Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.

Inversion 101

“Do your best. But like it. Like what you are doing.

Katherine Johnson (1939—2020) was an American mathematician who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon.

In 1939 Johnson was selected to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University. Later she was a member of a group of NASA employees called "computers," made up of African American women who excelled in mathematics and problem-solving.

From Time.com:

“Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start,” she told NASA in a 2008 interview. “I said, ‘Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”

NASA Langley pioneer Katherine Johnson talks about her life and her work at NASA, where she was known as the "human computer." She discusses the highlights of her career, including calculating John Glenn's flight trajectory.

INVERSION 101

INVERSION IS AN APPROACH TO PROBLEM-SOLVING THAT STARTS WITH IMAGINING WORST-CASE SCENARIOS – AND THEN USING THOSE SCENARIOS AS THE BASIS FOR DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS.

Behavior change is as hard and as simple as, “Just stop doing these things and do more of these other things instead.” That is no small thing for us as individuals, groups, and as a society.

The concept of Inversion is often interpreted in two different ways, both are valuable to consider: flip the problem (think of the opposite) or work with the end in mind. Both approaches look at the end result uniquely and result in some action. We spend less time trying seeking the right answer and more time avoiding the wrong answer. Avoiding loss is an easier starting point than seeking gain. The key takeaway: moving indirectly gains more ground than directly.

Considering an opposite asks us to hold our ideal result loosely, and to consider the opposite of our desired result. Working with the end in mind assumes we are keeping the same goal but approaching the solution from a different direction, by backing into it. We can also think of adding vs. subtracting.

If we are always inverting a problem, like playing with a Rubik’s cube, we experience it from multiple perspectives. Multiple vantage points challenge our certainty. It can shake our beliefs.

Despite our best intentions, thinking forward increases the odds that we’ll cause harm (through unintended consequences). For example, drugs designed to eradicate one disease might also have adverse effects, become harmful if overused, or cause antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Thinking backward, call it subtractive avoidance or inversion, we are less likely to cause harm to become overwhelmed. Inverting the problem won’t always solve it, but it will help us avoid trouble and think through some of the undesirable and unintended consequences. We can think of it as the avoiding negativity filter. It’s not sexy but it’s a very easy way to gain clarity, get results, and improve.

So how do we learn to reframe complex or open-ended problems?

PRACTICE

Answer: Considering your career, what is it you really want?

Seems like a simple enough question, but it’s really hard to answer. Many people have a very hard time imagining the outcome we want because we’ve been conditioned for such long periods of our life (at home, in school, at work) to think a certain way or to embrace a certain idea of success.

However, when asked to consider what would guarantee our unhappiness…and few are at a lack of words.

Answer: What can be done to foster innovation?

Responses to this tend to be pretty standard: engage small teams, enable autonomy, consider the tension of deliberate and emergent strategies, etc. By the way, implementing any one of those things in a culture that doesn’t naturally gravitate toward those qualities is really hard.

Inversion: How do we avoid becoming traditional or unoriginal?

We start to consider all the things we can do to discourage innovation: reduce feedback loops, increase top-down decision making, enable homogeneous thinking, foster resistance to risk. Generally speaking, we would want to avoid these things, right? (And, this list is generally more workable because we are guilty of these behaviors in ways we can start to change immediately.)

COMMIT

[ ] I commit myself to practice inversion to reframe problems toward more creative solutions.

Thinking, Fast and Slow: In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman suggests two systems drive the way we think and make choices: System One is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System Two is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Exposing the extraordinary capabilities as well as the biases of fast thinking and the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and our choices, he shows where we can trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking, contrasting the two-system view of the mind with the standard model of the rational economic agent.

Extraordinary Tennis For The Ordinary Player: Simon Ramo, an engineer, businessman, and author, wrote a neat little book that most people probably haven’t heard of. I’m not a huge tennis follower. The reason this book is interesting to me is that Ramo highlights the difference between the Winner’s Game and a Loser’s Game adopting the lens of pro v amateur. Some amateurs believe they are professionals but professionals never identify as amateurs. Both play by the same rules and scoring, use the same court, and sometimes even the same equipment. The main difference? All things being equal, professionals score points whereas amateurs lose points. It’s a professional’s game to win, and an amateur’s game to lose. More…

Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger: Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, wrote in a letter to Wesco Shareholders, where he was at the time Chairman:

Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. … It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, `It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’

More…

In her words…

“Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Sometimes they have more imagination than men.”

“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”

“Like what you do, and then you will do your best.”

“We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.”

“We needed to be assertive as women in those days – assertive and aggressive – and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be.”

“I like to learn. That’s an art and a science.”

“In math, you’re either right or you’re wrong.”

“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”

“The women did what they were told to do. They didn’t ask questions or take the task any further. I asked questions; I wanted to know why. They got used to me asking questions and being the only woman there.”

“You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you.”

“Take all the courses in your curriculum. Do the research. Ask questions. Find someone doing what you are interested in! Be curious!”

“I see a picture right now that’s not parallel, so I’m going to go straighten it. Things must be in order.”

“Everything was so new – the whole idea of going into space was new and daring. There were no textbooks, so we had to write them.”

“Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.”

What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.