April 2005

or the world is full of zanies and fools who don't believe in sensible rules, and don't believe what sensible people say," wrote Rodgers & Hammerstein, in their lyrics to the 1964 movie Cinderella. "And because these daft and dewey-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes, impossible things are happening everyday!"

While most of us are not concerned with turning pumpkins into carriages, our businesses and our lives could be transformed just as powerfully by thinking "impossible" thoughts.

Think about it: How can things ever change—how can business, science or society innovate solutions to world dilemmas; how can our personal lives change trajectories—if we can only imagine what has been possible up to now? We might try to fix problems through automation, motivation and process improvement. But ultimately these efforts will stagnate until we change our mental models.

Our perspectives—the lenses through which we perceive and understand the world—affect all that we see and do. Problems occur when those perspectives become rigid and function more like prison bars, keeping us locked in set mental models, routines and behaviors.

What would happen if we broke out of the prison of those perspectives? What new patterns and relationships would we notice? What new actions would we take?

"What we perceive as 'the world' is as much inside our heads as outside," write the authors of The Power of Impossible Thinking, Jerry Wind and Colin Crook. "By realizing this and making choices about how we see things, we can become much more effective."

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