Perhaps it is the financial crises
or the fact that despite our incredible advances we are realising more and
more each day that there are lots of things we do not fully understand (Google
'
scientific consensus
'
or read the Wired Article on the '
What we don't
know
') but
somehow there seems to be a lot more introspection even, in unlikely places
like the business world.
Harvard Professor Rita McGrath has written
a couple of
articles
on the topic, covering Tata's scheme to incentivise failure and Google's
willingness to get it wrong (a lot). Kathryn Schulz's TED talk '
On being
wrong
' sums up
the issues very well. It is
worth a
watch
.
The world of strategy if famously littered with 'wrongness', some we see
immediately and at other times we have to wait a while before we cannot
believe how wrong things have gone.
Scenario planning when used as part of the strategy process ensures that as
Steward Brand said, rather than being exactly right, we are more importantly,
not wrong.
In fact right and wrong is perhaps too simple. Carveth Read in 1898 probably
said it best when he said "It is better to be vaguely right than exactly
wrong."
To get to the point of not being wrong we do need to embrace the fact that
wrong is an option.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to avoid information which doesn't suit our
worldview. Unless we are able to embrace being wrong (even a little bit) when
designing strategies we are not looking at the full picture and are likely to
be surprised.
Without introspection and challenging our blindspots we are unlikely to find
complete solutions to our strategic thinking challenges.
We often believe more analysis and better information leads to better
strategies. This is not the case. Strategic thinking is more dependent on the
psychology of the people creating the strategies, and their ability to be both
right and wrong in their thinking.