While chatting with my de facto boss today, we were discussing an often heard phrase that flies from the mouths of otherwise intelligent people, usually when they are preparing to explain why they don’t need to do risk management, or why their “safety programme” sufficiently protects them. To paraphrase, the rush of words come out something like, “We’re not as bad as…” and is followed by a list of companies much worse than their own. The rationale is, evidently, that as long as you can name someone who is worse than you, you are in no need of cyclic improvement of any kind. And thanks to BP, short of killing a half million people directly, I suppose deniers can enjoy complete indifference about their long-term risk management prospects.
What struck in my head after our chat was that this thought process is so incredibly common in life, where an astounding number of people are willing to maintain a crumbling state of being just because someone is observably worse than them. It strikes me that as the world digresses, I will eventually hear someone who is smoking a cigar say, “Well, I only have tongue cancer, but that’s okay because my Uncle Bill is coughing up his entire lung.” Or, perhaps more depressing, I really do some day expect to hear a pretender to the title “safety professional” actually say something like, “Well, we only killed one person last year; our biggest competitor killed three!” (After 10+ years doing this work, I have, actually, read several remarks that come frighteningly close to that, but never spoken directly with anyone who has had the gall to say it aloud.)
This idea that maintaining a static state is enviable is problematic from several perspectives, but ignoring all perceptive aspects of the problem it represents, applying basic logic tells it for the lie it is. Why? Well, simply because business is about progressive revenue enhancement, which requires growth, and growth is dynamic by nature. Hence, any business that is truly static cannot grow, and so operationally the idea of not managing change is an impossible one to attain – though, the world knows, folks will try. To grow a business, you must be operationally flexible, and to be operationally flexible requires dynamic change management – and that, eschews the idea of static state. Anyone who promotes status quo, then, in any operational domain really represents a pure liability.
Where the thoughts led me today was really more about how helpless people seem to be, and how irrational is the acceptance of loss that is not necessary. You see it in politics where compromise has replaced actual leadership, and in everyday life where we negotiate the least evil available rather than strive for better. In all these avenues of life, where risk management is a genuine reality, what we are really seeing is the price of an unhealthy misunderstanding about what risk is, and how one must manage it to achieve value. The simplest explanation for the frozen state of thinking is fear, but experience suggests that perhaps the real cause is not fear so much as laziness. We seem, as a collective, too lazy to challenge ourselves.
This hits home right now with us, at Pragmatic Solutions Ltd, because we are in an interesting position in terms of growth. We recognise we have a need for new expertise, and new resources in the business, but we have found it almost impossible to open that conversation effectively with partners who could actually enhance the business commercially. There are plenty of talking heads, many of them promoting themselves as experts in one domain or another, but the more they talk the more they tend to expose the depth of ignorance in their thinking. While that kind of statement can seem bitter, it isn’t bitterness but logic that implies the truth in it, because what we have found is that many of these promoters have a very static, patterned approach to their thinking that is not apt to recognise anything of value outside some narrow range. Specifically in the contacts we have made to try to jump-start some pursuit of a valid partner to take forward the ideas we espouse, what we run into is a lack of imagination. If the business prospect isn’t comparable to some pre-existing one, it is dismissed intellectually, and we get suggestions to reshape the product concept to be more like some existing product. While this would be a suitable statement if the product was like another, or immature, it becomes a complete barrier to communication given that our ideas are intentionally fresh. Exactly why would we mutate a new idea into the old form that has already failed miserably, just to commercialise it? If that was our intent, we would never have spent the enormous effort to develop, prove, mature and integrate the new thinking patterns. How do you communicate the power of an idea to people who are intent on erasing the value it represents to make it a metaphor for past failures?
These people are, of course, really representative of the same attitude this blog observed earlier; though, rather than “we’re not as bad as…” they are claiming some dynamic authority due to an adherence to status quo thinking: something like, “we are better than the following thinkers, because we project it to be so.” Yet underneath the same lack of imagination and the same odd adherence to old patterns of business approach and thinking are extant. It is no wonder that innovation is so nearly dead, given that the people who should be innovating are so busy trying to repackage newness in some form that buries the newness. This is of course, risk avoidance by way of dismissal; and it is a distressing thing to a risk manager to see that judgement of value has fallen on a tired cycle, rather than a cycle of improvement and advancement.
Research and Development is what creates progress, and yet commercially speaking, almost no entities exist where there is a true appreciation for the pursuit or new value. This, like the attitude that maintaining sameness will change outcomes, is a very disturbing thought process.
