When pressure is high, short-term decisions take precedence over long-term sustainability. Quick wins deliver a rapid lift and a sense of progress. Yet, to realise long-term viability, it pays to do the deep work to learn the consequences and assure survival before applying high-powered solutions.
As a young lad of seven, life could be intense enjoyment in any moment. None more so than when playing with my new favourite toy.
I’d received a battery-powered car for Christmas. These were rare toys in 1962. I remember playing on the floor of the lounge-dining room. Well, not so much playing, as holding my car upside down fascinated with the workings of it. Embroiled in flicking a small switch to turn the motor on. Watching a rod spin to a simple gear. The meshing of the gears turned the axle for the rear wheels. I loved the whirring of the engine, feeling the buzz of the gears in my hand and seeing the wheels spin. Off and on.
Then it stopped. Hmm. Flicking the switch again… and again. Nothing. I pulled the battery out. Put it back in. Still nothing.
Blast, no power.
Instinctively, I saw possibility.
I took the battery out. Extracted the red and black wires from each end of the battery compartment. Holding one in each hand, pushed them into the electrical socket.
Blast… still nothing.
I picked up a plug lying on the floor in front of the socket, pushed the wires back into the socket then rammed them home with the plug.
Bang…
…like, really big B.A.N.G.!
B...I...G... blue flash… higher than my head. Shadowed in smoke.
Crash…
My head slammed into the dining cabinet, eight feet across the room, body still attached. Luckily without breaking mum’s crockery.
Hi mum.
Mum was just through the doorway cooking in the kitchen. Rushing in, she saw me ashen faced and rubbing my head, still hard against the cabinet.
Then she looked down. The blackened socket and plug and the burning wreck of my car hung near her feet. The cord attached to the plug also blackened for about half a metre. Otherwise, the 2-bar electric radiator seemed in reasonable order.
So it was I learned how a small idea of injecting a 1.5V motor with 240-volt, 10-amp radiator pulling 1500 watts of energy was not a great idea.
If the wheels went around, I never saw it. I didn’t get a buzz in my hand. The motor blew apart. The wires vaporised and my curiosity copped a bruising. I got a crack on the head.
The boy, luckily, lived to tell the tale. A mother relieved. And, then to wait till my father got home. Not sure which was worse, the explosion, the loss of my car or waiting for dad, while not knowing the consequences and having plenty of time to think about it after the fact. And then I got to see how gentle a man he is.
As a boy of seven who had lost power and the buzz of the moment, I executed my first solution without any thought. I could say I didn’t know any better. Yet, that would ignore the number of times mum and dad had told me of the dangers of electricity and instructed me not to put anything in power sockets. I’d not paid attention to the regulators.
This was my first lesson of the problem we face when we uncouple interdependencies. In my case, the interdependency between a small device and a small power source, which I decoupled and rapidly established a new relationship between my small-scale power requirements and a high-power source. All done without me talking with anyone else about my problem. Without me even recognising I had a gap in my knowledge that I needed to address if ever I was going to comprehend the consequences of my actions for the viability of the device and myself.
Never mind trying to do all that thinking before taking action.
C’mon, it was an intense moment. I was focussed and had to act... for my own selfish reasons to get a buzz.
It led me so close to a ‘Titanic’ disaster. My first near-death experience.
As adults, it would be good to think we’re less likely to create these ‘Titanic’ moments of disaster. (With tongue firmly in cheek as I say that, thinking of a few examples like the Exxon Valdez, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Piper Alpha explosion in the North Sea, nuclear disasters in Chernobyl, 3-Mile Island and Fukushima, and the Alberta oil sands described by National Geographic magazine [1] as “the world’s most destructive oil operation and it’s growing.” … Ok, there’s a lot of them. And, there’s many more.)
Just like the boy seeking new buzz, our short-term focus seeks out more power or more profit or more enjoyment, quickly. And, when we get it, we want it continuously. We’ve lost the art of knowing how much is enough. We fear loss more than opportunity. The bigger the potential fall, the bigger the perceived problem.
We’ve learnt to address big problems by breaking them down. In the process, we uncouple interdependencies. We don’t wrestle long enough with a solution to understand how we might bring it all back together.
It’s the reductionist approach. As soon as we’re invested in a solution, we stop exploring the potential consequences further downstream. If it works for now, we move on for we believe action precedes clarity. But action precedes catastrophe if we are constantly driving for short term gains without understanding downstream impact.
Of late, becoming agile is popular. This process shortens the cycle to innovate rapid responses to changes in the environment. It’s an extension of natural curiosity and the essence of survival. Innovation is the organisational equivalent of mutation. Like bacteria fighting penicillin seeking a quick mutation to survive the changes in the environment. A few strains become resistant but most die. We seem to forget that most innovations die.
We homo sapiens are smarter than bacteria. Although, like me as a boy, sometimes our behaviour might suggest otherwise.
So, if we continue to innovate in the same way organisms with a lower level of cognition do, then we are playing dice with the future and risk our extinction at every occasion.
I proffer four beacons for boardrooms and executives accountable for long-term viability.
First, do you know the value you deliver? To the planet, to society and to your stakeholders. For clarity on this is the bar by which all else is measured. If value is tied to remuneration [2] then the answer will be dominantly economic and the risk to being driven by short-term thinking is high and it is yours.
Second, do you have a skilful, systemic process to manage the cognitive complexity of how your enterprise operates, manages itself and how it shapes and makes sense of the environment? Is this process built around a mental model that can hold the organisation together and be shared widely to explain what keeps your enterprise viable? Can you use it to discuss the problems people face and explore a range of solutions that address the whole problem before deciding on any course of action? This is deep work.
Third, do you assure people take time to understand the consequences before acting? Board and executive decision making are a mystery to many. By the time it trickles down through the enterprise, its rationale is often lost in policy and competing interests. Yet it is incumbent for leaders to see where the ripples might flow through their complex enterprises. If you get it wrong, you’ll spend more time and money in recovery and restitution – assuming your organisation has my boyhood luck and survives.
Managing the cognitive complexity of this work before taking action to address the complexity of the situation will lead to better outcomes [3].
Finally, do you have a design authority in place to assure long-term viability? Our major global challenges have arisen because humans consistently decouple interdependent things and reconnect partial solutions. When we do this in ways that change the power distribution rapidly, we should not be surprised to find significant problems blow up in our face. Our latest example now is occurring with the Turkish invasion of Northern Syria.
It’s time to first do no harm. Survival precedes growth. Survival should never be presumed.
The immediate payoff for doing deep work is knowing you don’t risk extinction to you, your people or your organisation. You have a better understanding of your time to extinction. You’ll be keeping active at the interface with your stakeholders in ways that rebuild trust. There’s a deep act of due diligence in eliminating or minimising the risk to you, your people, the public and the environment involved in doing the work.
Let me close with the wisdom of Peter L. Bernstein who was interviewed by Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal. Jason describes Peter as an, “economist, historian, investment thinker, and one of the wisest and most philosophical people on Wall Street. Peter had seen it all, met everyone, studied everything, and came closer than almost anyone else I’ve ever met to knowing everything that can be known.” [4]
In doing deep work, Peter says, “[This] doesn’t mean that you have to be convinced beyond doubt that you are right. But you have to think about the consequences of what you’re doing and establish that you can survive them if you’re wrong. Consequences are more important than probabilities. This isn’t just a paradigm for always coming out with conservative decisions. It’s really how you should make decisions, period.... In general, survival is the only road to riches. Let me say that again: Survival is the only road to riches. You should try to maximize return only if losses would not threaten your survival and if you have a compelling future need for the extra gains you might earn.” [4]
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References
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back/
[2] Kenneth Hayne, Royal Commission into Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services
[3] J. N. Warfield, “Twenty laws of complexity: Science applicable in organizations,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 3–40, 1999.
[4] Jason Zweig blog A Safe Haven for Investors, A (Long) Chat with Peter L. Bernstein