Seeing Possibilities

Note to the reader: This is a repost from LinkedIn

About seeing the possibilities others don’t… I’ve noticed something interesting about how I approach problems differently from others. This became clearer to me during my PhD and has continued throughout my career as a software engineer. I am often the one who comes up with the “crazy ideas” that make people tilt their heads… mostly they don’t work but sometimes they do, and they’re always fun to explore! There is also a neat psychological trick of giving others the permission to say their “crazy ideas” once there are already other (dumb) crazy ideas out there.

I’ve been reflecting on where these insights come from, and I’ve recognized distinct patterns:

• When I question the assumptions that everyone else takes for granted. Those moments when I ask “Why do we always do it this way?” or “Does this constraint actually exist?” have led to some of my best breakthroughs. Sometimes what seems like an immovable limitation is just a habit we’ve never challenged.
• When I make unexpected connections between ideas. Some of my strongest contributions came from bringing together concepts from different domains—like when I applied Web spelling correction to document spelling correction. Sure the style of writing is different, but the underlying tech feels like they should be transferrable, plus the Web spelling correction system is automagically updated with new words!
• When conventional approaches don’t work, it means we have to try new things. Innovative solutions have emerged when the standard playbook failed completely and we had no choice but to explore outside our comfort zone. These moments of being forced to abandon the familiar have often led to our most elegant solutions. I would say that doing a PhD really forces one in this space, after all, your goal is do something which no one else has done before!
• Be willing to try ideas, even though this is a balance as I can’t try everything, and so I had to build an intuition over time of how much to push here, but as they say, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

Not all my ideas work out—plenty crash and burn spectacularly. But I’ve learned that being open to pursuing these insights, even when they seem risky, has made me a better software engineer and problem-solver.