Achieving the Impossible

Introduction from the Editor

Our conventional notions of impossibility and of being realistic can lead us to limit what we try to achieve.

What if we replaced any sign indicating, ‘Impossible!’ with a sign that read, simply, ‘Unexplored beyond this point’?

–The Editors

Achieving the Impossible

“There's no use trying,” she said. “One can't believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. 
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

“Be realistic!” is a frequently heard injunction.  In fact we are all so used to hearing the continual demand to “be realistic!” that we are numbed to the fact that those two innocent little words, taken together, must be a candidate for the single most extraordinary and controversial pair of words in the English language. 

Controversial?  Why, what could possibly be controversial about being realistic? Who would not want to be realistic?

For starters, the injunction to be realistic not only begs a lot of questions at once, but it begs all the most important questions.  What is to count as realistic?  Realistic as opposed to what?  Who is to say what is or isn’t realistic?  Realistic for whom?  Is it really desirable to be realistic in the first place?

Again, no one can ever be expected, almost by definition, to be realistic on command.  Rather, whenever someone says, “Come on, be realistic!” in everyday conversation, normally they don’t just stop there.  It’s merely a prelude to going on at once to adduce further considerations that the person whom they are urging to be more realistic may not have considered, or to which they may not have given sufficient weight—in their opinion.  We all have blindspots, and once again by definition, we can never know where those are. 

Unrealistic?  Says who?

The person urging us to be realistic, whether tendentiously or not, is often trying to “help us” see another side of whatever it is we are planning to undertake, including the risks, downside, relative probabilities, and so on. They think we may be missing something, and often they are right. But by the same token, and perhaps just as often, they may be missing something that we can see but they cannot, considerations meaning that we are already being more realistic than they are; and, what’s more, we ourselves may be in a better position to judge.

And whose reality is it anyway?  …Well, the one and only objective reality, I suppose.  Point taken, but that admission gets us precisely nowhere. The one and only objective reality, fine; but who’s to say what that is?  Sure there’s only one objective reality, but the tough bit is discerning it, and knowing we’ve discerned it, and, especially when what we’re talking about is not verifiable actualities but unknowable potentialities—because that’s precisely what the question of being realistic or not is usually all about:  potentialities. 

What is actually going to prove possible after all, and therefore worth the effort …and what’s not?  And the crunch is—and here comes the Catch-22 to end all Catch-22s—can we ever know what is realistic until we know the actual, eventual outcome?  And when can we ever know it is time to say, “time’s up! So did it work or not?”

We’ve got a problem with verb tenses here.  What turned out in the end (past perfect tense) to have been realistic or not is a judgment that can only be safely made after it’s all over but the shouting.  Here, not only is hindsight required for 20/20 vision, it’s required for any clear or certain vision at all.  And more to the point, or more often, when it comes to what’s realistic, once again, because this is so key, when is it or isn’t it still too soon to call? 

Or contrariwise, when do you call it a day, and just write off your apparent misadventure to experience—to having been unrealistic after all?  We had a client the other week whose biggest shortcoming was her implacable optimism, believing anything to be possible, and optimistically continuing to pursue the impossible instead of noticing that her efforts did not and could not work. But the far more common error is giving up too soon in the name of realism.

From Intractability to Impossibility

In the early days of MI when Interchange embarked on a 10-year R&D programme funded by government and industry, we knew we had a still nascent but very powerful methodology, with 15 years of in-house research and a decade of experimentation and practice already behind us. For us, a problem was a problem was a problem, and a challenge was a challenge was a challenge, simply because our theory said nothing at all about problems or challenges. It was all about patterns and how to change patterns, and a pattern is timeless and the same as any other pattern from our scientific point of view. Time or scale were never factors because neither factor applies to patterns the way we analyze them.

What is more, we could treat all problems or challenges equally since they were all the same to us—just patterns—and so our approach was not only problem-agnostic but industry-agnostic, and topic-agnostic. For those coming from a conventional business-school or management background, an analytical methodology capable of dissolving any problem of any kind by the same means must have sounded as mythical as the alkahest, the “universal solvent” sought in vain by the alchemists of the early modern period. The alkahest had been described by Paracelsus (1493-1541) as capable of resolving a compound body into its constituent principles without itself being altered or consumed, which isn’t a bad metaphor at all for our own scientific approach to breaking anything down into its key constituent patterns.

Invariably, however, such a generic scientific methodology for swiftly transforming patterns of any kind made our approach sound like snake oil to managers who were used to applying different tools to different kinds of problems—even if ours was based purely on hard science and despite the fact that our “snake oil” really worked!

So since we couldn’t “specialize” in any obvious way and would happily tackle any attempted change, we needed somehow to defuse the deceptive appearance of snake oil. We also needed some way to mark ourselves out and quickly demonstrate the unparalleled power of our approach, along with its superiority to traditional approaches, and after some debate we decided to “specialize” in tackling only intractable problems.

For one thing this made our universal solvent sound reassuringly, almost conventionally, specialist, and something which senior executives therefore knew when to call upon. But better still, every decision maker had no shortage of problems or ambitious challenges which had so far proved intractable. And they could not complacently take the view that the approach they were already taking was good enough, for they were plainly failing to make any headway on the issue at all, often after years of trying.  Nor did they have anything to lose by trying out something completely new and without precedent in their experience, something which no one back then had ever heard of.

So big corporations and government bodies at high level were keen to invest resources in this new technology in exchange for early access to these state-of-the art change approaches which they knew uniquely had the potential to enable them to successfully tackle their most intractable challenges. So from the day we started we had a constant stream of huge problems and challenges thrown at us from the C‑suite, all of which we could rapidly put paid to.

However, as we expanded our practice beyond those courageous partisans of the avant garde we found not all CEOs were equally keen to be seen by their Board as taking out a think-tank subscription to the “intractable problems specialists.” They didn’t want the Board to misread it as an admission of failure on their part that they had an endless supply of intractable problems to bring. 

Yet the challenges they were tackling were widely regarded within their corporation and within their industry as literally impossible to solve—“intractable because impossible.”  Now, no one minds being seen as the CEO who takes on the impossible and seeks out the state-of-the-art to make the impossible happen. So for marketing purposes, we started talking in terms of impossibility, instead of talking about intractability.

The Epistemology of Impossibility

It was at about this time that one client suggested to us that the best short description for our radical new approach to change was something that had nothing to do with “intractability” per se—he called our approach “minimalist intervention”:  finding the smallest intervention to create, instantly, the whole of the desired transformation. The name stuck.

By that time, the analysis to design such a “minimalist intervention” was starting to take us less and less time.  Creating a major culture change across the corporation, which only a year previously had taken us up to nine months (which seemed incredibly fast to those who had repeatedly been told it would take five to seven years), was being telescoped into as little as three or four hours of rapid-fire analysis followed by immediate implementation, with the culture change complete within a matter of weeks or even days. 

We now had two layers of impossibility associated with our work in the minds of our clients: clients told us we not only made “impossible” things happen but that we made them happen “impossibly fast.”

Logically, of course, we knew these admittedly flattering attributions were meaningless. No one can do what is literally impossible or do things impossibly fast. Rather we could only do what had mistakenly been assumed to be impossible, and in a timeframe widely regarded as impossible before the fact. But regarded by whom? Certainly not by us.

What on the old epistemology appeared to be impossible actually turned out on the new epistemology, especially when armed with our analytical technology, to be readily feasible; and what appeared to be an impossibly short timeframe only appeared that way in the first place from the point of view of the old, discarded epistemology. 

But on our epistemology, change does not take time. As for the rest, it just boiled down to the merely technical problem of pinpointing the intervention required as fast as possible by developing and applying improved analytical techniques to filter the apparent complexity of any situation more and more rapidly.

So while we were getting used to doing allegedly impossible things, and doing them supposedly “impossibly fast,” we meanwhile started to get interested, theoretically speaking, in the very notion of impossibility.

Not least, the concept of impossibility was already close to the heart of our new epistemology, since we viewed the existing state-of-affairs as the only state-of-affairs currently possible given the constraints currently in place, and we were always looking for the smallest shift in those constraints that would make the “impossible” desired state-of-affairs the only possible state-of-affairs once those constraints were altered. And of course, that shift happens instantaneously once we’ve replaced the previous set of constraints with the minimally different new set of constraints.

That’s what every minimalist intervention does.  The idea is to replace what is currently the only possible state-of-affairs by one that is currently impossible, but which, following the intervention to modify the set of prevailing constraints, will henceforth be the only possible state-of-affairs, and simultaneously rendering the preexisting state-of-affairs now impossible in turn.

Impossibility for Competitive Advantage

Our clients soon realized too that by using MI they could avail themselves of a kind of ‘modal arbitrage’, or ‘possibility arbitrage’.  By venturing forth and doing the very thing their competitors all regarded as impossible and so not worth attempting, they could confidently attempt the impossible which they knew how to achieve by novel means, namely using their secret weapon, MI, and thereby could catch their competitors completely unprepared.

One client, who designed hundreds of minimalist interventions with us and thereby broke every industrial record for sustained rapid growth, market share, margins, etc. along the way, got used to only bringing us impossible challenges.  He knew we shouldn’t be wasting time working together on anything that wasn’t impossible.

One morning, after he’d been working with us for some years, he brought a challenge which, he explained, was universally assumed in the industry to be impossible not only in practice but in theory. After explaining why that was, he asked rhetorically, “Impossible enough for you?” “Well,” I said, “What’s your timeframe?” He thought for a moment and replied, “Shall we say, six months to complete? Is that impossible enough now?” “Well,” I fired back at once, “if it can be done in six months, why wouldn’t we just say, ‘let’s do in six weeks’?”  He looked startled. “Six weeks!!” he exclaimed—“now that truly is impossible!” And he shook his head, frowning. But then he paused and looked thoughtful for a moment until a mischievous grin spread across his face. “OK,” he said, “what about six weeks—shall we do it?”

We got straight to work and the result was achieved in less than six weeks, with the intervention design completed that morning.  The proposed feat went from impossible to accomplished with no room for any “hmmm, maybe it’s possible” in between.

Near the beginning of every MI design session we ask the client for their estimate on a scale of one to ten of the possibility of the company achieving the desired result. Usually the answer is a two or a three out of ten, and if it’s a four we make the goal more ambitious until the client’s estimate is back to a two or three.

Even when the client has a key challenge that’s already at a four before they start, they are typically reining-in their idea of how much they can accomplish because they aren’t considering certain possibilities, which is why we are keen to up the ante.  In any event, we don’t consider a session finished until the client revises their estimate up to a ten out of ten. 

Clients sometimes bring a problem for which they already have plans for an ambitious multi-year program to accomplish, just to see if it can be done at less cost and in a shorter timeframe. Sometimes that same result or better can be “impossibly” achieved and made to stick within a few weeks following a single design session, and from the outset we are raising the bar of what’s possible based on our knowledge of what is genuinely achievable—far beyond what the client already only dreams of.

What is possible or impossible is invariably a function of the frame in which it is considered. Something is only held to be “impossible” within a particular timeframe, or within what are assumed to be the resources available, or in relation to particular means that have been considered so far for achieving the allegedly “impossible” thing. Clients regularly tell us that they have already “tried everything,” to which we reply, “Well, you’ve only tried everything you or anyone else could think of.”

If you find yourself saying, or thinking, “this is impossible,” just listen to yourself!  How can you know for sure that something is actually impossible? Most of the time you cannot, even if you think you can. For what you are talking about is something never achieved before. It is something unexplored and untried, and therefore surely possible until proven otherwise, is it not?  What if we replaced any sign indicating, ‘Impossible!’ with a sign that read, simply, ‘Unexplored beyond this point’?

Uncharted territory is called that for a reason. Across that boundary there are currently no maps. There is nothing we can say in advance about how to find our way about, or what dangers may lurk, or what may be asked of us, or what we bring to the party, or what unimagined treasures are just lying there, hidden in plain sight across that boundary line, shining in the sun and all ours for the taking. The known is mapped, and it comes with lists and checkboxes, signage and guidebooks. The unknown is up for grabs.

Impossible? So what, specifically, is stopping you? Which constraints are you thinking of? And how long has it been since you last updated, tested, checked whether those constraints are still operative? Or questioned how they might be overcome or bypassed or tunneled under?

“Impossibility = opportunity,” particularly in the commercial world, but also in every field, from the art world to warfare. What we might call “modal arbitrage” is playing with what we can see as possibilities that appear to others to be impossibilities. From one point of view it’s impossible; from another point of view it is eminently doable. Where the gap between the two is wide open, there lies opportunity. And the more desirable the prize and the more apparently unobtainable it is the greater its value.

“Opportunity” is another name for impossibility. The inventor of the Polaroid camera (and so much else) Edwin Land advised, “never undertake any project unless its success would be manifestly desirable and its achievement apparently impossible.” Has there ever been any better route to sustainable competitive advantage?

In war it is unsettling to find the enemy succeeding in doing what everyone on our side “knew”  to be impossible. But success in war depends on doing the allegedly impossible. And isn’t every genuine innovation a case of doing the formerly impossible? Here we might recall the admonition, “It is an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.” And those means are yet to be discovered, invented, improvised. The author of the admonition was Francis Bacon, the founder of modern science, who at the dawn of the 17th Century opened the exit door from a still fundamentally mediaeval industrial mentality, leading the world to wide, bright new vistas of technological process in which previously impossible things were achieved by previously unthinkable, scientific means.

“Impossible” means we can’t currently see how it could be possible.  But reality is infinitely re-describable. So what exactly is the “it” whose possibility we are questioning? How is it being considered? And how might it be looked at differently if someone tipped you off that not only was it possible, but that someone, somewhere had already pulled it off?

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© Copyright 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted