In Charles Duhigg’s terrific 2012 book The Power of Habit, the author discusses – at some depth - the observations of football coach Tony Dungy, and his experiments with breaking down habits into their component parts in order to alter behaviour.
But one of the things that I think was lost in all the discussion of Dungy’s insights, was his basic understanding that football players in general, and linemen in particular, didn’t have time to think. That the normal process that one would go through in any situation – assess, evaluate, act, etc – was not really an option for them. So fast were things moving, so little time did they have, that Dungy was forced to look elsewhere for an advantage, and thus tried to change their reactive habits in order to be effective. Or said another way, if they stopped to think, they were screwed. All they had time for was to do. And habits are, in a sense, non-thinking doing.
And because Dungy was successful with this approach, winning a Super Bowl after enduring many years of the establishment telling him that his insights were wrong or impracticable, it has become, in many ways, the de facto way football is played today. Eliminate thinking. Focus on and refine doing.
And to be clear, neither I nor Mr. Duhigg nor Coach Dungy are saying that football players can’t think, or that they’re stupid or that playing football is for idiots. Far from it. Many are brilliant, erudite, and highly intellectual. Again, what we’re saying is that the game is so fast, and especially that the line of scrimmage is so short, that football players don’t have time to think. And if they don’t, then why focus on it? Instead, focus on activating habits, which take significantly less time to execute, thereby giving you a competitive advantage (there, that should keep me from getting beaten up, right?)
I always thought that was interesting, so it’s been floating around in my brain ever since I reviewed Duhigg’s book (here). But then I was reading Dutch soccer legend Johan Cruyff’s memoir My Turn and I saw this passage:
“That was why we had to train so often and so intensively. The more instinctive our play became, the less mental energy it would require. That way something was created that looked difficult but was actually easy. You’re 100 per cent concentrated on the task at hand, but because you automatically knew what to do, you didn’t notice.”
In other words, become so adept at the doing that you don’t even have to think about it. In fact that you’re not even aware you’re doing it. That you’re doing it before you’re even thinking about it.
And that got me thinking if the same thing were true in business.
What if most companies don’t think? What if most companies really only do. And again, I’m not saying that they can’t think. I’m saying that the focus of the organization is on doing. That’s why there’s endless talk about process and efficiency. Ways to make the doing faster and cheaper so you can extract more value from it.
And I include advertising agencies in this as well. “How can we streamline the process of making that commercial, developing that strategy, generating all that social content, in order to pull through more profit and increase our margin?”
You know, MBA 101 stuff, right?
Okay, but what if some businesses began weaponizing thinking as a strategic advantage?
Look, in many ways, a slavish dedication to “doing” only works if you assume the underlying fundamentals are unchanging. And this is a fair assumption in football – the offensive lineman knows what his task is and it hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Same with the soccer player. The tactics may change, but not the fundamentals.
But that’s not the case with business. Businesses are buffeted by a thousand different fluctuations every day – suppliers, wars, consumers, demographics. One day you’re the king of beepers, the next day Research in Motion brings out the blackberry, the day after that, Steve Jobs drops the iphone. Fundamental changes.
And yet businesses focus on maximizing the efficiency of doing. Why? Because they can. Because it’s measurable. “Last year we had 100 people and our company made a million dollars. This year we had 80 people and we made 1.2 million. Yay us!”
So we focus on process and efficiency and build cultures that prize and reward doing.
But what happens when those fundamentals change and a company has to think?
Well, in my experience, having witnessed it at Fortune 500s and mom and pops, one or all of four things.
One, nothing. They ignore it and hope it will go away. And frankly, they feel confident it will because if it’s a fundamental change, it, by definition, runs counter to everything they’ve built their company on. So they just keep on keeping on, until one day they find they can’t.
Two, they try to be more efficient, cheaper, better. In other words, they do more of what they’ve already been doing, because that’s what they know how to do. “Sure the iphone is nice, but we just knocked 30% off the price of our blackberries by getting rid of staff suddenly deemed ‘inefficient’!” Which rarely impresses people who are captivated by what the iphone can do, and generally just earns less money from people who were already going to buy a blackberry in the first place.
Three, they try to think – “Okay, gang, major change going on. We need fresh ideas, new ways of thinking, how do we pivot?!” Except all the people who can think differently have been filtered out because they weren’t efficient, because they weren’t helping the company do what they were already doing, faster, cheaper, better. So they not only don’t get new thinking from the troops, they don’t have any generals who know how to evaluate it.
Four, they acquire some outside resource that can think – and then promptly start measuring them by the doing criteria that got them into this mess in the first place. Until either the resource leaves in frustration, or the company waters everything down to more ways to do exactly what they were already doing. Because to a man with a hammer, everything’s a nail.
If a company weaponized thinking, it could constantly force its competition to respond in one of those four ways, three of which actually disrupt their competition’s expertise at “doing”. (And the one that is “no response at all”? That gives them a head start while their competition dithers).
But perhaps more importantly, it also builds a culture that is better able to respond to changes in its industry than its competitors can. So it doesn’t have to cycle through those four options. Consultants like to call this “being nimble” but I think that’s exactly the wrong vocabulary because it’s the language of doing. “I’m nimble, I’m able to change my course more quickly than you.” No. I’m able to asses, evaluate and then act. I’m able to think.
You know, all those things an offensive lineman doesn’t have time to do, no matter how nimble he is.