Rethinking progress.
Looking Outside Rethinking.
We know pressure tested and sense checked plans are stronger, with a higher chance of success. Yet we still assume that it’s a disadvantage when re-evaluating or reassessing a position. The act of rethinking doesn’t have to mean you throw away your starting idea, change your position on an issue, or stall your progress, it can simply mean taking care to pressure test, with the humility to recognize that you may not have everything worked out.
Does rethinking our plans mean we second guess everything we do? On the contrary I see it as leaning into our instincts. As Tom Goodwin put it on our Looking Outside Rethinking podcast, it’s that ‘feeling’ you get when things don’t quite stack up. Like one faulty building block will make the structure unstable.
Harvard Business Review wrote that it’s vital to find weaknesses in strategies before they’re implemented. Vital; it’s the act of seeing the cracks before they break the ice sheet. Risk assessment, war gaming, alternate scenarios. This is the ‘what if’ question in the room. It’s the ‘but what about’ question. Why do we assume experienced high functioning adults cannot take this kind of objective counter in a business meeting? Why are now teaching people in business to start everything with ‘yes and’? We are not so delicate as humans, and our strategies certainly shouldn’t be.
Often when we talk about building agility into a strategy or planning cycle in business we think this has to mean moving quickly, ignoring our flaws. ‘Progress over perfection’ has become a business mantra for organizational change. The origin of this is likely from the famous Winston Churchill speech in 1952 at a conservatives party, where he said, “Perfection is the enemy of progress”. Government change happens at a much slower pace than business, and this still rings true today. The sentiment is familiar, we have heard it in philosophers and writers over time, right back to a Confucian scholar in the Ming Dynasty who wrote, “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without”.
Today, this is used in business for mindset shifts where a company might be overthinking to the detriment of action, of falling behind competitors, of organizational paralysis. It is also used in mindfulness and self care as a method of self acceptance and openness to iterative progress. What’s interesting is the ‘progress over perfection’ sentiment speaks precisely to rethinking - moving around, through and with recognized flaws. In contrast, how it’s understood today is to ignore imperfection for the sake of motion.
Agile innovation teams, like those in small companies with fewer resources, move more intuitively to progress a product to market. But do they? Or are they more comfortable to pressure test their assumptions, and discuss their set backs, because fewer stakeholders are involved, fewer processes distract them, fewer delicacies are taken to pose questions? The Scrum process that agile innovation is built on is explicitly designed to make you stop and address potential flaws before you take another step. It helps you move at pace, but it also forces you take the time to pause and reevaluate where you are, based on where you need to go. We forget that progress isn’t just about speed but efficient use of time.
Adam Grant, author of Think Again and Originals, talks about approaching business problems with humility and a level of self doubt. Of remaining open to the fact that you may be wrong. In an UnleashResults interview, he discusses the conundrum of overthinking versus taking action. After all, in business action is necessary and strategies are useless if not brought to market. We are not rewarded for a great plan, we are rewarded for a great deployment of a plan, or a great pilot off the back of that plan, or a great implementation of that plan. This is part of the challenge for quantifying the ROI of foresight, and why we need to, as foresight practitioners, demonstrate how our futures thinking can lead to successful implementation. So back to the point, action is necessary, but no action should be built on complete certainty. And so, no plan should be rigid and inflexible. By the way Adam is a scientist, he has a pHd in organizational psychology. And he himself recognizes that ‘there is no amount of evidence that should make you 100% certain’.
Tom Goodwin mentions on Looking Outside that we have a negativity bias. This is demonstrated in the fact that as humans we more easily point to the flaws of something. We are better at ruling out theories when they are wrong, than accurately gauging when they are right. But there is something else that we do as humans and it’s called the Pollyanna Principle. This is our human tendency to focus on positive things, to cling to positive memories and to use positive terms and words in conversation. So if you’re a realist or consider yourself objective, you might be surprised by that. But perhaps this is your advantage?
We break plans apart so we can rebuild them stronger. We question things like an outside company would so that our activities stand up to competitor scrutiny. We consider the worst alternative so that we build contingencies for that reality. We pressure test, we rethink, we reassess our plans with positive intent. It’s fun to play the devil’s advocate, sure, it’s easier to spot the negatives than the positives, but it’s also imperative that we do so. So that our initiatives are stronger for it. So that our plans are prepared for alternate scenarios. So that we as professional workers see this kind of provocation in the room as necessary, as vital to the success of our planning. Not as a distraction, not as negative, nor as argumentative ‘for the sake of it’ … but for the sake of success.
And as Tom said, this openness to rethinking creates more opportunity for our business, and for ourselves to generate better ideas, because, “When nothing is certain, anything is possible”.
5 reasons why Tom Goodwin values rethinking.
1 | Being open to opposing ideas gives you a chance to understand better.
I think we will do better by arguing to understand things rather than to win points. We'd all do better to float theories out there with the intention of changing our own opinions on things. And that's not always easy these days.
2 | It’s our job to ask good questions, not just to continually hunt for answers.
One, we work in a really nice industry. I mean, we have amazing jobs. We get to understand people. We get to live in a world where our subject matter surrounds us all day long and it's a real privilege to operate in that situation. Secondly, we really love the power of a wonderful answer, but actually the power of a really good question … It's not necessarily more important, but it's certainly way more important than most people seem to think.
3 | Exploration beyond the boundaries of what you know can unlock great ideas.
Realistically, I know this sounds quite profound and philosophical, it's not, but you only really establish the boundary of what we know by finding that mark by going over it. If you're not wrong quite often, then you're not really probing things enough. I'm staggered by the degree to which best practice and assumptions and the rule of thumb dominate our industry. And how comfortable people are only ever living in a paradigm which is rooted in sort of truisms. I think often the real business value is actually unlocked by the people that explore those areas.
4 | Diversity of thinking starts with recognizing homogeny and familiarity.
This is human nature. I mean, we do literally see the things we look for. Everyone's reality is absolutely biased because we're programmed to do this. And that makes it a very difficult challenge to solve, because even when we think we're being open minded and even when we think we're coming to things objectively, there's still an inherent bias and discrimination in the way that we're looking at things. And that is in no way sort of “OK”, but it is sort of understandable, and it's something that probably requires a lot of effort to change, and it probably means that a big role in companies is recruiting people who are very different.
5 | Contrasting perspectives can ultimately serve positive purpose.
I'm just trying to be reassuring and I'm trying to find the two or three things that are very different impacts on a lot of companies and then focus on those. But people are very quick to take that as a negative thing. Everything I say is actually normally rooted in an incredible sense of optimism for the future and incredible love of human ingenuity. A really deep sense that people are, by and large, wonderful and well intentioned. And then I contrast that with how really stupid most business meetings feel and how awful many decisions are made. How terrible a lot of the governance and governments in the world are. And I think good ideas and progress only ever comes from an optimistic perspective. That doesn't mean we should be blinded to reality, but we can also be proud about what we've accomplished so far as well.
Listen to the episode with Tom Goodwin:
