Delighting in the possible
In an unpredictable world, executives should
stretch beyond managing the probable.
It’s only natural to seek certainty, especially in the
face of the unknown. Long ago, shamans performed intricate dances to summon
rain. It didn’t matter that any success they enjoyed was random, as long as the
tribe felt that its water supply was in capable hands. Nowadays, late nights of
number crunching, feasts of modeling, and the familiar rituals of presentations
have replaced the rain dances of old. But often, the odds of generating
reliable insights are not much better.
Perhaps that’s because our approach to the
hardest problems—and the anxiety those problems create—is fundamentally
misdirected. When most of us face a challenge, we typically fall back on our
standard operating procedures. Call this “managing the probable.” In much of
our education, and in many of our formative experiences, we’ve learned that
some simple problems have one right answer. For more complicated problems,
accepted algorithms can help us work out the best answer from among available
options. We respond to uncertainty with analysis or leave that analysis to the
experienced hands of others. We look for leaders who know the way forward and
offer some assurance of predictability.
This way of approaching situations involves a
whole suite of routines grounded in a mind-set of clarity if not outright
certainty. To that end, they are characterized by sharp-edged questions
intended to narrow our focus: What is the expected return on this investment?
What is the three-year plan for this venture? At what cost are they willing to
settle? But asking these kinds of questions, very often legitimate in
business-as-usual settings, may constrain management teams in atypical, complex
situations, such as responding to a quickly changing market or revitalizing a
privatized utility’s culture. Our tendency to place one perspective above all
others—the proverbial “fact-based view” or “maximizing key stakeholders’
alignment”—can be dangerous. All too often, we operate with an excessively
simple model in enormously messy circumstances. We fail to perceive how
different pieces of reality interact and how to foster better outcomes.
Moving from “managing the probable” to
“leading the possible” requires us to address challenges in a fundamentally
different way. Rather than simply disaggregating complexities into pieces we
find more tractable, we should also broaden our range of interventions by
breaking out of familiar patterns and using a whole new approach that allows us
to expand our options, experiment in low-risk ways, and realize potentially
outsized payoffs. But be warned: leading the possible involves coping with our
own anxieties about an unknowable and uncontrollable world. A few simple habits
of mind presented here can prod us toward thinking and acting differently.
These should not be considered a checklist of to-dos; indeed, the very point is
to move beyond a check-the-box mentality.
Unexpected possibilities
We relish stories of unexpected
possibilities—little bets that created huge and unforeseen benefits. Twitter,
for instance, was born when its creators noticed how alive and engaged they
felt when communicating with each other in real time over SMS. The concept was
brilliant, and the platform has reshaped the way the world communicates. But
the initiative arose from brainstorming rather than an elaborate business plan.
Tweeting caught on, in large part, because it grants its users freedom. In
fact, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams has explained that, in general, his rule
is to do less. We can’t foresee how uncertain conditions will unfold or how
complex systems will evolve, but we can conduct thoughtful experiments to
explore the possibilities.
That’s what happened at the birth of Emirates
Airline. We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of Dubai as a major transit hub,
but its development was hardly inevitable. During the mid-1980s, Gulf Air, the
area’s regional flag carrier at the time, began to cut back its services to the
city. Faced with the possibility of hundreds of stranded passengers in the
short term, and the threat of long-term decline, the government tried something
new. With a small infusion of cash (by airline standards), it leased two planes
with crews from another airline and converted a couple of jets from the royal
fleet for commercial use. In time, the fledgling Emirates Airline flew high.
Traffic through Dubai International Airport seeded a local tourism industry
and, on the cargo side, a logistics platform. This in turn attracted ever more
traffic in what became a fantastically virtuous cycle. Not even the most
optimistic of the airline’s founders could have reasonably imagined that
Emirates Airline would be an industry giant—or that Dubai would become the world’s
busiest international-passenger airport.
The leaders of these new ventures used
unconventional approaches to try new, unexpected moves—with enormous payoffs.
But it’s not just large innovations that make a difference. When people think
in new ways, very small shifts can have unexpected and significant
consequences.
Habits of mind
Uncertainty can’t be solved with pat
procedures; it takes new habits of mind to lead the possible. In our
experience, three such habits stretch the capabilities of leaders and help them
not only to lead the possible but also to delight in it.
Ask different
questions
The questions we ask emerge from our typical
patterns of thought. We focus on narrowing down a problem so that we can find a
solution. But we often fail to notice that in doing so we constrain the
solution and make it ordinary. Asking different questions helps slow down the
process. We begin to take in the full range of data available to us and in
consequence have a significantly wider set of possible options. Examples of
such questions include the following:
·
What do I expect not to
find? How could I attune to the unexpected?
·
What might I be
discounting or explaining away a little too quickly?
·
What would happen if I
shifted one of my core assumptions on an issue, just as an experiment?
The two of us have seen this approach applied
successfully to real-life situations. For example, a government agency
struggling with ever-shrinking resources and ever-increasing demands had asked
two questions for years: “How will we get enough money to meet the demands?”
and “Which services can we cut to stay within our budget?” The senior team,
tired of running in circles searching for untapped financing streams or arguing
over which core services to cut, intentionally explored a new idea: “How can we
share our workload with others so that our current financing becomes sufficient
without cutting back on services?” This new question significantly widened the
available possibilities, and the organization set out to conduct a long series
of small-scale experiments with businesses, other government departments, and
community members to keep the same level of service for far less money. Asking
a different question opened up dynamic possibilities.
Take multiple
perspectives
No one can predict when or where the next
vital idea will emerge, but we can support an expansive view of our present
conditions. We can start by pushing back on our natural inclination to believe
that the data we see are all the data we need and by distrusting our natural craving
for alignment. Considering multiple perspectives opens up our field of vision.
Diversity might create more disagreement and short-term conflict, but in an
uncertain environment, a more expansive set of solutions is desirable.
We can try these approaches:
·
Take the perspective
of someone who frustrates or irritates us. What might that person have to teach
us?
·
Seek out the opinions
of people beyond our comfort zone. The perspectives of, among others, younger
people, more junior staff, and dissatisfied customers can be insightful and
surprising.
·
Listen to what other
people have to say. We should not try to convince them to change their
conclusions; we should listen to learn. If we can understand their perspectives
well enough, we might even find that our own conclusions change.
New perspectives often arise from unexpected
sources. At a large consumer-goods organization that prided itself on its
customer-centric approach, the leadership team rightly asserted that it
understood the perspectives of its diverse customer base and key suppliers. The
team was asked whether any group—anywhere at all—“just wasn’t getting it.”
Rueful laughter followed; of course there was such a group: a set of consumers
written off some time ago and now never considered. Taking a new approach, the
leaders probed that group’s perspectives, not to win over these consumers or to
sell them something but to learn from them. The leaders discovered the
possibility of a whole new product line that slipped easily into the company’s
supply chain but hadn’t been on the horizon previously. Taking multiple
perspectives radically opened up a new set of possibilities.
See systems
This approach is about seeing patterns of
behavior, and then developing and trying small “safe-to-fail” experiments to
nudge the system in a more helpful direction. Leaders are best served when they
get a wider, more systemic view of the present. Yet we’ve been trained to
follow our natural inclination to examine the component parts. We assume a
straightforward and linear connection between cause and effect. Finally, we
look for root causes at the center of problems. In doing these things, we often
fail to perceive the broader forces at work. The more we can hold on to the
special features of systems, the more we can create experiments in unexpected
places to open up new possibilities.
To best understand systems, it’s helpful to
resist the urge to disaggregate problems and to solve them right away. Here are
some alternatives:
·
We can hold opposing
ideas without reconciling them. If it looks as though we’re confronting an
either/or choice, we can reconsider our narrow framing and wonder what we’re
missing.
·
We shouldn’t waste
time arguing about the best solution; instead, we can pick several good but
different solutions and experiment with them all in a small way.
·
We can give up the
hunt for the root cause and instead look to the edges of an issue for our
experiments. The system’s center is most resistant to change, but tinkering at
the periphery can deliver outsized returns.
Elements in a system can be connected in ways
that are not immediately apparent. For example, call-center employee turnover
is notoriously high across industries—an expensive drain on this particular
system. Many managers have tried to develop better hiring practices to
eliminate some of the turnover before it begins; others beef up their HR
departments to deal with the inevitable churn.
One executive, looking at the edges of the
issue in his district, noticed that many skilled people outside the workforce
care for their children or sick parents. He experimented with ways to bring
these people into his call center in a flexible way: working from home, setting
their own shift lengths and hours (a revolutionary idea in call centers), and
managing their own performance targets. Over time, he nudged the model so that
it became enormously successful. After 12 months of the new system, when the
call-center staff had been ramped up to more than 200 employees, upward of 90
percent of them felt engaged with their work—a remarkable achievement in the
traditionally transient and disengaged world of call centers—and turnover fell
to under 10 percent a year. Looking at the whole system and experimenting with
(and learning from) different approaches helped the executive to solve a number
of related problems: turnover, customer satisfaction, local unemployment, and
even rates of depression among people who provide care for family members.
Leadership implications
Of course, such shifts of mind have
implications, and opening ourselves up to the delights of the possible comes at
a cost. One casualty may be our cherished image of the traditional leader. The
default model of a clear-minded person, certain of his or her outlook and
ideas, is not consistent with the qualities that allow possibilities to
flourish. In a complex world, we’re often better served by leaders with
humility, a keen sense of their own limitations, an insatiable curiosity, and
an orientation to learning and development.
Understanding this can have significant
implications. For example, a group of private-equity leaders began to chart
different leadership styles required at their various portfolio companies.
Eventually, they realized that CEO searches were too often based on a
one-size-fits-all model. Even as they fought their anxiety about breaking the
standard mold, they came to understand that fluid circumstances require
flexibility. Their awareness of the very different requirements of leadership
in unpredictable settings helped them select—and develop—the leaders they
really needed.
Transformative change is certain to happen, often in unforeseen
ways and not necessarily led from the front. Unintended repercussions often
stymie our best-laid plans. The world is neither simple nor static. It is
patterned but not predictable. In the face of new challenges, we all default to
how we think we should act and to what seems to have worked before. Managing
the probable is reassuring but leaves us more open to being blindsided. Some
problems do not lend themselves to rote methods, simple models, or
sophisticated algorithms. When we treat them as different, complex, and
uncertain, we can unlock solutions of immense creativity and power. And by
exercising three simple habits of mind, we can begin to delight in the
possible.
byZafer Achi and Jennifer Garvey Berger
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/managing_in_uncertainty/delighting_in_the_possible?cid=other-eml-nsl-mip-mck-oth-1504
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