Beware the Unintended

Need a jolt of inspiration? Let's take a card from the Creative Whack Pack. Today's message is "Beware the Unintended." Let's see what it says:

In preparing for the Olympics, the coach of a leading crew team invited a meditation instructor to teach awareness techniques to his crew. He hoped that such training would enhance their rowing effectiveness. As the crew learned more about meditation, they became more synchronized, there was less resistance, and their strokes got smoother.

The irony is that they went slower. It turned out that the crew became more interested in being in harmony than in winning. What are the unintended consequences (both positive and negative) of your being successful in a current project?

Unintended consequences are fascinating. Each of us has examples of things that we did for a particular reason, and something much different was the result.

For example, in September, 2006, I started blogging with the purpose of promoting my (then) brand new product, the Ball of Whacks. As I got into blogging, though, it turned out that very, very few of my posts pertained to this product. What happened instead are two main things: 1) I've met a lot of interesting people from all over the world; and, 2) I developed a lot of new content ideas some of which I've been able to put into the new edition (25th Anniversary Edition) of my book, A Whack on the Side of the Head (coming out in May, 2008).

Question: I'd love to hear some of your "Unintended Consequences" stories — both negative and positive. What are some of your favorites?

Comments

[Randy]

Consequences! On a personal note, many years ago, when ALMOST complete with a major home-improvement project, a very-nearly-final action virtually always led to personal injury! Tired and careless, sure, but nevertheless.

Result - after painfully confirming the apparantly inevitable, I simply designed the last action to be one that was both inconsequential to the design/execution and virtually invisible - known only to me!

No more end-of-project lacerations!
Broad application to other fields!

[Graham Horton]

That kind of thing happens to me all the time. Perhaps because I spend a lot of time talking about and teaching idea generation techniques :)

In one case, I was teaching the technique called Assumption Reversal or Provocation/Reversal. I was using the university as an example. One of the assumptions I stated (on the spur of the moment) as an illustration was
- "students receive their exams at the end of the term",
which yields the reversal
- "students receive their exams at the beginning of the term."

While most of the students laughed, I realised that this was actually an interesting suggestion, since it would require formulating the exam in such a way that it wouldn't matter that the students knew it ahead of time (and incidentally meant that it wouldn't matter if it fell into the "wrong hands" before the exam date.)

That turned out to be a very worthwhile exercise, since it taught me a lot about the difference between knowledge and understanding and about asking the right questions.

So for the past few years, I repeatedly amaze students by announcing at the beginning of term that they will be given the exam papers several weeks before the exam date... :)

[Roger von Oech]

Randy: Nifty solution, but painfully learned!

Graham: Nifty solution, arrived at in an interesting way!

[Saurabh Garg]

For me, unintended result was better than the objective.

I never read any books. Once I had to create a class report and for that I had to read a book by MK Gandhi. Once I took that book up, I could not put it down.

Have been hooked onto reading ever since. And not to mention, picked a very very good hobby. Now it is more of a necessity rather than a hobby. Cant think of a life without books.

Regards,
SG

[terry grant]

My blog has also yielded unexpected consequences. I started it almost by accident. I was reading someone else's blog and wondered how one built a blog--followed the link at the top of the page and before I knew it had set up a blog, without any thought as to why. I learned that I loved writing. I learned that writing a blog entry every few days seemed to make my life more interesting and I was observing my own life more closely. I met interesting people. I sold artwork that I posted on the blog. I was approached by two different magazines to write articles, which will be published soon. I reconnected with old friends. Who knew?