Ever had that feeling, as you undertake an ambitious new effort or project, that you have no idea what you’re doing or how to proceed? Designers find themselves in this position a lot, particularly if they do the kind of diversified work that spans many categories and industries, and that regularly takes them into new and unfamiliar territory. But even though those initial feelings of being “lost” on a project can be unsettling, the designer Bruce Mau makes the case that this period of “not knowing” should be seen as a window of opportunity. “When you don’t know what should be done, or how something is supposed to work, it’s a brief pocket of possibility,” Mau says. “You’re free to speculate on something unencumbered by the conventional structures.”

 

In such a situation, your first instinct might be to hit the books (or the Internet) and start doing as much research as possible. But at the Bruce Mau Design studios, Mau actually encourages his designers to hold back on doing too much upfront research—at the outset, he believes, you should make time for speculation. With limited knowledge of the situation, try to come up with your own offbeat ideas, scenarios, and possible solutions; jot them down or sketch them out, tape them to the wall, talk them over with friends and colleagues. At these earliest stages of thinking about a problem, when you’re not weighed down by expert opinion and conventional wisdom, you just might happen upon and be open to fresh, unusual, and possibly game-changing ideas. “If you start out speculating,” Mau says, “you’ll find yourself saying, ‘It’d be exciting to try something like this—I wonder if it’s possible?’ Then later you do the research to find out how feasible it is.”

 

During his periods of feeling “lost” on projects, Mau has observed an interesting phenomenon. He has found that there is a unique kind of creative energy and resourcefulness that seems to come to the fore when people are on unfamiliar turf. Mau likens the situation to being “lost in the woods”—during which time, he says, “everything about your surroundings takes on added significance. Suddenly you have to navigate and negotiate every detail of the environment, processing all of it while trying to regain your bearings.” When people are in this “hyper-attuned” state, it’s an ideal time to experiment and speculate, because the mind is wide-open and the senses are alive.

 

Mau’s “lost in the woods” theory is closely connected to another analogy he uses, one that he borrowed from the military. In “the fog of war,” soldiers often must make quick, instinctive decisions based on limited and degraded information. Because of the difficult conditions and uncertainties of the battlefield, they may only have 20 percent of the information they’d ideally want in order to make a fully-informed decision. But the trouble is, “if you’re on the battlefield and you wait until you have 100 percent information,” Mau says, “by that time, you’re dead.” The commanders who do well in the fog of war are those who learn to see through the haze, recognize the important pieces of information that are available, connect that with experiences from other battles, and, ultimately, trust their instincts. They do all of this under intense life-and-death pressure, because they have no choice. But it can result in optimal performance and enhanced creativity.

 

The point is that in the woods or in the fog, gut instinct takes over and creative juices flow—and sometimes great, original ideas can materialize. And in this brief period of time, because you’re lacking information, you’re less likely to prejudge ideas and instincts. Of course this runs counter to the way most of us have been taught to begin working on projects: You’re supposed to dive into the research, head-first, before you even have a thought of your own. But a growing number of innovation experts are moving toward the view expressed here by Mau. Several recent business books have argued that breakthrough ideas are more likely to come from “zero gravity thinkers” (meaning those who aren’t weighed down by expertise and conventional wisdom). And some innovation pundits now refer to the “curse of knowledge”—which holds that as expertise increases, creativity tapers off.

 

To maximize creative opportunities during the temporary state of not knowing, Mau says you have to give yourself room for experimentation and free association. You (or the people who work for and with you) need the time and permission to experiment, to connect ideas and explore adjacencies—in a word, to “drift,” as Mau puts it. And during those exploratory periods, criticism of new ideas should be tempered if not withheld until the later stages of creative development. There’s time enough later to subject ideas to rigorous critical analysis and testing to separate out the best—and to find out if any gems have been found by those who’ve been wandering lost in the woods and the fog.