Chapter 9: Actionable
How consensus and consent - supercharged by interpersonal friction - energize insights into action.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
— Marcus Aurelius
What will I learn in this chapter?
You’ll discover how all of the skills and concepts previously covered in this book work together to drive action with your stakeholders. You’ll learn how the proper application of guile and empathy are prerequisites for whatever actions you choose on their behalf and how you’ll defeat the inevitable obstacles that will emerge as you pursue your goals.
Here are your key takeaways:
Action is the process of energizing collaborators to have confidence in executing a shared actionable esteem or hypothesis about the future. Action systematically defeats under-certainties so stakeholders can progress to the goal without letting their emotions stop them.
Forcing action does not require stakeholders to form a consensus, but it does demand their consent. Empathy and guile can be used to build trust and encourage those holding you back to step aside voluntarily.
Most people need a coach, mentor, friend, or other advocate to help them go beyond their self-imposed limits. Your job is to help stakeholders challenge their own biases so they can commit to fulfilling their vision.
For stakeholders to commit to your recommended course of action requires deep empathy with their fears. This will be necessary if you wish to avoid their resistance to recommendations that might seem demoralizing at best and counter-productive at worst.
Missionaries will hesitate to take action unless the action serves their just cause. Pragmatic Mercenaries, who have a lower threshold to action because the ends justify the means, are unencumbered with this idealism.
Confidence in your strategy is unjustified without the right metrics. Metrics equip your team with KPIs that allow less productive tactics to be trimmed back.
Friction between stakeholders is necessary to make plans actionable because it’s the source of trust to move your plans forward. Accelerating the development of trust between stakeholders will require them to embrace friction together.
You’ll hear stories of confrontation like Rubbermaid vs. Tupperware and George Bailey vs. Henry Potter. We’ll explore the connection with psychology topics like exposure therapy, neurotransmitters, imposter syndrome, and sound parenting. Finally, we’ll recall wargaming with a roomful of salty exploration geologists and compare the differences in how innovators and financiers manage strategic risk.
Doctrine and Tradecraft
In his book, The Obstacle Is the Way, Ryan Holiday writes, “Overcoming obstacles is a discipline of three critical steps. It begins with how we look at our specific problems, our attitude or approach; then the energy and creativity with which we actively break them down and turn them into opportunities; finally, the cultivation and maintenance of an inner will that allows us to handle defeat and difficulty. It’s three interdependent, interconnected, and fluidly contingent disciplines: Perception, Action, and the Will.”1
You recognize the Tupperware container the instant you see it. You’ve been moving it from shelf to shelf in your fridge for so long that you’ve forgotten which sublime delicacy was so rare as to have deserved perpetual preservation. You’ve long since given up hinting to your spouse that it’s finally time to use it or lose it.
When you finally summon the courage to open the Tupperware and identify its unknown contents, you discover it's filled with an unrecognizable science experiment. You have no choice but to toss out whatever-it-was and write off the money you spent on the food. You might even wonder whether the Tupperware can be salvaged.
You might be upset that neither you nor your partner recycled those leftovers into a delicious next meal. You had good intentions, and so did they. Otherwise, you’d have thrown the food out when it was originally left uneaten.
But think about how your partner’s week might have unfolded. They were working on projects of their own, looking after the house, and taking care of the kids, among other things. If you understood everything they had to deal with during the week, you might realize how unrealistic it was to expect them to transform these precious leftovers into another meal.
Perhaps, instead of assuming they’d make use of the leftovers, could you have taken the initiative and made the executive decision to cook the food yourself so your partner could take a couple nights off at dinnertime?
While you’re contemplating the options you overlooked, it all comes back to you: It was taco night!
It was your suggestion in the first place to have tacos because you could turn the leftover taco meat into spaghetti sauce the next night and chili the night after that. What happened to your elaborately argued strategy that the family would all enjoy tacos, and that the reusability of the raw material would be infinitely versatile well into the middle of the week?
You assumed consensus about the week’s dinner plans — tacos, spaghetti, then chili — would lead your spouse to take responsibility for putting that plan into action. But to your family, it wasn’t consensus at all; it was merely consent — an agreement not to be an obstacle in the path of your plan. Consensus is the way we energize others to work together toward a common goal; it’s no longer your plan, it’s our plan. But consent is just permission for you to do it yourself; consent lacks the will required to see a plan through to completion by sharing responsibility for its success.
Business situations are not much different. Stakeholders may reveal their shared objectives, but they might not lay out concrete steps for themselves — and their future actions — to turn goals into results. If you haven’t taken the time to consider stakeholders’ circumstances, you can’t empathize with their reasons for resisting action. Without understanding their rationale, it’s impossible to assign responsibility or cooperate on what happens next. The opportunity that held so much potential ends up wasted.
As you learned in earlier chapters, most people fail to inventory their options; they also fail to imagine potential stochastic events that might randomly derail their plans. Instead, people tend to lean on their biases and assumptions about what they’ve seen in the past. We are prone to allowing our ego to take control, seeking out ease and comfort over efficiency and effectiveness. Many of us will only choose to see the familiar instead of the more challenging task of trying to understand incomplete or false knowledge. We tend to avoid topics that make us think too hard and risk being wrong. We choose, instead, to focus on topics others might forgive us for misunderstanding.
Consent is easier to grant than consensus is to achieve.
Whenever humans act in conditions of under-certainty, those actions will be less rational than they could have been. If we were to take time to inventory the two or three questions preventing us from acting, we could be more confident that our choices would not end up as mistakes. Instinctively, we know we’re missing something about the situation that could prove disastrous if left overlooked. But sometimes, urgency calls for haste when perfect knowledge eludes us.
Never forget that all of our mistakes happen in a hurry.
As Benjamin Franklin used to say, “That which hurts, also instructs.” When we confront what we don’t know and admit our biases, decisions become grounded in logic instead of emotions. That logic ensures there will be less risk of regretting the choices we’ve made. We can avoid the negative consequences of letting mistakes be our teacher.
Making options actionable is not a simple matter of creating the knowledge that’ll make us feel better as we deploy resources in new or unfamiliar ways. Rather, actionability is the beneficial side effect of defeating under-certainty. Confidence to act can be defined as the absence of anxiety preventing us from moving forward. But having the confidence to act is earned through the lessons of experience. Group dynamics demand the intentional building up of confidence among less-experienced teammates.
But how can less experienced teams build the confidence to act without all those hard-won lessons?
Action is based on a high degree of confidence that things will work toward a desired outcome because you’ve seen similar circumstances in the past work out that way. It helps to energize people toward the execution of a shared vision of success, which we call the actionable esteem.
An actionable esteem is nothing more than an IGC that has been put to the test through simulation. As a result, it is held in high regard by its coauthors. Simulation participants will be so excited to move forward that perhaps they’ll even take reckless shortcuts in the mistaken belief every scenario has been exposed. But those who have not had a hand in its testing lack the confidence that simulation can bring to an IGC.
You learned how guile and empathy between stakeholders can drive action. But how will you tackle the much bigger challenge of guiding the team along a disciplined sequence of execution steps when they’re so enthusiastic — perhaps even overconfident — about making your plans a reality?
Simulating engagement with other stakeholders reveals that hasty choices, executed in a hurry, are likely to lead to unpredictable responses from allies and enemies. This is why simulation is so necessary to avoid mistakes. The exposure to probable scenarios helps inoculate us to the unfamiliar. That exposure also tests the logic of the decisions being made against how others might respond.
Simulation is the process of earning real-world experience without suffering the real-world risk of failure.
Most of us believe our choice-making is driven by our logical brain, but that’s not entirely true. Most of our choices are emotional and based on how we feel, rather than how we reason. Our emotions are governed by neurotransmitters rewarding or punishing us for productive or unproductive behaviors. Those mechanisms were inherited from our ancestors, who prospered or died because of the consequences of similar behaviors. The humans who survived passed their characteristics on to their descendants — including you!
Back in Chapter 7: Guile, you heard about the influence serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin have over our choices and behavior. But there are over 100 neurotransmitters that regulate everything from sleep, mood, memory, heartbeat, and respiration to our very ability to love and be loved.2
The most powerful neurotransmitter is cortisol, the so-called “stress hormone.” Doctors use it medicinally as hydrocortisone to control and alleviate inflammatory responses by our immune system. But cortisol is also deeply involved in our anxiety about past, present, and especially future events where stakeholders stand to gain or lose based on how we decide to act and react.
Stress from control factor stimuli — whether we have control or not — has powerful psychological and metabolic effects on the human body. Those effects are made more serious when we try to temporarily alleviate that stress in unhealthy ways. This can come through substance abuse, compulsive behaviors, or overdoing the things in our lives that bring us peace or pleasure. Anxiety is not the same as fear, but their effects on our ability to act are closely related.
Reality becomes tolerable when emotions become predictable.
Exposure to stressors can remove the mystery of what might happen when we encounter an unfamiliar scenario. It can help us practice different ways to handle situations we have less experience navigating to remember how it made us feel. Do you remember the therapist from Chapter 7 gradually exposing a person to the snakes they’re so afraid of? Exposure therapy and other tools — such as vagal nerve theory and mindfulness — can teach us how to rewire our brains to manage the autonomic instincts and primal emotions that make it harder to think through our choices objectively.3,4,5
Simulation techniques — like business wargaming — are merely the most efficient way to expose a management team to the responses of other stakeholders, who might be generating fear or anxiety about our untested choices. Realistic, simulated experiences are indistinguishable to the human mind from real-world experiences. Confidence in the choices you select in a wargame is the same kind of confidence that would cost real capital in our actual markets.
Part of testing business strategies to make them actionable is building consensus among your shareholders, the people who own your enterprise. But consensus — agreement on what to do and how to do it — is not a prerequisite for success.
Consent, on the other hand, is essential if the aftermath of executing those decisions is to be survived and their benefits sustained. Without permission on what to do and how to do it, foot-dragging and sabotage are not only possible, but likely. Passive-aggressive resistance will threaten the future effectiveness of the team.
Consensus is ideal, but Missionaries tend to be slower to achieve such agreement by all. Consent is more pragmatic, and Mercenaries are comfortable letting influential stakeholders grumble along at the risk of being left behind. All the consent they need is a solemn promise to stay out of the way. Remember our hero Howard Roark, architect in The Fountainhead: As much as it's a matter of who will let you, it’s also a matter of who can stop you.
Now, let’s return to our wargame design example from Chapter 8: Empathy. When we left them, our Alpha was deliberating over how to acquire the private label Beta new entrant. We were focused on designing an exercise that would make for a more confident strategy while also subtly demonstrating to our leadership how emotional their decisions really are. We must balance our Missionary quest for consensus with the Mercenary’s more practical goal of consent.
Private label products offer retail channel partners a chance to remind buyers where they actually acquired the product every time they use it. A retail store brand, for example, would have common household essentials placed right alongside similar items associated with the private label offer. Walmart’s store brand of milk — Great Value — sits right alongside premium brands such as Organic Valley. But every time you reach for a cold glass of Great Value milk, you’re subtly reminded you got it at Walmart. Organic Valley could’ve come from anywhere!
Private label offers are typically much cheaper to supply in bulk since the private label maker has almost no marketing overhead to recover. It’s also a chance for channel partners to let the branded maker know they’re not as beholden to their control and might have more negotiating power than first thought. To the buyer, choices differentiated only by brand and price are less distinguishable from one another and might even appear functionally identical.
We see this phenomenon wherever brands are distributing premium offers through retail channels with a price sensitive buyer segment for whom brand is less important. Private label offers are always Beta to the branded Alpha. Depending on consumer recognition of their maker’s trademark, buyers would need to understand the offers’ functional comparison at a deep level to choose the branded offer.
It’s ironic that the Beta is now free to specialize its product development investments around the functional effectiveness of their offer instead of creating brand awareness through marketing for buyers. They avoid costly budget line items like brand reinforcement or coupon-style discounts to turn over volume. They might even invest in disruptor criteria, such as mining consumer data, to see patterns in sales volume competitors might miss.
The ability of the Beta to focus on the functional effectiveness of their offer means Alphas might end up branding an inferior-performing offer to market segments that expect a much higher level of performance in exchange for the Alpha’s higher asking price. This is the worst-case scenario since performance will be redefined by price of the offer at the exact same time a Beta is driving performance higher through specialization.
An Alpha who overestimates the superiority criteria of their brand is one of the original sins of competitive advantage.
Unless the Alpha’s offer can back up its brand with superior performance that matters enough to buyers to pay extra, market share will migrate to the cheapest functional equivalent.
You see this at work whenever a buyer acts as a benefactor to a group of users who are their beneficiaries. Healthcare insurance is one industry that behaves this way. Generic pharmaceuticals, for example, are usually paid for by benefits providers, such as the government or a private insurer. For these specialists, brand is only necessary when it’s impossible to acquire the functional equivalent without it. The user might wish for a branded equivalent, but the payer will seldom justify the added expense unless there’s an efficacy reason to do so.
Designing a wargame to reveal a solution for channel conflict is never simple, but it can be easier than you might think. Solutions will always boil down to your ability to stalemate the driver criterion and stop further market share from being bled away by the Beta.
A stalemate is only discovered via one of the following three approaches:
Imitate — offer private labeling yourself;
Leapfrog — develop a better private label offer that buyers will prefer to reverse erosion of share; or,
Surrender — induce capitulation in private label suppliers by introducing a criterion they didn’t expect to see (a disruptor); or, by surrendering yourself — perhaps by creating an alliance with the superior Beta.
Asking-price sensitivity is a primary driver for private label retail channel partners, so wholesale price, volume discounts, and other costs can be stalemated by imitation fairly easily. Leapfrogging a Beta with price can be done, as well, but only by discovering another criterion to drive selection besides price. Flexibility, configuration, or support can all offer a path to leapfrog.
The choice to surrender is most difficult for Alpha incumbents dealing with a private label Beta new entrant competing on price. It’s a fundamental issue of economics. If an Alpha will not be able to price match (imitate) or differentiate by improving another dimension of performance (leapfrog), they’ll have no choice but to capitulate (surrender), sooner or later.
Sometimes, the choice to surrender is about deferring the painful decision to restructure the cost economics of the business. Other times, it’s about avoiding damage to the brand itself. But delayed surrender is always, at its heart, about humility. Alphas have a harder time humbling themselves to market reality because they’re so encumbered by their past success. Betas have much less past success to base their reputational identity expectations upon. The result is that Betas have the ability to act much more quickly than Alphas usually do.
Once you’ve defined the strategy problem, you must identify the stakeholder entities your wargame will simulate. In our channel conflict example above, you’ll need to represent no fewer than three important perspectives:
channel partners currently succumbing to the price sensitivity of a private label offer;
the private label Betas redefining performance based on the twin criteria of house brand of the channel plus price economics; and,
the market of buyer segments, as well as regulators, suppliers or other branded sellers, and any other points of view that might be important.
The market team is always thinking about the superiority criteria the market will reward with share. The relative attractiveness of your offer compared with others will be scored by the market team to help you appreciate the importance of each satisfier, driver, or disruptor criterion. The market team’s only job is to be realistic in how they reflect the will of the market relative to the strategy problem your exercise is solving.
In our example above, unit price in bulk might be a satisfier you must imitate, but it will not be rewarded with additional revenue for over-delivery. The increased brand recognition of the channel partner by their consumers might be a driver you’ll need to leapfrog.
Finally, while Betas are seldom disruptor-driven, there might be aspects of the supply chain that channel partners find disruptive, which is contributed to by their price advantage. Inventory management is a good example. Perhaps the Beta also offers a financial benefit to channel partners by accepting inventory onto their P&L in order to elevate cash flow performance for the channel partner. The cost of depreciating inventory has to be borne by someone. The Beta is simply turning that expense into a driver that might induce a switch from an Alpha that doesn’t.
The wargame agenda is based around episodes of realistic — but artificial — changes occurring in the macro-environment. These changes might be an announcement by your company in the form of a press release or a stock market correction that diminishes the power of capital enjoyed by another stakeholder or actor. You might want to see how other players react to lesser-known events, such as the sudden entry of an “X-factor” player who has anonymity on their side. Or, maybe government becomes a significant enough force to be reckoned with that you’ll want to simulate how they’ll respond to your plans when you roll them out.
We recommend a wargame agenda that includes one or two rounds as a first foray into the method. The mental exhaustion a round requires of participants is extreme enough that it’s unlikely an inexperienced staff of players will be able to endure more than two rounds over a couple of days. However, as your participants gain experience, they’ll know what to expect the next time. Ideally, you’ll experience what we see in our most mature clients: A culture of simulations emerges where wargames become the de facto final step in IGC testing.
How will we know where the soft spots are in our strategy unless we test it against the interests of helpful and hostile stakeholders?
Your IGC is the central subject matter of your wargame. We have templates for translating your IGC into programming inputs for a workshop like this, but it all begins with simplifying your IGC into a central strategy question. By the time you have an IGC to work with using the superiority criteria you’ve determined the market will reward with share, you will already have a lot of excitement among teammates and stakeholders to get underway with your untested strategy in the real world. The principal benefit of wargaming is the ability to put that strategy to the test. Imagine how excited they’ll be when you reveal the risks everyone else has overlooked!
Untested strategies still suffer from soft spots other stakeholders will use against you. You’re simply unaware of where they lie or how they’ll be taken advantage of.
In our channel conflict example, you’re solving a major problem that’s cropped up and called into question the underlying assumptions about your business model. Countervailing such a threat is not to be trifled with! If you fail, you might doom your company to a slow, painful decline.
We recommend you conduct a minimum of two separate simulation exercises to cope with and harness this issue for your own advantage:
an exploratory session to brainstorm ideas and solutions; followed by,
a second exercise that tests each solution against the influence control factors of the other stakeholders.
For well-capitalized Alphas like the one in our channel conflict example, one advantage might be a liquid cash hoard or “war chest” with which to invest. However, the corporation’s Treasurer will guard this war chest as if it's their own money. Gaining their consent to finance a new IGC will be primarily based upon two track records — yours as well as theirs.
Alphas have the disadvantage of complacency, resting on their track record of past innovation successes to fuel its continuation. Without adaptation, every strategy will eventually become unfit for the macro-environment in which it was conceived. The by-product of a successful strategy is the source of future retained earnings to finance the next IGC.
This ability to finance, however, assumes you haven’t wasted all your earnings on stock buybacks and dividends to investors. An investor will only ever ask for their money back in the form of a dividend when they’re sure of one thing: that you don’t know how to invest their money any better than they do. If you’re buying back your own stock to prop up its price, you have more important problems to address than investor relations.
Investors represent a specific type of financing, usually associated with an eventual exit from whatever they’ve invested in, to realize a return on their investment. But what about large enterprises that finance subsidiaries or other businesses built around unfamiliar offers that they don’t expect to exit?
It’s useful to use a term like financier to describe the role these enterprises play in funding the innovator’s IGC. A financier with a low risk tolerance, for example, will demand collateral or even a cosigner to ensure against any losses. A venture capitalist, by contrast, understands some proportion of their investments will go to zero and there will be no way to recover those losses, other than through their investments that strike it rich. This much higher risk tolerance is usually associated with much higher potential for returns. Inside large corporations, risk tolerance must be managed just as carefully as if you’re dealing with a banker or VC.
Without risk, there’s no return. Exposure to risk is the way capital grows for those innovators and their financiers willing to take the leap. But capital can easily be lost if risk is miscalculated. Managing risk — to the enterprise as a whole but also to a specific strategy — can make the difference between a competitor successfully taking or growing market share and whether they’ll hang onto it once they’ve got it.
Do you remember how Silicon Valley Bank entrusted their CEO with risk management responsibilities? The executive responsible for growth was incapable of taking responsibility for the risk that accompanied that growth. Risk management is a control mechanism on growth aspirations.
Stakeholders will accept less than 100 percent certainty that an idea or offer is going to pay off. The differing priorities of innovators, who want to grow, and their financiers, who want to realize a return on the capital they invest, means they don’t always achieve consensus on how to handle the risks of their new venture.
Innovators are Missionary about their yet-unproven ideas and believe in the just cause they serve. They hope to get everyone on board since consensus validates the just cause and makes it easier to achieve before profits can incentivize effort. They will do their best to convince those who might be dragging their feet that the idea is in their best interests and they should contribute.
But Mercenary financiers believe that consensus is unnecessary. If they see someone foot-dragging, they’re more than happy to kick the saboteur off the bus so they don’t slow everyone else down in pursuit of success. All they’re seeking is consent.
Both Missionary and Mercenary have under-certainties they must defeat before they choose how to act. Both must then adapt those actions as conditions change in their macro-environment. Once under-certainties have been defeated, action is not only possible, it’s demanded.
Your spouse and family consented to taco night. They even consented to your strategy of spaghetti and chili the next two consecutive dinners. But consensus was lacking. The responsibility is yours alone for the waste of resources represented by your Tupperware science experiment. Though you won their consent, you failed to lead them through your IGC to success. Consensus would have given them permission to adapt your actions to changing circumstances. But you never granted them that permission.
Consensus makes delegation possible because teammates are all in agreement on what they’re doing together and likely even what to do next. Everyone can take collective responsibility for roles that need filling and tasks that need attention for plans to succeed. Ideally, they even think of your plans as their own. They’ll be willing to move Heaven and Earth to see them come to fruition.
Consent, on the other hand, demands that leadership drive accountability. No one will accept personal responsibility for simply getting out of the way.
In both instances, the actionable esteem is held in high regard by its co-authors, but make no mistake: If they’ve merely consented not to stand in the way, it’s your plan, not theirs.
Applied Case Examples
The film It’s a Wonderful Life, which we introduced in the last chapter, shows how these concepts can play out.6 When the Great Depression causes a liquidity crisis in Bedford Falls, the bank calls in the debt of the town’s Building & Loan company to raise enough capital to remain solvent as depositors withdraw funds. The townspeople panic and try to get their money out of their accounts before the bank and Building & Loan run out of cash. This is known as a “bank run,” since there’s never enough cash on hand to redeem all deposits and depositors are literally racing to the teller’s window ahead of friends and neighbors.
The rich antagonist of the film, Henry Potter, sees his chance to eliminate the Building & Loan as his competitor for home construction financing for the people of Bedford Falls. So, he guarantees the bank, on the condition it must close for a full week. Knowing people need money to live on during that time, Potter offers depositors at the Building & Loan $0.50 on every dollar for their shares. He knows that if he can take advantage of their zero-risk tolerance and get them to act together, he’ll be able to take control of his competitor and monopolize home construction financing for the foreseeable future.
The protagonist and proprietor of the Building & Loan, George Bailey, wants to stop Potter from taking over the business his father, Peter Bailey (Samuel Hinds), had started. George desperately tries to convince his depositors not to take Potter’s offer. He spills the beans about what Potter is up to and tries to get them to reevaluate the risk ahead. He points out they can get through the crisis together if they ask only for the amount of money they need to get through the week until the bank reopens.
Having gotten married earlier that same day, George and his new wife, Mary (Donna Reed), volunteer the $2,000 they’d set aside for a globetrotting honeymoon to cover withdrawals at the teller’s window. One depositor opts out right away and demands the entire $242 he’d put into his account, selfishly ensuring a victory, but only for himself.
Although it can’t be described as consensus, the people finally offer consent to George, one by one, making requests based on rough estimates of their needs for the week. Mrs. Davis (Ellen Corby) asks for exactly $17.50. She knows that asking for more would cause hardship to the Building & Loan and prevent her neighbors from withdrawing what they needed. In empathy with George, she makes her request as specific as possible. Mrs. Davis balances consent and consensus so touchingly that George kisses her on the cheek when she shows her peers how to act accordingly.7
Ruthless competitors can deliberately generate a destructive consensus that drives people to act in a way that harms others, as this pivotal scene portrays. But the scene also shows how the Missionary and Mercenary can work together to manage the friction and actions surrounding risk in a financial scenario. Using empathy, an innovator can equip their Mercenary to achieve consent from individual financiers to safeguard the innovator’s Missionary idea. An innovator’s efforts to bring individual financiers on board can also change consensus about what action to take. We’ll talk more about how George Bailey championed risk management in the next chapter.
The COVID-19 pandemic made the difference between consensus and consent clear for us at Aurora WDC. We didn’t necessarily have consensus about how to react to what the pandemic was doing to our business. Consensus was, in fact, impossible in the short time we had to react and recalibrate the company for survival mode, as many of the thousands of enterprises that failed to adapt to the “New Normal” demonstrated.
Arik gave Derek consent to run the GPS and FirstLight sides of the business as best Derek knew how, ensuring our strategic and operational posture could adapt to the changing definitions of value our clients were about to discover. Derek similarly gave Arik consent to temporarily put our learning business, RECONVERGE, to sleep. This would buy time to explore the next wave of where the company could go with its learning offers and allow us to discover this new definition of value for ourselves. That bilateral consent was given because we had built mutual trust through tackling obstacles using deliberate friction over many years together.
Empathy and guile both support the development of consensus and consent. Empathy allows you to build trust with those who can help you, while guile helps you neutralize those who might hinder your progress.
Guile and empathy often play off of each other, as in the movie Facing the Giants. In the film, football coach Grant Taylor (Alex Kendrick) sees that Brock (Jason McLeod), the leader of his team, isn’t pulling his weight. He knows that Brock’s poor attitude and unwillingness to work harder is sabotaging the whole team’s success. When Coach Taylor challenges him to the dreaded “death crawl,” Brock believes he’ll be able to carry a teammate for about 20 yards. Taylor’s empathy for his player helps him understand how challenging the exercise is, but he also knows that Brock and the team need to break free from their self-imposed mental limitations.
When Taylor blindfolds Brock, encouraging him not to quit by making his progress invisible to him, Brock is beguiled into making it an incredible 90 yards. Because Taylor won’t let Brock defeat himself with the demoralizing distance he has yet to travel, Brock is able to break through his self-imposed limits and set an example that inspires the entire team. The players learn to have a deeper trust in Taylor and push one another to try harder to win the state championship.8
The idea that people sometimes need others to reveal their potential by guilefully removing biases is also on display in this story about legendary martial artist Bruce Lee. In The Art of Expressing the Human Body, Lee’s friend, John Little, writes:
“Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a-half minutes per mile.] So this morning he said to me, ‘We’re going to go five.’ I said, ‘Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.’ He said, ‘When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.’ I said, ‘Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.’ So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go anymore and so I say to him, ‘Bruce if I run any more,’ — and we’re still running — ‘if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.’ He said, ‘Then die.’ It made me so mad that I went the full five miles.”9
Options aren’t actionable unless all stakeholders are confident in the potential for success. Part of your responsibility is to get everyone to believe that the goal is achievable, just like Taylor did for his team by fooling Brock into breaking his limits and Bruce did for John in getting him so mad he finished the five miles. Not everyone has to agree how the team should proceed, but everyone will need to consent to forward progress or risk being left behind.
As you work to unite your team, empathy will help people pool ideas and resources to activate innovative problem-solving. As Stephen Covey puts it, “When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.”10
Let’s return to our wargaming example for a moment. How can we, as an Alpha, predict the actions of another, non-competing adjacent Alpha who might be sizing up a lateral move into our P1 as a specialized new entrant in Beta? Are we supposed to monitor every nascent competitor with potential superiority criteria that might threaten to take market share from us?
The simplest answer — in our era of massively-scalable, automated monitoring — is YES!
But you won’t detect disruptions by looking at competitors who look just like you. You’ll have to look at unfamiliar, nearby players with an unfair advantage they could exploit to take share from you and your incumbent peers. Complacency induced by decades of monitoring one’s own direct competitors is no excuse for overlooking a new entrant with a way to take your customers away. Quite the contrary, that’s exactly how Alphas are usually vanquished. The instant their brand loses its status as a driver, it degrades to a satisfier criterion and is no longer rewarded for over-delivery of performance.
Exceeding customer expectations is just another way to waste capital on palliative feelings that make us more comfortable while we’re dying.
Let’s return to our leftover taco meat example of food storage containers and examine how a particular kind of Alpha evaluates new market entry decisions. In this case, our non-competing adjacent Alpha is someone who should be on everyone’s LIST: Amazon.
Amazon is a special Alpha in that they see every other market segment as a potential Delta growth curve. Recall that Deltas are largely imaginary in the mind of the innovator or entrepreneur, becoming real in Stage 1 of a new S-curve when a Gamma or Beta offer makes its first sale. Data from that first sale — and the million sales that follow — becomes the disruptor criterion Amazon will use to accelerate more rapidly up the slope of Stage 2 to Stage 3 maturity.
Let’s start by getting a lay of the land, or as with every new intelligence topic, a lay of the landscape.
In the landscape historically known as “Food Storage Containers,” there are two important Alpha brands competing with each other: Tupperware and Rubbermaid. Summarized below, you’ll find a more detailed background of each brand and how they compare with one another. But to really understand them, you’d need to appreciate the Angles of Attack of their S-curves.
Tupperware was an early pioneer of multi-level marketing (MLM) following its founding in 1946 by chemist Earl Tupper. By the 1950s, the Tupperware Party had cemented itself in Americana. Pairing word-of-mouth testimonials with a direct-to-consumer, commissioned sales model, the company’s practice of paying its hostesses to introduce the product to neighborhood friends was a powerful innovation in delivering utility to kitchens nationwide. However, with the erosion of brand as a driver criterion in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Tupperware eventually had to confront the reality of selling via the retail channel. First offered in Target stores in 2021, Tupperware products are now available at Macy’s and Walmart, as well as online.
Rubbermaid was acquired in a 1999 merger with Newell valued at $5.8 billion. It was eventually sold again to United Solutions in 2017, although it is still offered by Newell under license. Driver erosion of brand loyalty in the mind of the consumer has had a negative impact on Rubbermaid’s fortunes, as well.
However, no force in retail has affected this landscape quite so much as the online hegemony of Amazon.
Beginning in 2009, Amazon launched what has become its flagship private label business. This includes kitchen products, such as food storage containers, as well as many other household essentials, ranging from bath and bedding to office products and electronics. Made by companies around the world but operating under the private label brand of Amazon Basics, the business has grown dramatically. By 2021, it featured more than 5,000 products. Sales grew from $1B in 2015 to more than $7.5B just five years later:
Amazon Basics products tend to be highly functional with minimalist, no-frills designs. What you see is what you get — and that‘s all many shoppers need for basic commodity products they use every day. With its streamlined manufacturing process, lack of overhead related to physical stores, and immense scale, Amazon can price these products substantially below the competition while still maintaining quality.11
Of course, Tupperware and Rubbermaid also both sell on Amazon today, but neither would truly grasp the competitive advantage of Amazon’s disruptor criterion: data.
Data is more of a driver than a disruptor these days, but Amazon’s ability to meticulously track consumer preferences remains its unfair advantage. They know exactly how much interest there is in the minds of buyers for brands like Tupperware and Rubbermaid. After all, over the past 30 years, Amazon has become the third most frequented way consumers search for information on the Internet, after Google and YouTube.
Incumbent Alphas like Tupperware and Rubbermaid underestimate adjacent Alphas like Amazon because they miscalculate the attractiveness of their own P1 plane of demand to specialists. A Beta wielding a consumer demand data specialization like Amazon can catch Alphas by surprise when they laterally enter their market segments. Understanding consumer preferences like Amazon does is the ultimate superiority criterion that will be difficult for any competitor to imitate, let alone leapfrog. The most probable pathway is the third eventuality when an unassailable driver takes away market share the way Amazon Basics has with its dramatic rise: surrender to it.
Although you don’t see Tupperware showing up in generic searches for “food containers” on Amazon, you will see Rubbermaid featured prominently, right after Amazon Basics. But those are sponsored results. Indeed, you’re more likely to see Rubbermaid show up in a search for “Tupperware food containers” on Amazon because of that sponsor’s search strategy targeting their more traditional rival brand’s share. Rubbermaid has been forced to surrender to Amazon’s unassailable driver of data. Tupperware will be forced to surrender in the same way eventually — if they survive at all.
But how does this relate to the difference between the Missionary mindset and how a Mercenary might see it?
Amazon is a good example of a Missionary mindset effectively changing the rules of the relatively tiny food container landscape by weaponizing its data as a disruptor. Using data, Amazon’s infinite mindset destabilized the finite food container game. Mercenaries will always find that kind of shift puzzling and, if they’re an Alpha with a new entrant specialist in Beta, they’ll default to underestimation.
That’s exactly what Tupperware did, in reverse, way back in the 1950s with the Tupperware Party. A finite game, like an evening spent with other homemakers learning how to preserve their leftovers for the rest of the week, destabilized the retail channel selling food containers on a more infinite shelf-stocking basis. Turning the tables on our Alphas, Amazon is able to see every trend on its platform and force incumbent brands into competing on price.
We know the strategy is working, if Rubbermaid’s financials the past few years are any indication. This destabilizing effect hasn’t allowed them to keep up with such a rapidly changing game and, after a quarter-billion dollars of negative cash flow in 2022, Rubbermaid finally got a new CEO and reorganized the company back to financial sustainability.12
Amazon’s lateral move into whichever commodity market segments it finds attractive through Amazon Basics is effectively changing the definition of performance to a new P2 Gamma where consumer preference data is the coin of the realm. For incumbents that lack a similar depth of detail, their old P1 Alpha curve will have to adjust to reflect the Beta they’ve accidentally become. Betas simplify and specialize. Rubbermaid is turning itself around by slashing SKUs and concentrating power in fewer, better-defined offers.
But the real source of Rubbermaid’s future, if there is one at all, will be imitation or leapfrogging of Amazon’s consumer preference data hegemony. Stalemate is always easier than inducing a surrender, but the real source of competitive advantage comes from changing the market’s definition of performance entirely. Does your mindset balance these opportunities in a way that your teammates and stakeholders can act on with confidence?
Which mindset is strongest in you?
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.” — Groucho Marx13
Over half a century, the Marx Brothers rose from their start as a turn-of-the-century vaudeville act to dominate Broadway and star in 14 major motion pictures. Arguably the most influential comedian of the 20th century, Groucho (Julius) Marx played the smart one, going on to mega-stardom in a solo career on television after the group disbanded in 1950. His point about learning from others' mistakes perfectly illustrates the value of Simulation.
You’ll never encounter all of the pitfalls the real world has lurking just beneath the surface. Any one of them might spell the end of your endeavor. The reason to simulate is to imagine what might go wrong.
Parents know better than their children how life can throw you a curveball. It’s why caring parents often come across as controlling — they’d rather have their kid mad at them for being strict than have a tragic accident end life as they know it before it’s even begun. Friction between parents and kids might be unpleasant, but the alternative is an inexperienced and overconfident young adult who might get themselves into trouble they can’t get themselves out of.
Another way of describing friction in families is “tough love.” Your teenager might want to stay out late and even argue with you about it. But you might know from your own days as a teenager what can become of a late night and, as a result, set an earlier curfew. You’ll earn their respect and trust when your teenager sees that your tyrannical boundaries kept them safe and your annoying rules taught them sound life lessons. Too much permissiveness backfires when your teen thinks you’re a pushover. They might even assume you don’t care enough to stop them from making stupid mistakes. Healthy friction can be seen as evidence that another person’s well-being or results matter to you. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t bother to set boundaries.
Derek had a high school football coach named Gary Fitzgerald who used to say, “If I stop yelling at you on the football field, it’s not because you’re perfect. It’s because I’ve given up on you. I’m never going to stop yelling at you to strive for perfection. If I do, you should know it’s because I’ve given up hope.”
Missionaries are content knowing their just cause will never be achieved in their lifetime. They willingly delay action to ensure plans serve their just cause while stakeholder consensus is maximized. But they won’t wait forever. It’s never permissible to do nothing — faith without action is dead. Missionaries use empathy and guile to energize others to confidently pursue an actionable esteem they created together.
Mercenaries are driven by the desire for an immediate win. Because action yields results, Mercenaries seek consent rather than consensus with less hesitancy to act than Missionaries do. They will move forward once they see any path to action and use empathy and guile to exploit other stakeholders' fears of being left behind. Extracting consent through fear is obviously faster than building consensus through patient collaboration. Mercenaries understand that what counts is never who will let them, but who can stop them. That slight advantage in pursuit of winning aspirations gives Mercenaries an actionable edge.
The story in Chapter 3: Control about Derek not answering his exam question demonstrates that, sometimes, doing nothing is the best option. Inaction, when deliberate, can be the most empowering action of all. Inaction is not necessarily a weakness, but it cannot be accidental or unplanned.
Inaction is the selection of intentionally doing nothing that maintains accountability, especially if doing nothing was a mistake.
In the absence of accountability, actions are seldom taken seriously. As John F. Kennedy told a journalist after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, “Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.”14 JFK was paraphrasing the ancient historian Tacitus — “This is an unfair thing about war: Victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
This kind of deep contemplation is intrapersonal — happening inside of you — as opposed to the interpersonal analytic insight work we’re used to collaborating on with others. There can be as much friction inside you as there is between you and others.
You might want to lose weight for your health, for instance, but you also might be unwilling to admit that you get winded climbing a flight of stairs. Maybe you know you should exercise in the morning before work, but you struggle to sacrifice the extra hour of sleep you’d enjoy instead. You know that a healthy weight loss rate is 1 to 2 pounds per week, but you’re impatient for it to take months to reach your goal. You’re tempted to starve yourself to get quick results and more immediate gratification.
The contemplative friction of your conscience must decide whether your actions should be pragmatic or idealistic. This contemplation reflects that your Missionary and Mercenary are in a constant state of tension. This tension, when applied to testing limits, can make the risks to personal growth, as well as the growth of a business, more predictable and less prone to mistakes.
An actionable esteem must produce a beneficial result. If there are no benefits, there’s no reason to act. Yield is the accumulation of benefits over and above the cost of acting. If the benefits are anticipated to be less than the cost, you’d be a fool to act accordingly to produce a negative yield. But how do you know if the cost of acting will yield a positive or negative accumulation of benefits? That’s where Simulation comes in once again.
Intelligence analysts and insights professionals across diverse industries have leaned on key performance indicators (KPI metrics) to verify that the result they promised is achieved at the most beneficial yield. Sales in units sold or dollar value, profit margins year-over-year, or how many new people you hire are all examples of KPIs. In fact, whether you’re dealing with a loan officer, investor, or potential client, the ability to measure what’s happening plays a huge role in how people decide to act as they employ your insights. The business world rewards proof and evidence, and the preference is for quantitative proof in the form of numbers. Numbers are regarded as less subjective, with their interpretation being harder to argue with.
Measurement of quantitative, concrete, or “hard” KPIs — like numbers in a P&L statement — is easier for the Mercenary, who plays to win and values methods that prove they’ve achieved the short-term gain they promised. They want to work with raw facts, not results that are open to interpretation. When someone changes their mind because of your insights — but tells no one — were your insights still valuable? The Missionary appreciates the often-dismissed value of anecdotal, hard-to-define measures of influence. You can see this at work when someone finally feels confident enough to share their skeptical or contrarian analysis for the first time. The courage to be the sole dissenting opinion demands a confidence that cannot be faked.
Integrating qualitative, abstract, or “soft” KPIs into your action plans — such as sentiment about the future — can be a powerful way to induce confidence. But it’s non-negotiable when your stakeholders have a more Missionary vision that might require decades to achieve and only on someone else’s watch. The combination of hard and soft KPIs enable you to understand a more complete yield potential for the actions you’re considering.
Despite the importance of both quantitative and qualitative metrics, stakeholders will seldom be able to source all the insights they need to close their stochasm alone. It can be painful and damaging to their ego to confront the truth from all angles. It’s common for stakeholders to cherry-pick a favorable narrative to look like they were right all along. This is done at the risk of overlooking important variables that disagree with their plans. Missionary and Mercenary alike know how dangerous an open stochasm can be to future yield potential!
Remember the last time you visited a trade show booth at an industry event. How many of the sales pitches you heard went into detail about the limitations, restrictions, weaknesses, or deficiencies of the offer they’re exhibiting? Few or none. Salespeople will emphasize the best features and benefits of those features to the prospective buyer, spinning their offer to be as perfectly attractive to that buyer as possible.
Mercenaries are particularly good at translating features into benefits because they are so driven by the need for a win. They are successful if the end (a sale) justifies the means (the pitch). Missionaries don’t tend to make very good salespeople as a result, but they’re great marketers. Marketers segment buyers based on their identification with intangibles such as design, brand, user experience, and company values. The function of the offer is secondary to the way the buyer will feel experiencing it.
Remember that the role of a good analyst is to create intelligence insights that stakeholders can act on, usually by answering questions the stakeholders hadn’t thought to ask. Oversights that lead to mistake-making can result in a loss of confidence that interrupts the stakeholder’s expectations and stops them in their tracks while they reorient. There are dozens of factors that can interrupt the delivery of actionable intelligence, especially a stakeholder’s own emotional response.
At the same time, there is a constant tension between the need to build insights from reliably-sourced data and the need for timely reaction at the pace the operating environment demands.
Taking too long or not taking long enough can put success at risk, which means that neither the Mercenary nor Missionary mindset can be permitted to dominate the other.
Friction is a human condition. It’s not always very comfortable, but it is ever-present, happening inside of us even when nobody else is around. Making plans actionable is achieved when Simulation uses interpersonal friction to test your IGC. Thorough testing allows confidence to be achieved even if it only reveals a few of the myriad mistakes we couldn’t foresee until another stakeholder’s potential reactions were considered. KPIs help direct the allocation of power to ensure yield potential is maximized while mitigating the risk of our plans failing.
Adjusting our plans to account for such perilous obstacles equips our stakeholders for the path ahead and enables us to champion their cause. Just as your child can’t survive all the mistakes they might make before experience becomes wisdom, you must be willing to put your stakeholders’ interests ahead of your own and present a range of options that includes doing nothing at all.
You will only know for sure the right actions to take in the future after the window of opportunity to take them has passed. Action is based on confidence, and the confidence to act is the principal yield of a well-balanced Missionary + Mercenary mindset. Whichever mindset feels more natural to you, remember that you’ll have to work on the other to master this balancing act.
Memoirs
When we were kids, our dad planned a Greyhound bus trip to Madison. Curiously, the office where we did our final rewrite of the book you’re almost finished reading is only a block away from where that Greyhound bus let us off.
We planned to stay at the Howard Johnson Hotel at the end of Johnson Street near the UW campus. The hotel, however, was about 30 blocks from the bus station on the other side of Capitol Square. Derek, still just a little guy of five or six years old, had to lug his monstrous suitcase — which had no wheels back in those days — all the way across downtown Madison. We’ll never forget the death march across town with suitcases in tow. But it was all part of the adventure we were having with Dad. The obstacle represented by our grueling walk to the hotel became the next step on our journey together.
One big reason behind the trip was that our dad wanted us to experience what it was like to take the bus and stay at the hotel. He easily could have taken us in our own car to Madison. But if he’d done that, we wouldn’t have had the experience of traveling in a new way together. The action of visiting Madison as we did was an intentional choice, sacrifices and all.
But there was a second agenda, too. Years before, he’d bought his parents farmstead out on Hogback Road, where we started life. There was a milking parlor on the property, but the dairy business just wasn’t as economically viable as it used to be. Dad wanted to figure out if there was a way to turn the milking parlor into a fish farm. Missionary as ever, he was willing to explore the possibilities. He needed more information before he could rationally allocate resources for the project.
Ultimately, based on the information he got on our trip, our dad decided not to pursue the fish farm. Instead, he opted to tear down the dairy parlor and move the family off the farm back into Chetek, where Mom had her beauty salon. He used the materials from the dairy parlor to build a pair of rental duplexes — four units in all — across the alley from our family’s new home in town, Mom’s mother’s house. But the trip allowed him to find out what would happen if he followed through with his original idea. That initial move, which you might call a narrative estimate, helped him to decide how to invest and set the stage for the next work he would do to support the family.
Intelligence analysts and insights professionals often have the same mission. We investigate and ask questions that can deliver relevant information to help stakeholders make educated decisions about where to invest their precious capital. Just like our dad sacrificed one project so he could pursue one that was more profitable, analysts try to help stakeholders build a rational sequence of actions based on their empathetic understanding of stakeholders’ circumstances. Engaging stakeholders in the co-creation of strategies that emerge from that understanding energizes the team to achieve their plans.
Snowstorms, a tractor, and the nap that never was
Once upon a time, a man named Alan went into the ditch right outside my house after a late winter snowstorm covered Wisconsin in a foot of heavy snow. Seeing him there on my way home, I pulled over and asked if he needed help. He asked if I had a shovel. But I told him I’d be back in five minutes with my tractor and chains to pull him out. He looked at me in shock and blurted out a rather skeptical, “Really?” But after I got home, I changed into farm clothes, fired up the tractor, and tossed some chains in the bucket.
As I worked to get the chain around his axle, one of our neighbors from up the road, Jim, pulled over to help direct traffic. We managed to get Alan’s vehicle out of the ditch, but lo and behold, he had a flat tire. So, I drove him to his place to get a jack and spare tire.
I got to know a little about Alan as we fetched his equipment. He’d immigrated to the United States in 1980 from Vietnam, and he’d been on his way to go watch March Madness with a friend until he hit that icy patch on the county road outside my farm. He also didn’t have the money to call a tow truck, which is the reason he’d initially asked for only a shovel.
As I finally got him on his way, I told him I hoped he still had a chance to catch the basketball game. But he told me that, thanks to the fact I’d taken the time to help him, he had an entirely different plan for the day.
It would have been easy for me to hand Alan a shovel like he’d asked me and call it good. The selfish part of me didn’t want to sacrifice the nap I was going to take that sunny Sunday afternoon. That self-interested side of me struggled with the part of me that prays for opportunities to help other people like Alan.
I was forced to contemplate how God has higher expectations for me than I often might have for myself. By reflecting on how my previous decisions in the day set the stage for me to be in Alan’s path, I was able to make the deliberate choice to sacrifice my nap to help a brother out.
— Arik
Where real confidence comes from
In the fall of 2004, we facilitated a war game for a mining company in Colorado. Most of the people in the room were exploration geologists. One player made it clear that they were ready to mop the proverbial floor with another team competing in the simulation. The profanity-laced trash talk left no doubt that both players wanted to take action and wholeheartedly believed in their ability to succeed, hopefully intimidating competitors in the process.
In this case, the instigator was responsible for the discovery of several million ounces of gold and other precious metals our client had profited handsomely from mining. In his mind, this mock industry confrontation would surely pose no challenge for whichever team was blessed with his presence.
But simple confidence can’t defeat an enemy. Belief in one’s own ability to succeed is not the same as the right to win we talked about in Chapter 5: Superiority. The ability to succeed merely means that a player has the inventory of utilitarian tools, skills, and practice using them that will be necessary to outperform their competitors. This includes the consistent application of empathy when interacting with other stakeholders to understand their perspectives and objectives.
If that player chooses to deploy this inventory in alignment with the market segment’s superiority criteria, the right to win is theirs for the taking. If they choose not to align, however, then the opportunity to succeed will pass to the one who will.
As we’ll cover in more detail in Chapter X: Champion, imposter syndrome is the result of never having had your ability to succeed tested well enough for you to be sure that the right to win is yours alone. Derek’s a fan of basketball legend Kobe Bryant’s famed “Mamba Mentality” — continually striving to be the best version of ourselves by testing our limits and enabling the discovery of our unique right to win.15
In this case, even as our boisterous exploration geologist made it clear they were willing to do battle, they didn’t yet have any information that would allow them to form any kind of real strategy or plan. Their confidence was premature and potentially blinded them from understanding the degree of preparation necessary to win. It made it blatantly obvious to us that they needed the war game simulation to teach them how to control their feelings, tap into empathy for other stakeholders, and practice being guileful instead of showing their cards before they played their first hand. They probably weren’t even thinking about how other players would interpret their brazen comment or how it could shift the attitude and actions others might take over the course of the exercise. The trash talk was simple intimidation of an opponent, designed to ding their self confidence. But what if it revealed the trash talker’s hidden anxieties even more so?
Real confidence in any competitive intelligence analysis comes from having confronted your stochasm and objectively analyzed the data you’ve collected for insights that might produce an unfair advantage. If that analysis reveals vulnerability, there’s a legitimate reason for concern. Your focus should be on identifying paths to reduce or eliminate those vulnerabilities, not on brashly declaring your willingness to go to war. Taking the time to understand your competitors is a huge part of this.
Even when your analysis reveals that another stakeholder will likely be an ally and that you have actionable ways to strengthen yourself through an alliance with them, you should remain humble when you court that new partner. As Sears taught us, an arrogant resistance to continue your analysis prevents an honest assessment of reality and undermines your ability to correct flaws in your superiority that the market is indifferent in revealing to you. This arrogance can be an Achilles heel that tricks you into thinking that staying the course and doing nothing is best. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The more you believe you’re invincible, the less likely you are to correct when you drift off course.
Challengers, by contrast, are quick to act because they still have something to prove and haven’t yet gotten trapped by the common Alpha attitude of complacently resting on the laurels of their past victories. Innovators are unencumbered by past success. They can take the necessary risks because they have much less to lose.
As COVID-19 proved, life has a funny way of forcing us to pivot quickly away from our original action plan to reveal a new one. We had planned to host our RECONVERGE conference in April 2020, but we had to cancel two months before it was scheduled to happen. Confronting that reality helped us redefine what the event could be. It also helped solidify the concepts we wanted to communicate in the years since.
This book represents the course-correction our own company was forced to confront. How could we solidify the lessons and experiences of an in-person conference into the kind of resource you’re holding in your hands right now? If we are successful, The Missionary and The Mercenary represents an intellectual property platform Aurora WDC will use to rethink, redesign, and reenergize our offers and our businesses for the next 30 years.
Questions to Activate Actionable
Most of your stakeholders will not have initial clarity about where to focus and take action. Even those with influence usually don’t understand that true control is self-control. Sometimes, when we don’t know what we have control over, we try to influence things beyond our control and get angry when our will is ignored.
Walking our stakeholders through options and presenting data that challenges assumptions creates the friction necessary to verify what their values and goals are and to feel good about what they select and sacrifice. The empathy you have for your stakeholders will influence how much friction you create, eliminate, or maintain.
Your stakeholders need a little friction to gain the traction necessary to move forward. Take a few moments to remember a time in your life when you experienced friction with someone, whether it was a family member, work colleague, or a close friend. As we learned at the start of this chapter, most of us will recall at least a few times when we had to confront someone we loved about whatever their version of moldy Tupperware leftovers happened to have been. How did those experiences build trust for higher-stakes decisions that came later? Did the trust you already had allow you to confront the problems in need of solving? Or did insufficient trust negate the traction required to move forward?
As we learned in our discussion about neurotransmitters, choice-making is based more on feelings than on logic. Exposure to stressors removes the mystery about what might happen when we encounter something unfamiliar. The fear that prevents us from acting can be the obstacle that, as the philosopher reminds us, becomes the way forward. How have you struggled to win consensus, as the Missionary would seek out, when Mercenary consent would have been enough? Was fear of the unknown the only thing preventing you from moving forward?
Managing the strategic risks that accompany these unknowns is best addressed the same way parents raise their children: by creating sufficient friction to avoid making the same mistakes the parent made. After all, as Groucho says, we’ll never live long enough to make them all ourselves. Have you ever felt like an imposter simply because your abilities have never been put to the test? How did your children respond to your strict parenting, knowing you wouldn’t bother if you didn’t love them so much? How did you respond to your own strict parents — with consternation or appreciation?
With the memory of these personal scenarios in mind, commit to seeking out friction opportunities with those in your life you hope to help succeed. Don’t make them wait longer than necessary for you to champion their cause. Start by actively seeking out somebody you disagree with about politics, healthcare, religion, parenting, business, or any number of other issues. How can fresh perspectives, debates around alternatives, or evidence that seems out of place help fight the inertia that can send you spinning out of control?
With interpersonal friction between stakeholders as the key attribute that provides the traction to move forward, there’s no better organizational crucible to simulate our choices than wargaming. You wouldn’t want to fly with a pilot who hasn’t spent hundreds of hours in a flight simulator, testing the unlikeliest scenarios. Similarly, there is no more efficient method to put your IGC to the test to refine and purify an actionable esteem.
The yield potential of your fully-tested IGC will be based on the KPIs measuring the possible payoff minus the expected costs of acting. What other methods have you used to choose whether to imitate, leapfrog, or surrender in a competitive confrontation? Which KPIs will be most compelling to both innovators and their financiers when you sequence the actions you’re testing to move forward with confidence?
The final chapter of The Missionary and The Mercenary will show you how to champion the cause of everyone you meet, not only those you have a vested interest in serving.
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