The Dangers of ‘Collective Ignorance’ in the Meeting Room
I didn’t exactly make myself popular with senior management when I would refer to meetings involving anything “strategy” or “business planning” as ‘collective ignorance’. Even though this is exactly what they were. The looks on some of the surrounding faces suggested they did not find it appropriate or humorous. While others appeared unsure how they should respond because of a condition called groupthink (a psychological phenomenon where the desire for harmony or conformity results in irrational or dysfunctional decision-making).
Most people have an immediate association with the word ‘ignorance’ as being in some way, a derogatory accusation. It is in fact not a derogatory word at all. But it does do the job of getting attention, like clapping out of sync in a seated crowd. But it doesn’t, however, result in the intended pause for humility about the possibility of over-confidence related to the truth of the matters at hand.
Many of you know this scene:
Sitting around the conference room table, surrounded by dry erase boards, flip charts, Powerpoint slides, stacks of market data, and let’s not forget the all-important “2 + 2 = 4” cleansed version of the sales funnels. I have actually heard the top brass once say, after having the entire North American sales team travel to headquarters for one day (after of course 3 reschedules), “I want to feel as though I can touch what is in your funnel. I want to know what I can take to the bank.”
The reason I decided to add this personal example is if you were as “tuned in” to hear it as I did, this single statement tells you a lot. It exemplifies what happens when a company or division leader becomes anxious (or desperate) for sales. Rather than get into the weeds with their own sales army they want their soldiers to explain the general high points of the field of battle. But not the gory details, just the high points, in 30 minutes, using simple charts, figures and bullet points, and the “probability of success” to close the business. In fact, most account managers are graded on their ability to boil down their complex realities while avoiding criticisms of the company for inhibiting the desired success.
The type of meeting really doesn’t matter. Just about any work-related meeting will consist of taking turns pontificating each person’s beliefs on the solution and what must be done. In the end, the Gospel reveals itself. The internalized believed facts about the situation (such as the target market and the customers) followed by being dipped in molten bronze. Even if there are people present that believe decisions are being made out of collective ignorance, they rarely advocate this view. If not because of groupthink, it is out of fear of being known as the one that “rocks the boat.” Even when they are only asking a simple and prudent question.
Your company’s original founders also spent time in conference rooms. But I bet they didn’t leave the conference room believing their own bullshit. In other words, their collective ignorance did not end up seducing them into believing it as facts of the external world.
The process of dumping the team’s collective ignorance on the table to “sort it out” is nothing more than the Scientific Method we learned in school. With the scientific method, you use your observations and data (a.k.a. collective ignorance) to come up with a Hypothesis. Then you go out into the world and objectively test it looking for support or basis to nullify it. And this does not mean searching for the support that can be biased as evidence to confirm your own hypothesis/belief.
Have you ever known someone that seems to go about their life searching for the pieces of things to justify their own feelings? I am sure you have. Now, imagine that same person only not about their feelings but out in the market looking for support for their project. How often does your own company’s management more or less expect this (go find support for the project versus testing a hypothesis)?
Projects are forced to be defined up front with in-scope and out-of-scope conditions. The team’s sole purpose is to advance the project. Even if it is advancing collective ignorance. Accurately testing a hypothesis on a market opportunity in an objective way takes not only the right type of person but the right type of company. It reminds me of a quote by Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame baseball catcher and manager who once said,
“When you see a fork in the road, you should take it.”
Unfortunately, I never knew Yogi Berra personally. But I sure wish I did because I would have followed him as often as possible with a pen and notepad. The quotes that he is known for are “earthy.” They do not go over one’s head but rather below one’s line of sight, to the ground itself. In the context of business development or growing sales, I take it to mean that while you are out testing your hypotheses on the world you must stay open-minded and have your eyes wide open. The people that live and work in the market itself will lead you to that fork in the road. But don’t expect them to realize they are giving it to you, let alone tell you to take it, or, lead you to it with a map in hand.
Chances are, your company’s founders had a much different team chemistry than your leaders today. My hunch is they didn’t try to figure out the world from a comfy distance using colorful bubble charts. Instead, they packed up their humilities into their briefcases and went into the market wilderness to listen, learn and find those forks in the road that built the company’s foundation.
“There is only one valid definition of a business purpose — namely to create a customer.” — Peter Drucker
They never lost sight of the purpose — to create customers. It forced them to remain humble to what they didn’t know, or yet understand, about what they must do to achieve this goal. In the formative years, the customers valued your company in some measurable way beyond simply the product and price relationship. There was something traceable to the people involved; the genuineness of the trust and support and suspect the customer’s experience was palatable.
(Continue that thought of yours. I am pretty sure I know where your mind is going right now.)
We have all heard the stories of how great company icons began and how the founders created whole new innovation categories. For example, Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita who dreamt the idea of a portable listening device and launched the Walkman TPS-L2 in 1979. But like Sony, the rise is followed by the decline. Icons rise and then fall like General Motors, Ford, IT&T, Eastman Kodak, Microsoft, Motorola, Sears, J.C. Penney, Yahoo!, Circuit City — and this goes on. None of these companies are what they used to be and we have heard and read many business autopsies of why. To really understand and separate the symptoms of a problem and what causes them starts with simply appreciating the reality of ‘collective ignorance’ in the meeting room.
Eventually, those conference chairs are only holding a handful of people that create efforts to chase symptoms to problems and implement more solutions to the additional systemic symptoms. It becomes blinding to the company. Soon the obsession with growing sales to satisfy shareholders will start. The very customers that put the company where it is in the first place will start to look and feel like a necessary nuisance to the self-declared path to omnipotent greatness. Why else would Verizon and Sprint have to pay $158 million in a class action lawsuit for mobile cramming? This is where they got caught purposely hiding third party charges in consumer’s bills to get a cut of the profits from the vendors. When all else fails right? The take away is the “customer” becomes a faceless entity that is internally believed cannot survive without your company’s self-declared superior products and service.
A more recent example of this is Mylan’s EpiPen. Another one is the controversy over the repeal of Obama Care. At some point, I hope, it becomes clear to everyone what the real underlying reason is for the cost of healthcare to be rising faster than (I think) the likewise unjustifiable inflation in education costs. Shareholders want their cash. Customers are the means to “show them the money” and nothing more. If they cannot get it from top line, they will squeeze it out of the bottom line. Personally, I cannot help but picture Mr. Huph, the CEO of Insurecare from the Pixar movie The Incredibles when I think of those who are actually responsible.
The stories of the founders always have a similar remembrance to people-centric-tangible-feelable-values-based-on-trust-and-genuine-desire with respect to themselves and with those they wanted to become customers. Then we hear and read how these companies grew to only accelerate themselves into the drain. If you want to see what circling the drain looks like before the after-death autopsy then looks for strategy meetings that trade humility and appropriate subordination for unsubstantiated confidence and sentiments of how we will grow sales at the accounts with the highest probability of success. The question on many of the minds around the table that dare not ask it is, why exactly? Or, how do we know what conversations they are having inside of their conference rooms?
One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein. There is some controversy as to the exact wording and what he meant by it, but it fits nicely with what I am going to show you next. He said,
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
The intuitive and visionary founders started something big. Over time the needs of the business call for the rational minds to attend to the efficiency of erecting a well-honed system around the business. For example, if all your business does and cares about is making diesel engines then the need for far-reaching vision is not as significant as say, the consumer electronics industry. Just ask Apple why they asked Steve Jobs to come back and retake the helm.
This is when the company gets into trouble. This is when the customer truly does become a nuisance to the ultimatum of growing shareholder cash (let’s stop saying ‘shareholder value’ here okay?). Soon enough fiscal quarters will have passed to where pulling sales orders forward, balancing inventories and buffering the numbers to finagle the quarterly results no longer helps eek by without being noticed. It is what Clayton Christensen says in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma of what happens when the company’s capital has soured. With soured capital comes stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, more management processes, and processes to manage those processes, implementation of customer-insensitive policies, and what I call ‘premature extrapolation’ and, an office sex ‘Business Quickie’ scandal you had no idea you were even part of.
Let me explain.
There are two types of what I call Brain Hardware. Now, I am not making this up other than my own way of describing it. Carl G. Jung considered the founder of analytical psychology was the first to show these two distinct differences, first published in his seminal book Psychological Types in 1921. Katharine Cook-Briggs and her daughter Isabella Briggs-Myers later took Jung’s work to create the most widely used personality type identification method in the world called the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, or MBTI®. MBTI® refers to these hardware differences as I call them, as Intuitive (N) and Sensing (S).
I find it difficult for many to understand exactly what (S) versus (N) means. I will give you a different way to picture it:
- Intuitive (N) hardware are those that “make sense out of things.” Using a math terminology, they are Extrapolators.
- Definition of ‘Extrapolate’: An act or instance of inferring an unknown from something that is known. The act or process of estimating the value of a variable or function outside the tabulated or observed range.
- Sensing (S) hardware are those that “things need to make sense to them.” Using the opposite math terminology, they are Interpolators.
- Definition of ‘Interpolate’: The process of determining the value of a function between two points at which it has prescribed values. A similar process using more than two points at which the function has prescribed values.
- Remember in grade school math: 3/15 equals X/30 and you solve for ‘X’ by taking 3 x 30 and then divide by 15? The Interpolator’s brain solves for ‘X’ based on their own experiences and beliefs. If they cannot solve for ‘X’, it gets rejected. Kinda like a ‘Syntax Error.’
When the company’s managers become too heavy in interpolators and the world around them is changing too fast for it to make sense, the repercussion spiral begins. Like Christensen suggests in his book, once the capital sours and impatience for growth sets in, it creates a death spiral. They are not only already prone to believing the collective ignorance of facts, they become obsessed with it. They force the few visionary extrapolators in the room to ‘prematurely extrapolate’ while the interpolators put their stamp of ‘pragmatic realism’ based on their own experiences and indoctrinated belief system. What is left is not a testable hypothesis nor a realistic goal. It is an embarrassing walk of shame from the ugliest “business quickie” ever. And I wouldn’t rule out that you feel violated from the experience.
As the company demands the picture on the puzzle box to be shown and agreed upon, it is setting itself up to fail. The reality is that picture doesn’t exist. The puzzle you are putting together is unknown. Only by respecting ‘collective ignorance’ as a means to generate testable hypotheses and objectively testing them in the market will that picture begin to show itself. Then and only then can any company marshal resources with any specific strategic intent.
Another way to characterize this collective ignorance process is based on a simple pie chart I call the Humility Chart.
The Humility Chart explains everyone’s life — personal or professional. It says there is this amount of stuff that you know you know — facts, details, realities, etc. The things that no one can argue, they are more or less, Facts.
Then there is this larger than we realize amount that is what we don’t know we don’t know. This is the stuff that causes projects to miss the mark, fail, or never see the light of day. This is the part that should instill a constant daily paranoia in all of us. Especially when we are in charge of navigating the company’s future (not to forget the families that depend on your success).
The last part of the pie chart is the part that you know you don’t know. This is the most important part because the only way to know we don’t know it, at least in the beginning, is through the collective ignorance-gathering process. This is the part that is the QUESTION that forms the HYPOTHESIS!
HEADLINE NEWSFLASH: It is far easier to find the answers you need when you know what the right question is.
Be careful when you set out towards the other end of that rainbow you and your team agree exists. You don’t know exactly what you find when you get there.
This is the first of many blogs to come as I unveil what I call The Ultimate Human Dilemma and The Ultimate Human Solution. Feel free to email me ultimatehumandilemma@gmail.com or by visiting our website at www.up-factorllc.com to learn more about these topics and how I can help you or your company.
