How helpful is it to get the right answer to the wrong question ? Can you hold two conflicting ideas in your mind at the same time ? Being able to think different, to see business in another perspective is an essential skill in 2021. Corona, the SARS variant virus [not the beer] has shown just how uncertain business can be.
Understandably, managers crave certainty, applying all sorts of frameworks and tools, predicated on a mindset of the predicable. Our way of approaching management problems assumes clarity, that we can be pretty much certain, with a margin of error. Often the planning and problem solving more resembles a rain dance routine, with the hope that jitter bug repositioning in all those PowerPoint slides, will get the clouds to rain down profitability, in the form of the next successful product. But what if one can’t be certain? What if asking the tedious predicable old questions just won’t cut it anymore? How do we break out of the ‘same old, same old’ thinking and gain genuine insights ?
CASE STUDY IN DRIVE AND IMAGINATION
One of the most imaginative and entrepreneurial people in the Kenyan insurance sector in the last two decades, is not one of the big players. It’s someone who began by asking a different question: How can one add value for both the underwriter and policyholder, and in the process, create a profitable product ?
In being one of those that introduced insurance premium financing to Kenya, the late John Macharia, started by looking for a financial investment, he pitched the idea to just about every bank in Kenya. They all rejected the business proposition, except one bank, and an investor. Triple A Capital was created offering insurance premium finance, which took off. Soon the same banks that had rejected the product, fast copied it. Today, it would be surprising to find a copycat bank, or insurer that does not offer insurance premium financing. When the premium finance market became saturated, John then went on to be one of the founders of Directline Assurance that aimed to bring profitability, organisation and sanity to motor commercial PSV insurance. Where so many matatu insurers had failed, Directline aimed to make the business profitable, modelled on the experience of a public vehicle insurer of South Africa, in which Hanover Re had an ownership stake. Here was a young outsider, who saw things differently, that created two companies that shook up the staid Kenyan insurance industry.
HOW CERTAIN IS ‘CERTAIN’?
Planning and setting targets is critical, but how often do business plans go exactly as planned? Just keep a tally, it would be surprising if even one fit the template of what was expected?
Uncertainty rules and can’t be addressed with standard operating procedures. The structure of our thinking, the mental model we have in our gray cells determine what we see, and what we miss. Disturbing, often we miss what is right in front of our eyes, and imagine what is not there. Questions we ask emerge from our ‘business as unusual’ patterns of thought. Aim is take all the data and fact finding and look at it differently, and in the process consider a wider landscape of possibilities. For instance, what if one asked: What do I expect not to find? What might one be explaining away too quickly? What happens if we shift one of the core fundamental assumptions, and tried a little no risk experiment?
Yes, longer term aspirational planning is useful, but often business resembles driving at night, down an unfamiliar road. In management lingo, this is called emergent planning, needing to quickly respond to new insights, in the form of unexpected disruptive potholes. Somehow, we have to be able to master paradox, and ask the right questions. Remember the words F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.
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