Jordan Berkowitz

It’s Time to Forget, i.e. Create a Bubble

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

I’m calling bullshit on this wildly over-referenced and often misstated quotable. Forgetting can be rational, inspirational, and desirable. More to the point, forgetting frees us from the realities of a situation so that we can reestablish our objectivity and approach. I submit that remembering only forces us to relive the realities of the past and prevents us from envisioning a future that may or may not be informed by history.

In Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble identify institutional memory as common inhibitor of innovation.

Executives usually repeat actions that they believe have produced success. If success continues, then not only individual executives but also entire organizations shift from consciously repeating these actions to unconsciously accepting them as correct. Soon, these assumptions are embedded not only in managers’ minds but also in the relationships, processes, and communication patterns that make the organization tick. Even when organizations face failure, it is a struggle for them to reassess these deeply entrenched assumptions. They become orthodoxy.

I often find myself staring down the barrel of this figurative gun. I desire freedom to think about a problem outside of the organizational construct, but find myself revisiting the “reality” or history of the problem. I’ve come to realize that straddling this gap is risky and challenging. The truth is that I may never be able to step away from this duality, as my job often demands it, but it does motivate me to create an environment for other people that has none of these trappings.

The best analogy I can think of for this kind of environment is a bubble. What follows are some rules for how to get the most out of your bubble.

• Give yourself permission to create a bubble.
• Protect that bubble and the people/thinking inside of it.
• Allow thinking to percolate out of the bubble, but don’t allow reality to seep back in.
• If you created the bubble, it’s your job to translate, apply, and distribute the bubble’s output.
• Don’t look to your bubble to solve all of your problems, but expect that you’ll find something. It may be inspiration, a lateral solution, a literal solution, dissonance, or seeming randomness. In the right hands, any or all of this can be useful.
• When the bubble pops, which they always do, don’t look at it is as destruction but rather the opportunity to create a new bubble that is slightly different than the last one.

Take what you will from this. It may be that you are the sole inhabitant of your bubble … that’s totally fine. Your bubble is the place where you are uninhibited by history and reality. This is the place where visionary solutions are discovered. It’s the place where things that never seemed relevant are. Your bubble is the place where forgetting isn’t optional, it’s required.