Introducing Section One: Discovery
A preview of chapters 1 through 3 - Under-Certainty, Stochasm, and Control
This headline might shock you, but we didn’t always get along as brothers.
We do now, fortunately. But just a few years before our parents passed away, you wouldn’t catch us in the same room together unless we were compelled to be. For the first two and a half decades of our lives, we were learning how to collaborate in ways that would enable us to survive the loss we’d soon experience. There was a lot of friction involved in getting to know and love one another.
We had to explore each other’s points of view and define what we wanted our relationship to look like. That took some time.
We didn’t realize it then, but we were living out what we’d come to call Discovery, the first phase of the Supercycle described in this book. A core premise within Discovery is owning and being deliberate about your actions, whether you’re an experienced CEO, a college undergrad, a full-time parent, or a retiree trying to figure out how to navigate changing responsibilities and relationships. In some cases, you might choose to take action by staying exactly where you are and doing nothing differently. In other situations, you might pivot drastically. But you must first know where you’re starting from, where you’re going, and what resources you’ve got to get you there.
Action without understanding is foolishness.
In the first section of this book, our goal is to introduce you to how actionability emerges from insight. People must engage across their full range of available options by selecting from a list of the uncontrollables they must strive to survive or safely ignore. Before a selection is made, many options must be sacrificed to narrow the range of choices. This shorter list will enjoy a much deeper analysis to make actions more confident.
Because we work in the business world, growth tends to be an innovation problem. We define innovation as designing and developing a valuable, profitable offer the market will uniquely desire and reward you for producing in an operationally efficient way. However, we’ve noticed that innovation is insurmountably difficult for most companies to consistently do well due to the accelerating complexity of their macro-environment. Their creative capacity simply can’t keep up with the pace of change.
The three chapters to come — Under-Certainty, Stochasm, and Control — will explain the flow from insight to action by detailing the fundamentals of Control Factor Theory. These fundamentals explain how to discover what you can and cannot control.
First, discover your landscape — where it is relative to your current position and what it might take to operate there — and inventory its contents. In the next stage (Optimality), you can begin to intentionally sacrifice or strategically select each option along your path to deliver superior results for your stakeholders. We call this landscape the macro-environment because it is much, much larger in scope than your plans within it. Nearly everything in the macro-environment is beyond your control; your primary objective is to outfit your plans with characteristics that grow stronger under stress when confronting forces in the landscape.
This concept that stress is beneficial to development and essential for survival is also called anti-fragility, popularized by essayist, analyst, and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb.1 It is present everywhere in nature and often in human affairs.
In a famous experiment conducted at Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona, researchers discovered that trees not exposed to wind would eventually collapse under their own weight. The trees needed the mechanical force of the wind to develop a reaction or “stress” wood, which is structurally different, gives the trees the strength to support themselves, and helps trees best use available natural resources.2,3 Similarly, baby chicks need the stress of fighting their way out of their shells to prosper as mature chickens.4
Do humans work the same way as other examples from nature?
Humans use anti-fragile concepts to become stronger, too. Athletes, for example, train different parts of their bodies for strength, form, endurance, energy consumption, speed, or mental aspects of their sport to condition themselves for uncertain competitive circumstances. We can also see anti-fragility at work through our interactions with others. The right degree of interpersonal friction provides a level of stress that improves the depth of relationships and outcomes. Teammates will even scrimmage or spar together to realistically simulate actual competition.
In our profession, providing insights to businesses, Discovery can also be called Strategic Intelligence. Think of your strategy as a by-product of the contents of your landscape, prevailing forces driving change, and the analysis of their impact on you and your stakeholders. The same strategy attempted in a different landscape is likely to fail, primarily due to your insufficient understanding of the uncontrollables your strategy will need to survive to succeed.
This operates similarly to the way athletes condition themselves differently. A powerlifter is built to lift a superhuman mass of weight in a specific range of motion. A cyclist, however, is built to cruise long distances and prevail in short sprints in a group setting where teammates draft wind and block opponents. The advantages of one are the disadvantages of the other.
You will see that each mindset — Missionary and Mercenary — are very different in handling two of the key features of the macro-environment. We call these two features under-certainty and stochasm, and the mindsets are never so far apart as the way in which they each cope with them.
The Mercenary, who prioritizes their own victory, does not empathize well with stakeholders beyond their immediate benefactor, the person rewarding them for performance. Mercenaries can ignore almost all of the uncontrollables the rest of us tend to worry about in the macro-environment to defeat the short list of obstacles standing in the way of success. The principal advantage of the Mercenary is using that short inventory to choose how to win during Optimality.
The Missionary, by contrast, is paralyzed thinking of who will win or lose because they have a higher calling they are always working toward. The longer list of uncontrollables is overwhelming to the Missionary because they pursue the ideal for all involved, even at the expense of maximizing their own success or satisfaction. The Missionary eventually must learn from the Mercenary how to ignore almost all of those uncontrollables to get anything done. We call these contingency control factors.
By complementing each other’s strengths and mitigating each other’s weaknesses, the Missionary and the Mercenary give themselves the best chance to survive the forces that threaten their shared mission. Discovery is about building the self-discipline required to grow stronger when confronting the uncontrollable.
Discovery is survival of the fittest. The unfit simply do not survive.
The landscape almost always vanquishes the unfit before they have a chance to align their plans with the factors governing their success. As you explore the next three chapters, remember to ask yourself: Do my teammates and I possess the characteristics needed to survive the macro-environment we’re operating in? And if not, what do we do about it?
References
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014).
Lenore Skinozy, “Metaphor Alert! Trees Need Wind to Grow Strong,” The Let Grow Project, June 3, 2021, https://letgrow.org/metaphor-alert-trees-need-wind-to-grow-strong/.
Travis Brownley, “The Necessity of Stress,” Marin Academy, December 12, 2013, https://travisma.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/the-necessity-of-stress/.
Tom Marlowe, “Why You Should Not Help a Chick Hatch,” The Homesteading Hippy, January 20, 2023, https://thehomesteadinghippy.com/helping-chick-hatch/.
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Interesting🤣🤣🤣