According to the rhyme, Thursday’s child has far to go. Or perhaps, far to “boldly go, where no one has gone before” ….. yes, you guessed it. Today’s pandemering is based Star Trek – in particular the 1982 movie “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”
I chose this movie because of one particular piece of dialogue that impacted how I think (or perhaps how I describe my way of thinking) for almost 40 years.
It has to do with a scene in the movie where they discuss a training exercise designed to test the character and command decision making of Starfleet Academy cadets. It is based on receiving a distress call from the freighter called the Kobayashi Maru. The test is designed as a no-win scenario.
As one would expect, James T. Kirk, the starship captain, was the only cadet to ever have beaten the scenario. When asked by an officer in the movie how he did that, he said “it was easy. I reprogrammed the simulation.” When the officer said “isn’t that cheating?”, he replied “No. I don’t believe in a no-win scenario.”
I had two responses to that scene. One was intellectual. The other was more visceral.
The intellectual response was recognizing that the no-win scenario training exercise was a test of ethical decision-making and ethical leadership. A crucial feature of good ethical decision-making in the real world is understanding the limits of our powers. We try to make choices that bring lots of good consequences and minimal bad ones, that fulfill our obligations to everyone to whom we have obligations (including ourself). However, we are doing it in a complicated world where we must make our choices on the basis of imperfect information, and where other people are doing things that may impose constraints on our options. Sometimes even the most creative and optimistic ethical decision-maker has to face a situation where none of the available choices or outcomes are very good.
Ok. That’s it for the beginning of an intellectual response. Of more importance to me was my visceral response.
I believe that I connected to the scene precisely because it presented a perspective… a way of looking at the various situations that life can present to us. Sometimes the way we look at a problem is the problem. All too often we can get stuck in a way of viewing a problem (or a condition we find ourselves in) and can’t see a way through, or beyond. This happens in business and it happens in life.
When it does, I pause, step back, and “Kobayashi Maru” the situation – I go outside of the process or rules or prior ways of thinking in an unexpected way to get through a supposedly no-win situation.
More than anything, this “stepping back and reframing” of how I look at a situation has been one of the most useful and powerful ‘tools’ I have to deal with life. I call it Kobayashi Maru — others will call it something else – but regardless of what we call it, it speaks to being able to change the way we look at things, to think “outside the box” as a way of dealing with the stresses of life.
It’s a message that has run through each of the movies I have referred to this week. And in this time of pandemic, where the future has a lot of uncertainty, and our sense of being in control has been greatly challenged, it is a message that I find still brings me comfort and reduces my stress, even after almost 40 years.
Tomorrow, we will try to bring all of these perspectives together to close out the week.