How to be as innovative as the Wright brothers — no computers required

In 1895, the world’s top scientist predicted wrong. Epically wrong.

The scientist was Lord Kelvin. Born in early nineteenth-century Ireland to a mathematics teacher, he was from his youngest summers a wizard with numbers. Like a living computer, he thought effortlessly in digits, entering college at the age of ten and dashing up the ranks to full professor. By his middle age, he had reduced electricity to algorithms, unified the known rules of physics, and formulated thermodynamics, achieving such eminence that in 1892, he became the first scientist elevated to England’s House of Lords.

It was three years later, while serving out his final term as president of the British Royal Society, that Kelvin made his epically wrong prediction: “I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” In other words: There will never be an airplane.

Years passed, the century turned, technology advanced. Across the Atlantic at the North Carolina beach town of Kill Devil Hills, a pair of thirty-something brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, began crafting a flyer with an aluminum engine, wing warps, and a movable rudder. Kelvin, meanwhile, remained implacable. In 1902, he declared to a reporter from The New York Journal: “No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.”

One year later, the Wright brothers flew.

In our modern space age, it’s easy to laugh at Lord Kelvin. He was a luddite, a fogey, a stick in the mud. But we shouldn’t be so quick to smirk. The mistake that the good lord made then is one that almost everyone on earth is making now.

The mistake is to confuse probability with possibility. Probability is the statistical likelihood that an event will occur — and so too, in modern parlance, is possibility. All that distinguishes the two terms nowadays is that possibility is on the lower end of the probability spectrum. If you ask a data scientist to define a possibility, they’ll reply: It’s a small probability — say ten percent or less.

This is wrong. Probability and possibility occur in different regions of the human brain. They do so because their underlying physical mechanics are fundamentally distinct.

Probability is computed from an analysis of prior events. Those events are correlated with one another, yielding patterns that in turn produce statistical forecasts. By definition, a probability is therefore an event that has happened before — usually, multiple times.

A possibility, in contrast, is an event that has never happened before. What makes it possible is that it doesn’t violate the laws of its environment, so it could occur, if initiated. As an example, there’s American football. American football has rules that dictate how points are scored, when the clock runs, and what players aren’t allowed to do. But those rules don’t mandate innovations like the forward pass, the spread offense, or the 4-3 defense. From the sport’s beginning, such innovations existed as possibilities — permitted but not preordained by the rulebook — as do other sporting inventions that have yet to (and may never) be introduced to the game.

If you can’t imagine those inventions, your brain is stuck in probability. Probability is how computers think. And it’s how Kelvin thought too. He was certain that machine flight was impossible because it had never happened previously. Its odds were therefore zero.

Possibility, meanwhile, is how children think, because children think in story. Story makes possible the worlds of science fiction, which (like American football) are based on rules that circumscribe action without determining it, encouraging our brain to speculate: Maybe in that future world, I could do X; maybe with this tomorrow tech, I could do Y.

The Wright brothers were emboldened to think in story by their father, who permitted them to skip school so long as they spent the day reading authors like Mark Twain. And by thinking in story, the Wright brothers imagined what Lord Kelvin could not: A contraption that did something radically new.

Today, most of us think like Kelvin. We’ve been conditioned by the rise of quantitative economics, mathematical forecasting, Bayesian statistics, “moneyball,” AI, organizational psychology, system 1 and 2, quantum mechanics, management science, MBA programs, and the rest of our algorithmic age to think that life can be reduced to computer spreadsheets. In those spreadsheets, we see patterns — aka, probabilities. By reasoning this way, we believe we’re seeing the future. Yet really, we’re shutting our eyes to potential innovations, limiting our personal growth and missing the first hints of big change.

It’s possible, however, to restore our vision. All we need to do is train up the storythinking brain regions that the Wright brothers activated with their father’s bookshelf. For a comprehensive guide on how to do so, see my book Primal Intelligence, but as a quick start, here’s a simple two-step exercise.

First, to get your team thinking in terms of possibilities, distribute a list of extraordinary economic events. Ask your team members to circle events that have happened before and to cross out events that could never happen. Then explain: The circled events are probabilities and the crossed-out events are impossibilities. Which means that all the remaining events — uncircled and uncrossed-out — are possibilities.

Second, present your team with a lightly sci-fi scenario in which a rule of their current operating environment is altered by a near-future technology (e.g., stem-cell therapies that reverse aging, or highways that wirelessly charge electric vehicles while driving). Having disrupted your team’s priors, ask them: What potentially profitable initiatives could we launch that don’t contradict the new rule? 

Give each individual team member five minutes to propose possible responses that can’t be validated with data but also can’t be shown to be impossible. Award one point for every response, and allow participants to “steal” a point if they can show that another participant’s response is either a probability or an impossibility.

In trials at Fortune 50s and SMEs, teams who practiced this two-step exercise improved significantly at proposing initiatives that were both novel and feasible. And the more you practice the two steps yourself, the more your own brain will do like the brothers Wright: Exit probability for possibility, where imagination can take flight.

This article How to be as innovative as the Wright brothers — no computers required is featured on Big Think.