Exist between certainties
It only took me 36 years to fully appreciate the joys of a nicely put together oat chai latte. This also means I am now one of those people who are particular about where the chai latte is well done, vs – well, not. What I appreciate about it is what some might call a paradox: something feeling sweet and spicy at the same time.
And yet, this is precisely why it works. And I realise now I’ve always liked the idea of paradoxes being not only a version of reality, but perhaps all there really is. I remember being in university and reflecting on how we couldn’t possibly be selfless if we did it to feel we’ve lived a good life, which in turn is actually quite selfish because it makes the whole thing about you. Yeah, I was one of those “I read Nietzsche” arrogant ones.
But this second dose of caffeine (I’d already had a coffee earlier today at home), coupled with being off work recovering from surgery, plus all the painkillers I am on (codeine, yo!), plus the fact I’ve been catching up on a lot of movies, has got me thinking. And the thinking started emerging when I finally watched ‘Conclave’. My mind can’t stop thinking about paradoxes, or more precisely, the liminal spaces where things are uncertain.
Faith and doubt
There will be mentions of things ‘Conclave’ made me think, but don’t worry there won’t be any spoilers. A bit of raw soul searching, sure, but not spoilers. One of the strongest initial scenes is when Cardinal Lawrence does his inaugural speech, and he talks about how there cannot be faith without doubt. I buy this, big time.
You see, when you’re fully certain about something, it becomes redundant whether you have faith in it or not. You simply know it to be true. Of course, you know you still need to persuade others, but within you there is no doubt. Which sounds great, in principle, except there’s a very fine line between not doubting something and having a blind faith in it. And blind faith, paradoxically (there it is again), tends to deviate us from truth.
But this idea, that you cannot have faith without doubt, seems to me quite central to what it means to be a creative and strategic person. Because all we have, deep down, are choices between fairly equally valid options. If you have blind faith in a strategy, chances are you might be missing something, because all strategy work includes a need to make conscious choices between things that are otherwise quite valid.
While I was in hospital, recovering from my surgery, I finished ‘Playing To Win’, the book by Roger Martin and AG Lafley on the nature of strategic decisions as told by their experience working with P&G. And in it, I found a few moments of reassurance that my own beliefs around strategy were confirmed by people who’ve been doing this for longer than I have lived my life. Strategy, in their definition and experience, was not the product of a grand design by an all-certain mastermind, but rather a social exercise that emerges from team debate.
In other words, what defines strategy is not how much you believed in it, but how much you’ve stress tested your doubts by taking them seriously, instead of simply pushing them aside. The existence of doubt is what makes the nature of the decisions consequential, because without doubt you just do obvious things which likely will not offer any competitive advantage. Working through doubt, in this way, is how you win. But this doesn’t mean doubt simply vanishes, because as the circumstances change, new doubts emerge yet again.
Representing the ideal
What felt refreshing about ‘Playing To Win’ is that the whole book is about an ideal endstate, but not about people being ideal practitioners at all times. They talk at length about strategic mistakes, as they do about strategic victories, not as the rare scenarios but rather as the common scenarios. It’s very easy to make mistakes in strategy because there are so many factors at play in any given problem you want to solve.
Our negativity bias often makes us over-fixate on the mistakes we’ve made (some very basic ones I’ve done at work still terrorise me to this day, even though everyone who witnessed them has forgotten years ago), but taking a lesson from improv culture everything is an offering. Just like ‘negative’ feelings are useful information, so too are negative experiences. They teach us what to avoid, of course, but they also teach us to not take ourselves so seriously even if (or especially if) the subject matter we’re dealing with is indeed serious.
Back to ‘Conclave’. In one of the endless corridor debates and backdoor politicking (this movie can be described as ‘Succession’ plus religion, and that means almost everything you think it means), one of the Cardinals wisely says their job is to represent the ideal, even if they can’t be the ideal. Sure, he says it to condone some possibly shady behaviour by another candidate, but there is truth in this. Or at least reassurance, that you can aspire to represent something good even if you’re not always good yourself.
Taken to an extreme, this leads to hypocrisy. But if we stop before it does, there is a deep sense of shared empathy around how we can aspire to higher standards in our work and life, even if we know we will fail in some capacity. This is what parenting is, and it’s what working in strategy is too. You have a set of things you know define how it should be done, and then those things meet the acid test of daily reality. If half of your advertising spend goes to waste but you don’t know which half, then so too half of our strategic recommendations might turn out to be mistakes, but we won’t know until we’ve given them all a go.
This should be cause for despair, but I actually find it liberating. It means we can loosen the grip a bit, and acknowledge that we can work with the best information we have and still miss something important. The job of course is to minimise this (all plans are useless but planning is indispensable), but realising its possibility is like living your life knowing one day none of this will matter in the grand scheme of things. Memento Mori, but for strategic advice. Aim to do what’s right, but be ok if that’s not how it turns out.
Exist between certainties
In that scenario, I may be more of a soft deontologist than a hardcore consequentialist. Indeed it’s true that the value of strategic advice directly correlates to the effects attached to it, but if we take this to its logical extreme we remove the idea of having compassion and forgiveness and growth mindsets from the equation. If we only ever judge people by the certainty of the outcomes attached to their advice, we will always judge everyone and ultimately trust no one, because like in Hollywood no one really knows everything.
We should evaluate people’s impact based on the outcome of their actions, or the actions they recommended, but always in balance to the original intention behind those actions. I’m not smart enough to turn this into a mathematical equation that actually makes sense, but I can offer an analogy from our own body weights.
If all you ever do is obsess with your Body Mass Index, you end up ‘being healthy’ on paper but making all sorts of unhealthy decisions to get there, which means you’re not healthy at all. Not only is the BMI based on very shoddy ‘science’, it’s actually only one measure. Put it this way, if you have 5% body fat and loads of lean muscle, you can still be above your BMI and therefore on paper be ‘unhealthy’ based on that single factor.
In ‘Conclave’, one of the great lessons is the value of being able to, quoting one of the characters, ‘exist between certainties’. This doesn’t negate the existence of certainties, but it does place value in the liminal spaces that exist between them. A BMI score is a certainty but so is a percentage of body fat and a regular heart rate and a healthy gut microbiome. None of them are objectively more certain than others, they co-exist and the real value is for us to combine them in an equation that allows us to experience a meaningful existence.
The real value of science is to make theories less wrong, less incomplete, and I find this to be the case as well with strategy and indeed anything we choose to believe in. Again there’s the relationship between faith and doubt coming into play. We can, and indeed should, accept that there is both an objectively knowable truth out there, and also that the closest we will ever get to it is a subjectively shared notion of what it might be.
In this sense, the practice of strategy is indeed a shared exercise of making meaning, rather than a solo exercise of imposing it. The allure of certainty is very real, but all we ever get to is the honour of existing between different certainties and hoping our combination of variables yields net positive consequences. And for this to work sustainably over time, perhaps one of the last great lessons ‘Conclave’ left in me, is that it’s far more important to know how to disagree, rather than seeking to dominate the people we disagree with.
