Leading with "AND" (Part 3 - We Live in a Gray World - replacing the word "OR")

"A gray area is a world that doesn't like gray areas. But the gray areas are where you find the complexity, it's where you find the humanity and it's where you find the truth." - Jon Ronson

Think about how complex the world has become. Over the past century, change has accelerated in every dimension imaginable. From inventions such as steam engines, electricity, the automobile, the radio, flying machines, jet engines, television, teletypes, fax machines, computing, wireless communications, internet, space exploration, e-commerce, social media, AR, AI, VR, we have exponentially changed the world we live in. It has become smaller not only based on our ability to fly to every corner of the planet but to be able to communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. That has made the biggest difference.

Think of the retail trade for instance. Trading has been done for centuries as a means of payment, exchanging of indigenous goods and commodities in a barter system. You had roving merchants serving the population door to door (remember the milkman? I do). They became exhausted and set up a stationary outlet so people, who have now congregated in villages could come to them and shop or barter. General stores started to carry a broader selection of goods as a convenience for their customers. Department stores took that to the nth degree offering a never-seen-before assortment of merchandise.

Specialty retail shops started to pick off each demographic one by one from the behemoth department stores when populations started to explode and those niches became large enough to sustain a business model based on their tastes and needs. The era of the shopping mall coincided with these shifts (moving from cities to suburbs) and accommodated all these new shops. 

Then came the internet and e-commerce. It was surprisingly slow to take off in certain countries, which was ironic since people had been shopping by catalog since the early 1900s (including Sears, Gimbels, etc.). Once Amazon leaned into the strategy starting with books and then branching out into becoming the world’s largest general store, e-commerce has never been the same.

I am a big believer in brick-and-mortar retail as people like the sociability of shopping and enjoy the experience of stores, staff, and displays when done right. Amidst the recent pandemic, it has changed e-commerce forever. Although stores will still be where the majority of shopping happens (80-85% pre-pandemic), the pandemic has accelerated the growth of e-commerce which will become approximately 25-30% of all purchases when the dust settles.

There will be other disruptions, inventions, and technologies that businesses and entrepreneurs will have to navigate and flex their organizations around. The future of the retail industry, as an example, has never been as cloudy as it is. There is no one formula or playbook that can be deployed to manage forward. Not only are we in a gray zone, but it is also several shades of gray that keep morphing daily.

So what is needed to navigate through the stress of uncertainty and gray? Complex problem-solving techniques and processes. The boardrooms and conference rooms (virtual or not) will require participants to listen to each other like never before. It will require the participants to be comprised of diverse backgrounds, experiences, personalities, ethnicities. There will not be one ready-made solution but most likely an amalgam of ideas coalesced into a large brainstorm. 

And, in those brainstorming sessions, the word ‘OR’ needs to be put out to pasture. Because it is not about that any longer. It’s about taking multiple ideas from various diverse points of view and melding them together into one coherent and comprehensive set of solutions. 

That is where the notion of and leading with ‘AND’ comes in. Seemingly competing ideas do not necessarily have to create a binary choice. When we see things as ‘EITHER/OR’, we are limiting ourselves to a single side. When we see things as ‘AND’ we are seeing multiple layers of solutions to a particular problem. The complexity of issues organizations face today demands an equally complex set of solutions that are thought through, stratified, and coalesced amongst the myriad of ideas that are put forward.

Political intervention also creates false choices. As does bureaucratic intervention. Time pressures due to deadlines and the ever-changing landscape and heightened competition can lead to bad and false choices. If we look hard enough at it, the solutions are rarely cases of ‘EITHER/OR’ – only ‘AND’.

Lloyd A. Perlmutter is Founder/President of Veritas Advisory, LLC and has been leading and advising organizations for over 35 years. Call 248-794-9673 to have a meaningful and powerful conversation.