Every single person reading this suffers from a problem that is common: we all have questions in our lives of which we don’t know the answer. Unless you are significantly different than I am, those questions will span every facet of your life: questions about yourself, about your relationships, about your career, about your health, about your finances, about your future, and on it goes. As humans, with a limited capacity to know, we understand and accept this limitation. We all know that there is only so much we can know. Interestingly, in business, we often refuse to accept that exact same premise.
In business, the belief is often that everything is knowable. We just have to work harder, do more testing, isolate variables, get more expertise and/or experience, hire different people, or innumerable other solutions to have an “all knowing” organization. We can build entire ecosystems so we seemingly have all the answers, or at least feel self confident/arrogant enough to believe that. Companies build hierarchies of people, systems to gather data, teams to analyze that data, systems to analyze the teams that analyze the data, teams to take that analysis and create insight, teams to dream up the ideas/questions – it never ends. The core belief is that with enough resources organizations can understand (and predict) nearly anything.
As I have done work like this for years, that does not diminish the need for work to understand the costs and/or benefits, the risks/rewards, or the potential priority of options/ideas. Of course you don’t want to run blindly into things as an organization…but at some point you do need to make decisions, likely with less than perfect information. To that end, organizations want to minimize risk/maximize opportunity and move into the future with relative certainty or at least a façade of certainty to galvanize stakeholders, internal and external. Reassurance that the plans have been vetted for every contingency and with every tool available creates the air of knowledge and foresight. Companies go so far to spell it out that when they do “X”, they know “Y” will happen…it sounds as predictable as the sun rising and falling.
Interesting thing though: it’s deeply flawed logic. We can’t know it all and predict it all based on research, prep, modeling, etc. There are more examples than I could ever consider sharing. Ill just give you one: New Coke. I’ve posted about it before. If you aren’t familiar – Google it. No expense was spared in preparing to launch that product with every type of research under the sun being completed and years of groundwork were laid. They were so sure that New Coke was going to be the future, they discontinued Coke Classic. They just couldn’t have predicted millions/billions of people would say “hey, Id rather have the version of this that tastes objectively worse because ummmmmmmm because that’s what I want”. Yet they did. By the millions.
What can we learn from this? People are weird? (Ok, I think we knew this already!) I think the key takeaways for me are that:
- Research is a wonderful tool, but it can’t guarantee success. (New Coke was objectively better in tens of thousands of taste tests and failed monumentally.)
- There are always more questions than answers and it’s often impossible to guess the right question to ask. (Who would have guessed to ask if people would stick to a soft drink because it made them feel good even if it tastes bad?)
- Instead of living and dying based on a prediction, sometimes it’s just best to go forward and see what happens as you can’t predict everything. (All the taste testing, market research, rebranding, supply change management, etc. were all done assuming “what if this is a huge success?” instead of rolling it out as a competitive product to “Coke Classic” and see which version won.)
Does this make Coke dumb? No…it makes them indicative of corporate decision making: analyze until you can prove beyond a shadow of your own doubt that you are right and then execute. The flaw is always that “proof” is an illusion in nearly every business decision. Clearly this doesn’t apply to basic facts, legality, or morality…but to strategic decisions, there will be no concrete proof – just indicators that you can choose to accept or ignore. And that leads to back to our individual point.
If you go back to the individual premise (We all know that there is only so much we can know), it is amazing how productive, efficient, and effective we are as humans. We are working with partial data (putting it kindly), yet we aren’t paralyzed – quite the opposite. We thrive: we live, we grow, we evolve, we feel joy, we rest, we celebrate – and we do the opposite of all those; often all in the same day. Simply put, we move forward even though we don’t have all the answers. Heck, sometimes we don’t even know the questions!
How are we so well prepared to do this as individuals yet so poor at it as organizations? As individuals, we have evolved to become acutely attuned to indicators without concrete proof, consciously and subconsciously. We accept that there is much we won’t know, so we use the available indicators and continue moving forward (or not). Evolution beat this into us; when our ancestors heard the sounds of a herd of gazelles running, they took that indicator and knew to run. They didn’t know what was happening, but the indicator said “if the gazelle is scared, you should be too” so they ran. As a result, they likely avoided being a lion snack, as the gazelles were just a bit faster than the people. The individuals who waited for concrete proof (seeing the lion for themselves) were far far far less likely to live to reproduce.
We still do this today in a million ways, large and small. Think about your health for a minute. Do you know exactly what’s happening inside you with each of your organs every day all day? Of course not. Do you refuse to do anything until you absolutely know you are 100% in perfect health every day? No. If you feel certain indicators, you may go see a doctor to see if something noteworthy is wrong. Or you may not. You take the information you have, the indicators, and you make a decision and go on with life without being paralyzed about all the information you wish you had or the questions you don’t have answered. As someone who has had health concerns in my past, the ability to not need every answer about every possibility and yet still function was a critical attribute, as I had a life to lead while I waited to know more.
And that’s really the point to all this – whether we are talking about individuals or organizations, the faster that we can learn to live with questions and not pine for the answers, the better off we will all be. Listen to the indicators, move forward, and decide to live…sooner or later, the answers will come.
View from the Middle 