I Never Thought Of It That Way

The wonderful book?I Never Thought Of It That Way?reminds us of the Scottish word ‘ken’, mostly only used now in the phrase ‘beyond your ken'.

When Scottish sailors first talked about their “ken” in the 1500s, they were talking about how far they could see to the horizon out on the water. Then writers began to use “ken” to refer first to the range of your vision—at sea or not—and then, to the range of your knowledge or understanding. To what your?mind?can see, and not just your eyes. “One’s range of knowledge or sight,” goes the dictionary definition of ken. If something is “beyond my ken,” it’s beyond my understanding. I don’t see it, so I can’t know it. It’s beyond my horizon. It’s beyond me.

As Monica Guzman writes

What I love about this word is that it draws our knowledge with obvious bounds and limits. It’s finite. Proximate. Something we can reach the end of. “Ken” reminds us of something important: you can’t?know?what you aren’t close to. Look beyond your ken, and you won’t see anything clearly. Sometimes you won’t see certain things at all.?

One of the IDEA mottoes: ‘without a plan, 10 can see no further than one'.’ It refers to the same challenge - how do you see further (into the future, into a challenge) when you rely only on who can see furthest? Here, we’re not talking about simple eyesight, but noticing, insight, understanding. As soon as you link this concept of ‘ken’, the idea of seeing beyond one person’s knowledge becomes your focus.

That’s why teams are so important. Great teams rely on vulnerability, on honesty, for that reason. There should be honesty in the individual (‘there are things I don’t know’) communicated to others in the team, who may well have different perspectives and areas of expertise, but who also have limits in their understanding.

That is where Asymmetric Learning starts: you could rely on the limits of your team’s expertise. The alternative is you and they accept not just their limits but that there?are things worth knowing beyond. They make predictions based on what they ‘know’, or develop a plan to explore. It’s been said many ways, Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknowns’ perhaps the most famous. This leaves you with a choice: extend the limit of your existing process, with greater experts, bigger teams, who work with each other better; or, accept that there is a limit.?

This is a real and present problem for pharma, an industry that relies on super-educated and committed individuals. Most companies have codified a process that prefers teams to predict, to pick numbers, to make informed guesses,?within their ken. Despite the obvious statistical errors baked into PTS and PRS calculations, the problem isn’t in the spreadsheets that are run, that end up corrupting the eNPV - it is with the ones that?aren’t?run, the target opportunities acknowledged as possible, but uncertain. Our portfolios reward teams’ confidence, and positive numbers. Negative numbers don’t get moved forward. So, guess where teams are most confident: within their comfort zone, or outside? Exploration is, by definition, into the zone beyond your team’s ken. So it attracts low probabilities - rarely zeroes, as that would be falsifiable, but low enough to kill a project that isn’t safe.

This is a stark choice for pharma. Continue to rely on your teams’ internal consensus, knowing that your process forces them to play safe. Or, change the process to explore the world beyond that evident limit.?‘Safe’ isn’t working: the management-consultancy derived process is set up to reward certainty, but instead?incentivises false confidence. True confidence is to approach exploration with a plan.