If this is such a great idea to Start With What Works – if it really means the chance to find a new level of success with lower risk – why don’t more organizations do it? Let’s look at some of the mindsets responsible.
1. We’re seduced by the idea of a Saviour.
It’s tempting to assume that there’s a Saviour with some special knowledge or ability that no one or no thing inside the organization has. Typical Saviours include The Rockstar Hire, The New-Cloud-Based-Productivity-App-dot-Com (ideally AI-enabled) or even The Acquisition. While there’s nothing wrong with hiring the best talent, using the best tools and even making acquisitions if you know what you’re doing, it’s easy to under-estimate the risks. We can all remember times such Saviours turned out to be false. Yet how easy it is to forget.
2. We copy the wrong things from the outside, rather than seeking the right things within
Businesses copy each other too much. It's easy to look at successful performers and draw the wrong conclusions about the causes of their success. Putting it graphically, all CEOs go to the toilet, and it’s undoubtedly ‘best practice’, but nobody thinks that is a common factor in their career success as business leaders. This is a potential problem for all business books that hold up successful companies as exemplars (including mine!). Examples are great for inspiration and as a source of idea you can test, but not as models to be blindly followed.
3. We don’t notice the familiar
Have a look around the office (if you still go there). Are there ‘urgent’ post-it notes on computer screens that have been there for three months? We see familiar things, in the sense that the light hits our retinas, but we no longer perceive them. We notice problems because they’re anomalous, they stand out. But what about all the things that work in the business? Do we notice the strengths we could build on?
4. We get caught up in a dream world.
Nick Bostrom, a philosopher from Oxford, and Elon Musk, saviour of Twitter (I’m joking, I’m joking), both seriously seem to believe we are living in a computer simulation like the one in the film, The Matrix. It sounds a bit bonkers to me. But that doesn’t mean I disagree that we live in a world of illusion. What are some of the convincing illusions business people can get caught up in? Well, for example, that:
- Their customers are only interested in price (but they’re often not).
- Customers won’t pay more (but they often will).
- Generation X, Y, Z want everything on a plate (but they often don’t).
- What gets measured gets done (but what gets measured often gets gamed).
These illusions are convincing: they seem real! All of us can get caught out by this stuff. That’s why we need ways to escape the bewitching effect of what we think we know.
5. We won’t accept prophets in our own land.
Too many managers overlook the staff’s views, and therefore cut themselves off from a vast store of potential for business improvement. Ominously, a friend who’s a turnaround specialist says that the first thing he does when called in to rescue a failing business is to talk to the shopfloor and customer service people to find out “how management have messed-up the business, and what we should do to fix it?” Time and again, the information to help the business has been there all along, but was ignored by managers.
6. Exotica from afar distract us from what we have.
The word ‘exotic’ literally mean ‘from the outside’. The expert from afar is more appealing than the prophet from our own land. I once heard a New Yorker confess that while he’d never visited the Statue of Liberty, he couldn’t wait to get to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower. Stuff from outside just seems more valuable, whether or not it actually is.
7. We get stuck in existing categories.
When observed facts do not fit in with existing categories, people struggle. They resist the facts, or just explain them away. This is a huge trap for ‘industry experts.’ Think about the way the major US automakers responded to early ‘compact’ Japanese imports in the 1970s. They basically said: “Call that a car?” and carried on building gas-guzzlers, opening the door for Honda, Toyota and the rest to upend their industry.
8. We dismiss positive anomalies and outliers because we rely on statistical summaries.
My clients know I am fond of the following joke: "Did you hear the one about the statistician who drowned crossing a river of an average depth of two feet?" Averaging makes large amounts of information easier to grasp, but it can hide the most useful and critical data points. There are so many applications of this insight that it is well worth developing the habit of treating all averages with suspicion. It's easy to be lulled into the assumption that we are at the mercy of what are, after all, abstractions: 'the economy', 'GDP', 'consumer sentiment'. I'm not saying these convey no information, but they don’t always contain much of use. I often hear economic indicators being used to create compelling-sounding rationales for battening down the hatches, where other companies sailing in the same conditions are making dramatic progress.
9. We ‘know’ too much about the business.
Paradoxically, extensive experience in a business can make it too easy to miss its hidden potential. As managers develop experience, their expectations for what is possible quickly habituate. They get used to their industry, their organization and their people. When they look at it, they see possibilities that are only incremental improvements—“more of the same.” Wise managers need to be alert to this and have tools and practices to see a familiar world in a new light.
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