Fast-paced Tranquility at Hurb: how antifragile intuition is an asset to overcome Black Swans
Hi! I’m Dani Renner, Consumer Insights Lead at Hurb. In the first chaotic months of the pandemic, I’ve witnessed Hurb worthy achievements thanks its capacity of combining data analysis and intuition to navigate positively in chaos. I’d like to share some insights about how to develop assets for decision-making in volatile environments.
We’re programmed to use historical data to make decisions, right? But what to do when the unexpected happens?
Mental clarity: the intuition we can’t lose
In January 2020, Hurb (Hotel Urbano), a digital platform that sells one night stay every three seconds, was setting the company’s internationalization by opening its first offices in Porto and then in Montreal.
We were sharpening the ax to global expansion when the Black Swan popped up: COVID-19 — an unpredictable event that destabilized the global tourism industry in few weeks.
How to solve something unpredictable and of huge impact? According to Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, we, human beings, can’t measure opportunities clearly because we are not open enough to imagine the impossible.
Our CEO’s mind was racing but he still looked for an opportunity amid that chaos. Currently, the word antifragile can be based on numbers, but by the decision-making phase, the company’s founder saw opportunities in an industry that was laying off about 80% of its employees. And pessimists were making old-fashioned decisions hoping to anticipate the future.
It was in those circumstances that the term mutt was first mentioned. João Ricardo started using it in his first speech to over 700 employees, one month after we began working remotely — he said: “We are mutts. Mutts learn by themselves, mutts are dumpster divers, street fighters, but also loving and loyal. They walk confident, ears up, even after being badly treated. Pitbulls don’t ‘dive garbage containers’ to see whatever has inside because they are fed since they are born, they get the necessary understanding of things, so they ‘lose the scent’. A mutt is either antifragile or it dies.”
That’s it. If we stop being antifragile, we may lose our ability to listen and the courage to create. Being an antifragile mutt is to listen actively. It’s pure innovation.
4 insights to reinvent yourself in chaos
Don’t lose sight. Have mental clarity. Analyze data with intuition. It seems easy on paper but doing so in an unstable circumstance is harder. Based on that, I’ve summarized complex learnings very plainly since the beginning of the pandemic:
- Accelerated Tranquility
Instead of focusing on a magical solution, observe what everyone isn’t doing well (resist “proxies”) and when you find out, believe in your intuition — regardless of consensus (conviction overcome consensus).
- Silence
We receive floods of information daily, but the best insights and conclusions only occur when we are in silence or are allowed to keep our minds as clear as a blank board to be filled with the proper solution. - Knowing how to listen
Data is only useful when we understand the reasons for some behavior. Listening is a way to exercise humbleness and willingness to adapt.
- Don’t judge different points of view
Living in an ambiguous environment and not being 100% sure about things are good reasons to respond calmly and boldly to the market volatility and, consequently, to create solutions based on data and intuition. This is my motto for a long time, especially when I decided to face the challenge of launching the UX Research area at Hurb. I confess that this moment of the pandemic was a good opportunity to test that motto which became clearer with the events the COVID-19 brought up. I hope that everything we’ve been going through helps us to live more connected and centered in the human side of businesses.
