Some time ago I was cutting my grass, including the leaves and branches there, when my lawnmower suddenly made a horrible grinding sound, so I stopped. It turns out that what I thought was a pile of leaves, was in fact a pile of leaves and a wooden rake, and my lawnmower blade was hopelessly entangled with the tines. Well, not “hopelessly”, actually. I knew that it would just take a few minutes of wangling to separate it from the blade.
However, because of the way the rake was stuck into the blade, I was going to have to tip the lawnmower over and temporarily flood the engine. Which meant once I got the rake dislodged, I was going to have to wait about 20 minutes for the lawnmower to start. But if I didn’t tip over the lawnmower, well, I wasn’t going to be able to get the rake out, which meant I wasn’t going to be able to use the lawnmower to cut the rest of my grass.
In other words, it occurred to me that I had to actually make the situation worse before I could make it better. And this was kind of a revelation.
Because we usually don’t think that way. We usually think linearly. Here is a problem. I will solve it by doing x. Now things are better.
But this was sort of the opposite of that. And as ridiculous as it sounded, I was actually living it. I turned over the lawnmower, I flooded the engine. I extricated the rake. I turned the lawnmower back over. I tried to start it. It would not start. I waited twenty minutes. I started the lawnmower and went back to cutting the grass.
Worse, to make it better. My mind boggled. So I took this observation to friends of mine, friends who are smarter than me of course, to show them my discovery.
“Look at this” I said to a surgeon friend. “Sometimes solutions aren’t linear.” I said. “I had to make a thing worse to make it better! What do you think of that!”
“I think you’ve just described surgery” she said.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Well, do you really think that opening someone up, exposing their inner organs to the outside world, rooting around in their sinews and blood and muck is actually making them instantly better? Of course you don’t. If you did, you would expect people to hop off the operating table ready to run a marathon. But nobody expects that, do they?” “well, um…” “There’s a ‘recovery time’, right? Recovery from what? Recovery from the surgery, from what we did to you. The very existence of ‘recovery time’, the very fact that everyone is so used to that idea, is proof that the idea of making things worse to make them better is, well, obvious.”
Disappointed but undaunted, I went to a friend of mine who teaches mathematics and said the same thing. That I had this thing that was a problem, and I sort of made it worse, in order to make it better. That this idea seemed to run counter to the way I thought things worked, you know A plus B equals C.
“Because it’s not really about addition, is it. It’s more like multiplication.” “I’m sorry?” “Where a negative times a negative equals a positive. Surely you remember that, right?” “Um, well…” “Did you not take mathematics in middle school?”
Now, setting aside my disappointment that I had not discovered some fascinating new … something … AND the fact that I seem to have fairly snotty friends, it occurred to me that if this is true in mathematics and medicine and, well, gardening, then perhaps it could be true in advertising.
That is, clients come to us with a problem: “Sales are down” or “Awareness is bad” or whatever. And they expect us to come up with solution that will make things better. You know, A + B = my boss is happy now.
But what if some problems in advertising are like the rake and the lawnmower? What if some problems need to be made worse before they can be made better? What are those problems? I don’t know – and its entirely possible that they’re very specific to each situation. But now that I’m aware of this idea, I wonder how many problems I’ve mis-diagnosed and provided less than adequate solutions for.
Which is not to say that if I had told the client “we have to make this worse first” that they would have reacted positively. Clients don’t want to hear “worse”. Clients’ bosses don’t want to hear “worse”. By and large, businesses are not built for it. Certainly stockholders are not.
And just to be clear, I’m not talking about some kind of William Westmoreland “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” thinking. That’s about obliteration; “making something worse” implies a deterioration within the context of the thing, not a total restart. I didn’t, for example, throw out the lawnmower. I just made it inoperable. Worse. That’s different from a sort of “blank slate, let’s start over” thinking - which is also a legitimate tool for problem solving, but which works by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Like I said, I didn’t throw out the lawnmower and the rake and hire sheep to deal with my grass. I just made a bad situation worse, in order to make it better.
When I returned home, I found my son finally cleaning his room, as his mother had asked him to. Earlier it had been a mess. Now, it was a disaster. There wasn’t even a path from the door to the bed. Stuff was everywhere. I asked him what the hell he was doing. I told him this looked like a bomb had gone off. “Yes” he said, “I have to make it worse before I can make it better.”
I went back out to cut the grass…