So, why can’t we plan greatness?
Kenneth O. Stanley’s Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned makes a bold claim: setting rigid objectives often limits us, rather than helping us achieve extraordinary things. When we try to map out greatness, we narrow our vision and unintentionally block the creativity and curiosity that lead to real breakthroughs.
The book invites us to think differently, embracing exploration, serendipity, and what Stanley calls stepping stones—unexpected discoveries that open new possibilities, even if they don’t resemble the final goal. Stanley argues that objectives can act as a “false compass,” creating tunnel vision, rewarding surface-level progress, and steering us away from surprising opportunities. History backs him up: airplanes, computers, and other revolutionary inventions didn’t come from following a clear plan; they came from curiosity-driven exploration.
His approach is less about control and more about staying open, playful, and curious, trusting that each stepping stone you find can become part of a path no one could have predicted.
Why this book is worth your time
Stanley’s book resonates because it challenges a deeply ingrained belief that clear goals are the only way to succeed.
He offers a compelling alternative: exploration as a guiding principle. His stories and metaphors, drawn from AI research and real-world examples, show how rigid objectives can backfire while curiosity unlocks innovation.
Rather than fixating on a single destination, Stanley champions a treasure hunter mindset. This means collecting ideas, following what sparks interest, and trusting that remarkable things often come from unexpected connections. His writing is accessible and engaging, making it valuable for entrepreneurs, educators, creatives, and anyone working in complex environments.
Why objectives can mislead
Objectives often feel like reliable markers of progress, but in practice, they can be deceptive. They tend to reward surface-level results at the expense of creativity, making us overly confident in a single path forward, even when navigating uncharted territory.
One of Stanley’s most vivid examples of this is the British snake bounty story. During colonial rule in India, the British government offered a reward for every dead cobra, hoping to reduce their numbers. At first, the program appeared successful, but locals soon began breeding cobras to collect more bounties. When the program ended, the breeders released their now-worthless snakes, leaving the country with an even larger cobra problem.
This story highlights the danger of perverse incentives: when metrics become the primary focus, people optimize for numbers rather than genuine outcomes. Instead of solving the problem, the system amplified it. Stanley calls this a “false compass”—objectives that give the illusion of progress while leading us further from meaningful solutions. He likens it to a Chinese finger trap: pulling harder only makes it tighter, and the solution is counterintuitive. In creative work, the most valuable stepping stones rarely resemble the final goal, and clinging too tightly to objectives can cause us to miss them entirely.
The treasure hunter mindset
Instead of following a strict plan or chasing a single endpoint, Stanley encourages us to explore widely, collecting anything that feels interesting or valuable along the way. Every discovery becomes a stepping stone, no matter how small or seemingly unrelated, and each one has the potential to lead somewhere surprising. This mindset embraces uncertainty and serendipity, creating room for divergent thinking and richer innovation. Just as evolution builds extraordinary complexity by testing countless variations rather than following a blueprint, we too can thrive by staying open to unexpected paths.
This treasure hunter mindset is more than just a way of thinking; it’s the foundation for a practical method Stanley developed called novelty search. Where the treasure hunter roams, guided by curiosity, novelty search gives that curiosity structure, turning exploration itself into a measurable and repeatable strategy.
Novelty search: curiosity in action
Novelty search is the engine behind Stanley’s philosophy—a strategy designed to reward exploration itself rather than chasing a predefined goal. Instead of asking, “How close am I to the finish line?” novelty search asks, “What’s different? What haven’t we tried yet?” It measures progress not by proximity to an objective, but by how novel each step is compared to those that have come before.
The Picbreeder experiment brings this concept to life. Picbreeder was an online platform where people “bred” images by choosing the ones they found most interesting, generation after generation. Participants weren’t aiming for a specific picture; they were following their curiosity. Yet this open-ended process produced astonishing, intricate images, results that no one could have mapped out in advance. The lesson was striking: some of the most impressive outcomes came from users with no clear objective at all. By freeing themselves from fixed goals, they uncovered stepping stones that led to surprising breakthroughs.
This approach inverts traditional goal-setting.
In AI experiments, Stanley demonstrated that algorithms driven by novelty, rather than fixed objectives, could solve mazes and navigate complex environments more effectively than those trained to “win.” Free from the pressure to optimize toward a single endpoint, these systems explored unexpected paths, and those explorations often revealed better solutions.
Novelty search works because it embraces uncertainty, variation, and even failure. Attempts that seem fruitless often lay the groundwork for future discoveries. This mirrors evolution itself: nature doesn’t follow a blueprint, but through exploration and diversity, it generates extraordinary complexity. Stanley’s work demonstrates that when we stop obsessing over outcomes and instead focus on what’s genuinely interesting, we create a fertile environment for ideas and innovations no plan could have predicted.
A bigger picture of innovation
Stanley’s work paints a broader picture of how progress actually happens.
He demonstrates that serendipity isn’t just luck, it’s something we can cultivate by remaining curious and open to unexpected connections. Diversity also plays a crucial role: real breakthroughs rarely come from converging too quickly on one idea, but from exploring many directions and perspectives. And constraints, rather than being barriers, can sharpen focus and spark creative problem-solving. Evolution itself is proof of this, thriving on simple boundaries like “survive and reproduce” while generating extraordinary complexity. These lessons challenge our default approaches in education, research, and business, which often prize predictability over exploration. Stanley argues that the environments most likely to foster innovation are those that reward curiosity, experimentation, and an openness to surprise.
How UX product designers can use this approach
For UX product designers, Stanley’s work is a call to trade rigid certainty for curiosity—exploring broadly, questioning assumptions, and staying open to paths that can’t be fully mapped in advance. Holding objectives lightly helps avoid what he calls a “false compass,” where strict goals narrow vision and discourage exploration.
This mindset views every research insight, prototype, or discarded idea as a stepping stone; an unexpected discovery that might lead to the next breakthrough. Novelty search reinforces this by encouraging teams to prioritize what’s unusual or intriguing over what’s easily measurable.
Rather than focusing only on metrics like click-through rates or time on task, designers can evaluate success by a design’s ability to spark new ideas and uncover surprising opportunities. Progress in design is rarely linear, and Stanley’s work champions embracing that unpredictability as a source of creativity.
The exploratory discovery approach
(A framework inspired by Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned) 👇🏼
