Directors who step outside their comfort zones will have the best chance of spotting opportunities to innovate
The measure of an education," wrote the author and columnist, Christopher Hitchens, "is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance." Unfortunately, rather than acknowledging how much we don't know, and being curious about the endless possibilities implicit therein, many people's conceit, arrogance and narrow-mindedness seem to grow in direct proportion to their knowledge and expertise. We wrap this knowledge and expertise around us like a cloak to protect us from having to deal with concepts beyond our ken or that threaten the carefully constructed, but fragile, edifice of our assumed superiority.
We hold fast to and continually invest in what we know (the known known), frequently institutionalising it in processes, policies and best practice. But this myopia prevents us from venturing into the realms of the known unknown (what we know we don't know), the unknown unknown (what we don't know we don't know) and even the outer reaches of the unknown knowns (what we don't know we know).
This inability to think more boldly really matters. It confines us to the reactionary, the reactive, the safe and predictable, and it strengthens our hardwired biases and reinforces our prejudices. It blinds us to alternatives, possibilities and potential. As such, it is the enemy of the innovation and creativity that are necessary to progress. And, perversely, in a climate of increasing volatility and accelerating change, we are snuggling deeper into our comfort zones on the grounds that all this stuff is so big and difficult to deal with that there's really no point in trying.
But there is a point—for company directors shaping corporate strategy as much as for politicians framing national policy. To prepare and adapt our businesses and countries for the future, we have to grapple with the unknown, however difficult and unpalatable that might be. If we don't, those strategies themselves amount to wild guesses, figments of our imagination—and that really would be pointless.
I was discussing such issues recently with the iconoclastic, Finnish-born management professor, Alf Rehn, who is writing a book about why we are so bad at predicting the future. The future is, on one level, impossible to predict, of course—a classic known unknown. But what intrigues Rehn is why, despite the burgeoning field of futurology, so many predictions are not just so wide of the mark, but so tame. The answer, he believes, lies in our hard-wired (albeit subliminal) desire to conform—whatever our protestations to the contrary.
Our fear of looking different or stupid harks back to our Palaeolithic past when doing so would have resulted in us being eaten up. Best practices then would have amounted to knowing the best places to hunt and the best things to gather. But we have, over the intervening millennia, evolved. We now have the capacity for thinking beyond best practices to next practices, but we rarely use it because best practices reassure, and give us a sense of control and certainty.
But it is this very control and certainty that we need to ditch if we are to progress. Best practices, processes and policies are important anchors, but instead of letting them trammel our thinking we need to challenge them, confront others and test ourselves, because it is the difficult, unexplored—even taboo—areas that offer the greatest opportunities for innovation.
I was astonished recently, while researching a report on the impact of social media, to be instructed by one of my interviewees—a man I admire and who works for a highly respected agency—to use his extremely balanced comments only off the record. While attuned to the considerable potential benefits to companies of using social media, he had put the medium into context for me by citing statistics-again in the public domain and from a reputable source—suggesting that social media is far less important than the rhetoric might lead you to believe.
He explained his coyness as follows: "This stuff is all tremendously fashionable, and the social media fundamentalists take the view that you are either for or against them. Our agency doesn't want to be painted as Luddite. But you are almost not allowed to tell the truth. There are some in this agency who wouldn't like me even disseminating the online/offline figures. It is a case of not being able to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes."
What sort of world do we live in that we can't speak or write without fear or favour, and, equally, enjoy being proved wrong? Why can't we, like Christopher Hitchens, tell it as it is, or at least as we see it? Hitchens has no automatic respect for anyone or anything. More business folk should take a leaf out of his book.
