Let's 'act ourselves into new thinking' instead of 'thinking ourselves into new action'

Now more than ever, it’s a good time to learn how to embrace imperfection. Because, in my lifetime, I can think of no worse time than the present to be a control freak as the Covid-19 risk remains uncontrollable, unfamiliar and involuntary – and we don’t know when this ends.

Still, embracing the uncertain isn’t easy for a lot of people. If there’s one thing that ambitious individuals and institutions crave, it’s control, the imposition of order over chaos.

But today, companies like mine—and executives like me—have been involuntarily thrust into improvisation mode, and that may actually have some advantages.

Even before Covid-19, I was becoming increasingly skeptical of the quest for perfection. The quest for perfection, especially in hyper-competitive global markets, is just too expensive to pursue—figuratively and literally. Opportunity cost tradeoffs lurk in the space between “really good” and “perfect.” And though I would sometimes prefer perfection, it often takes five times as long, and is five times as costly, as “really good.”

I believe that action unleashes new thinking at faster and more successful rates than new thinking spurs action. The software industry is noted for its adherence to this principle. Their “minimum viable product” mantra holds that getting a good enough product into the market, and either refining it in real time or replacing it with the 2.0 version relatively quickly, beats waiting … and waiting … and waiting to release a product only when that product is exactly right. Because it is often within that span of what used to be years and is now months and sometimes even weeks that a competitor can swoop in and claim the territory.

To that end, I encourage the 400-plus members of the Insights team I lead at PepsiCo to work with colleagues across the company to test and optimize new products and ideas and embrace the imperfect. Our aim is to identify the right path with help from our advanced digital insights tools, take a few cautious baby steps forward, then, if the path appears safe, burst into a sprint. By placing more emphasis on acting than brooding, we discover opportunities and risks faster—and can both chase and mitigate them faster.

This is not intuitive behavior in many large organizations, which, upon achieving success, can become risk averse. Accordingly, in Fortune 500 companies, where the leveraging of scale and speed are key drivers of success, it seems to me there are two ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty.

One path is to convince colleagues to embrace incremental change. Before attempting to change the world, we often make changes in one small corner of the world. We establish a proof-of-concept precedent, even if it's tiny, then scale rapidly. “If we made it work in Belgium, perhaps we can make it work in Germany too?” the members of my team say to their business partners across PepsiCo. “And if it works in Germany, then it might work in Russia; and if it works in all three, let’s do it globally.” We’re increasingly digitizing and globalizing insights at PepsiCo to learn about consumer needs or occasions across the world so we can innovate quickly and maintain an advantage over niche players.

Path two is more dramatic, but can pay big dividends. Sometimes the best way to drive innovation is by jamming a crowbar into the spokes of a spinning wheel, which abruptly forces yourself, and the larger organization, into new thinking. It’s jolting, but it can be tremendously effective, as we learned when we designed and rolled out “Ada,” our centralized digital insights platform that we’re building inside PepsiCo. Ada sources, sorts, connects and, most importantly, leverages millions of consumer insights generated from all over the world.

Ada was my team’s crowbar in the spokes.

Most corporate insights functions want 100 percent control over their insights-gathering processes, and rely heavily on external agencies with predictable yet often outdated tools. We reckoned that by foregoing a bit of control, and crafting a few strong partnerships, we would gain more knowledge in the long run. Accordingly, we designed Ada in partnership with several pioneering technology companies we work with (Zappi is one of them, which was just chosen as the most innovative research tech supplier in the 2020 GRIT report). We’ve also moved light years beyond the traditional “client-vendor relationship.” We co-develop, and put our insights managers firmly in the driver’s seat to craft and analyze the research versus relying primarily on research agencies. By breaking the old model, we’re acting ourselves into new thinking. We’re discovering there are broad applications for this new technology—ones we never would have considered if we refused to stray from the risk-free path. And hence even though Ada was only born exactly two years ago this month, we are already rolling out V3.