“An error can never become true however many times you repeat it. The truth can never be wrong, even if no one hears it,” said Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the non-violent Indian resistance against the British colonial rulers. Lenin, the leader of the violent Russian revolution, believed the opposite: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Who do you think is right?
In the days of globalization and the Internet, it is more and more difficult to hide the truth for a long time. So it seems that we should better side with Gandhi, and also recall the caution of the English novelist Aldous Huxley: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
In other words, we need to get ready to check out what’s really going on. The way to do this is to use a series of serious thinking tools that I summarize under the category title Reality Checks. These are exploration techniques that you should use at the beginning of an innovation project (or any other business project) to test your knowledge and check if you really deal with fact or rather with fiction. Today and in two weeks’ time, let’s consider the five exploration tools that fall under this category: Standard reality checks, belief checks, assumption tests, rules for fools, and the sacred cow slaughterhouse.
1. Standard reality checks
In their enlightening book “Hard facts, dangerous half-truths and complete nonsense”, Stanford management professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton make a case for what they call “evidence-based management”. This term captures the essence of reality checks.
Pfeffer and Sutton present evidence that when digging out the hard facts, many popular management strategies and approaches prove to be value-destroying myths and fads. For example, evidence suggests that mergers and acquisitions mostly destroy (instead of create) shareholder value for the acquiring firm; ERP-software implementations are often deemed unsuccessful, take twice as long and cost twice as much as predicted; instead of making firms more efficient and competitive, two out of three business process reengineering initiatives were seen as producing mediocre, marginal, or failed results; best practice initiatives led to an increased employee turnover, reduced performance and a higher company failure rate; Six Sigma and Total Quality Management (TQM) initiatives can increase quality and lead to incremental process innovations, but distract management focus and resources from the big picture and prevent radical innovation; and layoffs can’t help companies to improve profits or long-term performance while reducing the administrative costs by less than is believed.
My tip: At the beginning of a new business project, list all the facts that are associated with the challenge. Then check out the evidence by asking: “How do you know? In percentage, how sure are you that this is really true? What evidence do you have to support this claim?”
2. Belief checks
Another popular trap to check for are beliefs. Beliefs come in a variety of forms — like false beliefs (“No one will buy it”), identity beliefs (“We don’t have enough … [money, resources, smart people, time, etc.]”), herd thinking (“Our competitors will laugh about us”), stereotypes and “global beliefs” (such as Murphy’s Law, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”, “The early bird catches the worm.”, and so on) and any other clichés, slogans and platitudes (“A Passion to Perform!”, “New management paradigm”, “Good things come to those who wait”, etc.). Beliefs are like a table — the more legs you put under it, the stronger the belief. But better make sure that all your “table legs are solid” (i.e., based on hard evidence) instead of being just an illusion based on gibberish.
A nice example for the paralyzing and dangerous power of global beliefs is the story of the four-minute mile. Before British runner Roger Bannister became the first human athlete to run one mile in less than four minutes in 1954, it was widely believed that “This is impossible!” Within three years after Bannister’s record, 16 other runners had also cracked four minutes.
My tip: Develop a healthy skepticism toward beliefs, stereotypes, conventional wisdom, clichés, slogans and popular myths. Whenever you encounter one of them, check out the evidence by asking: “How do you know? In percentage, how sure are you that this is really true? What evidence do you have to support this claim?”
3. Test your assumptions
An assumption can be defined as the act of taking something for granted, or supposing a thing without proof. In business, we regularly have to make assumptions: Assumptions about the market potential of a new product, about our competitors’ response if we launched this new product, and so on. Be aware of the assumptions you make, and regularly check on the viability of your assumptions.
My tip: Whenever you work on a (business or innovation) project, first clarify your assumptions about the perceived reality or the envisaged future in a given situation. Then test your assumptions by asking: “How do we know that this is really true? How sure are we from 0-100% that this is true?” If your confidence level for a given assumption is beyond 80%, and if you have solid evidence on hand that supports your assumption, then you can confidently move forward in the knowledge that you have done your job as a savvy business thinker. If your level of certainty is lower, however, then you need to look for more evidence to either confirm or adjust your assumption. In addition, also do some creative thinking to generate ideas for the questions: “What would we do if the opposite (of our assumption) were true?” (Assumption reversal)
In the next article of this column two weeks from now, we will look at two final forms of reality checks: Dealing with rules and sacred cows.
© Dr. Detlef Reis 2008. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 14 August 2008.