I remember growing up spending my Saturday mornings watching Looney Tunes cartoons. The ones I remember most were the dogged determination of the likes of Sylvester and Tweety Bird, Tom and Jerry and of course, Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner. Wile E would persevere no matter what happened. Trap doors, cliffs inexplicably falling from under him, rockets exploding instead of firing and boulders missing the target and ultimately landing on the aggressor. It was funny (still is) but I do wonder sometimes if there was a message we were being fed as kids of that era. The message most recently referred to by Jim Collins as the Stockdale Paradox. That unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end.
Firstly, the point of note was the seemingly never-ending list of methods to try to achieve your goal. I was watching the Roadrunner with my son recently and the creative options Wile E came up with to catch the elusive Roadrunner were still impressive to me as a 40-something year old father. Youth of today would likely have given up after their first meagre attempt at catching Roadrunner and gone back to their iPads to Snapchat their friends. Or they would watch TikTok and see how other “influencers” have faked doing it before. And sadly it’s not just the kids. Problems in life and in business are far too often easily dismissed as “not my fault”, “too hard” or easily replaced with some other form of instant justification. Excuses like the economy, the market and more recently, COVID-19 are just too easy to justify inaction and a lack of creative solutions. Where has the “can-do” attitude gone? Do we need to re-start giving digestible messages to the kids of today with new cartoons that hold such a positive message? Is this the way to ensure we can develop and maintain creative solutions into the future?
The second observation from the Looney Tunes stables; of never giving up; has also been lost. You can make attempts to solve a problem and they will often backfire or fail. But you pick yourself up from the proverbial rubble and hatch another cunning plan, often with the help of the ACME company. Some of the plans can be bordering on insane, however the sheer quantity and variety of the options can often lead to some creative genius and the achievement of the objective in the end. It is a shame that they never showed Wile E getting the roadrunner as it would have been a positive message that perseverance and grit can lead to successful achievement of your goal. Maybe that was thought to be a dangerous message of the “bad guy” winning… Or maybe I just didn’t see that episode.
These messages from the Saturday morning Looney Tunes episodes are really something we need to recreate if we are to nurture creativity and grit in society. The likes of TikTok and other online fads are killing-off this skill and burying the message of “never giving up”. We are creating youth that celebrate imitation and mindless copying of so-called “influencers”. We are in unusual times and the creativity required to find lasting solutions to our business, personal and political problems is more important than ever. The future resilience of society depends on reinvigorating this creative process. Or I could be wrong, and Wile E could have “flossed” his way to capturing the Roadrunner.
