How to make shit up

Otherwise known as "Leading through ambiguity"

Imagination is a muscle. Not a divine gift, not a well that dries up after your one good idea, not a visitation from a muse, and not the chemical reaction produced by alcohol and insomnia. I’ll get into why we might think these things, but the simple fact is: imagination gets better the more we let it work.

In Pilates, I sometimes get asked to activate a tiny muscle I didn’t even know I had. Have you ever tried to lift something with just your little fingers? Squeeze a ball with just your inner thighs? Or press down on a clamp with the arch of your foot? It’s shockingly hard. When I first started Pilates, I thought I needed more core strength to surf. I was quickly told that I had the muscle, I just couldn’t connect to it at will.

Imagination is like that weird inner ab muscle that only ever works when you’re half-way through a leg raise while suspended from some dungeon-master style gadget. Over time, you can make it work at will, but at first it seems you have to contort to get there. In the meantime, the excuses are as inventive as the ideas might have been: maybe I don’t have that muscle, maybe you’re teaching it wrong, maybe I’m doing it right, maybe I’ll just say I feel it where you think I should so you don’t look so disappointed…

(Pandemic-era Pilates)

At work, at senior levels, you’re frequently called on to lead through ambiguity. The sheer number of defensive reactions people have to being called on to make plans and decisions and progress when they lack information is staggering. Sometimes, these defensive reactions are disguised as needing more top-down clarity, more data, more time, or more resources, and sometimes they’re destructive: blaming others, blaming the situation, demanding more structure and process, or drowning in imposter syndrome and needing endless validation.

The shift I do internally at work is from “What do I need to make progress?” to “What is the progress that needs to be made?” You can’t just focus on the outcome in the abstract, but you have to commit to it completely. When I was very little, an adult told me that the most dangerous thing I could do when I crossed the street was to hesitate. Even if I had doubts halfway through, I had to get to the other side fast to avoid getting hit.

Practice walking around in the dark. Even if you know your house layout, you tend to slow down. You don’t trust yourself, even when the risk is low. It’s as if the part your brain that you use to make decisions is suddenly incapacitated, and you’ve forgotten you had other parts you could use.

Actually, it’s exactly like that. I’ve been slowly making my way through Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary, a book I’ve needed to read slowly because to read it quickly is to deny its full value. It reminds us the extent to which we’ve denied our whole-brain selves in the interest of quick computation and short-term thinking (mistakenly called rationality).

When we are asked to make shit up, to guess at the future, to navigate the dark places, the left-hemisphere side of our brain is suddenly under threat. It does not know how to do this. It panics and invents reasons why the request is unreasonable, when in fact, the most useful thing it can do is nothing. It can shut up and let the rest of our self work for a change.

So yes, alcohol, sleeplessness, weird contortions that suddenly force us to exercise new parts of our brain are how we experience imagination today, when we could totally have more of if we just knew how to keep our high-achievement, validation-needing side at bay. Because even the criteria we use to make our excuses ("I’m not good enough, I can’t focus, there’s not enough time to create anything worthwhile”) inherently reinforce the scoring criteria prioritized by the left hemisphere.

Note that earlier I said, imagination gets better the more we let it work, not the more we work it. Sometimes, our creative process is a little bit like having one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. How fast you go depends on how much you can let off the brake, not how much more you can smash in the accelerator.

This is what makes fiction such a joy. As someone who has written both fiction and non-fiction, fiction gives not just the ability to create vastly more interesting or satisfying worlds, but the ability to just make shit up with license.

On the flight back to London, I watched Interstellar (for the second time) and continue to be amazed by the film’s ambition. I felt the same way about Inception and Arrival, and of course the original Jurassic Park. The ability to take an unprecedented vision and see it through (without complaining about budgets or minutiae or not having time) takes courage and conviction.

Creation is what happens when our usual ways of processing a situation fail, and we must adapt to walking in the dark.