Indeed, many innovations have as their root source some form of just doing it —giving something a try, experimenting, just to see if it will work. Returning to the example of the 3M Post-it Notes, Spencer Silver described the original genesis of the adhesive:

The key to the Post-it adhesive was doing the experiment. If I had sat down and thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. If I had really seriously cracked the books and gone through the literature, I would have stopped. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.

People like myself get excited about looking for new properties in materials. I find that very satisfying, to perturb the structure slightly and just see what happens. I have a hard time talking people into doing that. It’s been my experience that people are reluctant to just try, to experiment —just to see what will happen.

1. SHORT EXPERIMENTS

In most companies, you have to justify so much of what you do - to prepare for quarterly
earnings statements if the company is publicly traded or, if it is not, to build support for your decisions. I believe, however, that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected. Scientific research operates in this way - when you embark on an experiment, you don’t know if you will achieve a breakthrough. Chances are, you won’t. But nevertheless, you may stumble on a piece of the puzzle along the way - a glimpse, if you will, into the unknown.
Our short films are Pixar’s way of experimenting, and we produce them in the hopes of
getting exactly these kinds of glimpses. Over the years, Pixar has become known for including short films at the beginning of our feature films. These three- to six-minute films, each of which might cost as much as two million dollars to make, certainly don’t yield any profits for the company; in the immediate term, then, they’re hard to justify. What sustains them is a kind of gut feeling that making shorts is a good thing to do.

Seemingly small steps, changing one project at a time, create momentum. Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems. Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response. We become paralyzed. We make the wrong move just to change. When we see change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we amplify our fear of it; we overcome this fear by putting one foot in front of the other, in a series of safer steps.

Small wins are also great ways to learn and to enlist supporters. Negotiating both a good fee and mostly remote work on her first consulting contract, for example, helped Susan discard barriers and discover resources that were invisible to her before. One small win in itself may not seem like much; a series of them increases the likelihood of serious change by setting in motion a dynamic that favors a next step and makes the next solvable problem more visible.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that “people tend to flirt only with serious things—madness, disaster, other people.” When we craft experiments, we are flirting with our many selves, a serious endeavor because it matters so much to us. The stronger the attraction, the more vulnerable we are to biases that affect how we perceive alternatives. Since we are not neutral about which outcome we prefer, we can fall into the trap of evaluating our experiments with a positive bias, one that encourages us to escalate commitment, even when we have evidence that it would be better to abandon ship or put the pet project on hold. A related danger is inadvertently putting a current work situation at risk. The exploration feels risk free, because we hide it from work associates. But the project becomes all-consuming, and it becomes obvious to everyone around us that our attention is divided.

As you’re wondering through the fog, you use the compass as you take a series of iterative steps toward having all three elements come together into One Big Thing.

And that is a key phrase: “iterative steps.”

The people in this study surprised me with the extent to which their lives were so often unplanned. Their lives were organic, unfolding, iterative, adaptive. They were like explorers adventuring into a vast unmapped territory, making discoveries and adapting a to whatever they hit along the way. Culling through tens of thousands of documents on the people in this study, I was continually struck by how their lives went down paths and ended up in places that they never expected. The path out of the fog lies in a series of small steps, a highly iterative, often unplanned approach that I think of as simplex stepping through life. And it is to this idea of simplex stepping that we now turn.