No Way!

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” says Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s “The Sign of the Four” (and two other books in the series). Many problem solvers have applied the maxim to separate the signal from the noise, finding the real cause. I believe that the maxim creates a real struggle for those under the gun to find the culprit causes. This is one maxim that lots of folks at Toyota are stressed over.

How quickly do we label something as “impossible” when evaluating risks, alternatives, or focus for investigation? Does our frame of reference filter out what we can’t imagine or refuse to believe? How much does the race to conclude cost us when we’re under the gun? How much does personal belief, level of ignorance, or cerebral capability affect our judgment? Sadly, even when all that stuff is working well, what makes us forget while under duress? After the recent earthquake, Why didn’t the Chilean navy issue a tsunami warning that cost so many lives, even when they had a plan and process to do so?

I don’t know for certain, but I am certain that there are lots that I don’t know. In fact, history seems to make the most assertive comments about what is impossible sound like idiocy. “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” said Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. A similar conclusion was uttered in 1843 by a predecessor at the Patent Office. A search on Google will unearth a myriad of similar comments including “640K ought to be enough for anybody” from Bill Gates.

Last year online sales surpassed in-store sales on Black Friday (the in-store sale make or break day). Does anybody recall all the chatter about online sales would never work because they were insecure? I’m glad that Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Pierre Omydar of eBay were steadfast in pushing forward. In-house IT departments have from time to time refused to support technologies that they did not sanction, a behavior that often lags the speed of business (Twenty years ago we ignored the scare tactic and pressed forward installing Word rather than continue to suffer with the less perfect WordPerfect). Some caution is warranted, careful evaluation is appropriate, but functional preferences are not. Technology seems to outpace most things we know and we can be easily scared by the clever. Anyone recall the go to market strategy of a very big blue mainframe computer maker focused on scaring customers away from moving to distributed computing (pc’s)?

Nothing in history, even the industrial revolution, comes close to the rate of change we currently experience, nor the way technology is changing everything we do, and much of what can be done for us or to us. For the most part, the world is better for it, Thoreau lovers notwithstanding. Technology is redefining how we will succeed or not and it does so faster than we can imagine. Maybe we need to get better at imagining? Or perhaps relax the jump to pull out the “that’s impossible” spray paint. A great habit to lose is reaching into the nostalgia bag and saying, “We tried that before and it won’t work here ….”Because it certainly won’t work as long as we believe that past failures define our current capability or possibilities.

Next time I hear No Way, I might imagine, Way!

Thoughts?