Mental, or psychological flexibility is understood as a vital aspect of of resilience, problem-solving, and overall mental health, as documented e.g. by Dr. Steven C. Hayes in the context of ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Abstracting it to its philosophical essence, we can discern in this flexibility an ability to untangle and "zoom-out", getting the bigger picture, as advocated by the Ancient Stoics, but also our mental ability not so much to "travel in space", but to "travel in time" : using our minds eye's ability to jump-start with the end (goal) in mind and then work our way backwards.
Where this "technique" becomes somewhat second-nature as one gains practical experience and wisdom(?), observing younger people, and also our own kids, we see this time-order-reversal ability is surely more nurture than nature. But how about us, seasoned professionals? Yes, when we have to formally define a project, we will always follow the prescribed recipe and spend ample time defining goals, but there might be less conspicuous, "smaller" challenges that benefit from the same paradigm... where we might forget it?
- A PowerPoint presentation showing the results our last researchy-kind-of-project. We're so groomed by the scholar format of 1. stating the problem, 2. linearly going through our (diligent and methodical) work to 3. end up with our conclusions ... on the last slide... keeping our audience in suspense 25 long minutes about what they came for, why they are sitting there listening to us? How about "provoking" the audience upfront with how the world has now changed with our results and (only) then, flashback-wise, building the underpinning we have not hallucinated the whole thing, or came up with this idea on the tube ride here this morning?
- Building a cybersecurity attack tree. One start is look at the outside of our "fortress" and try to map out the entire attack surface. But how about imagining the attacker's end-goal achieved, however scary that might be, and then backtracking his do-able steps? It might avoid spending a lot of time on first-stage vulnerabilities that end up leading to dead-ends, while something inconspicuous from the outside turns out to be the achilles heel of our Helm's Deep?
- Prototyping. What, wait, how does that fit in here? Bear with me. A prototype extends our imagination to the final product, long before we can possibly have it. We imagine the end-result, so yes, we work backwards, by pulling "a thing" forward in time, but there is an even more important aspect. We make it with its destruction in mind! We want to actually invalidate (aspects of) the prototype: we will throw it away as soon as we can! That is, we recognize that our initial ideas will be improved by, actually kind of overtaken by reality. We want to kill any bad stuff in there early on, instead of having it linger around. Rather then giving a software code illustration, I will take the case of a marketing white paper / brochure / strategic positing "thing" as an example. It is much better to get some bare minimal input as "how many pages, give or take?" and fast produce something quite shaky, but somewhat of the right form and size and then to get the necessary feedback from the market representative(s), to give it a big impetus to what it should become. What people don't want is easier for them to state than what they do want and this scrapping-pruning operation, is equally useful in steering the ideation/creation process as the forward-aimed growing-and-refining process, plus it avoids analysis-paralysis.
Sure, in hindsight, success stories are re-told as an natural series of stepping stones, ever upwards building upon each other. Of course, once it did, how could the Universe have unfolded in any other way then it logically... did? I'm afraid we are mostly dealing with an artifact of good storytelling here: only two extremes make for good stories: the tragic hero causes his demise going down a path of non-negotiable logic, given a certain blind spot or hubris, or, the ultimate real hero wins a battle against all odds and Chaos after 140 minutes of movie time, where we already know he/she will prevail from ... minute 7. The reality in contrast are millions of parallel stories of struggle and win-some, loose-some, where we grasp to make some leaps ahead of the pack, whenever we can imagine just a tiny bit further... and then work our way backwards of how to get there.
