Subverting Simple Stories
Recently, my business life has become increasingly complex. Whilst there are great opportunities and new challenges; my future is uncertain. Running my own consultancy…living between London and Geneva…working with a wide-ranging level of diversity as a consultant and psychotherapist, my business life and future increasingly doesn’t fit into neat boxes.
In the face of complexity, I have become aware of my craving for a simple narrative that allows me to predict the future. Simple stories about myself and the world around me, as well as the identification of patterns and procedures to follow that allow me to feel ‘in control’. At times I can feel myself attempting to ‘make sense of it all’, but become distinctly aware of the flawed, imagined reality I am attempting to construct that actually prevent me from engaging accurately with the true complexity of my life and the wider world.
Often our human brains are compelled to create simple narratives and decision-making frameworks, but how can we imagine our futures and embrace complexity? What do different psychological disciplines have to tell us about our compulsion to be ‘reductive’ when faced with uncertainty?
What kind of stories do our minds create?
The human brain struggles with complexity, and no more so in the world of business where we want clear roadmaps and assurances about where we are travelling to, and what will happen. We are intent on creating mental and emotional clarity that enable us to make clear predictions about the future. We write simple stories about ourselves and the world around us.
These are stories that tell ourselves about how things are going to turn out and that bring us a degree of safety and security. In business, we want our CEOs to have a prophetic vision of the future that determines success, we want our marketeers to wave a magic wand and increase our client conversion rate online; we want human resources professionals who can read people and tell us exactly how we are going to attract the best talent. We want to create a binary, black and white world where we project our hopes on to heroes who will fight against villains on to whom we project all the badness we experience. We want to follow predictable twists and turns on a clear road map to a ‘happily ever after’.
But the world we live in is not simple. There are an infinite number of potential variables that will shape our stories - settings, characters and plot twists that we cannot anticipate. As our lives have become more interconnected, physically and digitally, simple stories that we would like to tell ourselves and use to shape our identities are increasingly flawed; and there are increasing numbers of variables beyond our control and awareness. Management consultants, advanced analytics, and emerging artificial intelligence can provide us with a steer on the future, but what are the dangers of our craving for ‘simple stories’? What if we we were able to face the fact that our futures are wildly beyond our control?
Why do our minds desire simple stories?
Our neurological structure and cognitive processes are designed to provide us with a sense of control in the world around us. Our brains are primed to make predictions about the future and create patterns from what it sees. This is brilliantly expounded upon by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in what he describes as ‘System 1’ thinking in his 2011 book 'Think Fast, Think Slow'. Our brains often weave together disconnected and dissonant threads into 'simple stories' filled with systematic errors. These are reductive representations of reality that make it feel more bearable and within our control. We have cognitive biases and heuristic models that we use to categorise the world around us and create predictability; whilst missing many of the finer details. We are constantly searching for patterns, but as complexity of the world around us increases, the challenge of making sense of reality becomes greater. The reality is we often don’t know where we are going and the world is a lot scarier than we would care to admit. Often stories provide us with a locus of control, and levers that we can pull to arrive at our desire outcomes.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein who studied the infantile mind from birth to six months of age theorised that in early stages of life the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ predominates. This is described as a mental state where the infant creates a simple, binary representation of reality; splitting its world, itself and other people into ‘good’ (gratifying, loved, loving) and ‘bad’ (frustrating, hated persecutory) aspects. Her protégé Ronald Fairbairn expanded on these ideas and formulated that an infant has the challenge of combining the ‘fulfilling’ aspects of the parent (the good object) and the unresponsive aspects of the parent (the unsatisfying object) into the same individual and guards against this anxiety and dissonance by simplifying the world through splitting.
I wonder how often our adult lives, and journeys through the business world can feel like a terrifyingly incoherent reality that we make manageable through ‘splitting' our reality and creating simple business narratives with the binary characterisation of others embedded within it. Our challenge is to move to what Klein called the ‘depressive position’; where we are able to embrace ambiguity and integrate into a more complex narrative the depriving and satisfying aspects of the world around - facing the seeming incoherence of an often disorientating and threatening world.
The compelling nature of 'simple stories’ has recently been demonstrated in the effects of the simplistic rhetoric of populist political leaders in campaigns and their effects. People often vote for leaders on both sides of the political spectrum that propose straightforward solutions that produce superficial comfort and prevent people from facing the reality of a complex world often outside of our control. Whether it’s the demonization of immigrants in America by the current administration, or the ‘taking back control’ of the Brexit campaign; simple stories can be compelling but to lead to a rise in societal polarization, hatred and division. Relating this to business, 'simple stories' can distort our perceptions of reality, shape our business plans and roadmaps for the future and colour how we imagine other peoples' roles within our journeys. We end up creating one dimensional business narratives populated by 'heroes', 'villains' and applying 'magical formulas' that fail to account for the complexity that we are confronted with in reality.
How do we effectively embrace and navigate the complexity of reality?
As we think about our business lives we need to think about how we can move beyond embracing simplicity and navigate the future as business leaders.
1. Reimagine your business journey as a nautical voyage. Often 'simple stories' cause us to imagine the future as a simple, straight road ; which makes it difficult when we are confronted with a reality that contains strong currents, disorientating waves and strong headwinds. Re-imagine yourself as the captain of a ship and embrace the fact that ‘life is not lived in straight lines’. Embrace the posture and mentality of a captain at sea, unperturbed by the inevitable risks and opportunities that you experience. For further reading on this concept check out management consultant John Greenway’s book ‘Leadership Map’.
2. Practice ‘System 2’ thinking when making decisions. Our mind wants to create ‘simple stories’ but we need to embrace what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls ‘System 2 thinking’. This is slow, intentional thinking not based on quick decision-making or judgements - that engages with the complexity of reality. It is important for us to interrogate our decisions for implicit biases and over-simplifications that might undermine our ability to think rationally and in our best interest.
3. Find business principles to follow rather than prescriptive protocols to live by. Prescriptive patterns are static and are applied rigidly in reality; as though a protocol is able to supersede and smooth over life’s twists and turns. Being guided in business by overarching, dynamic principles or values means that your strategic approach can respond to contextual changes and be applied to different contexts.
4. Allow your business destination to be the primary focus. Have a clear goal of where you want to get, but accept that there are many routes and different vehicles that can be used on the journey to reaching your destination. It will be your role to experiment with different options and respond to the risks and opportunities that arise.
5. Reject simple narratives from other business people. When people have achieved success they often create a retrospective narrative from which they derive and sell their ‘steps for success’. Be careful when transposing another person’s constructed representation of their reality on to your own. Often the lines of these narratives have been arbitrarily drawn and fail to take in to account contextual factors beyond their control that contributed to their success.
6. Embrace serendipity on your business journey. In Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book ‘Outliers’ he explores business people who have been extraordinarily successful - one of these being Bill Gates. Gates happened to attend a Seattle private school called Lakeside in the early 1970s – one of the few high schools in the United States that had invested in expensive computers for its students. There, Gates taught other students about computers, digitized the school schedule and even hacked his school's scheduling system to be placed in all-girls classes. He also met and became friends with the future co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen. If there had been no Lakeside there would have been no Microsoft. There is no denying that business and life can often be serendipitous - as we step out and experiment we will be presented with the right opportunities and meet the right people.
