I’ve been lucky enough to work in a wide variety of businesses — including financial services, insurance, advertising, mobile SaaS, mortgages, and automotive — and so far they’ve all had one thing in common. Many of the people I worked with embodied a deep irony in one area. While they were all generally insightful, thoughtful people, they would frequently say and do things that implied that they thought their industry and business was completely unique in its complexity, regulatory environment, and competitive dynamics.
“That won’t work here,” they’d say. “Our business is just different.”
The Integral book club is reading How to Measure Anything right now, and Hubbard also comes across this issue. He says:
The conversation generally goes something like this: “Unlike other industries, in our industry every problem is unique and unpredictable,” or “Problems in my field have too many factors to allow for quantification,” and so on. I’ve done work in lots of different fields, and some individuals in most of these fields make these same claims. So far, each one of them has turned out to have fairly standard measurement problems not unlike those in other fields. (59)
The point is not to say that each industry has exactly the same solutions, but that the idiosyncrasies that do exist do not tend to preclude the application of tools, processes, and best practices from other domains. By limiting the scope of your inquiry and source of practice to your own industry — or even worse, just your firm — you’re shortchanging your team and limiting your opportunity.
How does this attitude manifest itself?
Sometimes people would say this outright. I’d be telling them about an approach that had worked in the past, and they’d just tell me point blank that it wouldn’t work because their business was too complex or regulated, or the competition was too intense. Or I’d ask about why we were doing something one way as opposed to another, and they’d explain that of course they have a different process, because they have inherently different needs. Sometimes, it was how they behaved that implied this thinking. Here are some examples of these types of behavior:
- Trusting expertise in your business over expertise in a functional area — such as having non-technical, long-time operations-focused people in technical leadership/product roles
- Assuming that innovation is only possible by perfectly understanding the idiosyncrasies of the status quo — such as by spending a long time dwelling on the current state of a product or process when discussing any new work
- Modeling outcomes based only on extrapolation, ignoring comparables — such as by dismissing financial comparisons to other firms with similar unit economics
- And of course the biggest tell of all: relying almost exclusively on internal, expert opinion for decision making
What makes people think this way?
There are often very reasonable explanations for this thinking. The best reason I’ve encountered so far was in a firm that had always done things a little differently. They were a small shop to start with, and grew rapidly in a competitive industry grabbing huge market share extremely fast. The people at the top knew their market very well, had always made decisions based on their experience and promoted people who had industry experience to leadership roles, and that approach had worked very well for the company. This makes perfect sense. You know a lot about a field, you make decisions based on your experience and promote people with the same experience, and you’re rewarded. Every time you see this happen, you’re further convinced that this is the right way to run your business. Why would you try anything else?
Another reason is fear of loss. This could be the fear of loss of market share or existing product market fit or the fear of regulatory or legal consequences. Either the firm feels that they spent all this time getting their business going and are afraid to waste resources looking for other ways, or they feel that they finally figured out a way to operate within all these rules and are worried about how to adapt new tools or practices to the rules.
What’s the harm in believing this?
The worst part about this way of thinking is that you most of the time you’re risking opportunity rather than loss of what you already have. There’s an enormous amount of research about risk aversion, or how people tend to prefer to avoid a loss rather than pursuing a (potentially larger) gain with a risk of loss. This makes it hard for people to really feel the risk of missed opportunities available from adopting tools and practices developed in other fields compared to the risk of change.
If you believe that your industry, company, regulatory environment, and competition is totally unique, then it’s very hard to believe that this risk is real. This kind of thinking — that you know your business better than anyone, and that the people outside your building don’t have any practices that you could apply — is limiting and ultimately can be destructive.
What can I do to fix it?
First, get outside the building. No, not just to the big annual industry conference. The conversations you’ll have with people from other businesses are the antidote to this thinking, so go to general conferences, local business or technology meetups, or lectures at a local university.
Two people who think this way will tend to find, when they are discussing an idea new to both of them, that this idea can be applied to both of their businesses.
This won’t always happen, of course, but it’s likely. Inherently, those who live their business will look at new information through the lens of their experience. In discussing the subject matter with each other, they will each help provide context on how the new stuff they’ve just heard about can apply to both of them. It’s just a short leap to the conclusion that there must be more they can learn from each other, and from many other experts in many other fields.
Second, start making a practice of re-stating problems for breadth of occurrence. Charles Kettering pointed out that “a problem well stated is a problem half-solved.” When thinking about your problems, try to re-frame them in such a way that you can imagine more people to have encountered them. State the problem in the way that you encounter it:
Every state has different requirements for this type of form! Every time they change the form, we have to update our records, and ask our customers for their data in the new format if we need it again.
Then, re-state it in a broader way, by replacing some of the parts with vaguer words:
The way we have our data stored doesn’t always match the way someone else needs it from us.
Try searching for blog posts, articles, or companies that might have solutions for this problem. If you don’t turn up much, try re-stating the problem again:
Data needs to be available in different formats.
You’ll be surprised how fast you find an enormous amount of helpful prior art you can draw on to help you solve your problem. By expecting that others have encountered similar problems, we can draw on their experience and ideas.
Next steps
In summary, this attitude that your problems are unique and you’re all alone is pretty widespread. There are lots of ways that it can manifest itself, and there are many ways to recognize when this style of thinking is affecting decision making. The real problem with this is that while it seems to be prudent — avoiding the introduction of unnecessary risk — and is often supported by extensive experience, it can lead to missing out on significant performance improvements and growth opportunities.
You can short circuit this mistake with a few simple behaviors. By getting outside your building and your industry, you’ll encounter myriad opportunities to learn from other fields and new ideas. By extending the framing of your problem, you can identify broader avenues of inquiry, that are more likely to yield true best practices. Try this technique the next time you encounter a problem that seems to only affect your specific business. You’ll be surprised.
Finally, be sure to follow Integral. on Medium. We will regularly post our insights on software, product, and consulting generally, and we welcome questions.
Andrei Stephens is a product manager at Integral.
