes, low hanging fruit. And for most part this corporate shorthand bonds us and helps us understand one another.
When corporate speak becomes the impediment
However, there are phrases that which are nothing more than euphemisms for ‘don’t think too much’. Throw away lines that discourage curiosity and serious thought . When I hear, ‘let’s not reinvent the wheel’ or ‘don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater’ or ‘let’s not boil the ocean’ and ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, I think of myself driving to work. And I picture the police officer at the scene of my car wreck telling onlookers that there’s nothing to see here. Which, when I consider my driving, will probably be a lie.
Your job and autopilot
The thing is there are activities that are fine to do on autopilot, but our job isn’t one of them. I’ve seen some of the smartest people I know do their jobs on autopilot. If the solution worked here, then it should work there. Rinse and repeat. People who are afraid to boil the ocean, to throw out bathwater and believe the wheel is still pretty amazing, aren’t thinking. Instead, they are focusing on what appears to them to be familiar problems and defaulting to tired solution.
And the more we engage that autopilot, the more we struggle to think clearly, creatively, and deeply when it really counts.
Now, I don’t want my airline pilot or my surgeon to get creative during landing or while she’s holding my spleen in the palm of her hands. But most of us aren’t pilots or surgeons. Most jobs I’ve encountered require people to solve problems – often complex, tricky problems. And to solve these, thinking, real thinking, the thinking that hurts and makes you tired, is required to uncover the best solutions.
Most of the world’s greatest solutions were found behind initial thoughts, under convenient assumptions, around the back of wheels and on the other side of that thing in the corner that seems to work just fine.
As I’ve told my team in the past; just because it’s in the baby’s bath don’t assume it’s a baby. If what is in the bath has a tail and rows of jagged teeth, then maybe it’s a crocodile, and you should throw it out before you give the real baby a bath.