There is no doubt that we are living in unprecedented times across the globe. I am writing this article under a mandatory “shelter at home” order from Wake County, North Carolina. My wife and I spun up home school for our children last weekend and we are constantly checking in with my parents 3 hours away to make sure they are okay. It is very disheartening and disturbing to hear of the challenges facing large cities across the world right now. We have been active in our community, doing whatever we can to help out. 

We are fortunate enough at Stone Door Group to have a robust business, delivering critical DevOps solutions to many Fortune 500 companies working hard to keep the economic lights on. It is times like this that we not only look for ways to help our customers through difficult circumstances, but we also look inward to ways we can be better ourselves.  If there is any positive that could come out of this terrible pandemic, it is that we should all be willing to challenge previous assumptions about anything and give ourselves permission to rethink everything. 

COVID-19 has forced us to think differently about everything in our business. It is affirming and accelerating some strategic initiatives while forcing us to drastically alter others. Somewhere in the mess of all of this, we are finding fresh innovation. We are thinking about old problems in new ways we had not previously considered. 

The following are a few lessons we have been learning in the midst of this crisis, trying to find a light at the end of the tunnel, a beacon, or whatever idiom you want to use that gives some hope that we’ll make it through...which we will.

Give Yourself Permission to be Wrong About Everything

Normal events in a normal life are still asymmetric and don’t always correlate. In order to make sense of this world, our brains work very hard to synthesize massive amounts of information into narratives. Narratives from the dawn of time have been used as a way to make sense of history. The issue here is that every one of us has a certain degree of cognitive bias leading to what Nicholas Taleb calls the “Narrative Fallacy”, or:

“The backward-looking mental tripwire that causes us to attribute a linear and discernible cause-and-effect chain to our knowledge of the past...there is a deep biological basis to the problem: we are inundated with so much sensory information... we must put things in order so we can process the world around us. It’s implicit in how we understand the world.”

To put it more simply, what we thought we understood about how things happened in our business, may not actually be how they happened. As a matter of fact, there is a possibility that we may be building our current assumptions about value based on a deeply biased and flawed understanding of what made us successful to this point. 

The current pandemic is challenging everything we know and understand, with information coming in at a frenetic asymmetric pace. Core systems on how to deliver value are getting disrupted: remote working, medicine, food delivery, and modification of time tested regulations to name a few. Even if you have an accurate narrative about what has made your business successful, it doesn’t guarantee you will be successful coming out of this. 

What to do? Practice the ancient art of skepticism. This word has a bad connotation in today’s upbeat world, but the original Greek “skepsis” simply means “investigation.” According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, “At its core, ancient skepticism is a way of life devoted to inquiry. Also, it is as much concerned with belief as with knowledge. As long as knowledge has not been attained, the skeptics aim not to affirm anything.”

A more practical use for today is to give yourself permission to be wrong about everything you consider valuable in your business. Suspend all judgement on why you think you are successful unless there is empirical evidence. Even traditional empirical evidence like topline revenue, profit, and growth should also be suspended. Who knows if customers will still buy the same way from you after this? 

Ask Why You do...Everything

In the line of skeptic thinking, the next step is inquiry. Simply put, inquiry is the relentless pursuit of answering the “why” question. From my experience, very few people can answer more than two layers deep why they do anything, whether it is a product or service to why they eat the same food for lunch on Wednesdays. Is this because we are all ignorant? No, it is because existing systems, rules, protocols, and etiquette are already in place that make it easy to both deliver and consume value. However, we are in a once and a lifetime event where the very fabric of value delivery and consumption is under disruption. These systems will come back different and more efficient after this, will your business?  

The following is a brief and general example of asking the why question.

Why do we make widgets? 
We make them because our customers find them convenient. 

Why do they find them convenient? 
Because our widget enables them to do something in 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. 

Why is it important for a customer to do it in 2 minutes?
Because this is something they HAVE TO DO and everyone’s time is valuable.

After 3 layers, we are at the first existential challenge...what if customers no longer have to do this because COVID-19 changed the rules and those rules become permanent. 

Come Up with Every Reason Why You will Fail

It is always easy to come up with an idea and a reason why it will be successful. The world is never short of good ideas. The chasm between ideas and execution of ideas is wide. Even for those who successfully execute an idea, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is the right idea. The world is full of very passionate people spending time and money on well thought out ideas. The problem is that they may simply be the wrong ideas. 

Along with the “Narrative Fallacy”, humans are also on a spectrum of a broad set of biases. While this is a fairly well covered topic, I will bring up the one I see most prevalent in our own business, confirmation bias, or the idea that when people want something to be true, they will only solicit feedback and inputs that will confirm their belief that it is true. Some call this wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking is the main driver of failure in most businesses in normal times. Add our current economic disruption coupled with lack of good data, and wishful thinking will only accelerate the demise of a business.

Going through the exercise of knowing why you will fail may be the fastest path to innovation for two reasons. The first is that this exercise will quickly eliminate confirmation bias and make you aware of your downside risk. It will then force you to innovate a solution into your product that inherently mitigates that risk. That solution you innovate is exactly what your customer wants, it gives them the reason to buy your product by eliminating the reason why not to buy your product. 

Conclusion

The world economy is in uncharted waters. We don’t have data on what’s happening and we don’t know where we will land. We are not helpless, however as leaders and innovators, we can take this terrible time to give ourselves permission to be wrong about everything, ask why we do anything, and get sober on why we could fail. At Stone Door Group, we take the long view and are perpetually bullish...on everything. We look forward to all the great things humanity will achieve as a result of our shared misery of COVID-19.

About the Author

Darren Hoch is a Managing Partner for Stone Door Group, an IBM and Red Hat Apex partner, that specializes in enterprise DevOps cloud engineering solutions. Stone Door Group helps enterprises of all sizes with their digital transformation initiatives. To talk to Darren and learn more how Stone Door Group can help, drop us a line at: letsdothis@stonedoorgroup.com.