Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves —a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers.

The moral to the stories of Dave, Melanie, and John is this: Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working. Reframe the solution to some other possibilities, prototype those ideas (take some test hikes), and get yourself unstuck. Anchor problems keep us stuck because we can only see one solution—the one we already have that doesn’t work. Anchor problems are not only about our current, failed approach. They are really about the fear that, no matter what else we try, that won’t work either, and then we’ll have to admit that we’re permanently stuck—meaning we’re screwed—and we’d rather be stuck than screwed. Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it. This is a pretty common but paradoxical human behavior. Change is always uncertain, and there is no guarantee of success, no matter how hard you try. It makes sense to be fearful. The way forward is to reduce the risk (and the fear) of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters. It is okay for prototypes to fail—they are supposed to—but well-designed prototypes teach you something about the future.

Prototypes lower your anxiety, ask interesting questions, and get you data about the potential of the change that you are trying to accomplish. One of the principles of design thinking is that you want to “fail fast and fail forward,” into your next step. When you’re stuck with an anchor problem, try reframing the challenge as an exploration of possibilities (instead of trying to solve your huge problem in one miraculous leap), then decide to try a series of small, safe prototypes of the change you’d like to see happen. It should result in getting unstuck and finding a more creative approach to your problem. We will talk a lot more about prototyping in chapter 6.

A team led by Professor Dan Schwartz evaluated two groups. One started with three ideas in parallel, then subsequently had two more ideas on the way to their final idea. The second team started with one idea and then iterated four more times. Each team generated five rounds of ideas, but the parallel team did much better—generating more ideas and clearly better final solutions. The serial team—who started with just one idea—tended to keep refining the same idea over and over, never really innovating. The conclusion is that if your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. Designers have known this all along—you don’t want to start with just one idea, or you’re likely to get stuck with it. Try not to think of your Odyssey Plans as “Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C”—where A is the really good plan and B is the okay plan and C is the plan that you really hope you don’t get stuck with but that you would accept as tolerable if absolutely necessary. Every Odyssey Plan is a Plan A, because it’s really you and it’s really possible.

A system for innovation

How do you increase the chances that a failed adhesive turns into a brilliant product? With a system designed to bring curious risk-takers together. Encourage and celebrate boundary spanning. Provide resources and slack time. Normalize intelligent failure and celebrate pivots. Declare that you want a significant portion of your company’s revenues (or school’s curricula or family’s activities) to come from new and different products, courses, or experiences. Successful innovation does not come from the lone genius. Importantly, each of these familiar elements of innovation is reinforced by each of the others. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

As Jim’s experience illustrates, the experimental method does not necessarily entail an orderly sequence of steps in which one side project leads logically to a next. Instead, small probes are often fragmentary and spontaneous, driven by unexpected opportunities and dynamic situations. Jim’s wife got pregnant and Alaska was out. What next? A different kind of experiment. Like Ben and Carol, Jim went for variety in designing his experiments. But the trend is clear: Small wins may be scattered, but what counts is that together they amount to a sense of progress—away from the stifling situation we are trying to escape.