Metrics increasingly drive our commercial lives.
We need the metrics to ensure that we are focused on the outcome, it drives the resource allocation choices that must be made.
Usually, we face a series of binary choices, do A or B, then X or Y. This is comfortable for us, our brains are triggered by binary, friend or foe, run towards or run away, is it a stick or a snake? Evolutionary psychology at work.
In the short/medium term this works well, it ensures focus on what is deemed currently to be important. However, it actively excludes stuff that is ‘interesting’ but not necessarily useful now. Those require us to accept risk, experiment, be comfortable with failure, all the things that our evolutionary psychology has bred out of us. Next time you want to spend some resources on something because it is ‘interesting’ but outside the plan, good luck getting that formally approved. You will have to be prepared to be an outlier, renegade, argue against what has gone before, and you know what happens to many of those who do that.
Breakthroughs only occur when someone forges a path towards the unknown because it is for some reason, interesting to them. It will always be inconsistent with the status quo, it will always be out in the fringes, messy, usually unseen by most, but that is where the breakthrough gold hides.
To see these outlier factors requires critical thinking, a disapproval of the safe optimised way forged by the status quo. By definition, you cannot plan for the unexpected. However, you can create a culture where critical thinking is encouraged, and fed into the processes that together can become a renewed status quo.
These interesting things do not comply with the way we create plans and budgets. They are long term; they do not accommodate the plans associated with most of the daily activities we undertake. They are the source of long-term breakthrough; they are often the result of serendipity. Penicillin was not developed because Fleming had an objective to develop an antibiotic. The product category ‘antibiotic’ did not exist. Serendipity took place, then it took 15 years and a war to become commercialised.
How many breakthroughs can you think of that emerged from a plan? They always come through long experimental slog, underpinned by critical thinking.
My conclusion is That critical Thinking and planning are not mutually exclusive, but are uncomfortable bed-mates. in the absence of the encouragement and culture that makes uncomfortable relationships possible, they will not survive together.
Header credit: It is a reproduction by Hugh McLeod of the wonderful copy written by the creative team at Chiat Day advertising for Apple after Steve Jobs returned.
