Help (Urgent) for Those of Us Who Keep Screwing Up

The book "Why Most Things Fail" isn't an easy read.  That's because it's written by an economist who's British, Paul Ormerod.  But why it's a must-read is that it provides persuasive evidence for the human reality that there is no such thing as perfect planning.  Think Communism that was so perfectly planned.  That wasn't the social and economic success that was intended.

The central thesis of "Why Most Things Fail" isn't new: The best-laid plans of mice and men often don't work out.  Primarily that's because organisms are constantly changing, at least if they want to remain alive.  The stoppage of change is called death. 

Elementary Watson: Given that everything is in constant flux and that everything interacts with everything else in constant flux, it's ridiculous to expect that planning will yield the anticipated result. 

Of course, some planning has a better shot at generating what the organization or nation wants.  But nothing is certain.  However, as we know, that doesn't get us off the hook when we screw up, at least if we screw up too often.  There have to be more wins than losses and some of those wins have to be early in the game.  When we have a new client or are a new Administration in Washington D.C., a number of fast wins are expected.   

So, how do we increase the odds for initial success and more wins than losses over time? 

Well, the secret could be to drop all the conventional mental models we've picked up in our education, from the brandname experts and from our parents.  Maybe that's why the M.B.A. degree is losing credibility in marketing circles.

Tip: We might have to start thinking in a more organic way, that is, in terms of what might really be going on out there.

Mr. Ormerod provides a nice anecdote about a provocative thinker called Thomas Nagel.  In 1974, Mr. Nagel published a breakthrough article "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" in THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.   

Somehow after too many setbacks in the increasingly volatile 21st century, I sort of adopted that approach to getting new clients and keeping happy the clients I had.  What I did was shift from conventional truths to a deconstruction of what might be really going on. 

For example, I investigated the intersections of what the prospects/clients might be feeling, what could be going on with their clients/customers, what could be emerging as an atypical form of competition, what the implications of emerging technology could be.

Result: I listened more to prospects/clients.  Said less.  Then I proposed: Given what we know and what we don't, this might work.  Often it did work.  When it didn't, I got back in there and analyzed the living, breathing intersection of variables.   Plan B usually usually was more solid.  But soon enough, we had to come up with a Plan C. 

If there is a principle to be articulated here it is the not-new notion that everything changes and keeps changing.  Don't rely on any formula.  Rely on what you put together this minute from what seems to be happening.  If you're wrong, engage in immediate course correction.  Incidentally, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has done a lot of thinking about that.  Ms. Kanter put some of that together in her book "Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End."  That analysis was published in 2004.  I took it seriously and I've had more winning streaks than losing streaks,