What does making bacon have to do with human adaptability?
Living without a kitchen for several months pushed my family to get creative about how to cook my kids’ favorite breakfast food: bacon, extra crispy. We were delighted to discover the magic of the air fryer: portable, electrical, and simple. There’s even a “bacon” button on it. Cook it for a little longer than that and you get fantastically crispy bacon with the grease channeled away through slats below. This wasn’t just replacement bacon. It was superior bacon! Our new kitchen is done, the dust-and-rubble stage far behind us, but we still crisp our strips in the trusty air fryer.
As a species, we have overcome far greater challenges than living without large appliances for a few weeks. Humans hate change but we’re also very adaptable.
As head of the Capital One Lab, my job is to foster creative thinking across a team of designers, researchers, engineers, and product managers. At the Lab, we’re lucky to have some latitude to push boundaries and explore the latest technologies to create new products that improve people’s lives. We’re encouraged to test, learn, and repeat the cycle.
People are often constrained from running experiments that don’t fit within their job descriptions and the adaptive muscle atrophies.
So, what can you do to encourage adaptable thinking among your teams even if you don’t work in a Lab? Ask two questions:
- Are your actions helping you accomplish your goals?
- How can you turn frustration into action?
These are not easy to answer. These questions are meant to spark creative thinking.
Adjust your actions
There’s enough going on at work that it’s typical to get stuck in a reactive mode, responding instead of formulating. More recently, humans have adapted to a high interrupt modality which can strengthen context switching. People get in trouble when they forget to intentionally create space to formulate and execute on goals.
At the Capital One Lab, Monday is for meetings. Tuesday through Thursday are dedicated days for collaboration and heads-down tech work, so our engineers can get deep into the flow. Friday is a day for learning and thinking.
Even in companies that don’t have this type of “structured defragmentation,” your calendar has some white space. Take time to reflect on whether your current actions are helping you accomplish your future goals. Consider setting aside a “thinking day” as a company-wide policy. Capital One started Invest in Yourself Days, where one Friday a month is set aside for development. While it’s still a working day, it’s important to set aside all or part of the day—as critical work allows—to make a meaningful investment in development.
Acquiring new skills or enhancing existing ones to adapt to changes in technology, industry trends, or job requirements is an important part of career development. We use this time to learn new skills, try new technologies, and promote adaptive thinking through new ways to work.
How can you turn frustration into action?
Engineers are always experimenting and, quite often, those experiments run into snags. What sets the best engineers apart is they don’t let frustration slow them down. They turn frustration into motion. It’s like solving a giant puzzle. Not everyone is an engineer, but everyone has felt frustrated. So I ask my teams—and my kids and friends—this question regularly.
When people get frustrated, they get stuck. Encourage people not to accept their current state of mind, or frustration can consume them. Approaching a problem with too many assumptions can be a trap, too. Can those assumptions be relaxed? Some perceived boundaries are concrete, but some are paper. An opportunity can be unlocked when people discover a constraint can be relaxed and their original assumptions were wrong.
One example of turning frustration into action outside my work was when I helped start Hacker Dojo. Back around 2005, a lot of my engineering friends felt frustrated that there wasn’t a time and a place for working on side projects and ideas together—like a writer’s circle but for coders. So, I teamed up with my friend Jeff Lindsay to launch an open-door hackathon called Super Happy Dev House where I invited anyone to my apartment to code together.
What started with a dozen folks in my living room soon grew to 2,000 people across a few blocks in Palo Alto. Hacker Dojo grew out of these efforts and was officially born in a 6,000+ square foot former glass-making factory in Mountain View. Some 15 years later, the organization is still going strong, having birthed many projects, even a few unicorns.
Of course, the critical part of this question is the “action” aspect. If someone is frustrated, they need to feel the agency to fix it. Even if the first attempts to fix a problem are “hand-cranked” or a bit MacGyver-style, that’s okay. The importance is the motion: Just get started. This universe is mutable and we are empowered to play a role in changing and improving it.
I ask my teams those two questions—whether their actions are helping them achieve their goals, and whether they can turn frustration into action—regularly, to build those adaptive muscles and produce outcomes that have an impact.
Having an adaptable mindset is what leads humans to new ideas, new approaches, and discoveries. After all, some adaptations become breakthroughs–much like cooking bacon in an air fryer.