The Easy Answer, the Received Wisdom, Is Almost Always Wrong

As a professor of innovation who needs to cover many topics to try to get his students to visualize innovative thinking and the development of business models around it, one of the challenges I experience on a regular basis is the easy answer: timeworn solutions that people believe out of inertia, without questioning them; most of the time received wisdoms that nobody ever bothers to look into and decide to take as a given, as something they never question.

The matter has become more acute with the rise of social networks, where everyone thinks they know everything and answers are not thought through, but instead shot from the hip without even taking aim. Twitter, with its 280 characters, or Facebook, with its comments that rarely go much beyond that length, are the usual breeding grounds for the “easy respondents”, who comes up with a knee jerk reaction to an article I have written that may challenge their worldview.

Sometimes this verges, inadvertently, on humor: somebody with no deep understanding — or perhaps none — about a subject I have written about, and about which I do know something, and gone to the trouble of documenting, fire off the first thing that comes into their head, probably without even bothering to read the piece through properly, or check the references.

In reality, these easy answers are simply defense mechanisms. Just like throwing a stone. No matter the subject: if you check the tweets I usually post simply to notify you that I have written an article, you will find people responding to the whole article with a simple sentence, with one of those easy answers. If I write about the need to integrate smartphones in education, they will reply that “school is no place for Nintendos”, as if these devices were only for playing games, as if the idea had never crossed my mind, or as though it is impossible to get kids to use their smartphones as a tool to search for information. If I write about the climate emergency, there’s always somebody who has to let the world know that the whole thing is a conspiracy, dismissing with a few ill-chosen words the work of the global scientific community.

That said, the easy answer problem isn’t so much those individuals who seem happy for the rest of the world to know that they haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about; the real problem, the one that really costs us money and, sometimes, survival, is when those easy answers are delivered by professionals, people with some level of responsibility in a key area of a company, who reject any hint of change by taking refuge in the easy answer, the cliché, or “that’s not how we do things around here.”

In reality, what these people are doing is trying to avoid the work of having to explore whether there is any possibility that this change, this new approach, this idea that has just appeared on his radar or that they have never taken the time to seriously consider, may just be the solution we’re all looking for.

Furthermore, these easy answers, which may be rooted in beliefs and worldviews that have long been superseded by science have a common characteristic: they can be dismantled in a couple of searches at reliable sites.

If we were to stick to the easy answers, the world would not move forward. We are genetically programmed to resist change, and whenever someone comes up with a new idea, there is always someone else who will shoot them down, clinging to past rules, as if it were impossible for them to change, as if they were truths written in stone. Think about it: if your thing is to resort to the easy answer, you may be missing out on all the progress we have made — or could have made — if you and others like you had not systematically resorted to them. A little mental flexibility never hurt anyone.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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