Visionaries, Prophets, And Heroes: Facing the future Without Them

For those - individuals and businesses alike - seeking certainty and answers in an uncertain world, there is it is fair to say, a near-infinite supply of confident advice, formula, and prophesy:

“You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life… You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle… Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

“I’m 41 and I’m just getting started. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from or what you did before now. Each day is an opportunity to deploy your time and energy toward your dream. Think about what you want, reverse engineer that, and then execute.”


“Just about anyone can be a key protagonist in building an extraordinary business institution. The lessons of these companies can be learned and applied by the vast majority of managers at all levels. You can learn them. You can apply them. You can build a visionary company”

We love this stuff. Perhaps we are lazy and want somebody else to take on the trial and error and figure it all out for us. Perhaps we just need some inspiration and motivation to keep us going. Perhaps we need to be given a belief system. Perhaps we really do think there’s a silver bullet out there. Perhaps it’s our innate appetite for satisfying patterns. Perhaps we need these stories to feel that progress is actually possible. Perhaps our brains are simply adapted to to copy the behaviours of the most successful. Perhaps we - no longer buoyed by faith - still seek our gods.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that these stories (Steve Jobs’ included) have little to teach us. Painting false realities, creating the illusion that success is far easier than it actually is, sowing the seeds of imposter syndrome, and laying claim to universal wisdom, they enslave us in the fictions, fantasies and ideologies of others. And comforting though they might be, they stop us thinking for ourselves.

The problem with success stories is that they are not stories about failure. And thus by their very nature, they are distortions. At this point briefly retelling a familiar story about World War II is obligatory. 

The story goes that during World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald was tasked with helping the Allies reduce  the number of bombers lost to enemy anti-aircraft fire. The Allies wanted to understand how much additional protection was needed. The challenge was not straightforward. Armour would make the bombers heavier, less manoeuvrable, and less fuel-efficient. But armouring the bombers too little would leave them vulnerable. Examining the bombers that did make it back, the Allies had noted that that the damage wasn’t uniformly distributed across the aircraft. Since there were more bullet holes in the fuselage than in the engine, the Allies concluded that this is where they should concentrate the armour. The question they had for Wald was how much armour.

Wald did not answer their question. Instead he argued that the armour shouldn’t go where the bullet holes were - it should go where the bullet holes were not, namelyon the engines. This argued Wald, was where the bombers were most vulnerable and where the planes that didn’t make it back had been hit.Returning planes with damage to the fuselage simply showed that this damage could be survived. From this insight, Wald then calculated how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it was destroyed and how likely it was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced.

Wald’s achievement lay in the fact that unlike his superiors, he did not focus exclusively on the survivors. He avoided what we call ‘survivorship bias’ and instead found a way of seeing the bombers that did not make it back and the bullet holes that were missing. The lesson of this story of course is that focusing exclusively on survivors creates a very distorted reality. As advertisers have long known, focusing exclusively on say, the successful lottery winner or the successful weight loser not only obscures quite how hard success really is to achieve, but all too easily oversimplifies or misrepresents the real reasons behind success.

Take the consultants Collins and Porras authors of the bestselling book Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t. To get to their recipe for success, Collins and Porras identified 200 leading companies then narrowed them down to include the best and most durable and successful. This was achieved by identifying the twenty organizations most frequently mentioned in a survey of CEOs. Companies founded after 1950 were eliminated and the list culled down to eighteen “visionary” companies (alarm bells should already be ringing at this point). They then looked at the common traits of these companies and compared them with companies that were just “good”. Lo and behold their research revealed that the great companies had a strong core ideology, built a strong corporate culture, set audacious goals, developed people and promoted from within, created a spirit of experimentation and risk taking, and drove for excellence.

“Just about anyone can be a key protagonist in building an extraordinary business institution” Collins and Porras promised, “the lessons of these companies can be learned and applied by the vast majority of managers at all levels. You can learn them. You can apply them. You can build a visionary company.” But in truth their analysis tells us nothing. Other than we are suckers for good story.

After all, as Phil Rosenzweig notes in his wonderful take down of business delusions The Halo Effect, it would be remarkable if great companies were not described in these terms - and if good companies in somewhat lesser terms. And because we know absolutely nothing about all the other companies that were neither Good nor Great, we have absolutely no way of knowing if these factors are the drivers of success, or merely ways of describing a successful company.

As Rosenzweig points out, picking a handful of companies precisely because they’ve done well for many years, and then looking back in time and ‘explaining’ what happened tells us absolutely nothing about what makes for success. If they had concluded that having a blue logo was the key factor in their extraordinary performance or that the CEOs were all Virgos (or white men) it would have had just as much plausibility.

There is then, nothing like a success story to obscure the real nature of success. The success story of Ryan Gosling renders us blind to every struggling or failed actor waiting on tables, just as the success story of Ryan Higer obscures the unsurfaced and unremarked content produced by a thousand YouTube creators, just as the success story of Chance the Rapper leads us to forget the legions of undiscovered performers toiling in the unknown loneliness of their bedroom. Their stories and accomplishments may well provide hope and comfort and inspiration for those who struggle. But they also misrepresent quite how hard success is to come by. And indeed how it is achieved. As David McRaney puts it:

Survivorship bias… flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain. You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.

In reducing their achievements down to a single factor, those who tell their stories of success invariably claim (or believe) to have had a monopoly of control of events and outcomes, and vastly exaggerate their agency. Yet no person, no organisation, no business functions in isolation from the environments and contexts they are located within. Any story of success is a story of a complex interaction offactors. Reducing that complexity to a single variable or a simple aphorism might make for good storytelling, but it is usually an exercise in nonsense.

Jim Stengel in his book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies for example, wants us to believe that companies with an ‘ideal’ at their heart see share price growth far in excess of those lacking such values.

This conclusion was arrived at by taking the 50 brands with the highest loyalty or bonding scores from Millward Brown's 50,000-strong database, searching for a link between them - a ‘Brand Ideal’ - and then looking at the chosen brands' stock value growth between 2000 and 2011. Since the these fifty brands had grown by 393% compared with a -7% loss for the S&P 500 benchmark - and ignoring the massively complex array of interrelated variables and dynamics that constitute a business - Stengel declared that having an ideal was the key to driving stratospheric business success.

One has to applaud the audacity of the argument. Yet for Stengel’s argument to have a shred of credibility, one would have had to a) have eliminated all the other factors that might have impacted growth before aligning upon Brand Ideal and b) demonstrated that successful companies have brand ideals more often than unsuccessful ones. Stengel's analysis does neither.  

We’re suckers for this stuff because as the author of Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Taleb has written, “We favour the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible”. In other words we love a good story.

We’d rather hear an inspiring and empowering “You Too Can Do This” story about purpose than interrogate the assumptions made in the analysis or consider that Stengel's analysis looks at but 50 companies out of a database of 50,000. And we're so dazzled by the mere presence of numbers purporting to support this exciting story that we gush about about the "scientist's rigour" of the author's analysis. Even the then Chairman of WPP Sir Martin Sorrell was not immune to a good yarn, declaring that Stengel had "the hard, clean numbers to bear his teachings out”. As Professor Daniel Kahneman puts it:

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion – we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.

In oversimplifying, success stories and storytellers invariably also fail to account for the role of sheer luck. But then survivors have always had the advantage that they get to tell the story how they want it. And hagiographers have always been able to rely on our appetite for exciting stories and lack of interest in critiquing their reliability.

Much for example, is made of the vision, intellect and intuition of Steve Jobs. But Jobs was also enormously lucky.

He was for a start that he was born in the US not, say, the Congo.

He was probably lucky that he was born a man, not a woman.

He was also lucky that he was born in San Francisco which within 20 years would be emerging as a technology hub.

Lucky that during the 1960s DARPA's  funding of new computer science departments at US universities had expanded the number of researchers and accelerated technological change in this area.

Lucky that research already carried out in various public–private partnerships at labs including those at DARPA, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Shockley and Fairchild had revolutionized the semiconductor industry through the introduction of silicon.

Lucky that as the sole consumers of the first processing units based on this new circuit design, defence contracts had already helped fund the development of the microprocessor industry.

Lucky that touchscreen technology had already been invented by E. A. Johnson, while working at Royal Radar Establishment a British government agency in the1960s.

Lucky that multi-touch scrolling and gestures had already been developed by Wayne Westerman and John Elias (funded by the State) at the University of Delaware in the 1990s.

Lucky that through the 1970s through the 1990s, DARPA had funded the development of TCP/IP.

Lucky that Tim Berners-Lee had developed the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), uniform resource locators (URL) and uniform Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) in the 1980s.

And lucky that GPS had been developed by the Department of Defence in the 1970s.

He was lucky in other words, that all the major technologies that made the iPhone possible already existed, and lucky that public funding had enabled the military to take on the burden of capital-intensive risk in developing them.

It is all too easy for such details to get lost in the telling and re-telling of myth. As Marianne Mazzucato, professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London observes:

Individual genius, attention to design, a love for play, and foolishness were no doubt important characteristics. But without the massive amount of public investment behind the computer and Internet revolutions, such attributes might have led only to the invention of a new toy – not to cutting-edge revolutionary products.

This is not to deny the skill of successful people and businesses. Chance is one thing, but spotting and capitalising on it (seeing for example, the potential of bringing existing technologies into a single, portable, elegantly designed device) is another thing altogether. But the idea of the entirely Self Made Person (or brand or business) is a toxic illusion and fiction. As Alexi Madrigal writing for the Atlantic puts it:

How many brilliant hardworking people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time? How many encountered a system that made it harder for them? How many people from uneducated families or inner cities, immigrants or the grandchildren of slaves never found themselves in a position to show their awesomeness? How many women were forced to act as mere appendages to their husbands… These were not conditions in which it was equally possible for all people to flourish. And yet we hand down these stories from generation to generation as if everyone had an equal shot at success.

The ironing out of luck in success stories is not entirely a case of conscious myth-making, revisionist history, self-promotion, and spin. Not entirely. Human psychology and the phenomenon of the so-called ‘availability heuristic’ can explain much of this telling of revisionist history. The availability heuristic is the phenomenon whereby vivid memories are the most easily recalled memory, will appear more numerous than commonplace incidents, and are accorded more significance than events that happen sporadically. It means that we tend to have an incomplete picture. And it means that we are unreliable autobiographers. As Robert Frank puts it:

Little wonder that when talented, hardworking people in developed countries strike it rich, they tend to ascribe their success to talent and hard work above all else. Most of them are vividly aware of how hard they’ve worked and how talented they are. They’ve been working hard and solving difficult problems every day for many years! In some abstract sense, they probably do know that they might not have performed as well in some other environment. Yet their day-to-day experience provides few reminders of how fortunate they were not to have been born in, say, war-torn Zimbabwe.

When we recognise the role of chance and circumstance and context we fast realise how absurd it is for the successful to make claims of universal wisdom and lessons based on their experience and accomplishments.

“Love what you do… Don’t settle… Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” advised Jobs. But as a recipe for success it is frankly bullshit. You can follow that advice all you want. You may even have his intellect and determination and instinct. But you will not encounter precisely the same set of circumstances with precisely the same set of variables, resources, opportunities, and chances. Because you are not Steve Jobs in 70s San Francisco. “Love what you do… Don’t settle… Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” may give us a warm fuzzy feeling, but a vastly incomplete account of personal success in the past is hardly the best and most reliable guide to future success for everybody else.

The fact of the matter is that the successful are unreliable witnesses of their own achievements. And extrapolating patterns from an unreplicable past and presenting them as universal blueprints for future success hardly counts as helpful advice, let alone wisdom.

***

As for the prophets, we’d be well-advised to heed the analysis undertaken by psychologist Philip Tetlock that revealed that the people who make prediction their business - people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables - are no in fact better than the rest of us in many accurate predictions. In fact, he found that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future were likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually had an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. As Dr Tetlock puts it: “Experts in demand are more overconfident in their forecasts and predictions than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

In fact not only should we be cautious around the pundits and prophets, but we should be dubious of all confident, sweeping predictions and prophecies of what life, marketing, the universe, and everything will look like in the decade(s) to come. Economies, companies, technologies, and societies are vast, complex nonlinear systems. And what those tidy predictions ignore is that their complexity and scale renders complete and accurate explanation (and thus prediction) impossible. Trying to understand the whole system by simply looking at a few of its individual parts teaches us little. As the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and founder of the Santa Fe Institute (“the world's leading research center for complex systems science”) Murray Gell-Mann put it, “No gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole”. In the face of that complexity says Michael Mauboussin Head of Consilient Research at Morgan Stanley “You can’t make predictions in any but the broadest and vaguest terms.”

Small wonder perhaps that since 2000, the median analyst forecast has called for an average yearly return on the S&P 500 of 9.5%, whereas the actual average gain was 6.0%. And small wonder that the median Wall Street forecast from 2000 through 2020 missed its target by an average 12.9 percentage points - which was more than double the [6.0%] actual average annual performance of the stock market. 

For the billionaire investor Howard Marks most financial forecasts, are either “(a) unhelpful consensus expectations or (b) non-consensus forecasts that are rarely right”. And it’s the unknowability of the macro future and the negligible insight payload of forecasts that Marks argues is at the heart of pretty much every investment strategy:



We’re convinced the macro future isn’t knowable… I can count on one hand the investors I know who successfully base their decisions on macro forecasts.  The rest invest from the bottom up, one investment at a time.  They buy when they think they’ve found bargains and sell things they consider overpriced - mostly without reference to the macro outlook.

But never mind all that. The fact is that many (most?) self-styled marketing prophets aren’t really trying to predict the future at all. They’re trying to make it happen to their advantage.


Anyone who tries to tell you the inevitable, unavoidable future is blockchain or NFTs or DTC or content or community or creators or personalisation or purpose or voice or performance marketing or AI creatives or conscious consumerism or activist branding or experience or the death of advertising… They don’t want you to be smarter. They’re using, as Heffernan puts it, “prophecy as a sales technique" to shape or accelerate a future they seek to dominate. The trick they’re trying to pull off is to convince us that their preferred version of the future is both inevitable and desirable. And that we should all get on board it with (and their plans of profiting from it).

Too cynical a perspective? Just look at what business the prophets are in and what product or service they’re paid to make or sell. It was ever thus. Plus ça change. Besides, it’s hard to sell or advocate a solution if we honestly don’t believe it has a future. But just because it’s human nature doesn’t mean we all have to uncritically swallow the rhetoric.

But what is perhaps more concerning and demands more resistance is that prophesies deny, to borrow the words of historian Thomas Nipperdey, “the fullness of the possible future”. For as Marks (he’s rather good on this subject) writes, “The future should be viewed not as a fixed outcome that’s destined to happen and capable of being predicted, but as a range of possibilities and, hopefully on the basis of insight into their respective likelihoods, as a probability distribution.”

The future in other words, whatever we might hear from all the stages, podiums, panels, blogs and articles is not a place we are racing towards and that the few divinely gifted amongst us can see better than others. It’s a set of probabilities. And as such it is far, far more unknowable, and far, far more contingent than many might have us believe.

So if we find ourselves on the receiving end of a prophecy or a Self Made success story or a formula for success, we’d be all advised to exercise extreme caution, to resist its seductiveness, argue with it, critique its reliability, rip open its methodology, interrogate it ruthlessly, consider what has been left out… and feel free to ignore it.

 The fact of the matter is that however much we might yearn for them, there are no priests or heroes or prophets who can tell us what to do. There is nobody who’s figured it all, who can save us the hard work and the risk. Nobody has the keys to wisdom and certainty. Nobody has a universally applicable playbook for success. Nobody has a monopoly of insight or wisdom. Nobody has one template to rule them all. And nobody can see into the future on our behalf for the simple reason that it has not been charted yet. We are alone. And we are free. As the management consultant and author Margaret Wheatley writes:



For too long, too many of us have been entranced by heroes. Perhaps it’s our desire to be saved, to not have to do the hard work, to rely on someone else to figure things out.. It’s a seductive image, an enticing promise. And we keep believing it. Somewhere there’s someone who will make it all better. Somewhere, there’s someone who’s visionary, inspiring, brilliant, trustworthy, and we’ll all happily follow him or her. Somewhere… Well, it is time for all the heroes to go home, as the poet William Stafford wrote. It is time for us to give up these hopes and expectations that only breed dependency and passivity, and that do not give us solutions to the challenges we face.

We should claim and exercise our freedom and agency.

***

But then? What should we do with our freedom? How do we venture into the unknown?

Well the first question that the British Royal Marines ask in preparing for any engagement is - “what is the situation on the ground and how does it affect me?”

Similarly Howards Marks argues that we should “gain a knowledge advantage regarding ‘the knowable’”.

Planner mega-mind, founder of Lucky Generals, and author of the recently published (and very good) Go Luck Yourself Andy Nairn recommends that “the first step towards improving your fortunes is to appreciate what you already have”.

And Margaret Heffernan puts it even more simply - “Start wherever you are”.

Situational awareness, knowledge of the knowable, starting where you are - they all point to the need to pay attention, and to see clearly. But the simplicity of this advice belies the discipline, rigour, and silencing of ego required to exercise this.

Albrecht Dürer painted his ‘The Great Piece of Turf’ in 1503 - around the time that Leonardo da Vinci had come home having finished his ‘The Last Supper’ fresco, and Michelangelo was in town busy chiseling away in private at a five meter block of marble that was eventually to become ‘David’. Dürer’s work was a great deal more humble - measuring just 40.8 x 31.5 cms.

The viewpoint is intimate - head-on, from down in the weeds. In the watery soil at the bottom, we can see the reflection of the stems above. In the foreground we see hound’s-tongue, and yarrow. And above we see several kinds of meadow grass, as well as plantain, speedwell, daisies, and dandelions. Dürer painted in watercolour and gouache on paper with the finest of brushes, using pen and ink to add the details so that each and every species, leaf, flower and blade is rendered with extraordinary, exquisite accuracy.

It is a humble piece of turf. And yet it is a revelation. This is seeing. What I wonder, would we have seen if somebody had dug up a chunk of real turf, and set it before us in a dish of water against a plain background?

***

Navigation of any kind demands that we see. But it’s to see clearly when we’re living in a bubble.

It’s hard to see clearly when women account for 36% of C-suite roles in creative and non-media agencies with fewer than 200 employees and 30% in agencies with more than 200 employees.

It’s hard to see clearly when the average age of employees in the industry is 34 years, while 6% are aged 50 years and over.

It’s hard to see clearly when 35% of creative roles are occupied by women.

Among agencies able to supply ethnic diversity data for their employees, 86% of employees were identified as being from a white background, and 14% from an ethnic minority.

It’s hard to see clearly when 31% of those in leadership roles are privately educated, while 7% of the total population is privately educated.

It’s hard to see clearly when just 17% of employees in the industry come from a C2DE background, compared with 40% of the UK population.

It’s hard to see clearly when only 10% of employees are aged 45 and over yet 29% of the UK workforce is aged 50+ according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

And it’s hard to see clearly when only 8% of people in leadership positions are from an ethnic minority.

***

And it’s it’s hard to see clearly when we’re focused on the thing that we are making, rather than who we are making it for. It’s easy to lose perceptive. Writes Mark Ritson,

As marketers, we quickly start to lose the perspective of the market as we spend hundreds of days a year inside a company that is launching or managing a product. We start to think the product is the centre of the world, not the customer that we are designing it for.

Once we start seeing the world through the lens of our product or brand, finding more people to orbit around our product becomes our primary goal, and once we start looking for more ‘satellite consumers’ as Wendy Gordon once characterised them, we quickly start looking for people who actually resemble our brand.


Small wonder that much of the time we are lost in fantasy land woven out of our own disconnect and vanity. Look at the fictions we invent:


“Go-Getters. People with an active attitude towards life embracing challenges, new experiences and driven by personal achievements. They are nothing like followers or mainstream. They are highly connected, always seeking for novelty and ways to be energized and facilitate their lives.”



“Urban Explorers. They are restless social beings and keep looking for new things to do. They do not settle for the obvious, dull brands or usual way of doing things. They are resilient, optimistic, and resourceful.”



“Optimisers. Their lives are packed, and they love it. In fact, they’re always looking to fit more in. To fuel their ever-expanding sense of self, they seek out new people, ideas and perspectives. Their lives are mosaics, in which each experience has been deliberately selected to better themselves and those they care about.”



These are not clear-sighted, insightful articulations of people’s needs, wants and desires. They’re onanistic fantasies.

And if if we’re not weaving fictions we’re letting jargon and labels get in the way of seeing clearly: “Mums”, “teens”, “millennials” , “LDA+” , “C2D” , “middle class” “rural”, “Tier 1”, “metropolitan media elite”, “opinion formers”… the list goes on. But just because we say “mums”, or “teens” or “millennials” does not mean we ipso facto understand them. It just means we know what some people call other people. No more. Labels give the illusion of seeing and insight. But they are a substitute for doing any actual thinking for ourselves.

So if we are to face uncertainty on our own we need to see more clearly.

***

Seeing clearly means finding ways to dismantle or open up what thermodynamics calls ‘closed systems’. These are systems that are isolated and closed off from their surrounding environments. The Second Law of thermodynamics describes the tendency of these closed systems to ultimately reach an end state of equilibrium. This is the point at which the system has worn down, done its work, and has exhausted all its capacity for change and dynamism.

The most obvious exception to this law is life itself. Living systems are open systems that are active partners with their environments. Their systems stay open to, interact with, and adapt to their surrounding environment. They’re open to outside stimuli. And it is this open-ness that provides them with the ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment.

An example of this was given by Helen Edwards in a talk given at Google Firestarters. She encouraged organisations to develop proximity - “the closeness that helps weave an intimate web of understanding” and told the story of how Emirates Airlines came to create the footrest that we perhaps now take for granted. It was cabin staff - those in immediate, close, direct contact with the customer - who had noticed that passengers often used their luggage as an improvised footrest.

When the conversation around developing consumer understanding (‘insight’ if one really must) all too quickly descends into one about research methodologies, it’s a salutary reminder that there are many ways for organisations to open themselves to their surrounding environments and develop this proximity and intimacy of customer understanding.

***

Seeing clearly also means that we know how to look. Margaret Heffernan reminds us that

We all inhabit multiple interconnected ecosystems. The small ones we control, larger ones we might influence; and many that influence us, but over which we have no or little control.”Preparedness requires knowing these ecologies in fine-grained detail, being alert to their changes, to the possibilities and problems they reveal.

Heffernan’s insight is of course, that we must be able to calibrate our ways of seeing to detect and understand both the big and the small. Yet if can seem that we’re either stuck in some kind of high-altitude corporate parking orbit from which all we can see is what we call lazily or confusedly call ‘culture’ (more on that perhaps in another post) - or we struggle to lift our gaze above the category horizon and the interaction of consumers with products.

The fact is that we need to be able to see at two focal lengths, as Richard Huntingdon has argued:

At a deep focal length we are able to understand and identify the broadest themes of humanity, the eternal drivers of behaviour and the cultural tensions of the moment. Here we see the thinking and work that moves culture, and that resonates because of its universality… At a shallow focal length, we empathise with and relate to the most intimate of experiences. Personal stories and the details of individual lives that resonate through proximity and relevance…

For Huntingdon, the middle ground is the dead zone of cliche. The focal length of too much research. Of seeing without actually really seeing:

We need to move far further away from our subjects so we can see and appreciate the vast sweep of humanity and able to mark the turning of culture. And at the same-time we need to get far closer to them, so we can press our noses against the glass of life, serving people as people, individual and idiosyncratic.

***

Seeing clearly also means embracing diversity. Now the ethical case for diversity is of course, inarguable. As Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Steering businesses towards becoming fairer, more diverse, more inclusive places is a fundamental lever for steering society as a whole towards opening up opportunity (and dignity and rights) for all. It is not the only lever of change.  But it is an important one.

However, equity, diversity, and inclusion also makes good business sense. In a speech he gave in 2017 entitled ‘Reflecting diversity, choosing inclusion’ given by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England said:

Homogenous groups that pay insufficient attention to minority views are vulnerable to biases, groupthink and over optimism. They are more likely to be influenced by the way information is presented (framing); and to stick with under-performing projects because of prior investments. Diverse groups can overcome these ills as they are more inclined to consider novel ideas and challenge each other, enabling them to infer cause and effect and to solve problems better. Diverse teams are also better able to adapt to changes and are more resilient. This is particularly important in a rapidly changing world, where information is super abundant and certainty is absent.

And study after study, report after report provides compelling evidence of this phenomenon. For example, a 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.

In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board.

And research conducted into the performance of venture capital companies by Harvard Business School demonstrates that on all dimensions measured, the more similar the investment partners, the lower their investments’ performance. For example, the success rate of acquisitions and IPOs was 11.5% lower, on average, for investments by partners with shared school backgrounds than for those by partners from different schools. The effect of shared ethnicity was even stronger, reducing an investment’s comparative success rate by 26.4% to 32.2%.

***

Carney’s observation above underscores the necessity that organisations make space for and listen to not just a diversity of people, but a diversity of opinion. For if we are to see better we need to creating organisational and workplace cultures that allow for dissent. That is easier said than done, of course. Organisations provide plenty of tangible rewards for conformity but arguably far fewer for genuine independence of thought.

The necessity of puncturing conformity has been argued for by Cass R. Sunstein, Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago and who reminds us of the pitfalls inherent in our own human condition. We are strongly influenced by the opinion of others, and most of us desire to earn the good opinion of those around us. So very often we will use the decisions and actions of other people around us as the best source of information and guidance on what to do. In other words, we follow the behaviours of the herd.

It can give rise to so-called ‘social cascades’ in which social groups blindly pick up and mimic the behaviours of other groups without actually examining the information they themselves hold. And it can give rise to polarization in which our tendency towards conformity means group members end up exaggerating their in-going tendencies and taking an even more extreme position.

Social influences then, according to Sunstein, “diminish the total level of information within any group, and they threaten, much of the time, to lead individuals and institutions in the wrong directions” and he identifies the role of the dissenter as an important antidote to the risk of information suppression. Crucially, he is at plains to not that the dissenter is very different from the mere contrarian. The contrarian is simply somebody who feels they will be rewarded in some way for disagreeing with others. The dissenter, by contrast, is he argues, “a discloser” - they disclose the full truth about the issue at hand, or reveal accurate information bearing on that issue that they actually hold, or they might simply state a point of view that would otherwise be missing from group discussion (valuable since, according to Sunstein, cascade-type behaviour typically leads people to be silent not about not just facts, but about points of view). And studies have shown that how even just one dissenting voice can dramatically reduce both conformity and decision-making error.

Founder of Netflix Reed Hastings has written openly about how his decision in 2011 to split the company into two operations - one for DVDs, one for streaming - resulted in millions of lost subscribers and a 75 percent fall in the company’s stock market value:

But that humiliation was a valuable wake-up call, because afterward dozens of Netflix managers and VPs started coming forward to say they hadn’t believed in the idea. One said, “I knew it was going to be a disaster, but I thought, ‘Reed is always right,’ so I kept quiet.” A guy from finance agreed, “We thought it was crazy, because we knew a large percentage of our customers paid the ten dollars but didn’t even use the DVD service. Why would Reed make a choice that would lose Netflix money? But everyone else seemed to be going along with the idea, so we did too.” Another manager said, “I always hated the name Qwikster, but no one else complained, so I didn’t either.” Finally, one VP said to me, “You’re so intense when you believe in something, Reed, that I felt you wouldn’t hear me. I should have laid down on the tracks screaming that I thought it would fail. But I didn’t.”

The decision was eventually reversed, but the realization that differences of opinion had not always been welcome at Netflix and thus not voiced resulted in a lasting shift in culture and process:

That’s when we added a new element to our culture. We now say that it is unacceptable and unproductive when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement. By withholding your opinion, you are implicitly choosing to not help the company. I can’t make the best decisions unless I have input from a lot of people. That’s why I and everyone else at Netflix now actively seek out different perspectives before making any major decision.

We call it farming for dissent. Normally, we try to avoid establishing a lot of processes at Netflix, but this specific principle is so important that we have developed multiple systems to make sure dissent gets heard. For example, if you are a Netflix employee with a proposal, you create a shared memo explaining the idea and inviting dozens of your colleagues for input. They will then leave comments electronically in the margin of your document, which everyone can view. Simply glancing through the comments can give you a feeling for a variety of dissenting and supporting viewpoints.

Hiring for diversity of background, downgrading the obsession with hiring for cultural ‘fit’, encouraging a culture of experimentation and enquiry rather than dogma and ideology, and actively seeking out dissenting views would all go a long way to encouraging higher-quality conversations and better, more complete, more accurate ways of seeing.

***

Seeing clearly means asking better questions. Or asking the questions nobody’s thought of asking or dares to ask.

My favourite story about asking different questions comes from the world of baseball and features a player by the name of Rich Hill. In 2015 Rich Hill was a washed-up 34-year old pitching for a semi-pro team called the Long Island Ducks. Rich Hill’s spin rate was an extraordinary 2565rpm. Hardly surprisingly, he could throw a curveball that hitters couldn’t hit. So why was he washed-up and not a super-star?

The problem was that the pitch specialists who analysed and quantified the games of players asked only one question: How many pitches did they have? And when they analysed Rich Hill’s game they found he had only one pitch, not the three of four the best in the game had. Ideology and dogma (what we in marketing call ‘best practice’) rendered them blind to Rich Hill’s true potential.

But one analyst by the name of Brian Bannister looked at the problem differently. What, he asked himself, if Rich Hill’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t have a traditional four pitch arsenal? What if the problem was that he didn’t have ten curveballs? And what new grips, speeds and arm slots were added to turn his single deadly curveball into dozens of them? 
Facing Rich Hill became like facing an octopus. In 2016 he helped The L.A. Dodgers beat the Chicago Cubs in the playoffs at Wrigley without giving up a run - and then signed a three-year deal with them for $48 million, at the age of 36 years (when the average age of an MLB player was 29 years).

It’s a story that illustrates that by nature, dogma and ideology - the conviction that we already know the answers - narrows our field of vision and our range of opportunities and chances. Conversely, letting go of dogma and ideology (what we in marketing might call ‘best practice’) opens our field of vision and our range of possibilities. As Andy Nairn writes “Lucky people tend to have better peripheral vision”: Alexander Fleming he reminds us, discovered penicillin when he noticed mould growing on an unattended petri dish, Percy Spencer invented the microwave after he noticed his chocolate bar had melted in a radar experiment, and Viagra was originally tested as a heart medication until researchers noticed some interesting side effects.

In 1976, Peter Drucker - “the founder of modern management” - gave a lecture at Claremont Colleges.  In his book A Class with Drucker, William A. Cohen, a longtime protégé of Drucker, recounts what happened:

Drucker began to reminisce about his work with various corporations both here and in Japan. He told us that it was often very simple things that an outsider could do which would have a major impact in the company he assisted. This was because inside people were generally much too close to the issues, and also because they assumed things from their past experience that they incorrectly thought were identical in the present situation. An outsider would wonder and question these things that a practicing manager in the organization frequently missed, although all managers needed to train themselves to ask questions.

Asked the secret of his success in these endeavors by a student, Drucker responded, “There is no secret. You just need to ask the right questions.”

Unexpectedly, one of my classmates raised his arm and exploded with three questions in rapid succession. “How do you know the right questions to ask? Aren’t your questions based on your knowledge in the industries in which you consult? How did you have the knowledge and expertise to do this when you were first starting out with no experience?”

“I never ask these questions or approach these assignments based on my knowledge and experience in these industries,” answered Drucker. “It is exactly the opposite. I do not use my knowledge and experience at all. I bring my ignorance to the situation. Ignorance is the most important component for helping others to solve any problem in any industry.”

Hands shot up around the room, but Drucker waved them off. “Ignorance is not such a bad thing if one knows how to use it,” he continued, “and all managers must learn how to do this. You must frequently approach problems with your ignorance; not what you think you know from past experience, because not infrequently, what you think you know is wrong.”

What all this points to is the need to employ what the renowned British graphic designer Ken Garland had called “the clarity of the innocent eye”:

Our proper role is that of the alert ignoramus… Linger for a moment on the synonyms for that admirable little word and I think you’ll see what I’m getting at: active, agile, attentive, careful, heedful, lively, observant, on one’s toes, on the ball, on the lookout, perceptive, sprightly… Now, there’s something to live up to, don’t you think?.. We should – alertly – exploit that original ignorance, or innocence, which allows us to see and perform with clarity. As for imagination, brilliance, verve, inspiration – yes, we are going to need all that, and more. But first we must employ the clarity of the innocent eye.

***

The more we see real people, real lives, the more we see real humanity, real needs and wants., the more we are prepared to listen to the stories people have to tell, the more we are prepared to open the windows of our corporate cloisters and let reality blow through, the more we see the muck and joy and pain and striving and dreaming and grafting and hoping and creating... the more we understand it, see it, embrace it and have empathy for it, the greater our chances of creating something of genuine value for them.

We have no need of the visionaries, prophets, and heroes. We do not need to follow in another’s footsteps. Or race towards anybody’s predicted halcyon future. Or apply another’s recipe for success. All we need to do is exercise our freedom, venture out, pay attention, keep our minds and eyes open, have the will and courage to search for and embrace the truth.

“The world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works” opined the educator, and chair of the philosophy  department at  University of California, Berkeley Joseph Tussman. And in the pursuit of that, perhaps we could do a lot worse than practise the wit and wisdom of Rudyard Kipling:

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

***

Sources

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