What Happens When You Flip Your Assumptions?

Imaginable, by Jane McGonigal

In a recent episode of Armchair Expert, Dax Shephard and his guest Neil Patrick Harris engage in a light debate over the merits of using videos for guidance when attempting new projects such as woodworking. When NPH shares his feelings of inadequacy and frustration while watching how-to videos, Dax takes the stance that diving into activities and figuring things out as you go is inherently more valuable and rewarding than following tutorials and instructions:

Dax: Please don’t watch a video. If there’s anything you can figure out, it’s building something with wood…If you get something that’s even remotely standing on four legs, you’re gonna feel…I'm telling you, there's a pride a man or a woman can get by assembling something out of their mind without any instruction that literally lasts four or five hours.

When NPH states that he doesn’t want to get it wrong or fail multiple times than is necessary, Dax presses on:

Dax: Would you advise your daughter to watch a YouTube tutorial on how to draw a cloud?

NPH: I wouldn’t singularly say that, no.

Dax: Would you ask her to watch a tutorial to do any coloring?...Would you ever want your kids to be instructed on how to be creative?...Why would you not treat yourself with the same love, desire, and support that you give to your kids? Let’s fail! Let’s f***ing get into it! Let’s fail!

Within this exchange are assumptions that are valuable not because they are particularly profound but because they are widely accepted as true. Whittled down to almost ludicrous simplicity, these statements could be summarized as:

1. How-to videos are shortcuts for gaining knowledge.

2. Trial and error are valuable ways to learn.

3. Rigid instructions hinder creativity.

What if we were to invert each of them so that the opposite were true? What kind of perspectives would we gain from this thought exercise? What would they reveal? In her immensely readable and actionable book Imaginable, Jane McGonigal shares an exercise she leads for imagining future scenarios called One Hundred Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future:

Here’s how it works: First, you pick a topic, like work, or food, or learning. Then you list one hundred things that are true about it today. The simpler or more obvious the fact, the better. Next, you rewrite each fact, one by one, so that ten years from now the opposite is true - no matter how ridiculous, at first, the new ideas sound. Finally, you look for clues, or evidence of change already happening today, that these ideas are plausible and realistic. It sounds simple, but it’s incredibly mind opening.

Flipping these facts, McGonigal continues, doesn’t have to produce anything terribly logical or profound. In fact, the more ludicrous or impossible, the better! However, imagining the context for these flipped statements must be rooted in “real trends or disruptions that are already underway.” The point is to try and make sense of an alternate way of thinking about real life. One such example she gives is about shoes:

Example: 

FACT: People take their shoes off when they go to sleep at night; they don’t sleep with their shoes on.

FLIPPED: Ten years from now, many people sleep with their shoes on.

Why or how could this be the reality in ten years? She imagines a scenario, informed by her own lived experiences of wildfire outbreaks in California, where people who live in parts of the world at extreme risk of climate-driven catastrophes sleep with their shoes on so that they can mobilize quickly if needed. “I was advised by an evacuation and rescue expert at the American Red Cross either to sleep with my shoes right by my bed or to wear them while I sleep because people panic and lose precious time looking for shoes when they have to escape a quickly spreading fire,” she writes. It’s a reality we hope will never occur, but it’s not entirely unfathomable or far-fetched when you think of displaced populations that must flee their homes today due to political or climate-related upheaval. The inverse of the original fact is not so much a blanket truth, but it is a reality within a given context.

Returning to our seemingly innocuous if not glaringly obvious statements, let’s flip each one.

FACT 1: How-to videos are shortcuts for gaining knowledge.

FLIPPED: Ten years from now, how-to videos are shortcuts for losing knowledge.

Suspend disbelief momentarily and recall that McGonigal says that ridiculous and unthinkable ideas as part of this exercise are fine, as long as they are grounded in some semblance of plausibility. In ten years, what would need to have occurred in order for the flipped statement to be true? 

Imagine that a knowledge research organization embarks today on a ten-year study in which they track two groups of novice woodworkers. Group A consists of 20 individuals whose education consists primarily of in-person, shoulder-to-shoulder learning with experts. Group B consists of 20 individuals who learn from how-to videos featuring the same experts from Group A, accessing the kinds of digital libraries you’re accustomed to seeing today.

In 2032, this organization publishes its ten-year comparative analysis. Group B was able to cover a greater span of information in a shorter period of time, and was therefore able to tackle projects faster. Group A, however, rated significantly higher in long-term memory, retention, aptitude, and problem solving. Members of Group A were able to expand and innovate on their skills and abilities to create novel solutions and woodworking projects, seeing their professions more as vocations than day jobs. They were also more likely to open their own woodworking shops and train novices with greater efficacy. 

Group B  members plateaued early. They took longer to develop the skills they needed to do their jobs successfully, felt greater frustration and dissatisfaction while watching videos, had higher error rates in their work due to faulty and uncorrected habits, and were more likely to experience burnout. 

Using fMRI scans, this organization reports that, while learning from experts, members of Group A demonstrate heightened communication between the parts of the brain responsible for attention and visuospatial processing, the hippocampus and amygdala (the parts of the brain that are responsible for memory and emotion), and the olfactory bulb (that processes smell). Meaning, their learning experience involved greater attentiveness and richer multi-sensory memory making. Members of Group B demonstrated far less neural activity while watching how-to videos.

Hypothetical though this is, it’s not that much of a stretch. In our customer discovery, we’ve heard from countless training and education professionals who have remarked on high error rates and an overall lack of motivation among trainees when they’re simply given libraries of videos from which to learn.

So, in order for our flipped statement to be true, in ten years time we discover that how-to videos in their current format don’t exactly reach into your brain and zap knowledge out. But as a default resource, they have an overall detrimental effect on long-term aggregate knowledge acquisition compared to learning in-person on overall job satisfaction and accumulated earnings. Going one step further, it could also be argued that if how-to videos, in their current format, are the de facto resource for training, that loss of knowledge occurs beyond a personal level and more broadly at a societal level. 

FACT 2: Trial and error are valuable ways to learn.

FLIPPED: Ten years from now, trial and error are detrimental ways to learn.

“Everyone knows that trial and error are incredibly important ways to learn!” you might insist. And you would be right. Countless studies have been done on the benefits of failure as a learning tool. In much the same way that Daniel Pink argues for the positive benefits of regret as a means for reflection and improvement, failure is widely considered a vital means for growth. Jo Boaler says in Limitless Mind:

Those with a growth mindset may approach hard challenges well and many times succeed, but what does a growth mindset say when we fail? Those who fail and continue on undeterred, those who get knocked down and get right back up again, those who get pushback and see it as a positive sign that they are doing something important are the people who are truly limitless. 

What, then, would need to happen in ten years’ time for our flipped statement to be true within a given context? We already know that there are certain domains of knowledge where failure and error equate to harm and death. It’s easy to think about how errors in organ packaging could result in non-viable organs, or a military strike on foreign territory where even the smallest of mistakes could have disastrous consequences. Or consider recently when a cleaning solution was “inadvertently introduced into a production line” at a Capri Sun factory, resulting in a nation-wide recall. Mistakes, in these cases, are catastrophic in nature.

Imagine in ten years that the current supply chain issues are exacerbated exponentially, which is a speculation already being made today. This means that jobs in manufacturing and production are in high demand and require a great deal of training, skill, and both procedural and declarative knowledge. Given the limited resources, any error in the supply chain process that would result in a recall would be excessively costly and intolerable.

What would we need in order to support a future of zero-tolerance for error? First, we would need to create robust learning environments in which mistakes and errors were both possible and required. These environments would require deeper analysis of mistakes as well as education in error evaluation and contemplation. Second, we would need an error “bank” – a singular place where the lived mistakes of others could be stored and documented, then re-experienced by novices and trainees. The preservation of errors and the incorporation of error knowledge into training would mean novices could effectively learn from the mistakes of others without having to make them on their own. 

Imagine how this kind of tool could accelerate progress and growth while minimizing avoidable losses? How could this translate to the aforementioned high-stakes environments in organ procurement or military actions? As L&D around procedural activities (e.g. medicine, manufacturing) move closer and closer to synthetic environments, perhaps error simulations are of critical importance to consider building into training curricula everywhere.

FACT 3: Rigid instructions hinder creativity.

FLIPPED: Ten years from now, rigid instructions produce a surge in creativity.

The term “rigid,” especially when it comes to learning, likely conjures up images of humorless school marms in tight buns, slapping down dense multiplication worksheets onto wooden school desks. In our current culture and society in which play- and project-based learning are increasingly celebrated, rigid instruction and rote learning are often framed in opposition to creativity-driven approaches like “meaningful learning” or “RIE parenting” (which is what NPH practices at home). This countermovement against rigidity is well-informed. Today, we know more about diverse learning styles and speeds, and recognize the detriments of one-size-fits-all, take-and-receive styles of teaching.

What makes this particular inversion exercise challenging is that rigidity and creativity are not actually mutually incompatible. The headlines below are completely fabricated but not far-fetched:

“Students Who Master These Four Bach Sinfonias More Likely to Win Awards for Original Compositions.”

“Sushi Chefs With Minimum 5 Years Tamago Training Later Achieve Two Michelin Stars On Average.”

“The Quickest Way to Die in the Wild? Not Learning How to Build a Fire.”

(Admittedly, that last headline is about survival rather than creativity, but we include it here because it speaks to the essentialness of core activities for which there are strict processes.) 

So in order for us to contemplate a future where rigidity is seen as the key to creativity, we really have to stretch our collective imagination and have some fun.

Let’s say that in the next few years there is heightened attention given to the most awkward and uncomfortable years of anyone’s life: puberty. Thanks to neuroscientists like Andrew Huberman and geneticists like David Sinclair, we know that puberty is the developmental stage in which we age the most rapidly, and that our lifestyles during our pubescent years have long-term effects on our overall health, decades and decades into our futures. 

But what are kids largely expected to do during this period of their lives? Wake up super early, go to school, and remain sedentary at a desk for the majority of the day. All while managing raging hormones, changing bodies, heightened emotions, increasingly complex social lives, and hair in strange places.

In this imagined future, a growing cohort of educators, scientists, parents, and student activists are calling to change middle school as we know it. Reframing it as “the gained years” and modeling it after gap years, apprenticeships, and walkabouts, these groups advocate for a different approach to 7th and 8th grade called “Life Lab.”

Life Lab is a government-funded two-year period in which students are taught practical, hands-on skills in large, open spaces supplied with everything from tools and instruments to washer/dryer units and sleep pods. Every semester, they choose three concentrations out of a larger menu of offerings (e.g. carpentry, tailoring, music, cooking, engineering, elementary emergency medicine, sculpture, etc.) under the tutelage of experts and the most advanced guidance tools. Life Lab is a transitional period and rite-of-passage in which students are activated physically, intellectually, and socially. Similar to the tamago and Bach examples, Life Lab is less about expressions of imagination than the foundations of imagination.

In order for Life Lab to work, students must be taught the why of what they’re doing in addition to the how (ie. “structural knowledge”). This means that while they’re learning how to make puff pastry, they’re also being taught the science of cooking, mathematical exponentation created through the layers of puff pastry, and the history and evolution of puff pastry across cultures. The emphasis is on structured core instruction for important skills and the development of confidence around them – the bedrock of what could translate into an explosively successful four years of high school.

What could this result in? Perhaps a generation of highly capable individuals accustomed to attaching intellectual knowledge with tactile skills - something we’re more accustomed to seeing in medical schools. Heightened optimism as the result of seeing clear and tangible results of their efforts. Greater respect for and engagement with the material world. Healthier and more vibrant bodies and minds. Kids who love school so much they practically trip over themselves to get there.

Ergo: Ten years from now, strict instructions produce a surge of creativity.

What’s important to note is that everything being discussed in this essay centers on procedural activities and procedural knowledge. A common misconception is that procedural activities like woodworking, drawing, and cooking don’t require as much knowledge as subjects like math and science. You would never hear someone say, “Just wing it!” when it comes to math equations and foreign languages. 

While it’s true that you can scramble an egg without understanding how proteins denature, or produce a chair with four legs without studying under a skilled artisan, it’s also true that unless you have context and/or key foundational knowledge, it is significantly harder to grow or even reproduce success. (Which is why so many people have to revisit the same recipe again and again, despite having made it a number of times prior.) 

Most damagingly, however: without real knowledge, any resulting frustration or lack of success can easily feel like personal failure and inadequacy.

Our message to NPH? It’s not you. It’s the status quo that’s failed you.