Playing a different game than everyone else
Finding patterns of unconscious conformity — behavior that is so ingrained no one else could imagine doing things differently — is more difficult than it sounds.
Even if you’re not a hockey fan, the name Wayne Gretzky probably rings a bell. With 2,587 career points — still an all-time hockey record — there’s a reason Gretzky is known as “The Great One.”
To put his hockey career into perspective: Even if he had never scored a single goal, he would still be the all-time leader in career points thanks to the 1,963 he earned from assists. No wonder the NHL retired his jersey number, 99, upon his retirement — no one else would be capable of living up to the legend.
I’ve been thinking more about Gretzky’s career lately — and not just because I’m experiencing hockey withdrawals during off-season. As it turns out, what made Gretzky such an impressive, unstoppable, force during his years in the NHL wasn’t his size (he wasn’t particularly big), or his speed, or some magical ability to put the puck precisely where he wanted it…
Instead, it was that he was effectively playing a different game than everyone else on the ice at the time.
When Gretzky was 14 years old, his family moved to Toronto so he could play in a more competitive hockey league. (He’s Canadian… He’d been playing since he was 2, as is the unofficial law-of-the-land in the frozen north.) However, when he arrived in his new league as a fairly scrawny teenager, he quickly found himself outmatched by much larger defensive players.
At the urging of his coach, he began studying Bobby Clarke with the Philadelphia Flyers — a fairly small player with a massive reputation in the NHL. And in so doing, Gretzky noticed two important patterns emerge in the way hockey was being played:
Unlike almost anyone else, Clark played disproportionately “in the corners,” allowing him to avoid the heavy defensive players guarding the goal.
Virtually no one — including Clark — played the puck from behind the goal itself.
So, as Gretzky later recounted, “I started playing out of the corner and from behind the net…I started using the net as a decoy. Consequently, I wasn’t… getting knocked over, and being on my keister the whole time.”
No one had played this type of hockey before — and it transformed the game.
Today, players routinely take the puck behind the net — and playing from the corners is a critical part of modern hockey. But at the time, Gretzky found himself doing something no one had trained to defend against… Hence the 2,587 career points.
He had found a pattern of behavior in his profession that was ingrained so deeply among those who played the game, no one had thought to challenge it. For most players, “the way the game was played” was effectively inviolable — not because of some gentleman’s agreement to play a particular way, but rather due to an unconscious conformity among those who took part in the sport.
When Gretzky noticed this behavior, he intentionally stepped outside of it. He made himself different, rather than merely making himself better — and in so doing, he accomplished both.
And that’s a valuable lesson in creative thinking and divergent behavior for the rest of us — even if we don’t strap on a pair of skates for 82 games a year. As I’ve written before:
The willingness to hunt for value in ideas, approaches or concepts that run counter to what we believe to be “right” (or good) invites us to view the world more creatively.
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Thinking creatively in our political, professional and personal lives is the art of deliberately deviating from what we know to be a “good” idea in search of the value that exists in its opposite.
Finding those patterns of unconscious conformity — behavior that is so ingrained no one else could imagine doing things differently — is more difficult than it sounds.
Especially because most of us likely engage in them on a regular basis. Most of us are unwittingly imprisoned by our own habits, worldviews and narrow perspectives of reality.
However, exploring our own behavior and actively looking for ways to “play the game” differently can present us with new experiences, fresh perspectives and exposure to creative alternative approaches. As the marketing executive Rory Sutherland explained in his incredible (and highly recommended) book, Alchemy:
“While in physics the opposite of a good idea is generally a bad idea, in psychology the opposite of a good idea can be a very good idea indeed: both opposites often work…”
Looking for and exploring those opposites is central to creative thinking — but it can also help reveal the fixed patterns of behavior we’ve unwittingly adopted, giving us opportunity to upend conventional wisdom and start playing a new game of our own.
And as Gretzky has shown us, if no one else on the ice is ready for that new game, we can do some pretty amazing things.
Michael Schaus is the founder of Schaus Creative LLC — a creative studio dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change.
Schaus Creative helps organizations and individuals develop the tools to tell their story in a way that motivates and engages the world around them… Learn more by visiting SchausCreative.com.
