"For the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don't believe in sensible rules
And don't believe what sensible people say.
And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes...
Impossible things are happening every day!"
wrote Rodgers and Hammerstein in their lyrics for the 1957 musical Cinderella.
While most of us are not concerned with turning pumpkins into golden carriages, our lives and businesses could be just as incredibly transformed by thinking "impossible" thoughts. .. And then doing impossible things.
Think about it. How can things ever change - how can business, science or society innovate solutions to world dilemmas; how can our personal lives change trajectories - if we can only imagine what has been possible up to now?
Our perspectives - the lenses through which we perceive and understand the world - affect all that we see and do. Problems occur when those perspectives become rigid and function more like prison bars, keeping us locked in set mental models, routines and behaviours that may be inaccurate or obsolete models of the world.
What would happen if we broke out of the prison of those perspectives? What new patterns and relationships would we notice? What new actions might we take?
"What we perceive as 'the world' and 'reality' is as much inside our heads as outside," say the authors of the book The Power of Impossible Thinking, Jerry Wind and Colin Crook. "By realising this and making choices about how we see things, we can become much more effective."
And what you see in any situation depends to a very large part on what you bring to the table.
To change our world, then, we first have to change our own thinking. Once we can recognise our mental models for what they are (i.e. the deeply ingrained assumptions, generalisations, or even pictures and images, that influence how we understand the world and how we take action) we can tell when they serve us and when they let us down. We can then choose to shift between a variety of different models to gain new perspectives.
Thinking impossible thoughts is not just the realm of fairy godmothers or eccentric inventors.
We can all zoom in and out of our previous mindsets with a little practice. Wind and Crook suggest a variety of ways to begin to see things differently and recognise the obsolete models that keep us from changing our minds - before a crisis or failure of the old model has made it too late. Here are a few:
