Play devil’s advocate with yourselves to stay relevant
The price of failure in biological evolution is extinction. When it comes to people and organization, the opposite of evolution is not stagnation; it's decay. Taking growth as a proxy for continued relevancy, 5% of companies in the Fortune 50 successfully maintained their growth across five decades. Only 4% could reignite some degree of growth after hitting stagnation. Once growth is stalled, it is nearly impossible to restart it. The studies all support the assertion that a 10% probability of succeeding in a quest for sustained growth is, if anything, a generous estimate. No wonder startups or the 10% of the remaining companies displace the once giants, Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, or Blockbuster.
The price of failure in personal evolution is not death. It is over-confidence. Overconfidence can lead to losing money from your poor investing decisions, losing the trust of people who rely on you, or wasting time on an idea that'll never work. Overconfidence could lead to death in extreme situations. I talk about mountaineers who fail to turn back in my previous blog.
“Ignorance frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” Charles Darwin
If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent, and the skills you need to produce a correct answer are precisely the skills you need to recognize what a correct answer is. We all know people like this in our lives, don't we?
When we are in that mode of over-confidence, we end up wearing the hat of either a
Preacher- when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals.
Prosecutor- when we recognize flaws in other people's reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove them wrong and win our case; or
Politician- when we're seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our constituents
We can't see gaps in our knowledge if we're preaching: we believe we've already found the truth. Pride breeds conviction rather than doubt, which makes us prosecutors: we might be laser-focused on changing other people's minds, but ours is set in stone. That launches us into confirmation bias and desirability bias. We become politicians, ignoring or dismissing whatever doesn't win the favor of our constituents — our parents, our bosses, or the high school classmates we're still trying to impress. We become so busy putting on a show that the truth gets relegated to a backstage seat, and the resulting validation can make us arrogant.
“The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know. Good judgment depends on having the skill — and the will — to open our minds. I’m pretty confident that in life, rethinking is an increasingly important habit. Of course, I might be wrong. If I am, I’ll be quick to think again.” Adam Grant
Over-confidence can lead to conflicts in relationships. Relationship conflict is destructive because it stands in the way of rethinking. When a clash gets personal and emotional, we become self-righteous preachers of our views, spiteful prosecutors of the other side, or single-minded politicians who dismiss opinions that don't come from our side.
We all have blind spots in our knowledge, opinions, or judgments. The bad news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, giving us false confidence in our judgment and preventing rethinking. In the case of BlackBerry, its founder, Mike Lazaridis, was trapped in an overconfidence cycle. Taking pride in his successful invention gave him too much conviction. Nowhere was that clearer than his preference for the keyboard over a touchscreen. It was a BlackBerry virtue he loved to preach — and an Apple vice he was quick to prosecute. Remember that Blackberry (or Yahoo) was once a startup and had brilliant founders who failed to rethink. Mental horsepower doesn't guarantee mental dexterity. Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you will fall for stereotypes because you're faster at recognizing patterns. This holds for all kinds of establishments like medicine as much as startups. We are subject to bias and noise when it comes to judgments and opinions. Discussions on judgment is a rabbit hole I might go down in a future post.
The question then becomes when successful startups become the established kids on the block, how do they continue to stay relevant in the changing times while not getting stuck in over-confidence cycles?
What do the startups' founders(or even Edward Jenner, the vaccine pioneer) do in their inception to avoid getting into this over-confidence cycle? For one thing, they don't have historical baggage. They cannot be confident about their ability to learn fast about what products will have a market fit (or have a suitable vaccine candidate for smallpox or even know what a vaccine is in the first place). And to be fair 90%of startups fail(The probability of vaccines progressing from phase 2 to licensure within ten years was 10.0% which oddly means 90% of vaccine candidates fail as well). But the ones that do succeed test their assumptions and hypothesis with carefully controlled experiments. They make mistakes and learn from mistakes fast, which implies they celebrate rethinking and don't hold onto beliefs for too long if it doesn't stand the tests being done. This is unsurprisingly the scientific method. Scientific thinking favors humility over pride, doubt over certainty, curiosity over closure. The rethinking cycle breaks down when we shift out of scientist mode, leading to an overconfidence cycle. Rethinking requires a willingness to change.
“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything” George Bernard Shaw
Recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs. Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that's distinct from how much you believe in your methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That's the sweet spot of confidence.
The sooner we all accept that we have blind spots, the sooner we can identify them and correct them. That will be painful as that might mean letting go of some of our deepest held beliefs and a vital part of one's identity. That is probably why organizations resist reinvention and why 90% fail to grow and evolve, keeping up with the times.
Where do you start if you identify and address your blind spots? As mentioned in my previous blog post, we as humans are great at picking the other apart but struggle to recognize our faults, so having fierce conversations with people we trust to have our best interests at heart(or are objective) is a way forward. This is akin to a peer-review process used when a scientific paper is up for publication. While no single conversation is guaranteed to transform a company, a relationship, or a life, any single conversation can. A fierce conversation is one in which we come out from behind ourselves into the conversation and make it real. In a fierce conversation, you will sacrifice one's deeply held ideas or beliefs for another. There will be pain and anxiety associated with that. But, if you are willing to let go, if you are ready to sacrifice, you can let your old ideas die. And not you. The discovery of the future itself is the most profound discovery of humankind- To receive an enhanced reward in the future, make the sacrifice in the present to build the future we want.
Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong- not for reasons why we might be right and revising our views based on what we learn.
All the stars, planets, and galaxies visible today make up just 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is made of stuff astronomers can't see, detect or even comprehend as of today. How can one be entirely confident in their convictions knowing that 96% of the universe is beyond our scope of understanding? Bringing it back down to Earth, what was the deeply held belief you had that you abandoned recently? And how long before did you do a belief reset where you sacrificed your present for a better future? Lastly, how long do you think you can go without doing a belief reset and still stay relevant, be it in your work or personal life?
