My goodness, a lot has happened since last week’s update. Just as people were starting to read my article at 10.00 am last Saturday, Donald Trump was announcing “major combat operations” in Iran. Here we are seven days later, and thousands of munitions have been used, while more than a dozen countries have been brought into the conflict. Worse still, according to The Times, more than 1,230 people have lost their lives.
All week, commentators and reporters throughout the media have been asking, “What’s the plan”? They want to know how this will all end. Sadly, the White House has provided contradictory and vague statements about the “end game”. That may be deliberate. Confusing your opponent can be a tactic in itself. Or it may suggest that the consequences of these actions have not been fully thought through.
That is not just a problem for world leaders. It is a feature of leadership more generally. I am sure you have worked for companies where the bosses come up with a plan and passionately follow it through. All the time, members of staff say, “This will never work,” and chat among themselves about the consequences of the changes implemented by the boss.
Indeed, the former CEO of BrewDog recently admitted to making such mistakes. The British brewer and pub chain that he founded went into administration this week, resulting in the loss of 484 jobs after a takeover by the American cannabis brand Tilray. It appears that BrewDog did several things without fully thinking through the consequences.
The fact is that when we lead, we can become overconfident in our ideas and blind to data that contradicts them. We are cognitively biased toward our own suggestions. This means we do not fully explore the consequences of our actions.
Just think of the case of Mario Costeja González. He is the Spaniard who got into financial difficulties in the late 1990s and later took legal action against Google, arguing that links to details of those problems should no longer appear in search results. His case became central to what is now widely known as the “right to be forgotten”. Yet the consequence of his action is rather ironic. In trying to become less visible online, he became internationally known precisely because of the legal battle over his privacy. I doubt that was the outcome he had in mind.
It is really easy to think you are doing the right thing when the consequences of your action could be the reverse of what you were intending. Leaders often focus on the immediate objective and congratulate themselves for decisive action, only to discover later that they have created a fresh set of complications.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a world leader or the head of a small team in your office, the chances are you will not fully think through the consequences of your actions. However, there are some steps we can take to make it more likely that we can predict the consequences.
First, remember that much of human behaviour is more predictable than we might like to think. People tend to respond to change in familiar ways. They worry about what they might lose, they resist uncertainty, and they interpret events through their own interests. That means the real challenge is not to focus only on the responses you expect, but to consider the unusual and awkward reactions you may be overlooking.
If you can form the habit of imagining the strangest and most awkward reactions to your plans, you are more likely to spot consequences that would otherwise escape your notice. When you focus on the expected responses, you are only helping to confirm your cognitive bias about your plans.
Another thing you can do is known as “wicked testing”. In this, you consider the most self-centred and socially reprehensible things people could do if you were to implement your plans. That can open your eyes to factors you may not have considered.
One other way you can consider potential consequences is to do a “pre-mortem”. You do this by assuming your project has already failed. Then you analyse what could have gone wrong. You work backwards from your project’s “failure” to determine the potential reasons why.
Thinking through the consequences of our actions and ideas is possible. You just have to get into the habit of doing it. Otherwise, you will fall into the habit of assuming that your ideas will produce only the outcomes you want to see. Now, who could possibly have done that recently?
