Question everything
Second only to “diversity matters” one of my favourite personal mantras is “question everything”, and anyone who works with me will find out just how fundamentally I live this in my daily life. It’s not just that I’m cynical; I’ve just learnt over the years that if you take the information you’re given at face value then you’re doomed to make the same mistakes as those presenting the “facts” to you. I’ve also found, through the process of questioning everything, just how little stands up to scrutiny.
The office-based working environment paradigm is a great example of something that has been disrupted in a very unexpected way. Companies and people, previously wedded to office based working, have discovered a world of remote working previously only adopted by a small minority. Even those of us who enjoy working from home, and work for a company that encourage it, realised we had been conforming to old habits and travelling in to the office more regularly than perhaps we needed or wanted to. A habit has been broken and this is leading to big changes and much heated debate.
So why do so many people take prevailing rules at face value and live by them, even when acting on them results in negative outcomes? The answer lies in a phenomena I like to call “Paradigm Paralysis”. Paradigm Paralysis can probably be best explained by recounting an experiment involving a cage full of monkeys, a ladder, a bunch of bananas and a hose.
Don’t try this at home
In this experiment five hungry monkeys were placed in a cage. At the centre of the cage was a ladder and at the top of the ladder was a bunch of bananas. Naturally, being hungry, one of the monkeys climbed the ladder to get the bananas but, before reaching them, they were hosed down with cold water. This was unpleasant enough, but to make matters worse, the other four monkeys were also given a soaking.
At first the monkeys persevered, but eventually the majority decided to give up. What is more, in order to avoid a soaking, any monkey attempting to get the bananas was strongly discouraged by the others.
It was at this point that the experimenters switched one of the monkeys for a new one. One that had never been hosed down. As would be expected, this monkey tried to climb the ladder, but this time no hose was used. It wasn’t needed as the other monkeys quickly and forcibly stopped the new monkey from making the terrible mistake. From their perspective, they’d averted an uncomfortable drenching.
You can probably guess where this is going. Each original monkey was replaced with a new one, and each time the result was the same. Finally, a point was reached where all the monkeys in the cage were new. None of these monkeys had ever been hosed down, nor had they ever witnessed the hose in action, but when a new monkey was introduced into this “vanilla” situation the response to an attempt to grab the bananas was prevented by the incumbents.
Banana eating was strictly forbidden, but no monkey in the group knew why.
So what does this experiment teach us about our own lives? Take a look at the rules around you, and the constraints under which you work. When you really examine the truth behind them, how many stand up to scrutiny? How many of the “ways of working” that you take for granted are actually just one way of doing things that might have made sense at the time they were created but no longer make sense in the world of today. How many of them are simply things you were told by someone who was also told by someone else… and so on.
A can of worms
Not convinced? After all, monkeys are less intelligent than humans. As far as we know, they can’t use language to communicate reasoning and logic. Problem solving and invention are our superpowers. Surely humans, with their greater intelligence and social skills, break down issues like this more quickly?
Maybe, maybe not. Let’s look at an example that involves humans instead of monkeys:
Can openers are a simple invention – a very basic machine involving a blade and a wheel. They’ve been around for a long time, but you might be surprised to discover that cans have been around for a whole lot longer. The first “modern” can was invented in 1810 by Peter Durand for the British Navy, and it was opened using a hammer and chisel. The first can of any type was used by the Dutch navy back in 1772 but being British, I’m conveniently ignoring that fact.
Despite that aforementioned human ingenuity, the first can opener wasn’t invented until 1858. Even by the British example that’s 48 years after the invention of the can! This early can opener was too dangerous for home use, and you had to go to the grocery store to get your can opened. We have William Lyman to thank for the first domestically available can opener (the one with the cutting wheel) which wasn’t invented until 1870.
What this demonstrates is that paradigms are addictive, and what is more, they stop us from doing things in a better way. We blindly accept what we’re told by those who came before us. We carry on making the same mistakes and enforcing the same inefficiencies. This paradigm paralysis can sometimes last for generations. Simply put, paradigms can be dangerous.
The problem with questioning what you hear and challenging how things are done, is that you open a whole new can of worms. It could even make you very unpopular.
The elephant on the desktop
Now let’s look at something more contemporary; something that might be staring you in the face right now. Are you using a tablet or smartphone to view this blog, or are you reading it on a laptop or desktop machine? If it’s the latter then you’re living within a long running paradigm.
For almost as long as I’ve been using personal computers, I’ve been presented with a windowing environment. From the very beginning it’s had menus, buttons to minimise, maximise and close windows, icons to launch things, and applications that can be tiled or stacked on the desktop. We all know what a computer desktop looks like, and very little has changed for over 30 years.
Have a look at this picture of the graphical user interface on the Xerox Star released in 1981. This is the first commercially available GUI and it was based on the previous non-commercial development, the Xerox Alto, which dates to 1973. Look familiar?
This very first GUI was windows based and used a mouse for navigation. It had buttons at the top of each window to allow you to close and paginate them. Barring the introduction of colour, it looks almost identical to the GUIs we still work with nearly 50 years later.
There is, of course, a situation where this paradigm has been broken at least to some extent, and this is in the tablet market. The path forged by Apple in introducing the iPad and iPhone has been followed by Google with Android. These devices now give us a whole new user experience, and yet, when these same manufacturers create a desktop device it’s the old paradigm they rely on and not the new one. After all, “that’s how it’s done”.
More and more, I’m finding myself questioning the desktop experience and quite a while back I posted a comment on LinkedIn about this very matter. It read “Come on Apple, Google, Microsoft et al. I don’t need a desktop experience on a tablet; what I need is a tablet experience on a desktop”. I immediately received responses questioning how you could live without the features of the desktop world. The features that were designed in 1973. Now, I’m not saying that the people who said this are wrong, but I am questioning the paradigm, and I’m certainly not convinced that they got it right back then. When it comes to the desktop I believe we are “customers asking for faster horses”.
And there’s another example of my “question everything” mantra. There is no evidence that Henry Ford ever said those words. Attempts at tracing the source find it’s first use around the start of this millennium, a mere 20 years or so ago. It would appear that the person who created this saying chose to attribute it to Henry Ford in order to add some gravitas to it and thus a false “fact” was born.
It is what it is
Just as we accept the Henry Ford quote, every day we accept the paradigms that surround us. Not only do we live with the way things are; we actively demand it. The desktop is just one example, and it may need to change if we are to invent the next “can opener” of human/machine interaction. We aim for the “x” because that is how you close a window. We point with a mouse because it’s the only thing accurate enough to hit those tiny buttons and pull down menus with any accuracy, and then we make the buttons tiny because we have a mouse. We demand a start menu because that’s where everything we need lives. (Google have even called it the “everything button” when marketing Chromebooks). That’s what our predecessors taught us to do, and it’s the way we’ve always done it.
And yet when we pick up our smartphones and tablets we happily tap, swipe, pinch and tilt without a care in the world on devices that are instantly on, and we love it. Surely there’s a lesson there for designers of products and services?
We live in an ever changing world, and as the world around us shifts we need to make sure we break the moulds into which we’ve been forced if we want to make things better. We need to make the paradigm shift, but what should you do with this information? What should you do next? Maybe what you should do next is search the internet for that original monkey experiment, and ask yourself “what exactly is a fact?”
Remember the mantra – “question everything”.
Or, play it safe and don’t eat the bananas.