Confidently lost, comfortably numb
A few times a year, I become a teacher again. For an intensive 7-week period, I’m part of a teaching team on a postgrad Education degree, guiding school leaders, L&D professionals, nurse educators and business owners through theory and practices they can apply in their workplaces. Right now, we’re almost halfway through a subject called Leading Innovative Practices, which integrates elements of design thinking and other approaches to innovation. We have a great cohort of students who are having lively discussions in the online boards, drawing on their extensive professional experiences as they identify a problem or ‘opportunity’ in their workplace to work on in their project-based assessments.
These professional experiences come with baggage, however. Their lived experiences usually reflect authentic but unhelpful examples of ‘innovation’ in the workplace: large technology-driven projects with doubtful user experience benefits; charismatic leaders clutching soundbites and claiming customer-centricity without going anywhere near the humans who use their services; pet projects that were funded because the CEO ‘loved the concept’ but never asked to see how it came about.
It’s no wonder students rush to get to their innovation ‘solutions’ before we’ve even finished Module 1. These professional habits are deeply embedded in established workplace cultures and incentive structures, exacerbated by the cult of speed and the thrill of a ‘quick win’. But do you know what happens when you keep running without checking where you’re going, or how everyone’s doing? You end up confidently lost, and comfortably numb. Unless you’re a songwriter, these are not good places to be.
Getting confidently lost
“I am confidently lost, I don't need you to find me”
- Sabrina Claudio, Confidently Lost (2017)
If you’ve ever been in a car with a driver who refuses to stop and ask for directions when they’re in a new place, this might feel familiar. Some drivers are great at being ‘confidently lost’, right up until they hit a dead end, drive into a lake or run out of petrol. “Ha, that’s not me!” you might be saying - and perhaps you’re right.
Being confidently lost isn’t always that obvious, however. If you’ve ever used AI to find answers to a topic you knew very little about and been pleasantly surprised by its articulate, self-assured outputs, it’s quite possible that you were confidently lost. Just ask the tourists who turned up in Weldborough, Tasmania, looking for the hot springs that an unchecked AI-generated article on a tour website had helpfully pointed them towards. Those hot springs do not exist, and the river Weld is freezing cold. The humans were not happy.
In organisations, being confidently lost can have serious, expensive consequences. Let’s say, for example, that your CEO believed so strongly in the ‘metaverse’ that he re-named his multi-billion dollar company, then had to backtrack less than 5 years later when ‘the metaverse’ had already cost over $70 billion. I wasn’t privy to the processes that led Mark Zuckerberg to those decisions, but it sounds like he didn’t spend much time checking whether people actually wanted to spend more time in virtual worlds, despite his company having billions of data points on human online behaviour.
Back in the real, more financially-constrained world of schools, hospitals, universities and offices, smaller versions of this play out on a daily basis, fuelled by deadlines, impatience and a casual disdain for the perceived mundanity of ‘process’ because nobody can see the point of it all. But process still matters, just as a map still matters when the GPS system fails and you’re out in the middle of nowhere without a 4G signal for the next 200 kilometres. The map matters so you can see the whole territory, even if you’re not exactly sure where you’re going.
In teaching, we can see the significance of ‘the map’ on students’ panicked faces when they’re in the messiest stages of their subject, and we see the relief when we anchor back to where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we’re going next. Trust the process, we reassure them. Especially when you’re feeling pressured at work to produce the bland self-assurance of an AI tool, smoothing the edges and bluffing your way through an answer. If you can’t explain how you got here, you won’t know how to fix it when it inevitably breaks again.
Staying comfortably numb
“There is no pain, you are receding/ A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You’re only coming through in waves/ Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying”
- Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb (1979)
So you’ve experienced the sensation of ‘confidently lost’; now we meet their equally stubborn and unhelpful twin: ‘comfortably numb’.
Comfortably numb is the feeling when an organisation has insulated itself so thoroughly from the mess of human experience that it mistakes the quiet for contentment (or ‘satisfaction’, as our self-satisfied survey tools like to call it). Nobody is complaining loudly, the data looks reasonable, all is well.
When you numb the discomfort, however, you also numb the signal. Listen carefully, and human insights will arrive with feelings attached – not the ones that are averaged out on a 5-point scale and pasted into the back pages of a report, but lumpy, ugly, painful, inconvenient feelings that dare to contradict your assumptions. They come from people whose experience of your organisation doesn’t look like the experience you thought you were providing. Listening to them asks you to acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong, and that fixing this may be slow, uncomfortable and uncertain. Most organisations, quite understandably, would rather not.
When we tackle painful things head-on, however, the impact can be huge. Design strategists and co-founders of The Care Lab Lekshmy Parameswaran and László Herczeg demonstrate this through their work in healthcare and communities. They even tackle death - the ultimate uncomfortable topic - in projects like their collaboration with the Festival of Life at the End of Life, creating cultural activities to de-stigmatise the social taboos of talking about death. I spent some all-too-brief time with them when I was a researcher in the UK and their design work is endlessly invigorating, deeply infused with human empathy and grounded in the rigour of good design processes. It’s what I wish all good research and design work could be like.
Take a look at the short summary video from the Festival of Life at the End of Life - it didn’t look like anyone was ‘comfortably numb’ next to that coffin on a Barcelona street… and I bet people were thinking about it for days and weeks afterwards.
Not sure? I know how you feel…
As we guide students through the latter half of our innovation subject, they begin to prototype and test their ideas, getting feedback from the people they’ve designed for, and reflecting on what they learned. They use this insight to ‘pursue, pivot, or perish’ – deciding whether their innovation will live to fight another day, be re-designed, or consigned to the recycling bin of broken design dreams. Some will just be glad to be a step closer to completing their postgrad degree, but others take their ideas back into their businesses and workplaces, ready to make a meaningful, well-considered change that seeks to improve a real human experience.
Does good process and human empathy guarantee success? Of course not – many innovations still fail when they meet the realities of a constrained budget, technical limitations or gnarly workplace politics. This group of professionals, however, now have the tools to unpick the process and figure out what went wrong - did we misinterpret the human insight, or just not get the detail of the design quite right? Was there a previous version we can go back to and try again? Great - let’s start there, so we don’t waste another $70 billion.
And if you’re not ‘confidently lost’ or ‘comfortably numb’ anymore, where does that leave you? Perhaps you know where you’re heading, but you’re not sure exactly how you’ll get there. What you do know is that the feeling is coming back, and it might be a bit painful, but it’s also the source of your next idea…