The Daftness Contention

Problems are by definition difficult to solve. If they were easy there would be simple answers.

And it’s often the case that the harder the problem the more failed solutions they accumulate around them, which in turn add to the apparent complexity of finding the answer.

The seemingly endless troubles in Northern Ireland stand as an example. Tony Blairs aide Jonathan Powell put finding the solution down to ignorance. He argued that being ignorant of the history and the reasons previous peace talks had failed gave he and Blair an edge in finding the answer.

I don’t find this a wholly compelling idea as ignorance and lack of preparation could equally have created bad feeling. Imagine going to see a client and declaring you are completely ignorant of their brand and market.

Zen Buddhism proposes the idea of the beginner’s mind as the answer to problem solving. Shunryu Suzuki’s famous quote ‘in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities but in the experts, there are few’ neatly captures the virtue of the concept.

At the risk of disagreeing with minds far greater than mine I’m not sure the beginners mind is any more practically realistic for the commercial world than the ignorance theory.

It won’t take very long for somebody already mired in the problem to tell you they’ve ‘tried everything before and it didn’t work’…. ‘and perhaps a bit of research and reading in might have told you that’

The fact is in most situations, particularly complex one’s, potential solutions have been mooted and in some cases tried tested and failed. Equally if we are too cognisant of barriers we naturally frame problems within the context of those barriers and potential solutions get blocked.

Having spent a career in and around the creative community I would suggest another and more left field solution to solving seemingly intractable problems.

Be daft.

Being daft is defined as being absurd, preposterous, ridiculous, ludicrous, farcical, laughable or risible. So admittedly this contention may have more application in the world of marketing than in the world of diplomacy but who knows?

If we think of daft solutions, in doing so we can free our minds to see the merit in more realistic ones. In fact, it’s by being daft we can often liberate ourselves to be creative enough to find unexpected and disruptive answers.

Maybe Da Vinci was being daft when he doodled the helicopter. And perhaps it was a moment of daftness for Dali that suggested dripping timepieces.

Doubtless Richard Branson was thought of as daft when decided to put his music business expertise into starting an airline.

I’ll leave it to a legendary duo of daftness to sum up

‘If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done’ Ludwig Wittgenstein

‘Creativity is intelligence having fun.’ Albert Einstein