How Many Things Can You Do With a Roll of Duct Tape?

How many things can you do with a roll of duct tape? Twenty? Fifty? Two hundred?

At first, the answers come easily. Fix a hose. Patch a box. Hold something together. Make a temporary handle. But keep going. After 20 or 30 ideas, something interesting happens: you run out of the obvious answers.

And that’s when the creative thinking begins.

The first answers come from what you already know. But once those are exhausted, your brain has to make new connections. Could duct tape become a wallet? A shoe? A hinge? A sling? A sculpture? Could you use it to teach something? Build something? Invent something?

Some of your ideas will be ridiculous. That’s okay. The purpose isn’t to be right. The purpose is to expand the field of possibilities.

That is divergent thinking.

Take the Model Apart

Most of us are pretty good at solving problems. Give us a problem, and we immediately start looking for the best solution. We analyze the alternatives and narrow them down until we find the answer.

But what if we’re solving the wrong problem? What if the problem itself is based on assumptions that are no longer true?

Sometimes, instead of trying to improve the model, we need to take the model apart. Look at every piece and ask: Why is this here? Does it still need to be here? Why does it have to be done this way?

Businesses are full of assumptions we’ve stopped recognizing as assumptions. “This is how we price.” “This is how our industry works.” “This is how we’ve always done it.” Those statements should make us a little uncomfortable.

Divergent thinking doesn’t mean conventional wisdom is wrong. It simply means conventional wisdom doesn’t get a free pass.

What Does This Have to Do With Your Business?

Almost everything. Every business develops patterns, processes and routines. We need them because they make us efficient. But eventually, a strength can become a constraint. The process that helped us grow from $500,000 to $2 million may be the very process preventing us from reaching $5 million.

When we hit a ceiling, our natural tendency is to work harder inside the existing model. How can we make this process faster? How can we find another person to fill this position? How can we sell more of this service?

Those are useful questions, but divergent thinking asks different ones. What if we eliminated the process? What if the position didn’t need to exist? What if we stopped selling the service? What if we could accomplish in one day what currently takes a week?

What if we could? That question opens a door that “How can we improve this?” sometimes leaves closed.

Moving From Comfort to Discomfort

Many times divergent thinking is uncomfortable. Our brains like patterns. We know how the pieces fit together, and familiarity feels safe.

But growth frequently requires us to move from comfort to discomfort. Why not question things, even the ones we created ourselves. Might that require admitting that something that worked brilliantly five years ago? Yup!!

We often hit ceilings because yesterday’s successful practices become today’s unquestioned assumptions. Do you keep pushing harder inside the same model when what we really need is something different?

Sometimes the breakthrough isn’t found by pushing harder. It’s found by asking why we’re pushing in that direction in the first place.

Don’t Kill the Crazy Idea

There is one important rule to divergent thinking: don’t evaluate ideas too quickly. Our analytical minds love to jump in. “That won’t work.” “We tried that.” “Customers wouldn’t accept it.” “That’s too expensive.” “That’s impossible.”

Maybe. But not yet.

There is a time for evaluating ideas. Eventually we have to consider economics, resources, customers and reality. But generating ideas and evaluating them are two different activities. If we combine them too soon, we can kill a promising idea before it has a chance to develop.

A ridiculous idea may contain the seed of a brilliant one.

So ask uncomfortable questions. What if we had no office? What if we doubled our prices? What if we cut our product line in half? What if we guaranteed something our competitors won’t? What if we weren’t allowed to hire another employee? What if we had to accomplish twice as much with the resources we already have?

And perhaps the most useful question of all: What would have to be true for this to work?

Does that change the conversation? Instead of listing all the reasons something can’t be done, we begin identifying what would have to change to make it possible.

What If We Could?

Most breakthroughs don’t begin with answers. They begin when someone looks at something everyone else accepts and asks, “Why?” Then someone asks, “Why not?”

And eventually someone is willing to ask, “What if we could?”

Because the next level of your business may not require you to work harder at what you’re already doing. It may require you to question why you’re doing it that way in the first place.

How many things can you do with a roll of duct tape?

Probably a lot more than you think.