I have been caught many times by the feeling that things used to be simpler, sweeter, or better. When enveloped by the warm blanket of memory, I recall all of those wonderful little details of the holidays with family, or the rampant productivity in the weeks prior to the launch of a new project. This feeling comes on most strongly when I am faced with a problem or frustration with something that seems all too similar.
The trouble starts with the remembering. The human mind has an incredible ability to fool itself into believing that it is recalling or observing with a very high level of detail. Your eyes are only high resolution at the very center. As a result, your brain has to splice together the images from your rapidly moving eyes into a single coherent, seemingly high resolution, image.
For fun, take a moment and look at one spot about 20 feet away from you. Concentrate on not moving your eyes, and think about how much of what you see is actually in focus. Very little.
If this is the input for our memories, how do we imagine that our memories can serve to help us recall what really happened? Even if you argue that there are all sorts of other sensory and emotional inputs that help to capture a more complete picture, think about your favorite birthday. Great, right? Think hard now; was it all great? Did you get annoyed because someone was 10 minutes late? Did your Mom get you a stupid gift? But, you also got a promotion, raise, and the coolest birthday present ever from your best friend. The emotional quotient for the day is a weighted sum. Not all of the events mattered in the same amount, and so the memory is like our vision experiment, very clear on a few details and everything else is pretty fuzzy.
Where this gets us in trouble is when you try to apply the wisdom of your nostalgic memory to your current problem.
The last time this went really well. What was different? Instead of this we had that. Instead of doing that we did this.
In my experience, success is usually not specifically repeatable. If it were, Microsoft would have major successes beside Office and Windows. They have been applying the specific strategies that they learned about what made those products successful over and over again with arguably limited success. In most cases, if things went well last time, you have already internalized the important parts of that success. The processes, work styles, tools, and attitudes that worked then are now just how you do business. It is so easy to make the mistake of thinking “If I could make right now more like back then, it would auto-magically make things better.” But, you probably have a new problem, and you almost certainly have an imperfect recollection of what made stuff so much better back then.
The solution? Treat your current problem like it is brand new.
Its scary to think of each problem as new because that means you don’t know the answer. But I find myself asking, so what? That only matters because I am afraid to fail. A little fear/uncertainty combined with a new problem are the perfect conditions for an innovation. If you try something new and fail, you have brand spankin’ new information about what didn’t work and a chance to understand the why of it. Not a bad worst-case scenario.
