Lenses & Constraints

I used to live on one of the roughest, most crime-ridden streets in Washington, D.C.1 Something about its layout—one solitary block with a T-intersection at either end, plus two rubble-filled lots along the way—made it especially attractive to scofflaws and ne’er-do-wells. Food delivery drivers were hesitant to serve our address when we ordered. Amazon only delivered packages during daylight hours. When the District Department of Transportation came one week to repave, the workers were so freaked out that they left the coarsely-excavated subsurface exposed for three months before returning to replace the asphalt.

Somewhat incongruously, the block also featured the small, recently-renovated modern apartment building in which my wife & I had found an affordable two-bedroom via virtual tour before we moved back to the U.S. after a year in France.

One night, we hosted a dinner party for a handful of friends. Around 11pm, when the last of the dessert dishes had been cleared and the conversation grown peppered with yawns, we walked our guests downstairs to bid them farewell on the stoop.

Opening the building’s front door, we encountered a raucous and rowdy scene. About a hundred local 20-somethings, half at one end and half at the other, were alternately taunting and laughing at each other down the length of the street.

The energy was loud and somewhat out of control. Music was thumping from a couple of smoke-filled parked cars, and people were clearly intoxicated. It was a warm summer night. Honestly, I could understand the appeal.

At the same time, it was late. A neighbor a few doors away, clearly unable to understand the appeal, trotted over and told us he’d called the police. Our friends waved good night and hurried the opposite direction to the nearby Metro station.

Within minutes, cop cars were careening into the entrance of our one-way street and bottlenecking it. Two. Three. Five. Eight. Soon, they were uncountable; a frantic cacophony of sirens and emergency lights. Apparently, the ruckus of this evening’s assemblage had triggered a shock and awe reaction. We watched from our stoop as the assembly grew.

Suddenly the police, taking a page from the militarized playbook they’d no doubt been trained on, formed a phalanx. Four across, eight deep, they began marching up the block. I counted no fewer than 32 blue-shirted and navy-pantsed officers in the formation.

All with guns on their hips.

The partiers had become agitated in a completely new way. Indignantly, they held their ground against these perceived trespassers on their territory. I shifted into eyewitness mode, staring widely, adrenaline surged.

Because my Substack is not intended as a crime thriller, I’ll cut to post-crescendo.

• The cops insisted that the crowd disperse.

• Several of the most indignant insisted that they had the right to stay.

• A police van arrived.

• Two dozen of the partiers were roughly handcuffed and whisked away.

• With its prime instigators shipped off to the clink and the courts, the crowd dissipated.

• Legal and administrative consequences ensued, consuming untold day/ weeks/ months (years?) of time for everyone involved.

I’ve thought a lot about that night, that phalanx, and those tremendously disruptive arrests. What disturbed me the most was the speed with which force was invoked.

How would things have turned out had someone hurled a plastic water bottle at the cops? Or hit one in the face with a can of beer, for that matter? Which officer at the end of a 12-hour shift, just barely holding it together in the wake of some other unprocessed work trauma from earlier in the day, was one swear word away from drawing his weapon and firing?

And who would have blamed him?

Here’s the thing: if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You hit flowers with it. Spaghetti. The future. Ka-blam.

With one simple trick, however, we can equip ourselves (and the 911 dispatchers of the future2) with a veritable bucket of tools.

I call it “Lenses & Constraints.” It’s the most powerful concept I teach my graduate students for effective brainstorming,3 and it’s the heart of the BrainSpin Method.

Essentially: look at the problem from more perspectives.

How would a ballet dancer solve this problem? What would an octogenarian do? What if everyone in the situation were deaf? Or had to wear sumo suits?

Going back to our phalanx, here are three alternative perspectives on 32’s that could have significantly changed the energy, mitigated the risk, and required orders of magnitude less expenditure for everyone involved.

1. (Chef) 32 pizzas. Pass out slices, for free. Look at this as a “hangry” situation, and neutralize it for less than a grand. Bring a bun to a knife fight, amirite?

2. (Child) 32 puppies. Walk through the crowd handing out puppies. Or kittens. Try to imagine anyone ignoring that cute-ification. Logistically complicated, sure, but do you think we could figure it out for less than $50k?4

3. (Choir member) 32 people singing. How’s a skirmish going to escalate with a whole slew of grandmas in robes sliding up in there all about Amazing Grace? With proper training and preparation, they could deploy in a jiffy. Church ladies versus crime. It’s too weird not to work.

Do you have other ideas for where lenses & constraints might help? Write me back or add a comment, I’d love to hear them.