Creative Analysis and “Failure of Imagination”

Jack recently read (or rather inhaled) Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason.  What an amazing story.

Mason is a fascinating character in so many ways. From both a success and failure standpoint, his “risk management” efforts make for compelling reading. He sees a big score as “a complicated puzzle to be solved,” always thinking first about the risk — not unlike prospecting for, and executing on, a major trading or investing opportunity.

The below paragraphs in particular caught Jack’s attention. “Failure of Imagination” is a deliciously apt way to describe both catastrophic lapses in risk management (i.e. Bill Miller at Legg Mason, for those familiar with the fund management world) and the routine pitfalls of conventional wisdom in market analysis (i.e. mundane, plain vanilla, “status quo” type assertions that cover the same tired ground and fail to account for key dynamics or critical hidden variables).

In terms of practical application, Mason has inspired Jack to more actively and deliberately “use his imagination” when trying to anticipate how and where things could go wrong; how various theme-driven scenarios might unfold both in markets and in life; and to be more conscientious on the whole in regard to seeing with fresh eyes.

Here’s the text (from Chapter 18):

Former astronaut and Eastern Airlines CEO Frank Borman coined an incredibly apt phrase in 1967. Testifying before a House committee investigating the deaths of three astronauts during a ground test, Borman attributed the disaster to a “failure of imagination.” He said that the engineering team had been unable to envision such an occurrence in the first place, and therefore were completely unprepared to prevent it or deal with it when it actually happened.

Similarly, I eventually came to realize that when a detective or security expert used a flattering phrase like “superhuman” in connection with one of my scores, what he was really doing was covering up his own failure of imagination. If he couldn’t figure out how I’d pulled off the heist, he retreated behind the excuse that the thief must have been “a human fly” or “the best there ever was.” What other explanation could there possibly be, other than that the detective wasn’t clever enough to figure it out, which is not something a law enforcement professional is anxious to admit.

In the context of metaprocess (and best life principles), one can further ponder the “failure of imagination” diagnosis as it applies to envious dismissals and unfortunate missed chances in life. When a person accomplishes something extraodinary, there seem to be two general types of public response — the more common revolving around “He was just lucky” or “He was born with superhuman talent” (i.e. the luck diagnosis once removed).

The second, more enabling response is “How can I do that too” — or perhaps, more firmly, “I know I can do that too” — the big difference between the two mindsets being a matter of quiet self confidence and the mystery of the “how.” The more common response (superhuman / just lucky) declares the “how” to be impossible sans any true effort to crack the nut, thus giving in to failed imagination (and conveniently letting mere mortals off the hook).