“Gradually, then Suddenly”:
Why Change Has Become So Quick (Part Two)
by Dee Smith, CEO
[part two of two]
If you ask a room full of people what color the sky is, those who answer will almost always say “blue.” But is the sky really blue? About half of the time, it is black sprinkled with stars. At other times it can be grey, orange, yellow, red, all these colors at once, or even green or purple.
The sky is blue much less than half of the time. So why do almost all of us say it is “blue”?
We do it because it is a practical shorthand, or “heuristic,” that might not be perfect or rational but will enable us to keep moving forward. Heuristics let us categorize things and move through life without expending too much thought. If you see a coil on a stove that is orange in color, you will assume that it must be hot before you assume that someone painted it with orange glow paint.
We are entering a time in which such rules of thumb, developed for an earlier era, are becoming unreliable and deceptive. They can be serious impediments to our success and even to our survival. For the reasons discussed in the first instalment of this article, the near future is becoming less and less predictable. Specifically, it is becoming less like the immediate past and less like anything that we might expect on the basis of previous experience—what we think we “know.” And so the rules of thumb that come from that experience—the heuristics—are increasingly likely to lead us astray and threaten us.
How do we deal with this?
First, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, do not assume that it actually is a duck!
Second, avoid thinking fast—which relies on assumptions, biases, and heuristics—and focus on thinking slow, as Daniel Khaneman and Amos Tversky described in the famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow, a distillation of work for which they both won a Nobel Prize. And as you change your way of thinking, you might want to remove a few words from your working business vocabulary. These include “always,” “never,” and “I’ve seen this before.” Today, it is always better to believe you have not seen it before.
Expectations have a great deal to do with what we see and understand. If you expect to see the same things that you have seen in the past, your mind will often filter out any elements that are different. In a situation of rapid change, this ingrained mental process is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusions. So you need to train your mind to expect different patterns and at the same time not to expect a repeat of what you know. In other words, avoid getting comfortable.
Third, inculcate some new mental models. For example, look at the data—the indicators—that are before you. If you jettison preconceived ideas, then what do they really tell you? Think about “what-ifs.” What might you see if a situation began to emerge that was very different from anything that you had learned to expect? Imagination is your friend in understanding divergent situations, which is why intelligence failures are often called “failures of imagination.” A useful thought trick is to suppose that a situation you encounter is the opposite of what it seems to be, and then go from there.
Mental agility is an equally critical skill. Be prepared for eventualities—but in a general way—because these days you don’t know what is going to happen, or where, or how, or when. Be prepared to turn on a dime, and then turn on a dime again.
Monitoring elements of interest to detect early warnings—subtle signals that can tell you if change is coming—can be very valuable, but it needs to be ongoing. And you also need to be attuned to paying attention to conflicting or “abnormal” signals. Major changes often announce their arrival through subtle and contradictory indicators, also called anomalous indicators because they violate expected patterns.
The single most important tool, however, is an analytical mindset. To deal with complexity and emerging risk, be objective and systematically investigative. Don’t be political, polemical, or emotional. You might not like what you are forced to confront—you will almost certainly not like some of it—but flying blind because you refuse to accept what the evidence is telling you would be even worse. “That can’t be the case” is another phrase to remove from your vocabulary.
None of this is easy or “natural.” It is more work—it requires more energy—to think through things instead of choosing the “automatic pilot” that heuristics provide. The autopilot can fly you straight into a mountain.
In a time of pervasive change, if you continue to employ existing and preconceived ideas, frameworks, or mental models, you will miss the signals, misinterpret or misunderstand them, and make profound mistakes.
The near future will not be easy to navigate. There are no fixed or “right” answers, only what is effective in circumstances that are constantly changing but does not contradict or betray your values. If you open your mind to seeing new patterns and finding new approaches, a course can be charted much more effectively.
As a very wise CEO once told me, “All conditions are temporary.”