Even the most intelligent of us can be guilty of committing a stupid, yet costly, ‘no brainer’. Leslie Hargreaves explores the concept of ‘no brainers’ and how organisations can mitigate their associated risks, which can all too often lead to disaster.

Imagine you were sitting in a planning meeting in the offices of the up-market publishers Dorling Kindersley in the late ’90s. Here came a new opportunity. The Star Wars franchise was to be revived and you had the contract to publish a tie-in book to coincide with the block-busting ‘Episode 1’. The book will be a beauty. The kids will love it. Their parents – who saw the original trilogy way back when – will love it. It’s a no brainer. How many can we print?

The answer was 13 million. But the book tanked and struggled to sell three million. The CEO was sacked. The company went bust and was sold. These were not stupid people, but something important eluded them at that time: they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns.  That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know,” said the former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, back in February 2002 during a Department of Defence news briefing. Whatever you think of Rumsfeld, he had a point – a point graphically described by the Johari Window, a thinking device that has been around for about 50 years (see diagram 1 below).

DIAGRAM 1: The Johari Window 

	Predicate
Subject	...we know	... we don't  know
... we know	A Things we know we know	B Things we know we don't know
... we don't know	C Things we don't know we know	D Things we don't know we don't know

Innumerable managers will have had this matrix waved in front of them during training courses and development workshops. But how many of them have gone on to use this neat epistemological schematic in managing their businesses?

The purpose of contemplating the Johari window is to enlarge Box A – the region of clarity – thereby reducing the other boxes. That way can we mitigate the risk of committing a ‘no brainer’ that leads to disaster.

But how do we know we know what we know, and how on earth can we get a handle on what we don’t know we don’t know? These questions may sound like the convolutions of an arcane word game but they have real consequences. Although hubris, fear and the adrenalin rush of ambition all conspire at different times to keep our knowledge of ourselves and our business environment limited, we are best advised to give them a try. Certainty will never be certain, but there are strategies that ER Consultants believes organisations can usefully adopt.

Reducing Box B (Things we know we don’t know) – Dig, dig, dig!
Not surprisingly, businesses focus great attention on reducing Box B – on gaining knowledge about the things they know they don’t know. Consultants and technical experts are always on hand to provide research and analytical techniques for every purpose. The resulting work is a never-ending exercise because, as items get shifted into Box A – the Known Knowns – the very fact of doing the research throws up new things we now realize we don’t know. But this continual inquiry is, of course, a good thing to do – as long as you are careful about what you ask.

Recently, fast food companies were encouraged to serve healthier food. Some big chains brought salads and fruit into their menus to complement the meat, carbohydrate, fat and extra carbohydrate standards. It didn’t take long for customers’ real preferences to emerge, however, and most of the salad ended up in the composting bin. As a spokesperson for the Wendy’s fast food chain told the New York Times: “We listened to consumers who said they wanted to eat fresh fruit, but apparently they lied.”

The key to reducing Box B is being able to ask the right questions before applying the techniques that will answer them. As ER Consultants is in the organisational change business, we often hear these sorts of questions:

• Our people are good, but we want to take a new business direction: what skills do they need to succeed?  ER Consultants response: conduct a strategically led definition of future competencies against which to evaluate current and future people.
• The organisation has served us well up to now, but the new strategy requires greater flexibility: what shape should our organisation take? ER Consultants response: model your organisation against the processes needed to satisfy customers and stakeholders of the future.  Look at the options and evaluate their likely impact.
• We’ve managed our business successfully using these metrics, but recently we’ve made an acquisition: what performance measures do we need going forward?

ER Consultants response: analyse your new, enlarged business aspirations and how these require revised contributions from each business area.

Doing some of this hard thinking about basic questions avoids the ‘no brainer’ in two respects. First, you know what you need to ask of yourselves, your people and your business. Second, you can stop asking all those questions that some people in your organisation have built into a cottage industry of uninformative box-ticking.  And that will feel good.

Reducing Box C (Things we don’t know we know) - Release the hidden treasure!
We all know that, while Wendy’s burgers were busy introducing and then removing healthy meals from its menu, there was someone at the back of the room thinking ‘But our customers want burgers – they don’t want this rabbit food!’ Perhaps he or she didn’t speak up.

Your organisation is full of problem-solvers, solutions builders and mature risk-appraisers with hundreds, if not thousands, of years of combined knowledge of the ways of the world. So why does this knowledge not always make itself apparent in the workplace? More bluntly, why do people seem willing to conduct their working life with a ‘no brainer’ mentality?

The answer seems to be that you can subject most business and managerial activities to a form of 80:20 pareto analysis; 80% of the task at hand can be carried out competently by the people available to do it, but they will achieve only 20% of what is required if they don’t receive the right kind of leadership.

The style of leadership that releases this knowledge and energy, and applies the leverage required, concentrates on three things:

• Giving people a purpose (a goal or mission);
• Setting out a conceptual framework into which people can slot their knowledge and expertise (a plan, a vision);
• Engaging them in the process of doing so (participation, communication, encouragement).

Our experience has shown that when these conditions are in place, people tend to bring their knowledge and skills to the table, knowing how they contribute to the aims of the enterprise. The alternative is that they leave all this back home.

This is the essence of Transformational Leadership – which is simply a smarter way of getting people to work for you than treating them as if they genuinely didn’t have a brain. Consider your current leadership style and the development programmes that support them. Do they emphasise the same old ‘decide and tell’ approach that few of us these days respect? Or something more visionary and empowering that releases energy? If the former, change the programmes.

Reducing Box D (Things we don’t know we don’t know) – Shift the paradigm
A few years ago, a very successful CEO of a major British company was presented with a takeover bid and had to decide what to recommend to the board. This man possessed a powerful intellect and vast experience. He had a formidable team around him, including – as his director of strategy – one of the most able minds you would hope to meet. If you wanted to succeed in that sector, those few people knew most things you needed to know.

So what did this introverted and well-advised man do when faced with this once-in-a-career question? Answer: he threw open the doors and invited opinions from all and sundry. Over 30 people sat round the table one afternoon, all giving their view. Apart from the obvious senior executives there were some who would not normally take part in these kinds of discussions, including the CEO’s long-serving PA, the Head of HR and – yes – even some trusted consultants. All had their say, and then the CEO decided. He had gone against the instincts of a lifetime because he knew there could be something he didn’t know he didn’t know. Here was an example of genuine Johari wisdom.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do the same people always follow the same agenda in making decisions or taking action in your organisation?  In that case, consider opening up your planning process to those beyond the ‘usual suspects’ – those who represent the whole system.
• Walking around your workplace, do people think it is pretty obvious what’s going to happen next week and how you’re going to handle it? If so, why not introduce scenario planning exercises into your strategic thinking – and not just at the most senior levels.
• Have you ever carried out an analysis of your organisation’s culture – and did it cite risk-avoidance as a key to promotion? What do you know about your organisation’s real culture, as opposed to that you wish existed? Set out to identify the hidden factors that keep people in risky conformity. Sometimes it is necessary to bring about a shift in the paradigm, or at least ensure that, just occasionally, the kaleidoscope is shaken.

Conclusion: Knowing more than we know
What all these occlusions and conundrums demonstrate is that the ‘no brainer’ is as much a matter of psychology and culture as of systems and data. There is much we can do to apply the wisdom of the Johari window – at all levels. ER Consultants can help the enterprise to adopt a more open approach to strategic change without falling into anarchy. The team can be helped to become more knowing of itself and its environment, avoiding groupthink.  Individuals can – with the aid of all-encompassing appraisal methods – learn to see themselves as others see them, thereby discovering the uncomfortable but valuable nature of their erstwhile ‘blind spots’.

As Mr Rumsfeld optimistically continued: “Each year we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.” So what are you going to discover this year?

To discuss how this approach can be applied to your organisation, contact  topics@erconsultants.co.uk