Game Changing

 We humans can’t help imagining, inferring, predicting, simulating and innovating. We have evolved to produce ‘multiple models of reality’ for ourselves. These cognitive moves encompass what is no-longer—in an infant’s language ‘all gone’, hence irretrievable except in our minds; what is not-yet—expected, hoped for or aimed for; and what is not-really—imagined or explored.

We connect the dots between the facts, myths, beliefs, opinions and rumours we’ve had access to. We make mistakes but, as the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman noted in his Thinking, fast and slow, published in 2011 by Penguin, ‘it’s easier to recognise other people’s mistakes than our own’. Building on the biologist Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, published in 1976 by Oxford University Press, the professor of literature Brian Boyd wrote in his On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, published in 2009 by Harvard University Press, that, to make the most of what we interpret and expect, our minds ‘mine the present for clues [we] can refine with help from the past—the evolutionary past of the species, the cultural past of the population, and the experiential past of the individual—to anticipate the immediate future and guide action’.

We’re likelier to adopt new ideas and alternative ways of doing things if they contain seeds and signs of what we already know and are used to. Most of us are challenged by radical departures from comfortable, customary ways of thinking and acting. For a while at least, revelations and revolutions tend to be controversial and unsettling (see, for example, the philosopher, academic and social commentator Karl Popper’s (1945) The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945 by Routledge & Kegan Paul).

The more significant a breakthrough is, the likelier it is to meet resistance. ‘Paradigm shifts’ the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in Chicago, IL, by the University of Chicago Press open up previously unthought-of understandings and practices. Upheavals of attitude and approach may be gentle, but the more significant a breakthrough is, the likelier it is that vested interests will resist and fight back—in academia, in society at large and close to home. It seems there are always individuals or groups who have something to lose when new ways of thinking and doing things come to light.

Competing paradigms offer choices of methods and outcomes and demand to be judged by divergent criteria or novel standards. They suggest more or less irreconcilable accounts and treatments of the way things seem to be and how they might go on to be. They have to gain acceptance to become commonplace. In The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, published in 2009 by Harper Press, the professor of biographical studies Richard Holmes wrote that ‘Science is truly a relay race, with each discovery handed on to the next generation. Even as one door is closing, another door is already being thrown open’. Sometimes, intolerable change is side-stepped: a new paradigm is rejected and we go back to ‘normality’, putting aside or suppressing disputes and schisms. But, if divergent and contrary testimony and evidence build up and take hold, a crisis is reached.

Yet new ideas and practices rarely eradicate every trace of what they replace. And when established paradigms fail to withstand emerging ones, they collapse and are subsumed along with stubborn discrepancies, ill-fitting methods and anomalous conclusions. We have ways of holding onto ambiguous, discrepant and contradictory ideas.

Looking back, it is as though new ways of thinking and doing things were bound to be as we’ve now accepted they are. Paradigms shifted with Galileo Galilei’s observational astronomy; Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics; Charles Darwin’s proposition that all species descended from common ancestors; Marie Curie’s theory of radioactivity; Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity; Sigmund Freud’s method for treating psychopathology; Rosalind Franklin’s understanding of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), ribonucleic acid (NRA) and viruses; and Vera Rubin’s work on the existence of dark matter. If you deviate from an accepted norm, you may be thought misguided and even be treated as ‘other’—deviant, subversive or wicked. But this is how science and everyday life proceed. We change our ideas and practices by questioning, bending, altering and displacing paradigms.

Outsiders and newcomers may have a head-start when it comes to reframing thinking and ways of working. Perhaps their advantage is that they understand and accept they see things differently. Over 65 percent of Nobel Prize winners from the USA in recent decades have been immigrants. The journalist, broadcaster and table tennis player Matthew Syed noted in his Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, published in 2019 by John Murray, that, when we stay within one perspective or on a single topic, we may ‘become prisoners of our paradigms. Stepping outside the walls, however, permits a new vantage point’; and ‘when ideas are shared, the possibilities do not add up, they multiply’.

The entrepreneur, chairman and CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings and the author and professor at the INSEAD business school in Paris, France, Erin Meyer wrote in their No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, published in 2020 by WH Allen/Ebury Publishing/Penguin Random House, that ‘In most organisations people join the dots the way that everyone else does and has always done. This preserves the status quo. But one day someone comes along and connects the dots in a different way, which leads to an entirely different understanding of the world’.

Just in case we’re tempted to think that ground-breaking and game-changing are all innovators and originators ever do, the organisational psychologist and author Adam Grant reminded us that ‘Originals are not that different from the rest of us. They feel fear and doubt. They procrastinate. They have bad ideas. And sometimes it’s not despite those qualities but because of them that they succeed’. His advice was that we should ‘know that being quick to start and slow to finish can boost creativity’. We ‘need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones’, and can motivate ourselves ‘by doubting our ideas and embracing the fear of failing to try’. (See his 2016 TED Talk The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers and his Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, published in 2021 by Penguin Random House.)

Being original is a considerable achievement. Game-changers must admit to themselves at least that they may not know but will find out and be inventive. If we’re going to live a better, more sustainable, more harmonious life, we have to have doubts, confront our ignorance, and look again and elsewhere. Perhaps game-changers’ and originals’ crucial characteristic is that they have a self-reflective observer’s heightened sense of what they imagine and do. More than the rest of us, they attend to and experiment with their intentions, methods and effects.

 

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