Embracing Chaos: The Role of Randomness in Success | 10min snip from Daily Creative with Todd Henry

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And so I tried to write a book that said that. That's Brian Kloss.
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And the book he's referring to is this new book called Fluke, in which he argues that so many of the things we experience in our life are less the result of some organized strategic plan and more the result of a complicated web of contingencies. I'm
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a political scientist by trade, but also, you know, just navigating modern life. I think that John Muir quote is referring to something that is a basic fact of reality, and that's why it spoke to me so much. All the sort of stuff that we get thrown at us is like, here's just what you need to do to succeed, or here's the way that you can avoid a recession. You know, these five variables, and you tweak monetary policy, and everything's fine. And I just, I don't think the world is quite so straightforward. I think that there is a lot more chance and randomness that plays a role and contingency where things could have turned out differently. And the way that you end up in that space is by understanding that there are ripple effects to every single thing that
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we do, which is where the interconnection comes in. So creativity is pattern forming. As Steve Jobs once said, creativity is just connecting dots. But Brian that one of the reasons we struggle is that we overconnect, that we find too many patterns. Sometimes patterns where there aren't even patterns to be found.
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Our minds evolved to find patterns because it helped us survive. I mean, it's basically that simple, right? So, you know, if you hear a rustling of grass in the hunter-gatherer period of human history, and you discount it, and you don't maybe there's a saber-toothed tiger there, you might die, right? So if there is a saber-toothed tiger, you start to learn very quickly, okay, run away when you hear this noise. Now, sometimes there's nothing there. And if you run away when there's nothing there, and it is just the wind, that's okay, you still survive. But if the opposite happens, right, and you don't run away, when there is a saber-toothed tiger, you will die. So basically our brains have evolved through survival mechanisms to over interpret patterns, right? It's better to see a pattern where there is none than to not see a pattern when there actually is one lurking in the weeds as it were.
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This over interpretation of patterns is what causes many people to latch onto an idea too early in the process and then become fixated on it. They suddenly can't see any alternative because the pattern just matches up so perfectly. This is what I call the danger of the first idea. The ideas we have first can be very dangerous to our process because they create a sort of blindness. I was talking with my producer Josh about this, and it's something he battles in this strategy work he does with clients all the time. Over the years, he's learned to take aggressive steps to keep it in check. what I'm going to do, but inevitably there always comes this point before we get started, where they want to know if they can send me over their materials, you know, decks and pre-reads and all of this sort of stuff. And I always tell them, absolutely not. I want to see and know as little as possible. I don't want your decks. I don't even want to look at your website.
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In fact, I go through great lengths to not look at any of their materials. Not because I'm lazy. It's because I know that as soon as I see those things,
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it's as though I'm seeing like their first idea. There's a pattern that's represented there. as soon as I see that, it's going to make it really difficult for me to see the alternatives. It creates that sort of blindedness that really doesn't help me come back to them with a new, better, clearer way of framing up their brand message and story. So that is really clear and anybody can understand it. Maybe to put it in another way, the problem with first ideas is that once you see them, it's almost impossible to unsee them. And unfortunately, they can have a tendency to eclipse a lot of other more interesting ideas leading you to miss less obvious connections, the ones that strike of brilliance. You've closed your mind and placed your bets on the first big idea that came along, and then said about convincing yourself as to why it was perfect. Brian says that the key to overcoming this temptation to put all of your chips on one big idea is to instead place a lot of little bets. But how? I mean, you have to start somewhere, right? In order to spin up a bunch of little bets, experiments as he calls them, you have to have a first bet. Isn't it the first idea that makes it so difficult to come up with the second, fifth, and twelfth idea? So how do you get started without getting sabotaged? One
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study people were forced to find a different way to work because the subway, the tube in London, the drivers were not striking. And what these economists found was that five percent of the people affected actually kept the alternative pathway to work that they were forced into by the strike. And it was better for them. And they had no idea, right? They had lived according to the way they thought was best. They were shocked into experimentation and they turned into a better route for them.
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What Brian is describing is a strategy for overcoming the danger of the first idea. You have to turn it into a non-option. Force yourself to reject it. You couldn't use that idea even if you wanted to. It's off the table. So what's another? This forced deprivation can help you spot new ideas, new experiments, that otherwise would have been overlooked. But first ideas aren't the only stumbling block we have to look out for as we reach for brilliance. Equally as dangerous are past ideas. It's hard to deny that consciously or subconsciously we judge new ideas by comparing them to old ones. We see an idea and think, yeah, that's kind of like that other thing, and it was a huge success, so this must be a good idea too. Or, conversely, eh, we've seen something like that before and it didn't work. This idea is a dud too. But that's a dangerous mistake.
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When we think about success and failure, there's a massive bias there because, of course, the survivors, the people who do really well are the ones we hear from. We don't hear from the ones who fail. And like my favorite example, this about how we we tend to audit outcomes. We don't tend to audit processes. So like the Challenger shuttle that blew up in 1986. It had the same problem in all of the previous launches, but it didn't cause the explosion of the shuttle. So they didn't investigate it. They just figured, oh, it's fine. And then when it blew up, it's like, oh, we need an inquiry. And it's like all those other launches that you thought were successes were actually failures. They just happened to get lucky that it didn't blow up because it wasn't cold enough. And if it had been slightly colder, it would have blown up earlier. So the whole idea here, I think is one where, when you start to ascribe causality a neat and tidy line between X and Y, and you write out the flukes and the luck, you misunderstand how
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the world actually works, and that caused you to make mistakes. Part of what makes past ideas poor measuring sticks is that we distort our view of them based upon whatever is most convenient or
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what makes us
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look best.
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We sort of learn backwards where we have an outcome and then we sort of have this neat and tidy path, oh, if we just do that again, it will be fine. And it's a serious, serious cognitive mistake in my view. There's a paradox that lies at the heart of Kloss's ideology. You're less in control than you think you are, which is at first scary, except for the flip side of that is that everything that we do is because the ripple effects of an interconnected world are enormous. At first blush, the thought of having no real control feels
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like powerlessness. Yet, Brian argues the opposite. Because of the infinite connectivity of the world and the potential ripple effects from every action we take, we are far more influential than we realize. Perhaps that's the reframe we need. It's less about control and more about influence. We can't eradicate chance from our work, but we can increase our chances of doing brilliant work. Experiments in ways that cross traditional boundaries. All of the
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smartest ideas I think I've ever come up with in my life have come from reading in fields that are not my own. When I think about my own creativity and my own process of writing fluke and so on, I read exclusively political science for a very long time because I'm a political scientist by trade. And then I started reading physics, evolutionary biology, philosophy, a lot more history. And all of a sudden it was like my politics ideas were getting smarter because I was getting insights that had never occurred to me from people who think totally differently from me. And so that experimentation combined with the sort of aspects of trying new things and not simply trying to follow the pathway that was forged previously is a very wise one. in your favor or increasing the chances
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that brilliance will strike at the moment's notice often comes down to how much time you spend crossing boundaries and exploring worlds and fields other than your own. If creativity is connecting dots, the more distance between the dots, the more profound the connections. And the other thing there's what's sometimes called leisure time invention. There's
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loads of people who have invented incredible ideas when they have not been trying to. And I think this is something else that is important is that you have to give yourself space to wander a little bit with intellectual ideas and concepts, and not simply sit in front of a computer 10 hours a day, and hope that lightning strikes and it comes to you. The Red Brothers came up with the idea for their airplane when they were watching buzzards during the picnic. Galileo came up with some ideas while he was, you know, looking at a chandelier actually swinging from a cathedral. So I mean there's like loads of these examples. I think the main point here is that when you think that the world operates according to very strict rules and laws and has this sort of neat and tidy reality, then you think you can control everything and you therefore optimize based on past experience, right? So you just try to squeeze every ounce of efficiency and do what was already done before a little bit better.

Replay: Chaos Theory

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