One way to win in the game of business is to ask questions that no one has ever asked before. Does every successful business have an element of absurdity? Is there value in being ignorant?
Unconventional thinking, breaking out of force field of rationality creates the possibility of being unbeatable. Playing the game of business, applying only logic and rationality, is like playing golf with only one club.
There is something wonderful about business problem solving, applying the scientific method to management problems. Using inductive thinking, setting a hypothesis of what one thinks is happening then doing the research to prove, or disprove the ‘best guess’. That is rationality – logic in action. Catch is, it doesn’t solve all business problems, because not everything is rational.
Biggest threat to Coca Cola
“One of the dangers of being rational is that you tend to end up in the same place as all your competitors. And the thing that one notices about successful business is that they tend to have an element of absurdity. If you gave a lot of rational people the job of coming up with a competitor to Coca Cola they would say we need a really nice tasting drink, that is cheap and comes in a big container.
But the biggest competitor is Red Bull — which comes in a tiny can and tastes disgusting. If life is like a game of poker, do I do what is sensible, or do I do something silly, when if I do succeed, the gains will be disproportionate?”Poses Rory Sutherland, the vice chair of Ogilvy UK.
Being rational extinguishes the fire of the enchanting
Logic often kills magic. In physics there is logic, no magic allowed, just the rules of how objects in space in motion are predicted to behave. But in business and management there can be magic. Tiny, almost miniscule ideas, and practices can have a bordering on astronomical impact, defying the laws of Newtonian physics. Asymmetric competition often wins.
Is there just one right answer?
Sarah, the customer fulfilment manager, in the darkness of night, may think that there is a single right answer, and a wrong response. In reality, in the noon sunlight, there may be a portfolio of right answers. Black and white just does not exist in real world, more blends of primary colours like green, red and blue, not to mention the brilliant yellows, and the more than 50 shades of gray.
Perhaps the best management problem solving approach is to be able to wear at least two hats. One would be the hard number- crunching facts and figures analysis hat. Other cap would be irrational magical creativity. Out of the box lateral thinking. Whenever a problem pops up, Sarah inevitably asks her team: What happened? Better to reach deeper and ask: Why? Better to think backwards, to question fundamental assumptions, to move forward.
Do straight lines exist in a garden?
Straight line linear thinking has its merits – it’s easily understood, it’s comfortable. A leads directly to B leads to C. But when you walk through nature, in a forest or a tea field, do you see any straight lines? Even a beam of light is bent by the forces of gravity.
What often happens in business and the NGO – donor community is that the influencers think logically, applying their own mental calculus, and apply the laws of motion, to determine the next steps. All of them, in their own way, are trying to gain that illusive good old fashioned Michael Porter’s ‘competitive advantage’ from almost half a century. For companies, it’s all about market share and profitability, for NGOs it is aiming to be a magnet for donor funding.
Porter’s ‘five forces sectors analysis’ no longer applies when the lines between industries are blurred, thanks in part to all things digital and global connectivity. In information and knowledge, we are ‘drinking from a firehouse’. Everyone is a journalist, an influencer, thanks to social media anyone can speak to anyone, old ideas of tedious Prussian hierarchies have evaporated. “Nothing is as more powerful than an idea whose time has come” said French novelist Victor Hugo, more than 150 years ago.
Gen Z thinking is ancient. Just that that those born from 1997 to 2012 grew up with an imaginative ability to use – not stone age implements – but instead, ever evolving, powerful tools of ‘the world is flat’ communication.
Predicable cycles of behaviour
Problem is that applying logic to business makes one pretty predicable. In competing, organisations typically work by analogy, often just plain copying, adding more of the same bells and whistles features, predictably claiming ‘to be the best’.
In reality, what is happening, they are converging to sameness, becoming more and more like each other, so that eventually the product or service on offer, becomes seen as simply a cheap commodity, that soon plummets in value.
Business and management goes through a predicable cycle of fads and fashions, each one claiming to be more earth-shattering than it’s predecessor. Today’s fashion on the corporate equivalent of the catwalks of Milan is artificial intelligence and ESG ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ which can be traced back 90 years ago to a Adolf Berle, a professor at Columbia Business School.
Nothing is new under the sun. Are we just recycling old ideas, in flashy packaging? Some would suggest that our age of artificial intelligence more resembles natural ignorance.
An unconventional awareness of ignorance is a plus. “To be conscious that you are ignorant is great step to knowledge” said the former British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli.
