How's your corporate mental agility?

Say you’re involved in strategic decision-making. You may be wondering, then, how best to make plans in a world that's changing so fast and unpredictably. The last 12 months have shown that carefully analysed trends are not safe predictors. Nor, on the other hand is a pure gut feeling.

What's needed now, equal to analytical brain power or intuition, is something I’ll refer to as corporate mental agility - a cluster of thinking capabilities and processes.

Capabilities like anticipating the unexpected (such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swans) or paying attention to weak signals that don’t fit our mental models. 

Processes that lead from the construction of alternative futures into a rich imagining of how best to adapt and thrive in them. Undertaken by a group of diverse members to foster serendipity – that magical creative productivity when people of different brain preferences, professional disciplines, and life experience come together to address key questions. 

Combined, these capabilities and processes raise the odds of overcoming the limiting unconscious biases we all suffer from, regardless of intelligence or creative talent. By the way, if you don’t think you have any biases, try Googling “the Invisible Gorilla” for some fun humbling. 

What I’m talking about is Scenario Planning. But the kind I’m describing is not really planning at all. It’s more about the opening of minds - creatively generating, and then lightly holding, a range of potential eventualities. Quite anathema to designing and becoming attached to “worst” and “best case” scenarios.  

Nor is it for the faint-hearted. It takes an appetite and willingness to have one’s mind stretched. Once in the process it requires significant humility and considerable personal resilience to allow one’s assumptions to be challenged. Not to mention playfulness to entertain the fantastical, and fortitude to resist to endure discomfort when considering low probability scenarios that could have an inordinate and deeply unpleasant impact. 

In fact, avoidance is a real danger. Some years back the WHO made clear the inevitability of a global pandemic at some point in the not-too-distant future. A case of “when” not “if”. Yet governments across the world chose not to prepare. Why? Because the enormity of the task was so unthinkable. It was easier to deny it might happen sooner rather than later. Indeed, both the Trump and Johnson administrations disbanded their pandemic teams shortly after taking office. The rest is history – well actually, our present.

So, it matters. It matters that, when we are in relatively calm waters, we spend regular time with colleagues considering what we might do should storms hit. Because when they do, the collective amygdala is triggered and higher-level thinking shuts down. Management teams are not immune – they’re only human after all. Fight/flight reactions can lead to rash decisions whose consequences haven’t been thought through. Or key decisions can be greatly delayed while the freeze response thaws. We’ve seen variations of each in some country’s responses to Covid. 

Scenario planning pioneers, Shell, responded to the oil price crash of the 70s quite differently to their spooked competition. By investing rather than retrenching, they were propelled into the top league once prices recovered. They've remained there since. Proof that a regular practice of scenario planning pays off.  The potential corporate rewards are high. 

To learn more, why not join my upcoming webinar “Scenario Planning: how to do it”. Put 10am on the 31st March in your diary. The registration link is in the comments below or go to calendar on the-innovation-network website. Hope to see you there!