A drunken fellow was wandering in circles under a street lamp feverishly looking for something when he was approached by a police officer.
“What are you looking for?” the officer asked.
“My car keys,” said the man.
“Are you sure you lost them around here?” the officer asked.
“Heavens no,” said the man as he hiccuped an inebriated burp and slurred his way into his explanation. “I lost them down the street, but the lighting is much better over here!”
What’s funny is I’m not really sure which lesson to draw out of that joke! On one hand, it teaches us to look where the answer lies. If you dropped your keys by the car, then by all means look for them by the car. It’s pretty dumb to look for them a block away, even if the lighting is better.
But on the other hand, in more abstract and less clearcut terms, our inebriated friend has a point. Sometimes, to find what we are looking for, we need to look completely outside our world.
I recall reading an article years ago about a surgeon’s epiphany on a flight home from a conference. After days of learning about medicine, it turns out his greatest lesson was taught by the pilot of a small commuter plane.
Up until this revelation, Operating Rooms were sterile of more than just germs. They were also completely devoid of a simple checklist akin to the kind the pilot followed prior to each and every flight of his career. Now, that may not sound like much, except that prior to such a checklist, operations often “left things behind”–way more often than you might realize. In the airline industry that might mean your suitcase stays on the tarmac during takeoff, but in surgery? That meant sponges, even clamps and other surgical devices, were left inadvertently in the patient. You read that right. In. This of course led to infections, more surgeries, and even death.
But then, taking a cue from his pilot, this surgeon implemented an O.R. checklist – arguably a remarkably simple device – and the success of surgeries, post-op recovery and many other measures immediately went way up.
If he had looked for solutions, insights and wisdom only from within his industry, he may never have discovered this life-saving procedure. Sometimes we need to leave the obvious, head to better light, look “outside the box,” and seek wisdom from unrelated industries and people in order to find real solutions.
What box do you find yourself in this week? What solutions could you discover if you looked at the problem from a completely different place? Where is the least likely location you could find your answer? Go there and see what you find. With an open mind and insatiable curiosity, anything is possible.
