wacky |ˈwakē| (also whacky)
funny or amusing in a slightly odd or peculiar way
eccentric, unconventional, uncommon, abnormal, irregular, aberrant, anomalous, odd, queer, strange, peculiar, weird, bizarre, outlandish, freakish, extraordinary; idiosyncratic, quirky, nonconformist, outré; way out, offbeat, freaky, oddball, kooky.
Brain Ruts
Why do we get stuck in our ways of thinking, such that new possibilities keep eluding us? Brain RUTs! It’s as if the wagon wheels on our thinking trails, just keep carving deeper and deeper ruts.
Try this to see how deep our “thinking ruts” are.
Ask people to give you a color, a type of furniture and a flower. Did you hear a lot of red or blue, chair or table and rose or daisy?
Established patterns in our brains can be a good thing. It helps us tie our shoes without thinking. It helps us attend to the whole and not have to painstakingly think about the parts. It is why we can see the forest, and not just the trees. These patterns help us. But sometimes these thinking patterns can get us stuck. They can hinder us from finding that break-through idea.
Get out of the Rut: Be Wacky!
Being WACKY can help us break out of our repetitive ways of thinking. Teams begin to see what was hiding behind their mental blinders when they take diverse, creative, and even silly perspectives. These out-of-the-ordinary perspectives can then be used to generate new paths of action.
Look what happened to a team that allowed themselves to think in a “slightly odd or peculiar way.”
Power Lines, Black Bears, Honey Pots and Helicopters
Sometimes it feels impossible to find a new way to think about an old problem. But, when the breakthrough happens – the result is as sweet as honey.
Elaine Camper shares a story from Pacific Power and Light about how playfully taking on the perspective of a bear helped a team breakthrough the log jam in their thinking.
One of the problems that lineman in the Pacific Northwest face is ice build-up on the power lines. It’s a job the linemen hate because it means climbing icy poles to shake the lines free. After several brainstorming sessions, no new answer was evident. But then, by taking on different perspectives… thinking began to shift. It started with one lineman sharing a story about a time he met a black bear on his return to the ground and the bear chased him for a mile.
Then someone jokingly said,
“Let’s get the bears to climb the poles for us!”
“Yeah, we could put honey on the top to attract them.”
“But that still leaves us climbing the poles to place the honey pots.”
“I know, we could ‘borrow’ the front office helicopters to place them.”
And then it happened, a shift in perspective brought a new perspective into view and that view met reality.
“I was a nurse in Vietnam, and the wash down from helicopter blades was amazing. I wonder if that wash is powerful enough to break the ice off the lines?”
To this day, PP&L uses helicopters to fly over the power transmission lines after ice storms.
From iced poles, to black bears, to honey pots, to helicopters, to a Vietnam nurse: new perspectives created a new plan of action!
Asking Wacky Questions
One of the best ways to start this wackiness is to ask unconventional, aberrant, outlandish, extraordinary, and kooky questions.
Questions that make the brain go WHAT???!!! What does that have to do with what we are doing? Exactly. Wackiness throws us a bit ‘off center’ so that new pathways in the brain are blazed!
Here are some wacky questions for your group to play with:
- What would our organization be like if a [zookeeper, cakemaker, or a _____ ] ran it?
- What ‘fictional character’ is running our organization? [Godzilla, Goofy or the Grinch?] Who would we want it to be?
- What if our customers had an ‘easy’ button? What would they want to make easier?
- What is not possible today, that if it were possible, would change everything?
- You (or your department) are under an evil spell cast by a witch: who is the witch, what is the spell, and what words were uttered to cast it?
- What proverb (make it up) captures the essence of our group? What should it be saying?
- What part of our work process do you find to be irrational, deranged and in need of intensive therapy?
For more wacky questions see: 75 Cage-Rattling Questions to Change the Way You Work.
Know How Practice: Apply it to your Own Leadership
1. Choose a problem that won’t go away – where you know you are in a rut.
2. Ask each member of the team to share, what they feel is keeping us stuck? What is the Roadblock? What is Impossible?
3. Try some wacky questions to get unstuck!
