March Madness and What We Can Learn From an N of 1

In the wake of the recent NCAA March Madness tournament, I was reminded of a particular basketball game that will always live in my memory.

In 2019, my son and I watched from a hotel room TV as Dwayne Wade’s one-footed three-pointer swooshed through the net just as the game-ending buzzer sounded. This logic-defying shot propelled his Miami Heat team to a 126-125 victory over the Golden State Warriors.

In addition to remembering a euphoric cheer erupt from my 13-year-old Miami Heat fan, I remember thinking that the moment held something more powerful than a simple sports win for him. It forever solidified within him the belief of possibility. My son now lived in a world where the seemingly insurmountable task of making a three-point game-winning shot while staring down an expiring game clock was a reality. While the task was still not probable, it was now within the realm of possible. We had an N of 1.

As a student of the social sciences, I have long learned the importance of statistical significance in research and the need to have large sample sizes to ensure accurate representation of a population in question. In a quest for coherence in a data set, outliers are often removed or explained away. Yet, I have recently become more curious about those outliers I used to ignore, and have begun asking, “What can an N of 1 teach us?”

My curiosity for this question only grows as pessimistic headlines highlighting our continued global disruptions seem to only be seeding cynicism. While not ignoring the challenges we face, thriving in these turbulent times will require a healthy dose of belief in possibilities for the future. Without even a small seed of optimism, we can easily become locked in a collective state of learned helplessness. To help us begin to shift into a mindset of possibility, our approach to empirical evidence may need to evolve, or at least expand.

Solving the seemingly insurmountable tasks before us as a global community will involve doing things we have never done before—like eradicating warfare, reversing global climate change, or sustaining cultures of equality for all. We may not need a statistically significant re-analysis of yesterday’s data, but rather an intentional search for Ns of 1 that fortify our belief in possibilities for tomorrow.

Social psychologist Ellen Langer has long explored the psychology of possibility. As the first female professor to gain tenure in the psychology department at Harvard University, she herself is a living model for what a new possibility might look like in a traditionally male-dominated environment.

In her book, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, Langer states: “The psychology of possibility first requires that we begin with the assumption that we do not know what we can do or become” (2009). She goes on to suggest:

“A new approach to psychology and to our lives is needed because the naysayers—those who demand empirical evidence—are winning. It is they who have determined what is possible and what’s achievable, to our collective detriment. If we suggest a possibility that seems far afield from what is currently known, the burden of proof is on us. Yet rather than ask, “How could that be?” it makes just as much sense to ask, “Why couldn’t it be so?” What the naysayers know is only based on probabilities, which were deduced from a fixed view of what was studied. Just as we can’t prove that something is so in advance of finding out, the naysayers can’t prove that it is not possible.”

Langer’s challenge to our fundamental assumptions about the directionality of empirical evidence was provocative when she wrote it nearly 15 years ago. But, it is perhaps even more meaningful today. As we continually learn in today’s tumultuous world, an analysis of yesterday will not necessarily help us predict tomorrow with any certainty. Perhaps then, we need to not only hone our ability to analyze mainstream data but also look for those inspirational outliers from which we can learn anew.

3 Questions for Unleashing the Psychology of Possibility

As I lean further into the psychology of possibility, I have been experimenting with the following questions and invite you to do the same.

1. Where does an N of 1 already exist? This question sparks the intentional search for outliers that we may have previously ignored in our quest to ensure statistical significance for a particular phenomenon. More often than not, however, if we look for it, we can find it. Thus, I have begun to ask questions to help me find those things I want to see more of in the world, such as: Where is an example of…

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• improbable cooperation that brought together unlikely partners?
• transformational collaboration that led to inspiring impacts?
• that inspirational buzzer-beater?

2. How can I create an N of 1? This question invites us to move beyond discovery and step into the active creation of possibility. Working to create even small prototypes of possibility helps to build our individual and collective self-efficacy to expand our sense of possibility. Suddenly, seeing becomes believing. For example, I have begun to ask:

• If I can not find a living case of something, how might I seed it?
• How can I embody the possibility I am seeking to illustrate to others?
• What is the smallest thing I can do to create what I want to see more of in the world?

3. What new possibilities might this N of 1 inspire us to consider? Whether we have discovered or created our own N of 1, this question prompts us to consider what might be scaled up from our spark of possibility. Ask yourself: What would it take to move from an N of 1 to 2, to 20, to 200? Such thinking shifts us into a generative space of creating new futures vs. simply analyzing the past.

Langer reminds us, “...we go through life unaware that what we’ve accepted as impossible may, in fact, be quite possible.” Yet, possibilities are all around us if we are bold enough to look for them, or courageous enough to create them. Whether you are a sports fan or not, this year’s recent March Madness once again offered us a living example that all of our well-founded analytical predictions can be upset (aka all of our predictive brackets busted) with a single, improbable moment when a 16th-seeded team bested a #1 team. If anything, my son and I have another N of 1 to take with us into next year’s predictions, giving us added confidence to believe that anything is possible.