September 5, 2023
by Stephen T. Messenger
In his book Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Disney Animation, talks about how our mental models often box us into a singular way of thinking and doing. When we’ve worked or lived with the same people for a while, our mental models often merge, and we become stuck in performing our tasks the same way over and over.
He argues we should look at how we’re performing tasks and see if there may be a better way.
The Dog Attack
After almost three decades of running, I’ve encountered between 30-40 aggressive dogs with no barrier or leash keeping them from me. When a dog runs at me in a threatening way, I’ve always had the same sequential steps to keep me safe while escalating force to allow it to back down.
- Turn to face the dog to see if it’s friendly.
- If not, raise my arms and appear larger than I am.
- If it remains threatening, make loud noises and aggressively take steps towards the dog.
- If it doesn’t stop, present my left forearm as a sacrifice for it to bite and prepare for contact.
- If it bites, be prepared to fight back.
Thankfully, I’ve never had to go past step three. They’ve all backed down when I became aggressive.
Last week, I was running on an unfamiliar road when a rottweiler came screaming out from behind a house and quickly closed the 200 feet between the two of us. My mental model said it was a dangerous dog, so I did what I always do in steps one through three: turn and face the dog, get big, make lots of noise, and be the aggressor.
I was confident this dog would back down like all the others.
He did not.
On my first time ever on step #4, I offered my left forearm and braced for impact, and he was going for it. In the last moment before impact, my brain went through a million permutations and realized two things… I like my left arm, and this was going to hurt—a lot!
In one millisecond my mind deleted three decades worth of training. I instead swung my right leg and kicked at the dog. He didn’t like that at all and realized the fight wasn’t worth it. He turned tail and ran.
There’s Probably a Better Way
My mental model of fending off a dog attack was a flawed theory. It would have resulted in pain, stitches, and blood. Ed Catmull says in his book that the models we have in our head distort our worldview so much that we often can’t see what’s right in front of us.
I certainly couldn’t see that allowing first contact with my forearm was a terrible idea until it happened.
Instead, we need to take steps as individuals to examine our processes and determine if they are either the most effective or just because “we’ve always done them that way.”
He suggests a number of techniques to break through old patterns, but it requires candor and thick skin on the part of the organization. Most, if not all, of it relies on the criticism of ideas, not the criticism of people. In fact, he says that failures are the launchpad to success. Some of his ideas are:
– Murder Board. Have a murder board session where an idea is presented to be reviewed and discussed among those involved in the project—and those outside the project. Encourage constructive ways to make the idea better.
– Field Trip. Get out of your organization and see how a similar one operates. You can learn a lot from observing others doing what you do, but differently.
– Try New Things. Take your people and do something to stretch their brain: play a new game, take an art class, experiment with a new technology. Outside ideas have a way of bringing new ideas into old ways.
– Experiment. Let people try out their untested ideas and allow failure to happen. Learn from it.
Something I did, at the one-year mark in my position, was gather the senior leaders and ask three simple questions. What do we keep doing? What do we stop doing? What do we start doing? I learned several things that were frustrating the staff. I also learned of some things that we were doing which I didn’t think had much impact, but they did.
Find the Better Way
A leader’s job is to find the best way. More importantly, it’s to know if your current processes are going to leave you broken, bloody, and stumbling away from a proverbial attack dog.
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