Happily Misunderstood

We all seem to go to great deal of trouble to make ourselves properly understood by others, especially in the workplace. However, thinking back, it seems that whenever I’ve been credited with a particularly large ‘lateral leap’, a general misunderstanding has often been the cause.

I’m a little dyslexic and often read things the wrong way round, substitute or miss words, and decide my own endings to sentences. When preparing for exams I was always encouraged by teachers to ‘read the question’ at least three times, and then another three times, just to make sure I was answering the examiner’s question and not one that I had made up. Every now and again I’d spend an hour writing an exam answer, and re-read the question one final time before writing my conclusion, to find that I had in fact completely ignored what the examiner was asking. This normally resulted in a bit of a kick-bollocks-scramble approach to make my conclusion link my irrelevant answer to the examiner’s question. However bizarrely, it was on these occasions that I received my highest marks, by answering the ‘wrong’ question I seemed to have displayed a degree of lateral thinking and been awarded for it (Rory has a great post about solving the problem the ‘wrong’ way here). I’ve managed to repeat this level of misunderstanding/lateral thinking a few times now, it even seems to have worked well in interviews.

My rather longwinded point is this, misunderstanding others can result in truly creative results, it allows us to redefine the problem and in doing so reach a solution.  Why don’t you try the following next time you get stuck on something:

• Increase your chances of misunderstanding by not paying full attention to the things that could be getting in the way, e.g. the creative brief, the research debrief, the Client’s problem or objectives
• Increase your chances of being misunderstood by being a little vague

NB. The objective is to subtly misunderstand the problem, not to ignore it completely, to get the wrong end of the stick as it were, not a different stick altogether, you know what I mean…

Disclaimer: Employing these tactics may result in your career going down as well as up.