Is it OK to want more?

Failure? What’s that?

As a strategist, I meet many clients who are?broadly, not specifically,?failure averse. It makes sense for some: hospitals don’t want unanticipated deaths; school systems don’t want suicides; builders of road tunnels don’t want collapses.

But, it’s when this aversion to failure infects?everything?an organisation does, that we have problems.

This two-minute video by NBA basketballer Giannis Antetokounmpo has rightly gone viral this past week. His team, the Milwaukee Bucks have exited the playoffs (the equivalent of season finals) and his challenge of a lazy journalistic question about failure is simply brilliant.

A similar ‘there is no such thing as failure’ mindset, albeit with somewhat greater consequences than a basketball game, was displayed by Space-X this week too. Elon Musk’s vision to extend the human species beyond our planetary boundary requires that we can re-use heavy space vehicles, and for the past 17 years,?he has embarked on successive tests for this.

The purpose of his latest ‘superheavy’ test was to validate how two connected vehicles — the booster, and the Starship upper stage — operate together. Every launch helps improve future builds, and moves closer to success and eventual reliability.

You possibly know that just like the Milwaukee Bucks's journey through the playoffs, Space-X’s flight also ended prematurely: in their case, at four minutes. But in the words of in the words of a Space X engineer: “The further we fly, the more data we can collect”.

Question: How do you set up successive tests for a new idea so that you maximise potential and minimise risk?

What will emerge?

Think about the way a cloud forms and moves, or how moss or mould spreads. It’s as unpredictable as the growth of an ant colony, or birds flocking. Or, in the human world the sprawl of a city, the hum of the stockmarket, or the nodes of the internet.

All are examples of?emergence: the characteristics of a whole that are not present in the individual parts.

I spend my entire life running ‘emergent processes’. In literally every strategy workshop or retreat, my job is to ensure that a-ha moments and convergent opinions emerge. None of these are possible within a single individual, but only within a group. Sometimes these are predictable, more often not.

ChatGPT is now well known to many of you reading, but what is less well known is that it is driving many thousands of emergent phenomena. The larger the scale of the language model on which it’s built, the better its ability to do things that weren’t possible even a year ago:

• Automatically transforming sentences into gender-inclusive forms.
• Generating creative content using novel questions

And, of course, I had to ask ChatGPT what?it?‘thought’ could be a potential emergent phenomenon that it contributes to:

• “AI language models could be used to generate convincing but false information or to manipulate public opinion”.

Hmm.

So, imagine reading a piece of writing where every sentence was converted to be gender-neutral (low concern), where you didn’t know if a human had generated the ideas within it (moderate concern), and where the veracity of the information was unclear to you (high concern).

This is just a small glimmer of what will emerge in our future, and will play out in our organisational and business lives. In fact, it already is, without our ability to predict the emergent properties.

Question: What are you comfortable not being able to predict??

Satisfied?

As regular readers will know, I spent a week on safari in Kenya last month and saw many apex predators eat their meals. I watched a cheetah rip apart a dik-dik (look them up) and a pride of lions (including four tiny cubs) systematically devour an entire buffalo.

But, after they eat, they are sated. For lions, this means several days of luxuriating, full bellies signalling ‘enough, until the cycle begins again.

I ruminated on our societal hunger for ‘more’ and our difficulty in accepting ‘enough’ and it made me think of a German client I had years ago. I asked her how she felt about our project’s progress.

“It is satisfactory”, she replied, without a smile.

I grew panicked, as I was accustomed to more effusive responses, so I probed further. “What could we do differently? Are there particular areas you’d like us to focus on?”

This time she responded more sharply, “I said, “I am satisfied”. There is no need for more from you”.

I went home and reported this to my wife, Kate, who happens to speak fluent German. She explained that “Ich bin zufrieden” literally?translates?as “I am satisfied” but it actually?means?“I am happy”. Its deeper expression is recognizing the importance of a source of pleasure — more similar to the word ‘sated’ in English: the feeling that nothing more can be added.

All of this caused me to think that, in English-language business and organisational life at least, we need a better vocabulary for ‘enough’, or ‘sufficiency’, so that we pull back from an often unthinking addiction to ‘more’ and ‘better’.

Question: In your organisation, what is the right balance of satisfaction and striving?

As always, let me know you’ve enjoyed reading by clicking the ‘Like’. I’m now back in Australia, working on numerous societally beneficial strategy projects until my next sojourn to explore the bigger world.

Do notice what passes for failure in the world around you, and I look forward to being with you again next Friday.

Andrew