Build More Breakthroughs in Your Day

Authors: Kim Christfort and Suzanne Vickberg

Do you ever feel a little bit stuck? Maybe you took on this first job because it felt just right for you, but six months in, the on-the-ground reality is different, and you’re worried about how a resignation would look on your CV. Maybe your team is trying to solve a challenging problem, but a viable solution exceeds your constraints. Maybe you dream about pursuing a new job opportunity, but you’re unsure about leaving the safety of the current role. Or maybe you’ve tried, time and again, to adopt a new habit, but keep slipping back into your old ways. Regardless of what your particular challenge is, you can’t get unstuck without having a breakthrough.

What is a breakthrough?

When you hear the word “breakthrough,” you might think of Nobel Prize–winning innovations and astonishing discoveries. By definition, a breakthrough provides new insight or overcomes an obstacle to progress.

But the pursuit of a breakthrough isn’t just for inventors and scientists. It’s for anyone who wants to get from “here” to “there” but hasn’t been able to get past the barriers in their way—anyone struggling to grow, transform, or solve problems more creatively in their professional or personal lives.

We’ve spent decades conducting research and working with leaders and teams facing seemingly intractable challenges. Through our work, we’ve observed that people are often inclined to think and behave in ways that contribute to keeping them stuck, as opposed to making a breakthrough. A few common behaviors include:

• Judging and dismissing new ideas without giving them a chance to develop and evolve

• Making assumptions and failing to challenge orthodoxies that are closing off possibilities

• Becoming so concerned with avoiding mistakes and appearing perfect that they aren’t willing to try new things for fear of failing

Based on our work with clients, we’ve identified some mindset and behavior shifts that people can make to enhance their chances of getting unstuck and reaching a breakthrough.

Stop judging yourself and start silencing your inner cynic

When was the last time you heard someone (or yourself) say, “That won’t work.” We’d guess it wasn’t all that long ago. We’ve seen in our work that it’s not uncommon for people to have this knee-jerk reaction when presented with new ideas. In fact, some people pride themselves on being able to spot the potential flaws in any idea or proposal.

If you’re one of those people who relishes finding what’s wrong, it could benefit you to make a shift. While a critical eye can be a valuable asset when you need to evaluate the pros and cons of a process, approach, or solution, in the early stages of exploring new possibilities, it can also shut down creativity. This is especially true if the criticism comes across as dismissive or hostile rather than constructive. Worse, if that judgment is applied to yourself (maybe you often think “My ideas aren’t good enough to share”), it can keep you from making potentially valuable contributions.

To silence your inner cynic is to suspend disbelief and assume anything’s possible, making room for ideas to take shape and germinate. Who knows? A “bad” idea can become a great idea if given a chance.

The next time you’re in a brainstorming meeting and you’re tempted to point out problems, tear down ideas, or hold back your own offerings, pause and consider what might happen if instead you were to expand, explore, or risk sharing something not yet fully conceptualized. Instead of saying “that won’t work,” try saying, “I’m not sure that idea works yet, let’s explore it for a minute and see where it goes.”

When you’re tempted to lean on what you know, strip away everything

We often work with highly experienced leaders who are deeply knowledgeable about their fields. Their expertise undoubtedly contributes to their success, but we’ve also observed a certain closed-mindedness that can result from being an expert—an effect known as earned dogmatism.

When a person knows a lot about a certain topic, their thinking can become rigid. They may not be open to new possibilities and might not even recognize when they’re making assumptions or clinging to orthodoxies that are holding them back. Even in the early stages of your career, when you’re still developing your expertise, there is a possibility that what you know is getting in the way of what you could discover. For example, you may have mastered a certain coding language and feel it’s the best one to use in most situations. Or you may have special experience working with a particular product and feel you know everything about its consumer base.

If you’ve got a tough problem to solve, whether it’s something your team is working on or a challenge related to your own career, consider stripping away everything. Set aside what you think you know, question your assumptions, and adopt a beginner’s mindset. You can do this by getting curious and asking more questions of yourself and others. Why are things the way they are? How could they be different? What assumptions might I be making? What could I be missing? Am I solving for the right problem?

Let’s say, for example, that your team is brainstorming how to increase the sale of a product featured on your company’s website. You’re feeling good because it’s something you’re quite knowledgeable about. You might be tempted to contribute by listing everything you already know regarding the product, your customers, and traffic on the site. But starting with what you know could steer you in a direction that limits how you think about the issue and ultimately solve your problem. Instead, take a step back and see if there’s a broader perspective you’re not considering, or if a different approach might create more value.

You might start by asking questions like, “Why is increasing sales of this product our goal? Is that the best goal for us? What if, instead, we focused on a different product? Or an alternate metric, like profit per sale? Or something totally different like customer experience? Is this the most valuable use of our efforts? What are we ultimately trying to do, and why?”

If you realize you’re playing perfect, get real

Have you ever made a mistake? It may sound a bit silly to even ask that question—neither of us has ever met anyone who could say no, have you? And yet, we’ve seen time and again that leaders and their teams hesitate to admit their mistakes or to take risks that could end in failure. More often, they try to appear as if they’re perfect. But in reality, if you want to innovate, transform, or grow, failure is often part of the process. You typically need to try one thing and then another that doesn’t work before you finally identify a promising approach.

We’ve found that attempting to be or appear perfect can be a barrier to meaningful change if it leads to a fear of failure or prevents you from trying new things. Maybe you’re interested in pursuing a promotion, but you’re hesitating because you’re afraid everyone will know if you get rejected. Or perhaps you want to ask for the opportunity to present to a client, but you’re worried you’ll screw it up. Or possibly you think you might have a great solution to a problem, but you fear suggesting it could reveal how much you don’t know as a newbie. If you believe the adage “to err is human,” maybe getting rejected, screwing something up, or revealing how much you don’t know doesn’t make you a failure, but just shows that you’re a person.

To practice getting real in this way, next time you make a mistake or things don’t turn out the way you’d hoped, spend some time reflecting on what you’ve learned or gained and how it could bring you closer to breakthrough. Even a move in the wrong direction or a stroll down a dead end can be valuable because now you know one thing that doesn’t work, and you can spend your energy on something that might.

Once you’ve come up with your lessons learned, share them with someone else, and maybe ask for their advice or to share their own lessons learned after making a mistake. This kind of sharing among teammates can help normalize taking risks and being less than perfect, while also helping people get to know each other as humans and build trust.

We all get stuck sometimes, and while it can feel like external forces are pressing to keep you there, it just may be that your own behaviors are to blame. Shake yourself loose by taking a good, hard look at how much you’re judging, leaning on what you know, or playing perfect. And then challenge yourself to shift your approach. You just may find that a breakthrough is within your reach after all.

Kim Christfort is the Chief Innovation Leader and National Managing Director of The Deloitte Greenhouse Experience group, which helps executives tackle tough business challenges through immersive, facilitated lab experiences. She is the architect and global leader of Deloitte’s proprietary working style system, Business Chemistry. Suzanne Vickberg is a social-personality psychologist and Chief Researcher for The Deloitte Greenhouse Experience group. With a focus on integrating empathy and creative problem-solving into work and life, she coaches leaders and teams to envision new possibilities and create cultures where individuals thrive. She is the primary author of the Business Chemistry Blog on Deloitte.com. Christfort and Vickberg are the coauthors of two books: Business Chemistry and The Breakthrough Manifesto.