Inversion: The Power of Avoiding Stupidity

I’m a big believer in success-seeking rather than failure-avoidance (or as a friend recently put it, “professionals play to win; amateurs play not to lose”). However, pure success-seeking, bias-to-action behaviour often results in some perverse outcomes:

Despite our best intentions, thinking forward increases the odds that you’ll cause harm. Thinking backward, call it subtractive avoidance or inversion, is less likely to cause harm.

What can we try instead?

Say you want to improve innovation in your organization. Thinking forward, you’d think about all of the things you could do to foster innovation. If you look at the problem by inversion, however, you’d think about all the things you could do that would discourage innovation. Ideally, you’d avoid those things.

In my experience the smartest and most successful people I’ve worked with do this naturally, because:

Inversion helps improve understanding of the problem. By forcing you to do the work necessary to have an opinion you’re forced to consider different perspectives.