CHAPTER 1
Leaping
When we’re toddlers, we have all the time in the world. Days last forever. Everything fascinates us. The world is filled with wonder. Our urge to explore and play fuels our curiosity, which is all-consuming. We are sponges, hungry to experience everything around us, immersing ourselves in our environment in every way possible, with all of our senses. Put us in the sandbox with a cup and spoon and we will occupy ourselves for hours, content to play until we get tired, thirsty, or hungry. Our brains soak it all in, wiring thousands of new connections each day, creating new knowledge. As we gain language skills, our curiosity takes the form of incessant questions, unbound and uncensored. Then, in preschool, our activity becomes more structured. We learn about rules: sitting up straight, coloring inside the lines, resting on cue, speaking in turn, standing in lines, and, of course, never talking when we’re in one. In elementary school, we learn the importance of answering the teacher’s questions correctly within strict time limits. Our performance depends on it: we’re graded on our ability to regurgitate quickly. As we move up in grade, all of that gets exaggerated, enforced, and accelerated, year after year. Our own questions lose priority, until we eventually lose our desire to ask at all, for fear of disrupting others. As we enter the workforce, we bring with us this embedded right-answer-now! mindset, which pleases the boss, who has taken the place our teachers once held. By the time we’re 25, we’re finely tuned, well-oiled machines of efficiency, wired to answer quickly and, if we’re lucky, correctly.
Given our grooming, is it any wonder that we leap to solutions?
THE LEAPING FLAW
Psychologists give Leaping any number of labels, from the more sophisticated “rapid cognition” to the more colloquial JTC, which stands for “jumping to conclusions.” Malcolm Gladwell called it “thin-slicing” in his 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, the genesis for which actually concerned an incident he had with some New York Police Department officers, whom he thanks in his acknowledgments.
As he tells it, he had grown his hair long after his megahit The Tipping Point, which for most people is inconsequential. Not for Malcolm . . . his hair is even more wild in person than it looks in pictures.* All of a sudden, he was getting all the wrong kinds of attention from authorities—traffic stops, airport security pat-downs—which culminated in his being stopped for questioning by three NYPD officers as he strolled down 14th Street in Manhattan. They were looking for a felony perpetrator, the defining quality of whom was a “big head of curly hair.” The officers had driven their van up on the sidewalk and jumped out on nothing more than a glance at Malcolm’s head. It took a full 20 minutes before the officers set him free, even though he had nothing whatsoever in common with the police artist’s sketch, other than hairstyle. “Something about that first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist,” Gladwell wrote. “That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions. And that thinking led to Blink—so I suppose, before I thank anyone else, I should thank those three police officers.”4
Blink was published right in the midst of my work with the LAPD bomb squad, so the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I shared the story with the officers I worked with in follow-up sessions, and we all agreed that no matter how trained and skilled someone might be, everyone falls prey to Leaping. They actually had their own term for it: jumping the gun. In fact, they decided to give me a taste of my own medicine, which actually involved a gun. They invited me to Elysian Park, home to the LAPD Academy. And oh did they ever exact revenge for the shampoo exercise.
The gun I was given didn’t fire real bullets, thankfully. It was wired to some sort of video training device. In front of me was a large screen. After some cursory instruction on how to hold, aim, and fire the weapon, the fun began. A video began to play, from my point of view. In other words, it was as if I was a police officer wearing a GoPro. In the first situation, I’ve stopped a suspect car, the driver of which is wanted for questioning. As I approach the car, the driver gets out, reaches into his jacket pocket, and before I can even react, he’s stabbed me in the gut. I’m down. They play it again, and this time I’m ready. As the driver reaches into his jacket pocket, I shoot him in the shoulder. Turns out he was just getting his wallet.
Over and over, through a succession of look-alike situations in which I really do need to “blink” rather than “think” my way through simply to survive, I come to understand the incredibly difficult and complex tension between the two modes. I come to appreciate the enormous pressure one can feel when placed in potentially life-threatening situations that can transpire in a millisecond. And I come to understand that blinking and thinking are two sides of the same coin. The challenge is in training our minds to be more effective in applying either or both, as the situation dictates.
As I left my bomb squad officers rolling on the floor laughing at my dismal display of paramilitary potential, a question began taking shape in my mind: How might we exploit our inclination to blink to improve our ability to think?
WHY WE LEAP
That question drove me to investigate the connections between mind and brain, as well as mind and body. It also enabled me to find and eventually use a different kind of thought challenge, a more physical one, and one that I used with Chief Bratton and his deputies and commanders.
Now, there is perhaps nothing more satisfying than putting a police officer in handcuffs and watching them try to escape. Which is exactly what I did. I found something eerily appropriate called “The Prisoner’s Release,” from an 1896 book called Cassell’s Complete Book of Sports and Pastimes:
Take two pieces of string, and round the wrists of two persons tie the string, as shown. The puzzle is for them to liberate themselves, or for any one else to release them without untying the string.*
I went to Home Depot, got some different colored nylon rope, and made five pairs of handcuffs, and with uncontainable joy presented the challenge to LAPD’s highest ranking echelon. I gave them five minutes to escape, impressing upon them the constraints: the handcuffs must remain on the original wrists at all times . . . no removal allowed.
In a magnificent display of Leaping, each couple immediately and without a moment’s hesitation leapt into various versions of the same solution. I call it string dancing: stepping over the ropes, sliding them up and over themselves as they twirl and twist and struggle to get free. Over the course of the five minutes, not only did no one escape, but all of the other fatal flaws of thinking gloriously manifested themselves: they kept doing different versions of the same move (Fixation), they went through gyrations, twists, and turns that tangled them up even more (Overthinking). Halfway through, as exasperation set in, I gave them a hint: “You do not need to perform any dance movements . . . you can solve the problem face to face without a single twist or turn.” They stopped momentarily to listen, looked at me like I had two heads, looked at their partner, looked at their handcuffs, shrugged, and then immediately returned to what they were doing before (NIH). Soon they began asking if they could cut the ropes or swap hands since it wasn’t explicitly stated that they couldn’t (Satisficing), asking me if this is even possible (Downgrading), and even overriding their partner who might say something like, “let’s try a different way” or “let’s think this through” (Self-Censoring).
To this day, I use this as the icebreaker to a one-day bootcamp I deliver twice a year at the California Peace Officer Standards and Training Command College, in a program for senior police executives aspiring to become a chief of police in a California city. The results are similar, with roughly one out of every 20 or so couples escaping the handcuffs elegantly. Each time that happens, it becomes clearer to me that the key to success is to hold off on “the dance,” and think about the problem first before taking any action whatsoever. Doing so enables the escape in just a few seconds, while the dancers continue to dance, with ever increasing levels of frustration.*
Perhaps the easiest way to explain Leaping is to do what psychologists and neuroscientists alike do: categorize our thinking into two main circuits. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow uses terms coined by psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West: System 1 and System 2. There are many other labels for these circuits, such as automatic and controlled, left and right brain, default and executive drive, conscious and unconscious thinking, working and latent memory, divergent and convergent thinking, basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex, etc. Let’s just keep it simple and memorable, taking our cues from Kahneman: FAST and SLOW. Let’s be clear that our brain is far more complex than this, and this two-circuit concept is simply a helpful metaphor that aids a short discussion.
FAST does the rapid, automatic, reactive, unconscious, and instinctive thinking we employ to solve routine problems . . . Gladwell’s “blink.” SLOW handles the labored, effortful, conscious, and rational thinking we employ to solve more complex and unfamiliar challenges.
Here’s how it all works. When I toss a ball to you, you don’t need to think deeply about it in order to catch it. FAST, operating on “heuristics,” or patterns, guides your automatic response of quickly positioning your hands exactly where they need to be and clutching the ball as it lands right where you know it will. But if it happens to be the very first time anyone has ever tossed you a ball, it’s SLOW that will handle things, and you’ll drop the ball. You indeed have to think about it at first, deliberately and consciously trying to catch it until you “get it” and your brain forms a pattern, enabling FAST to work.
FAST is where our expertise and confidence live, where our intuitive “sixth sense” operates. It’s also where almost all of our mistakes get made. And it’s where Leaping occurs. Kahneman tells us that our FAST circuit is a “machine for jumping to conclusions” when information is limited. This is exactly what Malcolm Gladwell experienced with the three NYPD officers.
For example, suppose I ask you whether you think Nancy would be a great nurse. I tell you that she is caring, empathetic, and meticulous. You’ve probably already leapt to a yes, thanks to FAST, which reads that bit of information as all good signs, which of course they are. Still, you leapt. You did not bother to stop and ask what the critical qualities of a good nurse might be. What if I was just about to tell you that Nancy is a kleptomaniac, hot-tempered, and suffers occasional memory loss? None of this new information conflicts with the first three traits I gave you, but you probably don’t want Nancy as your nurse any longer.
FAST is what allows us to not only make it through the day with ease and efficiency, but performs effortlessly and highly effectively most of the time, especially when it comes to familiar situations and routine problems. No one wants or needs to think deeply about walking, shaving, or driving to work . . . we’d never get anything done!
But FAST makes mistakes. That’s where SLOW comes in. The problem is that while deeper thinking SLOW should be the one that prevents those mistakes and keeps us out of trouble, it’s lazy. It wants to act like FAST. SLOW thinking is just plain hard work, requiring too much mental and physical effort. And our formative years have not focused on thinking slow, but rather how to economize thinking to make it fast. All the math, language, and science skills we learn in school are really just handy proxies for thinking. If you’re taking action of any kind, FAST rules. SLOW kicks in only when FAST has run out of possible alternatives. The tension between the two systems is quite dramatic, and plays out every day of our lives.
Take the case of the TV remote control. You plop down on the couch after a long day, eager to watch television. FAST kicks in, and you automatically grab the remote, aim it at the box, and hit the power button. But the TV doesn’t come on. What do you do? If you’re like me, you keep hitting the power button. You try different angles, maybe wiping the infrared sensor on your sleeve, all the while hitting the power button. That’s your FAST beginning its run through known fixes. It knows what to do next: play with the batteries. You don’t replace them, you roll them around, because just the thought of getting up off the couch and having to rummage around in the kitchen utility drawer in search of four AAA batteries that probably aren’t there—because that would have required some SLOW thinking ahead—is unpleasant. But the battery roll fails, and you have to change them, which you do. Then you start all over, aiming and pressing the power button. But the TV still doesn’t turn on. SLOW finally kicks in, but only because you’ve exhausted every known fix, and you’re forced into deeper thinking, which almost always begins with a question. In this case, why isn’t this thing working?
Unfortunately, SLOW is the system of last resort. When it comes to the more complex problems, FAST leads us astray, gets in the way, and prevents us from solving them. By nature, the mind stays closed as long as possible!
So what can we do to improve the tension between FAST and SLOW?
Daniel Kahneman isn’t much help, advising us that “The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.”
I believe we can do far better than simply compromise. I am confident we can leverage our FAST circuit to improve our SLOW, and train our minds to fix our brain’s fatal flaw of Leaping. The clues are in the Caltech study cited earlier, which supports what I have observed and experienced in the last 10 years working with hundreds of problem-solving teams.
The secret lies in how to trigger SLOW so that it acts and feels like FAST.
THE FIX: FRAMESTORMING
If I have learned anything from facilitating problem-solving sessions, it is that we will be largely unsuccessful in attempting to shut off the Leaping impulse, and we should not even try. We will make far more progress if we instead redirect and channel the instinct to act into behavior that feels like brainstorming,* but involves generating questions instead of answers.
It’s called framestorming, a mash-up of framing and brainstorming. It’s a way to change behavior without the pain of change, and it works amazingly well. Framestorming is more like aikido in martial arts, which uses opposing forces to one’s advantage, rechanneling and redirecting them; it’s less like karate, which uses one’s brute force in the form of punches and kicks to win a confrontation. Aikido means “way of balanced life energy,” which really gets to the heart of what framestorming achieves: a better balance between FAST and SLOW thinking energy.
Framestorming operates under the same basic rules of brainstorming, which are well-known and well over a half century old: go for quantity, build on ideas, withhold judgment. That’s the storming part. It’s the part that feels good, because it calls up FAST. What about the frame part?
Musician Frank Zappa perhaps put it best when he said: “The most important thing in art is the frame. For paint, literally. For other arts, figuratively—because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where the art stops and the real world begins.”
What Zappa meant is that how we frame something has everything to do with how well it turns out, and that framing is as much an art as art itself. We frame art to draw attention to the picture. A great frame enhances appreciation. A picture isn’t complete without it. But most of us probably don’t pay much attention to the frame. Unless, of course, it isn’t there. In which case we probably find it a bit tougher to give the piece its proper consideration.
Framing in problem-solving is every bit as important, and works much the same way. The ability to properly frame an issue or problem goes far in avoiding the typical pitfalls that limit our ability to reach the elegant solution. But we’re not as good at it as we could be, for several reasons relating to the tension between FAST and SLOW. We’re impatient, with attention spans sometimes far too limited to put the required energy toward framing. We’re obsessed with solutions, but not with the process of generating the optimal one. We’re fond of common sense, which doesn’t always square with proper framing. And we have a flair for the obvious, mostly because it provides a suitable mental shortcut. We’re deluged with routine problems every day that don’t require framing, merely quick workarounds via FAST thinking, so our natural tendency is to treat complex problems requiring SLOW thinking with our preferred FAST thinking.
In my observations of all the people I’ve seen work on the kinds of thought exercises I’ve shared with you, framing rarely occurs. Almost everyone moves right into tossing up ideas in the mistaken belief that I’ve given them all of the information they need. They bypass the critical step involving the frame. They certainly don’t consider multiple frames. The reason they don’t stop is clear: it’s the stopping itself that feels uncomfortable. Remember, calling up SLOW is the last thing we want to do!
The best tool for fixing the Leaping flaw is framestorming. You do it right before brainstorming . . . always, every time. It will come easily and comfortably, because it feels like Leaping. Except with framestorming, the focus is on generating questions, not solutions.
The power of framestorming lies in its ability to engage our SLOW thinking in a manner that feels like FAST thinking. At the same time, it turns problems into puzzles. When we view something as a problem, we naturally engage in Leaping to solutions. When something is a puzzle, though, we naturally slow down a bit: we learn at an early age when doing puzzles that we need to get the corners and edges down first. Getting the puzzle frame right is half the battle!
Framestorming in Three Easy Steps
Framestorming consists of three straightforward steps conducted under the general rules of brainstorming, with the ultimate goal of stating the challenge as a compelling question that acts to frame a problem as an intriguing puzzle, one that engages our more imaginative SLOW thinking.
Step 1: Cue the language of frames.
Good frames are stated as questions. Friend and fellow author Warren Berger wrote what I consider to be the definitive treatment of the language of frames in his book A More Beautiful Question. In it he argues that while we’re all hungry for better answers, we must first learn to ask the right questions, then proceeds to demonstrate through a number of well-researched stories that the most creative, successful people in the world tend to be expert questioners. They’ve mastered the art of inquiry, raising questions no one else is asking—and finding the answers everyone else is seeking.
As Warren defines it, “a beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.”6
In my interview with Berger,7 I asked him who in business does the best job of asking beautiful questions. His answer: “Entrepreneurs, or at least the successful ones. They almost have no choice . . . their whole reason for being is to disrupt, innovate, and solve a problem no one else is solving. But first they have to define and frame the problem, and that’s usually done through smart questioning.”
For example, Netflix founder Reed Hastings asked, why should I have to pay late fees for renting videos? Square founder Jack Dorsey asked, why can’t individuals accept credit cards? And it was Polaroid founder Edwin Land’s three-year-old daughter Jennifer who famously asked, why do we have to wait for the picture?
Warren advises cycling through three stages of inquiry:
- Why?
- What if?
- How?
“As I studied innovation stories,” he told me, “I found that questioners often started by trying to understand and frame a problem—and that tends to involve a lot of why questions. Why is this a problem? Why hasn’t anyone solved it? Why might it represent an opportunity? At some point, the innovator moves from why to what if questions—imagining possible solutions, often by connecting ideas. What if we tried X? What if we combined Y with Z? That’s the idea stage. Then, you have to get from imaginative, what if possibilities to something more practical and concrete; you begin to ask, how might we do this?”
Rarely in watching thousands of people grappling with a thought exercise do I observe questions of any kind get raised, much less beautiful ones.
Step 2: Generate questions.
Now generate as many Why? What if? and How? questions as you can. As in brainstorming, framestorming initially favors quantity over quality. Go for at least a dozen questions that frame the challenge, preferably more. Don’t stop until you’re well into the double digits.
Take the advice of Albert Einstein: “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” This is what your FAST thinking lives for, so go with the flow. Reserve judgment or evaluation for step three—the last thing you want to do at this point is be conservative or critical.
In thinking about the shampoo theft problem from the Introduction, a quick framestorming activity might have yielded a dozen or so questions such as: Why are people stealing the shampoo? Why doesn’t everyone steal the shampoo? Why haven’t previous solutions worked? Why is the shampoo so appealing? Why is it so easy to steal the shampoo? Why are people so tempted to steal the shampoo bottle? What if we did nothing? What if no one wanted to steal the shampoo? What if you couldn’t hide the shampoo in your gym bag? What if the shampoo didn’t travel well? What if the bottle was hard to move? How might we make it impossible to steal shampoo? How might we make people hate to steal the shampoo? How might we make it dangerous to steal shampoo? How might we remove temptation? How might we redesign the shampoo bottle without cost?
Note that none of these are solutions, but rather provocative precursors, some of which may immediately spark a solution that meets the constraints of the challenge. All of them challenge the original question of how to stop people from stealing without it costing a penny. As my friend and Stanford creativity professor Tina Seelig says, “Start by questioning the question you’re asking in the first place. Your answer is baked into your question.”
Step 3: Pick the two best.
Once you have a master list of frames, you can select at least two that will launch you into the solution brainstorming mode, which is essentially another round of the Why? What if? and How? questions, this time focused on answers. From there, you know what to do!
You should be aware that framestorming, while being a powerful antidote to Leaping, does not guarantee the elegant solution, but it will increase the odds of putting your best brain forward.
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* I met and spoke with Malcolm Gladwell several years ago when we were both speaking at the CA World Conference in Las Vegas. I was the warmup band.
* The original directions also include: “It adds to the amusement of the puzzle if one of the persons is a lady and the other a gentleman.” I’ve tried this. They are correct.
* The solution in Cassell’s is: “B makes a loop of his string, passes it under either of A’s manacles, slips it over A’s hand, and both will be free. Reverse the proceeding, and the manacles are again as before.”
* The rules of brainstorming are widely documented, so they do not need to be detailed here.