Agility Requires Humility
One of my Christmas gifts (yes, I am still reading my Christmas books) was The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova. Ostensibly, it is a book about a non-Poker player who decides to become a competitive player at the highest level. What it actually is is a primer on data, decision-making, and humility.
Humility, you say? Yes, humility. Here’s the thing. You might (in poker or life) win some hands with bad decisions, doubling down against long odds and getting rewarded. You are far less likely to win that way over the long term. Yet, you might let success fool you and decide your brilliance caused the success. It would take humility to admit that you benefitted from luck.
As EB White said once, “Never mention luck in the presence of self-made men.”
It is (apparently) human nature to think we are more competent than we are. This is known as the wildly-popular Dunning-Kruger effect, which says that people are most confident in areas where they have the least competence. Like all things in our time, the Dunning-Kruger effect has mostly evolved into a way for people to feel smugly superior to everyone else in the world. It’s hard to understand how this is comforting when we have to drive on the highways and have our blood drawn by “everyone else,” but you be you.
(Last note: this is a kind of meta Dunning-Kruger effect, where you are more certain than you should be that other people are more people than they should be).
The point is that all of us can sometimes think we are more competent than we are.
The Sobering Requirement of Success
Which presents a significant challenge for communicators. We don’t know what we don’t know. Even success might be good fortune or fleeting. And failure might be bad fortune or fleeting. If we lock onto the first thing we see…even when it is true…we lose our ability to adjust to changing times and be agile, which everyone seems to agree is a key success factor in business today.
It’s from Horace’s “To Licinius”:
“Always expect reversals; be hopeful in trouble,/Be worried when things go well. That’s how it is/For the man whose heart is ready for anything.”
That’s a sobering thought. But it does seem like the approach for our times, to be “ready for anything.” (Which is also the key tenet of my Resilient5 program. What a price, though. “Be worried when things go well”?. This sounds like a recipe for constant anxiety but what it really is is an antidote for unwarranted security. Given the speed of change and the rapid reversals we have seen, it seems to me that being “ready for anything” would be borderline obvious.
This means having the humility to accept that those two straight bluff wins might not stand the test of time. That your success might not be the result of brilliance. Or that even good efforts have to be constantly tinkered with as the world adjusts. To be “ready for anything” you have to tear down anything that might be influencing your judgment.
For communicators, I think this has three implications.
Less Certainty, More Inquiry
This is the mantra of Konnikova’s poker guru. For communicators, it means we have to be constantly asking questions of what we do, which is even harder when not in the “two pair beats one pair” world but in the subjective world of people’s knowledge and opinions. What do people really think? What is really important to them? What really helps them learn? Are we really earning their trust or just their affection? Through research, through feedback, and through active listening and observation, we should be always in an inquiry mode.
Have Plan Bs
When you implement a communication program, you should have agreed-upon mileposts. Some of the things we do require time and repetition, but we need to have an idea of what we are expecting to see and when. And what we will do if certain things happen or don’t happen, especially if we are measuring our efforts. We should think these things through at the beginning and spell them out. Plans without any chance to adjust should be viewed suspiciously.
These Plan Bs should also be prepared for changing situations and assumptions.
Be humble and resilient
A lot of work is a paradox. We need to find the sweet spot between humility and resilience. We have to create an overall philosophy that we don’t know what we don’t know, but that everyone is in the same boat and because we are as smart as anyone else and will execute our strategy fully aware of how much things can change, we will over time succeed.
Just like making good decisions at the poker table can only lead you to one result. With diligence and discipline, you can reach the point where you’re not gambling anymore.