Doubts and certainties

“If you insist on beginning only with certainties, you shall end in doubts,” wrote Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, “but if you will be content to begin with doubts you shall end up in certainties.”

It is advice, we feel, consulting firms would do well to listen to.

In not a few consulting firms, the approach to business planning starts and stops with going over what they already know. This is the equivalent of my 13-year-old son whose recent biology revision consisted of looking down the list of topics and thinking about what he could remember (he was quite puzzled when I suggested that he might read through his text book to see what he’d forgotten).Call me a pedant – my son certainly did – but I can’t quite grasp the value of an exercise in strategic planning which ends up repeating what everyone already knew. Much better, as Bacon suggests, to start off with all the things you don’t know or can’t be certain of, and see where that takes you.

Looking across the industry at the moment, I reckon you could divide firms up into two clear groups.

• Those that start with certainties: Firms in this category can be identified by phrases along the lines of: “We don’t need to survey our clients because we’re talking to them all of the time” (read that carefully – no actual listening is involved); “Most of our competitor intelligence comes from new recruits” (sorry – but most tell you what they think you want to hear); and – a personal favourite – “We work in this industry so we understand it” (professional footballers may play the game brilliantly, but it doesn’t mean they’re the best people to analyse it intelligently).
• Those that start with doubts: You know you’re talking to a firm in this group when you hear things like: “I’m not sure I trust what our client feedback programme is telling us” or “We really have no idea what’s going to happen in the next 12 months”.  These are the firms which will, I suspect, do better in the long-term precisely because they’re willing to challenge long-cherished assumptions and to debate issues based on data rather than the gut-feel accumulated over time.

I know who I’ll be putting my money on.