With Strategy In Mind: Part V

3. Paradigm: Use group wisdom, multiple perspectives, to counter balance individual bias

Yes…And.

Yes: For all the reasons cited in the McKinsey articles and more, use the knowledge, experience and perspectives of many people to develop and test strategic decisions. We would be foolish business leaders not to do so.

And: Take full personal responsibility as an individual high performing leader to do everything in our power to develop our own mental capacity for strategic decision making.

The history of scientific breakthrough is marked by discoveries that defied the collective wisdom of the day. Just how many centuries did all of humanity hold to the belief that our global world was flat? Why did it require a cloth merchant to show the entire field of dedicated, passionate medical doctors the unseen enemy killing their patients day after day? We live not just within the constraints of our personal bias, but our collective paradigms as well. Multiple perspectives are not enough to guarantee good strategy when we all see the world the same – i.e., literally, perceptually, neurologically, see the world the same.

Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist, tells us that it takes an iconoclast to see the world differently. Magnifying lens, microscopes, MRIs – external technological tools help us see the world differently. Some of us see things differently through the tools of human perceptions inside our brains. Dale Chihuly (pictured above;  his glass art below is located in the Columbus Museum of Art) is a dramatic example of this. His art design revolutionized the world of studio glass – after, Berns tells us, Chihuly lost one eye. In the world of glass art historically dominated by symmetry, Chihuly’s work took on a decidedly asymmetrical form. He saw things differently. (Iconoclast, Gregory Berns)

As an aside, the MRI technology, so essential to the advance of neuroscience today, also owes its discovery to an iconoclast. In 1940 Paul Lauterbur, a chemist, was struck by an intuitive insight (while eating a Big Boy hamburger) that the blurring contained in nuclear magnetic resonance might be useful information, not just meaningless noise. It took the rest of the collective world another 30 years to see.
Berns and other neuroscientists explain that for efficiency sake our brains have learned to process or filter visual (and other) data based on repetition and the familiarity of past experience. Understand, this means that experience actually modifies our (“hard wired”) neural connections. The neural processing in our brains categorizes perceptions into familiar and not; the brain quickly differentiates what it believes to be familiar and deals with it efficiently. This helps us navigate the complexity and volume of information around us.

This has profound implications for strategy. We use pre-existing mental categories to differentiate perception that arises in the moment. What we see or don’t see is impacted (biased) by what is already in the brain. At times there are things we don’t see clearly because the brain does not know how to categorize them. We also know that a different part of the neo-cortex is activated to deal with truly novel information, once it is recognized. It takes more energy, and a different kind of attention, to process novel information. This kind of mental processing is perhaps sensed as less efficient, somewhat inconveniently disruptive, especially when the brain is overwhelmed with many other tasks – unless the amygdala senses a life-or-death, fight-or-flight kind of important danger at the personal level.

The fact that perception can be changed by experience is hugely important for developing leadership capacity in strategic thinking. It is one compelling basis for exposing executives to broader management challenges in different aspects of the business. But its greater significance is in understanding that each of us can train our own perceptual minds to “be more strategic” by consciously changing the focus of our attention. We need not passively depend upon someone else handing us exposure to new opportunity in the business environment of our company to do this. If Einstein had depended on this as a development strategy, he may never have discovered the theory of relativity: Einstein’s thinking was advanced by his own mental capacity to imagine riding a beam of light at the speed of light. Not sure anyone has actually ever done that.

Nor did Fred Smith have any experience whatsoever, nor any conceivable way to actually prove in 1966 that there was a profitable and sustainable business model for overnight delivery service. But he saw things differently. Apparently he got a mere “C” for his academic paper at Yale first outlining this brilliant business concept that ultimately became FedEx.