Scene: 10:30 a.m., Parramatta Westfield, Sydney, Australia, April 27, 1983. As the 10 professional ultramarathon runners lined up for the first ever 875-kilometer (542.5-mile) Westfield Ultramarathon from Sydney to Melbourne, an eleventh man approached the starting line, looking clearly out of place. He appeared to be much older than the other men, twice the age of some, and his threadbare attire was nowhere near as fancy as the fine Nike and Adidas running gear the others were sporting. His varicose veins embarrassed him, so instead of runners’ shorts, he wore long plastic track pants to cover them. The pants had a series of small scissor-cut holes in them so he wouldn’t overheat under the Australian sun. While the other contestants had several different pairs of running shoes, he had a single well-worn pair that didn’t look capable of lasting 875 kilometers. He didn’t have sponsors, like all the other racers, nor a large support team or a mobile home to sleep in during the week long race. He looked like just some old guy lingering, loitering, and lumbering about.
But he wasn’t. He was racing. His name was Cliff Young, a 61-year-old potato farmer from “out Beech Forest way” who, in the press buildup to the event, had become known for his rather peculiar running background: chasing livestock around the family farm in waders and gumboots because he did not own a horse. He ran with an awkward style more like an erratic, slow shuffle than a runner’s smooth stride. As biographer Julietta Jameson put it, “To anyone seeing it for the first time, Cliffy’s shuffle might have looked like it would never get anyone anywhere, let alone get a bloke from Sydney to Melbourne. And if it did, it couldn’t possibly get a person that distance quicker than blokes with gaits honed by specialist training and sports science.”25
He was indeed an amateur compared to the rest of the field, all of whom were highly trained, elite athletes with deep marathon experience, winning records, and expert knowledge of how to run a race. He took his false teeth out because they rattled too loudly when he ran. By all measures, he was far more novelty than serious threat. When the starting gun went off he was left in the dust, just as everyone expected, in a true Tortoise and Hare kind of way.
Conventional ultramarathon wisdom held that runners should run 18 hours and sleep 6. Cliff Young did not know that, and no one told him. He had no idea of what it took to win a multiday race 875 kilometers long. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure of the route, and took a wrong turn on the first day. Since he didn’t know about the 18-hour “limit,” while the other competitors retired for the evening, Cliff Young just kept going. Even when a cold rain began to fall, he kept going. When he finally stopped to rest at midnight, he had gone over 100 kilometers without food.
As he started off on his second day, he did not know that his alarm clock had gone off two hours early, and simply began running. And he kept running, in that slow, awkward shuffle. After the second day, he slept for a single hour, and kept running. He continued in that pattern, not knowing what smart ultramarathoners know, that you are supposed to sleep for six hours, that the body has its limits. Henry Ford, who once said, “It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste,” would have been proud.
Whatever Cliff Young lacked in talent and experience, he more than made up for in mental toughness and grit. Perhaps the old maxim of where there’s a will there’s a way is true, because in a magnificent display of mind over matter, Cliff Young won the race on the fifth day, finishing a full ten hours ahead of the second place competitor, who knew, of course, what every expert ultramarathoner knows, that you can’t run 875 kilometers in five days, 14 hours, and 35 minutes—the equivalent of almost four marathons a day, without six hours of sleep each night.*
You certainly can’t if your brain leans toward Downgrading.
Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can or can’t, you’re right.” In that single line he captured the sum and substance of Downgrading. Cliff Young did not know that the whole world thought that running the Westfield Ultramarathon in the manner he did could not be done, so he was not limited by that mental constraint. In fact, his naïveté in all likelihood enabled him to win in the manner he did—because he didn’t know it “couldn’t be done,” he was empowered to do it. Downgrading does not exist without a mental limit. It exists because of a mental limit.
Downgrading is much like Satisficing, but is more of a premeditated, downward or backward revision of a stated goal. Downgrading, if left unchecked, often results in total disengagement from the challenge, a complete abandonment of objectives. The problem you’re trying to solve remains unsolved.
Downgrading manifests itself in several ways. In the Prisoner’s Release (rope handcuff) challenge, for example, it takes but a few seconds for participants to begin parsing the instructions stating that the handcuffs may not leave your hands at any time. In a true revisionist manner, they’ll reinterpret “your” to mean “our” and transfer one set of handcuffs to their partner and triumphantly sing out, “Ta-Da!”
In the shampoo and videotape challenges, the constraints are either completely ignored or immediately revised, the outcome being ideas that clearly fall well short of the admittedly stretch but achievable goals—0 percent theft or 100 percent customer rewind—followed by the selection and selling of an inferior solution. Or the trusty Pareto (80-20 rule) solution: “You won’t stop people from stealing the shampoo completely, but we can stop 80 percent of it with our solution.” They will proceed to rationalize away the other constraints with rhetoric intended to render them irrelevant.
The paradox at play here is that by Downgrading we somehow fool ourselves into believing we can declare victory . . . through a preemptive surrender! I see this happen often in project teams, and I call it “gaming the goal.” The legendary Jack Welch faced this very issue during his tenure as CEO of General Electric. Welch was known for his winner’s mindset, demanding that all GE lines of business maintain no less than second place in market share, and preferably first. But his lieutenants began gaming the goal by revising how they defined their respective markets, shrinking the market small enough that they could declare themselves number one or two in the space. Welch caught on, though, and reset the constraint so that no business could hold more than a 10 percent share, believing that if people defined their market to be much larger than their share of it, they would be more aggressive in pursuing opportunities to win the top spot.26
Psychologist Eric Klinger described the Downgrading process nearly 40 years ago, calling it the incentive-disengagement cycle.27 When we view a problem as unsolvable or a goal as unattainable, we go through four phases. The first thing we do is try harder. No surprise there. Next, if our efforts don’t yield the results we want, we get angry. Again, no surprise . . . happens every time I double fault my tennis serve. Third, we resign, mentally distancing ourselves from the goal, and we get depressed. Finally, our commitment dissolves completely and we become open to committing to a new goal. I’m fairly certain all of the world goes through these four phases each year with their high-spun New Year’s resolutions, and do so before January ends. As you will discover by the end of the chapter, though, there is new research on just how to exploit this cycle to defeat the Downgrading flaw.
A recent study by researchers at University of Zurich and University of Berne28 looked at marathon runners, not unlike those racing against Cliff Young, and introduced a concept they call an action crisis. “An action crisis,” they write, “is conceptualized as a situation in which individuals have already invested a great deal into their goal, but suffer repeated setbacks and/or a substantial loss in the perceived desirability of the goal, and thus become caught between further goal pursuit and disengagement from the goal, asking themselves whether to stop or go.” By following a group of marathon runners, some of whom suffered such an action crisis, they discovered a “mindset shift” in which the runners consciously devalue their goal of completing the marathon.
In other words, they Downgrade. The question is why?
Perhaps one explanation for Downgrading is that it comes naturally, and perhaps too easily. How often do we unconsciously sell short our capability? Let’s try a quick exercise:
Did you surpass your first mark? When I do this in seminars, almost everyone does. My point is that we often and automatically impose limits on ourselves that can unnecessarily hold us back, rather than propel us forward. The fact is that we can’t possibly know our true limits until we put our capacity on trial.
I have recently taken to timing how long it takes for participants in the Prisoner’s Release challenge to ask out loud, “Is this really possible?” In a sample size of roughly 500 people, the average time is 43 seconds. I make it a point to assure them that it is, and that I am not an evil facilitator. I cheerfully remind them about the third leg of our motto: what appears to be impossible, isn’t.
The question, “Is this really possible?” is by no means an unreasonable one. In fact, I’m sure it’s a sign of rationality, or at least sanity. Interestingly, though, once answered, people go back to doing exactly what they were doing before, expecting different results, which hints at Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.
Fourteen hundred engineers cried a collective “Impossible!” when in 1983 Toyota leadership announced the goal of producing a luxury performance sedan that would beat the best Mercedes and BMW in every possible measure. It took just six years, essentially starting from scratch, but the first Lexus did just that.*
Southwest Airlines employees, along with competitors, aircraft manufacturers, and even Federal Aviation Administration officials collectively cried “Impossible!” when the company’s senior leadership set a goal of 10-minute gate turns, which were eventually accomplished by adapting the techniques used by Formula One pit crews.
When the general manager of Toyota’s parts distribution business unit set a three-year goal to simultaneously save $100 million in costs, eliminate $100 million in inventory, and improve customer satisfaction 50 percent, her 80 lieutenants collectively cried “Impossible!” But the manager held her ground, and 10 supporting goals were set. While the actual results fell a bit short—$90 million in inventory and a 35 percent bump in satisfaction—she knew they would not have been achieved had she set her sights lower.
The entire Mars Pathfinder team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory cried a collective “Impossible!” when NASA gave them three years and $150 million to land a rover on Mars, but they did it.
Yes, these are cherry-picked examples; the important point is that in each case, the required capabilities were either present or acquired or developed, and what I call dramatic destinations set by the leaders of the respective organizations were audacious and arduous, but informed and intelligent, and so drove radically different thinking.
But the question speaks to another reason we Downgrade, which is the lack of an appropriate challenge. As we discovered in Part One there is an art to framing any challenge. What we did not discuss, however, was the capability to produce what will eventually fill the frame: the solution. You can have the most beautiful picture frame in the world, but if you’re aiming for a masterpiece and your ability to paint is as lacking as mine, you’re in for disappointment. In other words, a goal must be achievable, a problem solvable. Otherwise, we will disconnect. It’s fair game to articulate an audacious goal for yourself, as long as you either have or can acquire or develop the means to achieve it.*
Another possible reason for Downgrading is the lack of perseverance and passion for long-term goals, or as University of Pennsylvania psychology researcher Angela Duckworth calls it, grit.
Duckworth’s 2004 study of West Point cadets as they progressed through a brutal first summer initiation training called “Beast Barracks” focused on this very issue.30 “Beast Barracks is deliberately engineered to test the very limits of cadets’ physical, emotional, and mental capacities,” the study reads. Roughly 60 of the some 1,200 or so freshman cadets drop out during the Beast Barracks summer. “A reasonable response to the unrelenting dawn-to-midnight trials of Beast Barracks would be to exchange the goal of graduating from West Point for a more manageable goal such as graduating from a liberal arts college.”
In other words, Downgrading was a very real possibility.
Duckworth expected grit, as measured by her proprietary 12-question Grit Scale, to predict cadet retention through Beast Barracks better than could either IQ or a summary measure of cadet quality used by the West Point admissions committee. Results confirmed her hypothesis: “Grit predicted completion of the rigorous summer training program better than any other predictor.” The grittier the cadet, the more likely they were to make it through Beast Barracks.
The concept of grit indeed captures the essence of the study’s opening quote, taken from psychology pioneer William James’s 1907 book, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking:
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources . . . men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.
It seems Downgrading is nothing new.
Jumpstarting is my term for tapping into alternate sources of thinking power that help to revitalize and rejuvenate the creative neurons that may be blocking us from pursuing what seems to be impossible, but almost never truly is.
It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the ins and outs, pros and cons of what the business world calls “stretch goals,” a term many attribute to Jack Welch. Stretch goals are widely covered in both popular and academic literature.* It’s great fun to talk about them in retrospect, as I have, when they produce breakthrough thinking. My only rule of thumb when it comes to crafting challenges is to use the Why? What if? How? questions we discussed in Chapter 1 to first tell yourself a happy story of what your world looks like in the future if your problem goes away entirely, then working backward (how did you go about solving it?) to ensure that story gets told.
This is the “instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts” that Albert Einstein was referring to in the opening quote of this chapter. And this, more than anything, will help you think about your winning aspiration . . . and winning is the aim of this book. This much I know to be true: if you don’t set out to win—however you define it—you most certainly will not think about how to do so. And if you’re not thinking about winning, you won’t take action in that direction.
In other words, as long as you’re chasing a challenge that seems impossible, I’m much more interested in the nature of your progress toward thinking through it, and in helping you stick to whatever ambitious track you’re on when you find your mental energy waning and in danger of Downgrading.
Enter Jumpstarting, which Google’s dictionary defines both as “starting a stalled vehicle whose battery is drained by connecting it to another source of power” and “giving an added impetus to something that is proceeding slowly or is at a standstill.” I view Jumpstarting as a three-gear battery recharger, employing three effective methods I’ve used with both teams and individuals, including myself, in order to avoid Downgrading and eventual disengagement.
During my tenure with University of Toyota, I was involved in a rebranding effort of the Lexus brand. Lexus retained noted brand strategist Adam Morgan, coauthor of A Beautiful Constraint, to help guide the effort. One of Morgan’s techniques, called “Can-If,” a close cousin to What if?, has become a favorite of mine. If the first reaction to a challenge (even a private one of your own) is some version of “Impossible!” you’ve probably set a worthy goal. But emotional reactions like “Impossible!” can quickly decay into rational ones that start with “I/we can’t because . . .” It’s a very slippery slope, because before you know it, you’ve completely talked yourself out of a winning aspiration.
That’s where “Can-If” comes in. The concept is quite simple: force yourself to replace “can’t, because” with a “can, if” statement. If you’re on the Mars Pathfinder team, for example, “We can’t land a rover on Mars for $150 million, because landing modules cost too much” might become “We can land a rover on Mars if we figure out a way to land without a landing module.” You then keep going, using either another Can-If or, if a single Can-If does the trick, a Framestorming What if? or How? You never know, you might come up with the elegant solution the Pathfinder team did: use air bags like those found in automobiles to bounce the rover to a stop on Mars.
“Without a positive construct,” says Morgan, “the inability to have a ready answer to a difficult question kills the momentum and the flow of exploration.”
Converting a “Can’t-Because” to a “Can-If” is just such a positive construct, as it is an effective way to Jumpstart the effort, and to keep it rolling once you’re on your way.
From neuroscience we know that both a why and a how must be present and connected to keep us engaged in the pursuit of a challenge. The first is about purpose, the second is about process. And since we know that focusing on both why and how isn’t possible, we need a practical method to call one or the other up when we begin to stall and contemplate Downgrading. Seemingly impossible challenges seem impossible because there is no clear how, and the entire point of such a challenge is the creative search for a solution. So we can be fairly confident that we are in for a difficult struggle with the how at some point.
That’s where Why-How Laddering comes in. If the how isn’t yielding the desired progress, we can ladder up to asking ourselves the why. If the why isn’t as clear as it could be, we can ladder down to a lower level how until we find something we can accomplish to get a quick win and restart our progress toward the why.
One of my favorite Jumpstarting stories entailing this kind of laddering comes from Marcus Buckingham, concerning the turnaround of the ailing British prison system.31 When Sir David Ramsbotham retired from the esteemed position of adjutant general of the British Army in 1993 and was appointed Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, he inherited a system in a tailspin. Since Sir David’s latitude to effect change was limited to inspection, he couldn’t very well go in and tell the heads of prisons to change their ways. Instead, he had to make things happen by changing things within his domain of control: inspection. He chose to focus on the goal of the British prison system, and the measure of success against which prisons were inspected. As you would expect, the why of the prison system at the time was to prevent escape, and the logical measure of success was the number of escapees. But as he began to think about the problem, he concluded that the main why of a prison system should not be keeping prisoners off the streets, but rather to make sure they didn’t come back once released. The new why meant a new metric: number of repeat offenders. This new why effectively turned the prison system upside down. Sir David challenged the management teams of each prison to significantly shift their focus and to devote their energies toward figuring out new hows: processes and programs specifically designed to rehabilitate the prisoners while they were incarcerated, and better ways to ease them back into society once they were released.
The “Fresh Start Effect” is the term University of Pennsylvania professor Katherine Milkman uses in her recent study32 of the same name to describe the feeling we get when the new year hits and we fire up to set aggressive goals for the coming 12 months. According to the study, people are more likely to set a new goal corresponding with or immediately following an event such as a birthday or the start of a week, month, season, or year, suggesting that temporal landmarks or timestamps might make it easier to engage in aspirational behavior.
For example, the researchers asked hundreds of participants to describe a goal they wished to achieve. After describing the goal, participants were offered a courtesy reminder several months hence as an encouragement to pursue their goal. Half the group was offered a reminder date of “March 20, the third Thursday in March,” while the other half was offered “March 20, the first day of spring.” More people chose the latter date, which signaled the start of a new cycle.
Milkman proposes two mental processes to explain the effect. First, that these landmarks create new “mental accounting periods” that psychologically distance our present self from its past imperfections, propelling us to behave in line with their renewed self. Second, temporal landmarks interrupt attention to day-to-day details, causing us to take a big-picture view of our situation and focus more on the broader challenge we’re chasing.
But you do not need to wait for the new year, your next birthday, or even Monday morning. The Fresh Start effect is something I’ve been using for several years now (without calling it that), having learned from author and The Energy Project CEO Tony Schwartz about the power of pulsing: working in 90-minute cycles, effectively achieving the Fresh Start effect several times a day. It doesn’t matter much what you do as long as you change your space every 90 minutes or so. You’ll be surprised at the reenergizing effect this has on you. I do it now out of habit and ritual, even when I think I don’t need it.
We’ve known for decades that not only do we move through five stages of light to deep sleep in recurring 90-minute periods,* but these cycles don’t stop just because we’re awake. The science shows that after working hard for more than 90 minutes, our brains begin to slow down to conserve energy. We become more reactive and less capable of thinking clearly and reflectively, or seeing the big picture. Our FAST thinking takes a firm grasp on the steering wheel, while our deeper SLOW thinking goes into hibernation. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, known for his research and theories on expertise, believes that we are designed to pulse, to move between spending and renewing energy, pointing out that top performers in fields ranging from music to science to sports tend to work in approximately 90-minute cycles, then take a break and start fresh.33
These three Jumpstarting techniques can work wonders when it comes to ensuring that the Downgrading flaw doesn’t enter into your equation for winning the brain game.
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* I heard the Cliff Young story several times from the late Lou Tice, founder of the Pacific Institute, who was a frequent visitor to the University of Toyota during my early tenure there in the late 1990s.
* Engineers from a competing manufacturer dismantled two early Lexus LS400 cars, and concluded that they could not be built, at least not by them.
* I’m often asked about the Lexus tagline, which refers to the pursuit of perfection, mostly because I maintain that perfection is not achievable. If perfection is not achievable, I’m asked, why pursue it? The answer is that perfection is in fact not the goal, but rather a vector, like the horizon line. Perfection as a pursuit and process drives breakthroughs. Perfection as a goal can stall progress and stunt creativity.
* Many such treatments are biased pro or con, and almost always conflate cause and effect. The most balanced study on stretch goals in organizations that I’ve found was led by Sim Sitkin of Duke University: “The Paradox of Stretch Goals: Organizations in Pursuit of the Seemingly Impossible,” Academy of Management Review, 2011, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 544–556. The study concluded that organizations most likely to benefit from stretch goals are least likely to use them, while those least likely to benefit from them are the most likely to use them.
* Physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman introduced sleep cycles in his seminal 1939 book Sleep and Wakefulness. Kleitman introduced the concept of rapid eye movement (REM) in 1953.