I’m a big fan of Albert Einstein, but one thing he definitely got wrong was the belief that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.” It’s an aphorism I still hear churned out unthinkingly by just about everyone in the ‘creativity consultant’ world. As if the statement is some kind of call to arms for clients stuck in the rut they’re perceived to be in. If Einstein said it, the unspoken logic goes, it must be true.

It becomes even truer, the creative consultant believes, when it gets written onto a napkin and a photo of it gets inserted into all of their Powerpoint slide decks.

Fortunately, after not very much searching, it turns out Einstein never said anything about insanity at all. Rather it seems to have been attributed to him by those parts of the ‘creative’ world seeking to inflate their already bloated sense of self-worth.

I’m pretty certain Einstein never really understood complexity theory, so he might have had every excuse for coming to a conclusion that anyone doing the same thing shouldn’t ever expect to get a different result. On the other hand, I’m pretty certain he would have understood the aphorism ‘you can never step in the same river twice’. Heraclitus gave us that little gem around 2500 years ago, when complexity theory definitely didn’t exist.

Perhaps it didn’t need to. Perhaps people had the common sense back then to recognize that it was very frequently the case that people did exactly what they’d always done and ended up getting very different results. Like 88% of 1955 Fortune 500 companies that are no longer with us. They all believed they’d keep being successful by thinking and doing the same old thing too.

The really simple way to make that napkin picture look like the dumb thing that it really is, is to modify it so it looks like this:

Now we’re forced to think about everything around us – Heraclitus’ ‘river’ – and about whether it is sensible to think that it is all staying the same. Think about that for a few seconds and you  have to believe it’s never true. I’m sitting here in a noisy café and my not so good coffee is going cold. In a minute it will probably too cold. Which means I won’t get my full caffeine fix. Which means I’ll probably forget to write something on my job list. Which… you get the idea.

The reason there are so many fragile organisations on the planet right now is that they’ve somehow been brainwashed into believing the same-thinking-same-result mantra is true and, even worse, then connected it to the idea that, because they were doing well a couple of years ago, they just need to keep doing what they’ve been doing. It’s like they’ve become collectively drunk on a cocktail of cognitive flaws – Status Quo Bias, Normalcy Bias, Confirmation Bias and Illusion of Control. To all intents and purposes, you had me at ‘Fortune500’. The ‘environment around us’ doesn’t stay the same even in this stupid café with it’s dated soundtrack, never mind in a commercial organisation of several thousand people.

In a complex world the best we can say is that if we keep doing the same as we’ve always done we will probably get the same result. The closer we are to the edge of chaos, the less probable that same result becomes.There are no guarantees in a complex system because we’re surrounded by a swirling cauldron of interdependent causes and effects. The fact that thinking the same doesn’t necessarily mean we get the same result also tells us – anyone that wishes to be more resilient than the fragile organisation they’re probably working for – that what’s needed is a finely tuned what-around-me-has-changed radar so we can sense what’s changed and shift our response accordingly.

Oh, wait, evolution already gave us one of those. Strike that. What we need is to stay as far away as we possibly can from creativity consultants that teach us how to not use it any more.