Why We’re Bad at Business Decisions…and How to Fix It

Why We’re Bad at Business Decisions…and How to Fix It

by | Aug 27, 2019 | 2019, Opinion

by Glen Drummond
Estimated read time: 5 minutes

Can we agree that making good business decisions is getting harder?

For each business, the reasons vary, but we see common themes:

  • Volatility: The pace of change of everything (markets, customers, technologies, products and competitors) is accelerating.
  • Uncertainty: The accelerating pace of change challenges assumptions about what’s invariable.
  • Complexity: The number of stakeholders, variables, and perspectives involved in a decision keeps growing.
  • Ambiguity: We’ve become very clever at accumulating data, but having more data does not solve the problem of knowing what the data means.

School didn’t properly prepare any of us for making decisions in this environment. Deductive problem-solving works best in predictable environments. That’s not the world we live in.

Of course, there is no apparent shortage of external help:

  • Analysts proclaim their best practices.
  • Consultants promote their proprietary models.
  • Technologists offer their SaaS tools that aim to automate some choices.

And in their own particular contexts, all of these are, of course, helpful. But for higher-level decisions, “best-practices,” “models,” and “algorithms” share a common liability: they are, by design, reductive.

And so for those early, fuzzy, high-level and massively consequential choices, the question you need to ask is whether the way to make a good decision is to keep eliminating considerations until the right answer appears.

That happens often enough, but is there a better way?

We think so. It’s called: “Possibility-Oriented Thinking.”

The phrase is most closely associated with innovation, but this capacity is one that marketing people should also hone. Put yourself in the shoes of a classic innovator: you’re not yet sure what the product is exactly, or who the customer is yet, or what they will pay, or what exactly your competitors are working on, or who they even are, and when they will make their next move.

The answers are all emergent properties of a system too complex to fully understand. Doesn’t that sound a little like many marketing challenges today?

So what do you do?

The “Possibility-oriented thinking” approach begins with this perspective.

Rather than:

  • assuming there is a “right” answer, we assume there are a variety of answers, some better than others.
  • assuming that we have the facts required to make the right choice, we assume we don’t, and so adopt an attitude of humility about assumptions and relentless curiosity about new data and possibilities.
  • thinking the answer can be arrived at by way of deduction from existing facts, we assume that something new has to be injected into the system, something we imagine; a possibility we conceive, a relationship we speculate about and then explore.
  • making ballistic decisions with resources, we think about “Safe-fail” experiments, pilots, & prototypes.
  • thinking that the best idea comes from the most expert or highest ranking person, we think the best idea comes from a diversity of perspectives integrated through thoughtfully designed interactions.

What are some of those thoughtfully designed interactions? This comes back to context.

Are you seeking a strategy of differentiation in an established market?

You might consider using the Challenger Marketing framework that has been articulated by Brent Adamson and his former colleagues at CEB, now Gartner, in The Challenger Customer.

Are you seeking a strategy of transformation around the customer experiences you create, or the business model that you create them with?

You might consider using the Basadur Simplexity model for discovering challenges, organizing a map of dependencies around them, and prioritizing the action plans that advance your goals.

Are you creating a new category, or something very close to it, and seeking a framework for decision-making that does not rely on asking an as-yet undefined customer group how they would respond to an as-yet undefined value proposition?

You might consider a program organized around the concept we call “Pathfinding” – an iterative process that involves a rotation between stances – strategic sense-making, research, ideation, market ecosystem analysis, and marketing experiments.

Of course, organizations also look to Marketers to solve narrower more routine problems. If that’s all Marketing stands for and contributes, it does run the risk of being seen as the “arts and crafts” department of the business.

It need not be so.

A marketing organization equipped to provide leadership in decision-processes at those moments when the altitude is high, the problems are fuzzy, and the outcomes really matter – is a marketing organization that produces value far exceeding the narrow chores of “filling the funnel” and managing content.

Building your musculature in possibility-oriented thinking improves your chances of doing so.

Get more thoughtful content on how to ‘think differently’ on marketing, business, and work by subscribing to our newsletter.

Framing: The Skill That Separates Innovators from Inventors

Framing: The Skill That Separates Innovators from Inventors

by | Jul 22, 2019 | 2019, Observations

By Glen Drummond
Estimated Reading Time: 3:00 minutes

Does the competitiveness of your product, or even the success of your business depend on someone else changing their mind or practices?  If so, then here’s an instructive tale.

Louis Pasteur

This name, you probably know. Historical reports indicate that by age 55 Louis Pasteur was considered a national hero of France.  He won an impressive series of honours and awards for his pioneering work – perhaps most important the germ theory of disease – a theory he developed in the period between 1860 and 1864.

Ignaz Semmelweis

This name most people don’t know. In 1846, Semmelweis was appointed to lead the obstetrical clinic of Vienna General Hospital.  In 1847, he got to the bottom of a horrendous (35%) mortality rate from “childbed fever” – drawing a link between doctors performing autopsies and then attending to birthing mothers without first disinfecting their hands.

In his 1861 book, Semmelweis presented evidence to demonstrate that the advent of pathological anatomy in Wien (Vienna) in 1823 (vertical line) was accompanied by the increased incidence of fatal childbed fever. The second vertical line marks introduction of chlorine hand washing in 1847. Rates for the Dublin Rotunda maternity hospital, which had no pathological anatomy, are shown for comparison (view rates).

In the span of one year presiding over the maternity ward,  Semmelweis established both cause and cure – instituting a regimen of physicians handwashing with a chlorine solution.  Semmelweis conceived and implemented hospital infection-control procedures resulting in dramatic clinical improvements – a full 15 years before Pasteur.  And he actively promoted his findings for all to see.  

Fifteen years later, Pasteur basked in glory for his achievements in the understanding of the cause and control of infection.  Semmelweis was ignored by his contemporaries, who refused to adopt his infection-control procedures. Semmelweis became despondent and his life deteriorated into tragedy.   What’s the difference?

The course of a person’s life does not reduce well to a theory – but the course of an idea’s progression in society is a worthy subject of study.  Some good ideas have a hard time breaking through. And conversely some bad ideas catch on and linger. What’s interesting is that in this case we have almost the same idea – but in one case it catches on, and in the other it does not.

So what is the difference?  One clear difference in this case is “Framing.” 

Semmelweis saw that the behavior of the doctors (performing autopsies and then attending to mothers giving birth) was causing the mothers to be infected with “childbed fever”.   

He theorized, and then clinically demonstrated, that a change in doctor’s behavior (handwashing after performing autopsies, before attending to living patients) could sharply reduce maternal mortality.    Do you see the framing problem? In order to get doctors to stop killing mothers, they would have to admit to themselves that their past actions had been killing mothers. The frame generated a headwind of cognitive dissonance. 

Pasteur was not necessarily a more gifted clinician. But he was certainly a more gifted framer.   He recast the narrative of infection, shifting attention from the practices of the doctor to the “infectious agent” –  the pathogen or “germ.” Semmelwies invented infection control. Pasteur invented a signifier to represent a signified that was already, but only, implicit in Semmelweis’s clinical innovation. 

From the standpoint of clinical procedures, there’s nothing in the germ theory of disease that would cause Semmelweis to act any differently in his own clinic; nothing that would improve upon the results he obtained.  But from the standpoint of convincing other doctors to change their practices, the germ theory of disease was far more effective than Semmelweis’s call for doctors to change their practices.  

We can draw a lesson from comparing  the accomplishments of these two men.  We may draw a contrast in our mind between the “real” work of innovation and the “fluff” of representation,  but to do so is to mis-recognize the way people respond to change.  

Inventors who wish to gain attention for tangible innovation should not ignore the need for a new frame to go with it.   

Want more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a story!