Pushing Boundaries

You are getting along in your day. Routines beckon and you perform them. Automatically without much thinking. That’s why we call them routines. On the other hand a phone call comes in and challenges you with a problem you don’t experience often. Later that same day a couple of emails arrive with questions about matters you are unfamiliar with.

So it goes. Challenges. The routines keep our productivity moving along. The challenging stuff thus has time and our attention to be addressed. But how?

I think about the problems posed by others. What would I do in their place to champion the problem? And is it a problem? Perhaps it is a message from the future urging us to do something different than we are doing? Might that be it? Are we actually meeting the future on its own terms? How do we even know that is the message we are dealing with?

Well, in truth, we don’t know the answer to that question.

What I do is imagine what outcomes I would like to see from the challenge. What is the best desired result if we were handling the challenge very well? Do we even know what the desired outcome is? Wishing the problem would go away is not a desired outcome. No; we are challenged to do something more with it. 

But what? Well, that’s the real question isn’t it?

Seeing the world from our own perspective often lulls us into sameness. We expect things to be such and such and so we accept the status quo gladly. It doesn’t rock the boat. But what if we see the world from a different perspective? Perhaps we should try these vantage points:

• If I do nothing, what will happen? Is the imagined result good, bad or ugly? Why?
• If I do something to avoid the bad or ugly, is that result what we truly want? Or should I be aiming for a better result, maybe one that revolutionizes the situation entirely?
• Imagine I am sitting 5 years in the future; what then does this problem pose for me? Am I able to respond differently? And if so, what makes it different AND better. Doing something different is not the end product we are aiming for necessarily. Doing something better, or gaining a better result is the goal here.
• Are we using all of our abilities to address the issue? Are we specializing our faculties and only using those we expect we should be called upon to use? Or should we reach out beyond usual borders and norms and seek the larger, the new, the revolutionary end?
• Are we responding with creative and inventive processes to address the issues we face daily? 

I think not. I suspect we expect the world to work the way it always has. Problem is the world only works the way we have witnessed it to work during a particularly short span of history. I used to get university students in my office urging me to produce a program that we did the year before; ‘it’s tradition!’ We have to do it again! Only problem is last year’s program, although a smashing success, was the first time we ever did it. Some tradition!

It serves my point, though. What we think is usual or traditional is often not at all what it seems.

Life deserves all of our attention. What do I want to accomplish? What do we want to achieve as an organization or company or institution or group? What is the essence of success we would like to be associated with?

This is a much deeper and more demanding question to answer. It requires us to really think about the goals, the possible goals we haven’t thought about, the affected populations we haven’t addressed but should, and the desired improvements in productivity and resource minimization that would result from a new approach.

When we push against the borders or edges of our self defined ‘boxes’ we often discover fresh new worlds. Often we don’t even know we have placed ourselves in a box. Sometimes we feel boxed in by circumstances or by an employer’s job description. That’s OK, but trust me, everyone will be happier if we challenge those boxes. Not just for yourself, but for the benefit of other colleagues and especially the customer or end user.

I have urged readers to challenge the ‘normal’ and see for themselves if normal is evolving into totally new paradigms. Often it is without our being aware of it.

Is real estate selling to customers what they want or what we think they want. And wants are not needs; which end are we serving? Same with insurance products; what is needed by the customer and by the society? Are we really addressing these needs or only wants and the buying off of threats?

Is education teaching the student how to think or are we teaching him how to act or behave? The former is the idea; the latter only continues the ‘norm’. We are challenged to do much more in the education field. Deep down I think we all know it. The status quo is actually stultifying; suffocating. We must do something outside the norm, outside our boxes.

How else will we learn of what we are capable? Isn’t that the point of education and life-long learning? The becoming of a wholly new, improved and more capable person is good for you – the student – and for the society in which we all live. This is fueling the evolution that builds new futures.

That’s what we should be doing. Actively and instinctively and purposefully. How exciting is this? How boring is the opposite?

We should choose the better.

August 10, 2016