Strategic Thinking Bias. Part 1
Are you confident in your strategy? If yes, that's a reason to doubt
Imagine you are hiring a subordinate and are about to conduct a job interview. The CVs lie on your desk. One candidate is experienced, and another one is a rookie. Whom would you hire?
Logic tells us that the experienced applicant is a better choice. But it is not that simple.
Does experience make us wiser?
In the movie The Mule, Earl Stone, Clint Eastwood's character, runs his flower farming business. Once he misses his daughter's wedding so he can receive a lifetime award celebrating his professional accomplishments. And he sees an ad for an online flower store at the ceremony. He snorts dismissively, looking at it – nobody, he believes, will buy flowers on the Internet. Then, twelve years later, his business goes bankrupt. It was squeezed out of the market by e-commerce.
A "Birmingham screwdriver" is an old British saying meaning "a hammer." It is a mean joke about Birmingham workers implying they are such lazy that they knock screws in with a hammer. In fact, the Birmingham area has long been a source of excellent engineers. People said it to describe a situation when a person used the simplest tool when a more sophisticated one would be more appropriate.
And this is a mistake we all make. Scientists call it the Law of the instrument. Scientists such as Abraham Maslow researched it. And Maslow is credited for introducing the proverb: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail."
We are what we know
When we come to this world, we don't know things. But we can learn. We try different tools and techniques, and if they help us succeed, we put them into our knowledge database. We call it "experience."
And our brains are lazy. Nature taught us to save energy because it was scarce. So, when we face a task we have never solved, we try to employ familiar tools first. And sometimes, we persist in using familiar tools even where they are not applicable. We knock screws in with a hammer.
An experienced candidate may also do so. Read about what you can do at the end of the story.
Future thinking
This natural habit helps us save precious energy but works against us when we need to think strategically.
Strategic thinking involves contemplating the future. I have already written that we are inferior future thinkers, but it is not the only problem. Our brains use the same neurons to envision tomorrow they involve remembering the past. So technically, we don't "think" about the future – we "recall" it.
But we can't recall something we have never seen. I conduct many foresight workshops and see how hard it is for participants to envisage the future looking different from the present.
If we hold a hammer in our hand, our future looks like nails.
Strategic thinking
Our brain features prevent us from thinking strategically. Instead, subconsciously we build our assumptions on the ground that the future will be more or less the same as the present. But this is not true.
There are three simple ways to overcome this limitation.
Learn a lot. The more information you put in your mental database, the more diversified your future scenarios will be.
Never make strategic decisions alone. Involve your team, advisory board, and outside experts. The more "databases" take part in the strategic discussion, the lower likelihood that you will see "the nails."
Play a mental game with your team. Imagine that strategic moves that seem reasonable to you have become illegal. What other strategic tools could you use to develop your business?
Conclusion
Strategic thinking is an innate human skill. Our ancestors didn't think about hitting the Forbes list. Their daily routines seem primitive. But we inherited their brains, so we need a workaround to overcome the natural constraints. Strategic thinking requires cognitive effort and group thinking.
When I hired subordinates, I always asked them about the books they had read and new tools they had learned recently. An inexperienced employee who studies new things every day may be more valuable for a company than a pro who stuck to their old tricks.
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