This is certainly true of the business environment that you are going to have to earn your living in. It changes constantly never repeating itself in quite the same way. This makes life interesting but difficult. Just because a certain choice turned out well on one occasion does not mean that you can always use the same response in the future. One of the most difficult lessons of business life is that in order to stand still you have to change and develop.
Because Science tells us that there is a fundamental principle of uncertainty which underlies the physical reality within which we conduct our business activities. This idea, known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that we can never have certainty, the more we try to pin down reality the more it eludes us. If we carry out more and more precise experiments then we should not expect to achieve the same outcomes every time, even if we act in exactly the same manner. We must resign ourselves to partial truth and ambiguity when dealing with reality.
You have experienced this uncertainty principle in your own lives. When you have to take a decision you can focus on the facts of a situation, or you can give yourself over to the 'feel' of it. Focusing on the facts costs you perspective, or knowledge of the whole. Gaining perspective distances you from the details of the situation. You can never be detached and involved at the same time. In the same way it is difficult to focus on one clear and distinct idea (to be analytic) and to entertain a vague train of thought or pattern of loose associations (to be poetic). In organisations we often find that we must choose between imposing rigid rules and tight structure, or allowing things to unfold creatively with a sense of self-organisation. Tight structure gives us control but loses us the benefits of innovation. A marketing executive might gain a hard and fast knowledge of exact sales figures in the market at a given moment, but perhaps at the cost of understanding the overall drift of factors affecting the market demand.
This fundamental uncertainly means learning is hard in a business environment. If you experiment you change the market and if you repeat the experiment you will get very different results. Let me give you an example. If you produce a new and original type of snack food and decide to test market it in a limited area of the country. It may be extremely successful within that area so you decide to market it nationally in exactly the same way. The market has now changed because at the first limited launch none of your competitors was expecting the new product. When you come to launch nationally they will have had time to produce rival products which make use of the knowledge they gained about your product from your test launch. Instead of a unique selling proposition without competitors you are now selling into a highly competitive market. The very fact you test launched the product resulted in a change in the market place which made that market place a much more hostile and aggressive place.
It is no use attempting to respond in business like one of Pavlov's dogs, salivating when the bells rings whether or not food is offered. A reflex action is not sufficient to enable you to survive in an environment which adapts and conspires against you. Certainly the reflex action has survival value for many species, but in business operatives the picture changes. If you are to be successful you will have to be exploratory and you will be constantly running into new situations. You will be confronted with uncertainty and you will have to learn to deal with it. A traditional human way of dealing with uncertainty is to resort to superstitions. Soldiers often jealously guard a certain item of clothing or equipment that is closely associated with past experience of escape from danger in order to bring luck in the future. But a more useful pattern of behaviour would be to lessen the doubt by making the future known to us. What we really need is some system of prophecy or divination. These systems can take many forms, they can be known as planning, strategy, forecasting, accounting, tactics or decision analysis but they all deal with trying to make the future less uncertain.
If we look at some of the older techniques which have been employed to reduce uncertainty we often find that some of the oddest systems actually work, but not always in the way the users expect.
An American anthropologist, rejoicing in the name of Omar Khayyam Moore, investigated the divination technique used by the Indians of Labrador. These native Americans are hunters and failure to find food means hunger and possible death, so when meat is short they consult an oracle to determine in which direction they should hunt. They hold the shoulder bone of a caribou over hot coals and the cracks and spots caused by the heat are then interpreted like a map. The directions indicated by this oracle are random, but the system continued to be used, because it worked! Why do you think this is?
If the Indians did not use the bone oracle they would return to where they had last hunted with success, or where the cover was good or water plentiful. This could lead to overhunting of certain areas, but the use of the oracle meant that their forays were randomised, the regular pattern was broken up and they made better and more balanced use of the land so in the end they were more successful. Some magic works!
As Moore commented "Some practices which have been classified as magic may well be directly efficacious as techniques for attaining the ends envisaged by their practitioners".
In business we survive by controlling our environment, and control is made possible by information. So lack of information quickly breeds insecurity and a situation in which any information is regarded as better than none. An elegant experiment involving white rats in a maze showed this clearly. This inevitable maze, leading to food in one of two boxes, was modified so that on one path the rat was provided with information about whether there would be food at the end or not. The chances of food being in either box were even, but after some days of training, all the rats developed a distinct preference for the side where they obtained advance information, even though the food rewards were no greater.
Humans show the same sort of preference for knowledge about an uncertain unavoidable outcome. Time and again we show that, regardless of the nature of the news and in spite of the fact that we get no advantage from it other than learning what was going to happen in any case, we would prefer to know and thereby reduce our insecurity. This anxiety about the future can be so great that bad news is preferable to an absence of information, it may even come as a relief, because it frees us to adjust to a situation. Studies on prisoners have shown that those with the possibility of parole are under considerably greater strain than those who are reconciled to the fact that they have a life sentence to serve.
Yet a lot of our success as a species comes about because we do not demand a state of complete certainty, we have an ability to cope with environmental variation and a tendency to seek out new sources of stimulation. The popularity of risky pastimes such as mountaineering and motor racing is evidence of a need for a certain amount of uncertainty and risk, a certain amount of adrenaline in the system. But this can become too high and in threatening situations anxiety is very intense and there is a strong desire for both information and some means of control. Any activity that involves some feeling of participation in the turn of events is welcome and this need to know what is in store helps to account for the tremendous popularity of systems of divination, prophecy and decision making.
- (divination by cloud shapes)
- (in which a bird is allowed to peck grains of corn from letters of the alphabet)
- (divination by means of chance meetings with animals)
- (divination by means of the patterns of smoke rising from a fire)
- (the study of objects placed in the fire)
- (finding significance in onion sprouts)
- (telling the future from the stamping of horses hooves)
- (telling the future from the patterns of fingernails in sunlight)
- (using the sounds made by slapping rose petals against the hand)
- (a system of divination using cheese)
I do not propose to teach you how to use these ancient systems but I do intend to offer you an methodology which will help fulfil this need to obtain information and thus be able to exercise some measure of control.
An Objective to be met and a choice of means of reaching that objective.
Without both an objective and a choice of means there is no problem because there is no means of changing the outcome. In those circumstances cromniomancy is just as effective at relieving anxiety as any other technique.
To understand your objective it is important to state your problem in clear unambiguous terms. If your problem is choosing what shoes to wear than you must decide what objective you wish to meet. Is it
1. To keep your feet dry?
2. To impress a potential employer at an interview?
3. To protect your feet from rough ground or dropped tools?
4. To aid your running prowess?
Etc.
Having clarified your objective the next step is to list all the possible choices. What shoes do you have in your wardrobe? If you only have one pair of shoes you do not have a problem. Once you have listed all the alternatives the solution of the problem consists of evaluating the alternatives in order to choose the one which best satisfies your objective.
This is a easy sequence to see but can involve quite a lot of detailed work to carry out. The list of alternatives may be long, the choice may not be clear cut but the need for information and a systematic approach to the task is always going to be important. Over the next few weeks we will look at methods and techniques of deriving and using information.
A useful supersititous practise to relieve anxiety about the inevitable exams is to attend the all tutorials and learn to carry out the strange practices recommended by the tutors. Who knows perhaps this ritual may be another form of magic which works in achieving exam survival!
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