“The best thing about maths is that there is only one right answer. There’s no ambiguity. You are either right or you are wrong.” That’s my mother talking to me after I told her I loved maths back in 1982.
My love for maths waned in my teens, but my mother’s insight stuck.
I also learnt that right and wrong were themes that enjoyed an over representation at school. At school, and university for that matter, I was led to believe that the decisions we make in life are either wrong or right, that the world was binary when it came to solving problems. Granted, in some subjects, such as English, you might be less right and more wrong, but the absolutes remained, you could get a zero for an answer or full marks.
And the same was true for university. I didn’t take mathematics as a subject, but it was clear that there was a right way and a wrong way of interpreting literary texts, philosophical ruminations, anthropological theories, and psychological intimations.
Apparently, there is only one way to interpret this quote, and in 1998 my interpretation was wrong:
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Jean Paul Sartre
I started a business
It was a marketing and advertising consulting business. We believed that the old ad agency model was broken and that there was were better ways to deliver marketing and advertising support to people who wanted to promote their products. Our target audience were start-ups in the process of entering their scaling phase. We helped companies accelerate growing their client base.
It took me six months to make the business profitable, which I thought was a really long time. And when I think back to the sleepless nights my wife and I spent worrying about our savings bleeding from our various accounts without any hope of replenishment, it felt like a lifetime.
During those first six months I couldn’t rustle up any business. It felt like I was drifting in an ocean, and I had nothing to hold onto. I was a marketer, a bloody good one, and I couldn’t get a single person to pay me for what I had to offer. The only explanation was that I was doing it wrong, that I was missing something.
So, I read every business book that was recommended by anyone who had a business that was even marginally successful. I read everything from Seth Godin, to Ben Horowitz, to Napoleon Hill, to Peter Thiel to Eric Reis and a ton more. And I read all these books believing I just needed to find that one right answer and all my problems would evaporate, and the money would roll in. I honestly thought that there was a formula, a recipe that allowed businesses to become successful. And that I just had to find what it was and learn it and then implement it. I thought making money was like learning how to do multiplication.
‘Knowing’ the ‘right thing to do’ in business
What education struggles to do is teach students how to manage complex or wicked problems. As a student I was taught what they are and that they exist, but not how to approach solving these. The reason for this is that it is impossible to know if an approach is right or wrong when developing a strategy to attempt to solve a complex or wicked problem. There are too many variables and unintended consequences for one to declare that one approach would be successful and another a failure.
So, when many of us leave university and enter the ‘real-world’ we have a subconscious belief that the world is reasonably simple and that most decisions can be evaluated on the scales of right & wrong. And ‘right & wrong’ is a difficult heuristic to shake, mainly because we admire and look to people who are confident that they’re right and who can point out the flaws in alternative approaches. Conversely, we grow skeptical of people who are indecisive, or who admit that they don’t know what the right thing to do is.
My career has been littered with people who claim to ‘KNOW’ the right way. But they claim to know what the right thing is to do because it is the best way to advance your career. It’s through knowing that people garner a following, get promoted and become leaders. After all, we like our leaders to be cocksure, confident and right. And this ‘KNOWING’ fallacy permeates the business world. That there are absolute truths that are knowable and that these are revealed to the CEO and his direct reports is a lie.
There are very few people in the corporate world today who will admit that they don’t know shit and that the best they have is educated guesses as to what an outcome might be. Instead, most of us who work in the knowledge economy claim to know exactly what we’re doing and that our expertise removes risk from decisions making.
Impostor syndrome exists because we are all impostors.
How businesses recruit
If you look through LinkedIn job ads, almost every business wanting to employ someone is looking for a person with ‘relevant experience’. They do this because they want to employ people who have encountered and solved problems that they themselves are trying to solve for. They’re looking for people who know the right answers. Again, this propagates the idea that there are absolute truths, that there is a right way to solve problems, and that these can only be learnt through experience.
I’ll acknowledge that this might be true for a handful of disciplines. But I’d posit that problems rarely replicate themselves across organisations or over stretches of time. Instead, I prefer to think of problems being unique to a time and a business or a department. And that, when we fall back on experience to solve a problem, we unknowingly use our hammer of ‘true knowledge’ on a dilemma that looks (when we squint our eyes a little) like the nail we pounded when we were in a previous job.
I’ve seen problems that are squirrels being bludgeoned with hammers after someone with ‘previous experience’ pointed at the squirrel and shouted, ‘nail!’ They made a hell of a mess.
Nobody knows what they’re doing
The sooner in your career you understand that nobody really knows what they’re doing, the more successful you will become. It’s a scary thought people out there running governments, corporations, schools, infrastructure projects etc. don’t really know anything for certain. They use experience, guesses, luck, and bravado to make it look like they know what the outcomes are going to be, but nobody is or can be sure of anything.
And if you think about it, experience, guesses, luck, and bravado are all elements that go into conducting experiments.
As a species, since the beginning of time, we’ve been experimenting. Making fire, cooking, bread making, brewing, smoking, hunting, all these came about because someone decided to try something new. That’s experimenting, doing stuff to see what happens. And as we did more new stuff, we built up our knowledge and made a few more guesses and conducted a few more experiments. Experimenting combined with a bit of luck and quite a lot of bravado we evolved to create culture, civilisation, sky scrapers, computers and airplanes.
In the end, I made my business profitable by doing many different things and doing more of what worked. I leant my small but talented network of friends and peers to find my first clients. Advertising didn’t help my business, blogging did. Newsletters to my client base worked. SEM didn’t work, SEO did wonders for the traffic to my site, but I rarely got new clients through the channel. Reaching out to people on LinkedIn helped, Facebook didn’t. Through experimenting and thinking about my audience and finding a way to an outcome I eventually started making money.
However, what worked then would probably not work today. If I started a new business today, nothing of what I learnt in my last business would be of much value to me, other than: experiment, do stuff, analyse the data and identify what seems to be delivering results.
Conclusion
It’s rare in life that there is a single path that’s the right path. There isn’t a right and wrong way. Life is more complicated and multidimensional than most of us would like to believe. And by not acknowledging this truth we torture ourselves. I spent weeks after starting my consulting business wondering what was wrong with me, why hadn’t I cracked this business thing? Similarly, I see people torturing themselves as they agonise over if they made the right move when they accepted a job offer or bought that house, or married their spouse.
There isn’t one way to live. Everything, all of it, is about experimenting, about finding out what works for you and what doesn’t. And as you experiment and understand what it is that is good for you, you learn to know who you are and what you like. And once you have self-knowledge, and you know who you are you start to understand how uninteresting being right or wrong actually is.
Gerrit, I agree with you. A big takeaway I had from visiting India in 2014 with the view to learning how to launch a new business in emerging markets is as follows:
Our usual rational decision-making process is predicated on data availability, computing power and time to analyse information. It is a logic that assumes other players in the market are rational, and their moves can be understood and predicted. And we all know that these conditions rarely exist.
In real life, deductive reasoning naturally steps aside from time to time to make way for inductive reasoning because, beyond a certain level, our minds cannot deal effectively with complexity, and we intuitively understand that other people do not always behave as expected.
In day-to-day decisions, humans are used to operating with bounded rationality. We are good at making decisions based on simplified views or our untested hypotheses and selecting alternatives that meet a certain threshold, “satisficing” rather than optimising. Some things just have to be good enough, not perfect.
Tension exists between our trained academic way of solving problems and making decisions and our natural intuition in dealing with uncertainty. Day-to-day, we are comfortable operating with bounded rationality. And yes, in business people often lie to themselves that they understand the problems and have the solutions.
There is a quote by Mintzberg that I like: “Living forward is a blend of throwness, making do, journeys stitched together by faith, presumptions, expectations, alertness and action – all which may amount to something although we will only know for sure what that something may be when it is too late to do much about it”