Telling it like it is

In the BBC’s The Life Scientific professor and physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, quizzes scientists about their backgrounds and about what spurred them on to success, often in the face of ostensibly insuperable odds.  It would have been very easy for these to be fairly anodyne conversations, but Al-Khalili doesn’t duck the difficult issues, as when he asks Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell what it felt like to miss out on the Nobel Prize many of her colleagues thought she deserved: “It wasn’t fair was it really?” he asks.  “No,” the eminent astronomer replies, “but then the world's not fair and it's how you cope with the world's unfairnesses that count.”

We’re currently in the midst of reviewing the thought leadership published by consulting firms in the last six months (we rate its quality on a regular basis) and I was struck by the honesty of this exchange in contrast to the relentless optimism we encounter in our review.

In the parallel thought leadership universe, every project is implemented, every new market is successfully entered, every threat countered.  Managers are all freshly-laundered and alert; meetings buzz with productivity; offices are gleaming.  Challenges exist, but only to be overcome.  Business is a tidy, rational activity where the unpredictable only happens in order to demonstrate how good we are at coping with uncertainty.  Unfairnesses?  Those aren’t things we meet in the real world, are they?

One of the many things this pristine world lacks is learning because, as Dame Jocelyn points out, that’s what we get from adversity.  The thought leadership universe has no friction, so nothing ever sticks.

So what might the alternative look like?  Business leaders talk candidly about what frustrates them and why!  Strategy directors admit they have no clue about what’s going to happen next!  The possibilities are endless – and never going to happen.  Why?  Because no one will want to go first.  Talking about problems is fine if everyone is doing it (look at the growth of misery memoirs).  It’s a classic case of the individual incentive trumping the collective good: the person who goes first will stand to look stupid if no one else follows suit, even if everyone would gain from collective change.

Back to the parallel universe, I suppose...