Look for What’s Right

What kind of contributions get rewarded in your workplace? Hopefully, spectacularly brilliant ones! But what makes a contribution “brilliant”? Many folks don’t realize that the definition of “genius” changes as we shift between convergent and divergent modes of thinking.

Most of the time, the smartest person in the room is the most critical. The one who can find the logical flaw, what the rest of us missed. You know the type: they’re the person that speaks up in the middle of that presentation, “Pardon, but I just noticed the figures in the fourth column don’t add up, exactly...” Thanks, Arthur!

The thing is, this kind of fault-finding is incredibly valuable! Nobody wants a presentation going out to clients with grammatical or mathematical errors in it! Organizations should reward such courageous contributions. And often, they do. And thus the de facto motto for success can become, “Look for what’s wrong.”

But here’s the rub: what gets rewarded in one area of the business permeates into others. Behaviors that are constructive in one area—ie “Look for what’s wrong”—often sneak into aspects of business where they’re actually destructive.

Judgmental thinking, while valuable when converging, can hinder divergent exploration.

The fundamental difference is that when diverging, the greatest genius is the one who sees possibility no one else sees. The one who can contribute when everyone else is stuck merely not criticizing. This person looks for what’s right. Never mind the flaws! Look what they made from that jumble of incoherent free flow!

I stand in awe of that person every bit as much as the whiz who can calculate column four in their head.

Nolan Bushnell is a serial entrepreneur who founded not only Atari, but also Chuck E. Cheese pizza (think about that one for a second…). He is also Steve Jobs’s first boss! In his book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent, Bushnell shares how he used to regularly mine gold by pushing folks to look for possibility in the exact places they’re prone to be critical:

“At Pajaro Dunes, I used to employ one of my favorite tricks for enhancing creativity: I would ask everyone to make a list of all the ideas that have been presented at our meetings, and then have them rank those ideas from good to bad. I would then take the six items on the bottom of the list and say, ‘Let's suppose we were restricted for the next few months to work just on the six terrible projects. How do we make them work?’

This process reversed people’s normal mental dynamic. Instead of trying to figure out what's wrong with something, which triggers people’s critical instincts, here they had to figure out what was right with something, which triggers people’s creative instincts.

Every time we did this exercise, at least one of the bottom six ideas turned out to be not just good, but great, and eventually became a profit-making machine for us. The best was a gun game called Quack, in which player shot guns at ducks. At first the idea sounded dreadful, but once we figured out how to make the gun work in a really clever way, the game became enormously successful.”

It takes a rare, visionary leader like Nolan Bushnell to force teams to deliberately look for what’s right where they’d ordinarily notice what’s wrong. But when they do, a whole different kind of brilliance emerges.

Related: Generate Bad Ideas

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