For years, I thought that the most frustrating thing I’d ever experienced in my professional life was the moment when I realized I was stuck.
The deadline to submit part of a manuscript to a Publisher is looming, and after weeks of re-writes it’s Sunday night and I’m not quite there.
I’ve looked over the personnel problem, the operational breakdown, the go-to-market strategy a hundred times and I keep ending up with my head in my hands.
The prospect’s expecting the “big idea” from my team’s pitch on Thursday, and Tuesday I step back and look at the pitch and say “We’re not there yet.” I’ve tried writing the same column 23 times (true story), and all I’ve got to show for it is a wastebasket of crumpled paper.
“Stuck” is when, ultimately, you know it’s good, but it’s not great. You can see the runway, but you can’t quite feel the landing. It’s good work, but it’s not your very best and you know it. You’re feel like you’re pushing a solution upstream through the system, but you know it doesn’t feel like being led through a rushing downstream current.
Here’s a paradigm shift that’s changed my life. I’ve learned to embrace “stuck.” Stuck, I discovered, is a great place, and I’ve finally learned to treasure my arrival at “stuck.” It’s where you realize you have to get, in any process of breakthrough. It means you’re being challenged, being sharpened, pruned, and out of “stuck” will come growth.
Stuck forces you to step back, step away, and step up. Up above the problem, where you can see it in perspective from above like the view from an airplane. And, it allows for breakthrough if you’re willing to change one of two things: Change the view, or change the viewer. In other words, change your environment or change the set of eyes looking at the problem.
Environmental change: Once you discover what environments produce your greatest breakthroughs, you’re unwilling to work in any other. For some it’s a coffee shop, others it’s with a laptop on the back porch, others it’s in a bullpen of cubicles with a lot of noise and energy; maybe it’s behind a desk, or on a couch with no desk at all. People are much like fruit trees, flowers, shrubs and other living reproducers: We can probably grow anywhere and produce something in almost any condition if given enough time. But, there’s that one environment, that ideal set of circumstances that’s ideal for our best fruit to be produced. Plant us there, and we’ll flourish.
There’s something magical that happens when you step away from a problem when you’re stuck, and you hand it over to someone else with little direction other than “tell me what you see.” When we interview business advisors who have had their own consulting businesses, the biggest frustration we hear unanimously is, “it’s hard not having anyone to bounce ideas off from time to time.”
So many companies and non-profit organizations, with good hearts and intentions, hire and subsequently lose creative people because of their inability to embrace, understand and structure (yes, structure) the right boundaries for creativity and innovation to flourish.
Great leaders, great innovators, great over-comers spend less time dealing with problems that arise, and more time fine-tuning and cultivating the right environments with the right sets of eyes. They’ve mastered the ability to not just live in the vision of “tomorrow” while tolerating the realities of “today,” but build organizations with cultures that thrive on “stuck” because it’s been trained to embrace it., designed to look for it, and built to break through it.
