Biotechnology in Australia 2022

Industry Report

Biotechnology in Australia

Biotechnology involves applying science and technology to living organisms, and parts, products and models, to alter living or non-living materials to produce knowledge and biotechnology products and services. The industry includes biotechnology research and development, licensing, product manufacturing and product wholesaling. Companies that focus on medical devices are not included in the industry.

Industry revenue has grown at an annualised 2.4% over the five years through 2021-22, to $8.9 billion

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• Biotechnology is becoming an increasingly important part of product development in a variety of sectors, with businesses using biotech applications to address many social and economic issues such as human health, food security and alternative fuels. Several companies have reached commercial readiness, with robust product pipelines and the support of international partners improving their attractiveness to investors. While human therapeutics companies continue to dominate the industry, agricultural technology and food technology companies are gaining momentum.

• New funding sources have driven industry growth over the past five years. However, ongoing uncertainty due to changing government policies has dampened the industry's performance, particularly regarding changes to Australia's R&D tax incentive (RDTI) regime. The COVID-19 pandemic has also influenced the industry's operating environment with several industry operators at the frontline regarding COVID-19 research, prevention and treatment.

OUTLOOK 2022-2027

• The Biotechnology industry is forecast to continue growing over the next five years, driven by increased demand for, and greater acceptance of, biotech products. It is anticipated to derive revenue from a wider range of sources and it is expected to increase at an annualised 3.0% over the five years through 2026-27, to $10.3 billion.

• Employment is projected to slowly increase, although a potential shortage of STEM graduates may continue to limit this growth.

• Enterprise numbers are anticipated to grow modestly, however, pharmaceutical companies are anticipated to continue acquiring biotech start-ups to gain access to product pipelines and innovative technology platforms and there for consolidation trends will continue.

Source: IBISWorld | Biotechnology in Australia, Feb 2022

How should we think about Complexity? Is it complicated?

Article written by Mark Easdown

Business Planning, Mental Models, Ways of Thinking & Working

“A complicated system is the sum of its parts. You can solve problems by breaking things down and solving them separately. In a complex system, the properties of the whole are the result of interaction between the parts and the linkages and the constraints. In fact, in a complex system how things connect is more important than what they are. So, the properties of that emergent pattern can never be decomposed to the original parts.” David Snowden

“The problem is complexity (in financial markets) …we cannot prepare for every thread of causality through every interaction; in the speed of the event we find there is no time to make adjustments.” Richard Bookstaber

“Nature likes to over-insure itself. Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems.” Nassim Taleb

In the mid 1980s, a school of thought emerged around “Complexity” and “Complex Adaptive Systems” with the formation of the Sante Fe Institute, formed in part by former members of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The institute drew from multi-disciplinary domains and insights of : economics, neural networks, physics, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, cybernetics, biology, ecology and archaeology. Theories on Complexity and Complex Adaptive systems sought to develop common frameworks and understandings of physical and social systems that was an alternate to more linear and reductionist modes of thinking. Members sought to better understand spontaneous, self-organising dynamics and found examples in the;

• Natural World - Brains, Immune Systems, Ecologies, Cells, Developing Embryos and Ant colonies

• Human World – Political parties, Scientific communities and in the economy

Why bother?

Just say you and your team are facing a complicated problem, then you may break down the problem into component parts, build an expert team internally or partner with external consultants, you may take a data driven or fact-based approach, you may identify best practices create a strategic plan and solve the problem incrementally. However, is that all? Is there a one size fits all solution to problem solving?

What if your problem could be categorised with traits such as;

• Levels of uncertainty, ambiguity, unpredictability, dynamic interfaces - many diverse and independent parts that were interrelated, interdependent and linked through many interconnections into a network

• The properties of the whole cannot be predicted from the behaviours of the component parts, in fact the network of many components may be gathering information learning and acting in parallel in an environment produced by these interactions – the system co-evolves within its environment

• There may be significant political, social or external influences

“Wise executives tailor their approach to fit the complexity of the circumstances they face.” David Snowden & Mary Boone

Where in the real world might it be useful to have sound thinking about complexity and solving problems? 

In Project Management

Programs of work and problems to solve come in a variety of forms, at the simpler end of spectrum process re-engineering and best practices serve us well to achieve desired outcomes. Yet increasingly, our problems to solve are complicated, we need to analyse things to figure out what to do and cause and effect are distanced. Complex projects are harder still, they display behaviours such as self-organising, emergent properties, non-linear and phase transition behaviours. We need a different mindset, structure and strategy to wrestle with these problems.

In Financial Markets

These are complex adaptive systems, tightly coupled with unexpected feedback loops, with investors of different investment styles & horizons, the sum of the parts will not explain the whole in a linear manner, there are infrequent extreme price moves, not normally distributed.

In Nature

Complex collective behaviours are displayed when individual ants forage for food and lay down a pheromone trail on the way out from the colony and if successful finding food lay down even more on way back to the colony. Other ants follow this stronger pheromone trail to the food adding their pheromone. So, the pheromone trail becomes the whole colonies best path to food, it is an ant colony optimisation algorithm. Interestingly, this insight has helped form the basis of swarm intelligence and a wide array of solutions across routing and scheduling problems and bayesian networks.

 The twenty-first century will be the "century of complexity"  Stephen Hawking

COMPLEX PROGRAMS

“Strategy in complex systems must resemble strategy in board games. You develop a small and useful tree of options that is continuously revised based on the arrangement of the pieces and the actions of the opponent. It is critical to keep the number of options open. It is important to develop a theory of what kinds of options you want to have open” - John H Holland

In complex situations "cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and do not repeat" - Sarah Sheard

Complex problems to solve are unique and they challenge some of the traditional approaches to program and risk management thinking, which may emphasise a need to identify risks in order to control them or completely plan and control programs of work. Examples of complex programs may include: computer systems and networks, buildings, bridges, planes, ships and automobiles.

Let’s take a look at what makes complex programs unique; 

• Sophisticated structures with many component parts interacting with each other, giving a degree of uncertainty whereby you may not know what you don’t know until it occurs

• Unknowable interdependencies across domains, a need for agility and structures that favour the decentralised and local to the centralised approach.

• There may be interfaces with complementary projects which present challenges in scheduling of these interconnected systems, teams and resources

• The environment may have a political realm where new government decisions or public policy arises

So, what is a desirable mindset for complex programs?

• A Forward focus, a willingness to proactively manage project development and critical issues through agility, collaboration and adaptability. You may need nuanced responses and local innovation.

• Analysis of likely origins of complexity and thinking through dependencies, seek critical junctions, vulnerabilities & countermeasures. Contingency planning around time, buffering on sequencing, budget and people skills 

• Dynamic reporting and monitoring, a willingness to pick up early warning signs and take corrective actions

• Communications will be dynamic, real time & high visibility (as small changes can have oversized consequences amplified by scale of some projects)

• Program planning may have both a single view and multiple integrated project schedules

Cynefin is a framework to deal with predictable and unpredictable worlds (David Snowden)

In 1999, David Snowden described a framework and problem-solving tool which helps to adjust management style to fit circumstances, and has relevance across product development, marketing, organisational design and BCP/DR and crisis management. The framework had 5 domains;

• OBVIOUS. Options are clear, steps to success are known, variables well known, cause-effect relationships are apparent, you are able to assess the situation, follow a procedure, categorise its type and base your response on best practice (processes & procedures) and feasible to achieve best possible result. Examples: Product mass production, cooking with a recipe, known scientific issues, known legal issues. 

• COMPLICATED. Solutions not obvious to everyone but most variables involved are well known, cause-effect relationships are apparent, you may assess a situation, build a diverse team or utilise experts to deliver the best response. The best that can be achieved is a good result, maybe not the best result. Examples: Existing product enhancements, coaching a team, adopting new approaches, hiring process.

• COMPLEX. The context is often unpredictable, many factors uncertain, many variables may intervene, data may be incomplete, it may not be possible to determine right options, make predictions or find cause-effect relationships, there may be multiple methods to address issues. Exploring what has a proven record in past situations, small tests or business experiments, simple guidelines, brainstorming, innovation and creativity may drive solutions. Examples: weather predictions, stock markets, poker, epidemic controls.

• CHAOTIC. The situation is where nobody knows what to expect, anything can happen, it is impossible to make predictions. You may have to act towards the urgent and important, then check and evaluate result before responding to that result and acting again. Examples: Innovate new products, anything which predicts people’s preferences or behaviours, crisis event and crisis management, warfare

• DISORDER. The situation is not known, you need to firstly move to a known domain & gather more information.

COMPLEXITY IN FINANCIAL MARKETS

“In the last few years the concept of self-organising systems – of complex systems in which randomness and chaos seem spontaneously to evolve into unexpected order – has become an increasingly influential idea that links together researchers in many fields, from artificial intelligence to chemistry, from evolution to geology. For whatever reason, however, this movement has so far largely passed economic theory by. It is time to see how the new ideas can usefully be applied to that immensely complex, but indisputably self-organising system we call the economy” - Paul Krugman 1996

“By one estimate, 90% of international transactions were accounted for by trade before 1970, and only 10% by capital flows. Today, despite a vast increase in global trade, that ratio has been reversed, with 90% of transactions accounted for by financial flows not directly related to trade in goods and services.” - Didier Sornette 2003

“Fundamental analysis seeks to establish how underlying values are reflected in stock prices, whereas the theory of reflexivity shows how stock prices can influence underlying values. One provides a static picture, the other a dynamic one.” - George Soros

Financial markets have all the basic components of complex adaptive systems, namely:

• Investors have differing investment strategies and horizons from trading at the speed of light to long term cyclical horizons. They take external information and combine it with their own strategic intent and these compete in financial markets => this is adaptive decision making

• Financial markets is the aggregation of large-scale collective decision making and actions => these are developing, complex and emergent

• Financial markets exist in a non-equilibrium state , are non linear, they experience non-frequent extreme price moves with the aggregate behaviour more complex than would be predicted by the sum of the individual parts.

• Financial Markets are subject to feedback loops, where the result of one iteration becomes an input of next iteration

So, how has the emerging knowledge of complexity and financial markets framed regulators thinking?

The global financial crisis highlighted the complexity, leverage, inter-connected and tightly coupled of financial markets. In response we have seen;

• Efforts to reduce interconnectedness (intra-day local trading halts, regional collateral exchanges)

• Enhanced capital rules (increased contingency buffers and incentives for some activities to be managed by non-bank sector & efforts to reduce concentration of risks)

• Enhanced liquidity rules (increase quantum and quality of contingency buffers)

• Speed, agility and quantum of central bank and treasury initiatives to address market panics and crisis

• A re-think of the rule-making complexity and mental models applied to finance;

“Modern finance is complex, perhaps too complex. Regulation of modern finance is complex, almost certainly too complex. That configuration spells trouble. As you do not fight fire with fire, you do not fight complexity with complexity. Because complexity generates uncertainty, not risk, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity. Delivering that would require an about-turn from the regulatory community from the path followed for the better part of the past 50 years. If a once-in-a-lifetime crisis is not able to deliver that change, it is not clear what will.” - Andrew Haldane Bank of England Speech 2012 “ The Dog and the Frisbee” [https://www.bis.org/review/r120905a.pdf ]

COMPLEXITY IN NATURE 

In her TED Talk, Deborah Gordon: The emergent genius of ant colonies: highlights an example of a complex adapative system with no central control or management in an ant colony: [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS4UjCauUs]

So, what is the strategy of the ant colony to constantly adapt to its complex environment? As per Deborah Gordon studies;

• The ant colony allocates simple roles

  • At any given time 25% are patrolling, foraging and doing maintenance, 25% are inside with queen ant doing maintenance and looking after larvae, and finally 50% appear to be contingency and in reserve, able to surge as required to collect more food, patrol or more maintenance.

  • Communications are not centralised, they are dynamic, simple and local rules to adapt to emergent environment

  • The process is noisy, messy, imperfect and requires individual dynamic communications

Ant colonies can learn at the individual level by trial and error over many generations but this can nurture collective memory and problem-solving skills. The local instructing the central.

“So, the key to unlocking the efficiency of a leaderless system will rely on, among other things: clear role definition, flexible task allocation, a sense of responsibility toward the group, and shared understanding and response to communication patterns. Organizations would need to make an incredible investment in their employees, and vice versa.” Amanda Silver – Organising complexity – How Ant colonies self-manage. [https://medium.com/swlh/organizing-complexity-how-ant-colonies-self-manage-50455358f3cd]

How we should think about complex domains is still evolving, a multi-disciplinary lens across research and practice has been adding to this knowledge pool for decades. It is a vital enquiry for humankind, especially as our challenges become more complex to solve and our climate is as a complex adaptive system.

‘“he climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life.”- Pope Francis 2015

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LOOKING TO CURATE YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY? REACH OUT.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes.

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Article written by Mark Easdown

The Problem Is …. How to Solve It?

Article written by Mark Easdown

Individuals, Teams & Enterprise, Mental Models, Ways of Working

““A problem well put is half solved.””

— John Dewey

““I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children …””

— Karl. R. Popper

““By operating without a leader the scout bees of a swarm neatly avoid one of the greatest threats to good decision making by groups: a domineering leader. Such an individual reduces a group’s collective power to uncover a diverse set of possible solutions to a problem, to critically appraise these possibilities, and to winnow out all but the best one.””

— Thomas D. Seeley

““Probably he played it the way he did because it was not a good piano. Because he could not fall in love with it he found another way to get the most out of it.” ”

— Manfred Eicher on Jazz Pianist Keith Jarrett Koln Concert 1975

Did you know ?

3M has a “flexible attention” policy (take a walk, nap, play a game) as they know creative ideas and problem solutions can sneak up on us as we pay attention to something else. Ideas flow between silos with engineers rotated between departments each few years.

Problem solving is a process followed to find solutions to difficult or complex issues.

What might that look like ?

• Variances & deviations from desired outcomes – this may be pleasant (an opportunity) or unpleasant (Apollo 13)

• For a problem to be solved suggests some precision in description, identification, root cause

• Maybe we have a criterion that our best explanation or lived experience just fails to meet

An exploration of problem solving uncovers useful practices, shines a light on power structures and reveals a wider array of human perceptions, traits & group dynamics;

Author Charlan Nemeth in “No! , The power of disagreement in a world that wants to get along” highlights the case of United Airlines Flight 173, in the days before Christmas in 1978 flying from NY to Portland Oregon, USA. As the plane approached Portland it lowered the landing gear and the cockpit heard a large thump with the plane vibrating and rotating. The pilot questioned the landing gear, aborted landing and put the plane into a holding pattern. For 45 minutes, pilot and crew investigated the flight panel & landing gear problem yet overlooked the fact the plane proceeded to run out of fuel, falling out of sky, killing 10 people of the 196 on board, just six miles from airport. How can this problem solving go so tragically wrong?

Good problem solving needs: cognitive diversity, valuing dissent to mitigate consensus “fails” & “group think”, a clear approach in stressful situations, switch thinking or adding some randomness to process, a healthy power relationship (no hubris or silencing of opposition, a need for participative management & subordinate assertiveness training), multiple approaches to problem solving (broad information search, multiple alternatives considered), a human tendency to not see a solution if it is at odds with majority judgement, the very action of voicing dissent with conviction will alter the perception & awareness of others.

Maybe the way things “are” differ from our best thinking or theory on the way things “should be” .

Let’s take a look at Problem Solving & Mental Models across a few domains; In Adversity, In Manufacturing, In Investment Markets and In Nature

Producing your finest problem solving & improvisation, driven on by adversity

“”Messy : How to be creative and resilient in a tidy-minded world””

— Tim Harford

 In January 1975, 17 year old Vera Brandes stood on the stage of the Cologne Opera House, awaiting a full house, as the youngest concert promoter in Germany. Vera had convinced American Jazz Pianist, Keith Jarrett to perform a solo recital, had arranged the grand concert hall, invited 1,400 people and arranged for delivery of a very specific & artist requested Bosendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano.

The problem for Vera’s project was that the opera house staff had wheeled out the wrong piano and gone home. They had wheeled out a small piano which would not produce enough sound to reach the furthest balconies, the piano was out of tune, the black notes in the middle of the keyboard didn’t work, the piano pedals were stuck – it was unplayable. In the scarce time before the concert, the local piano tuner concluded that given the heavy rain outside, a substitute piano would not survive the transitional trip from nearby storage facility.

Technicians spent several hours trying to make the piano sound halfway decent, the high and low notes jangled, the piano pedals malfunctioned and even the performer was suffering from several days of back pain and wearing extra spinal support. Understandably Keith Jarrett refused to play, but Vera Brandes cajoled, pacified & pleaded and at 11-30pm the concert finally began.

So with Vera Brandes project flashing bright red, what problem solving skills did Keith Jarrett deploy to overcome sub-optimal & malfunctioning tools ?

As the author says “ The minute he played the first note, everybody knew this was magic”, “It was beautiful and strange”, “ The Koln concert album has sold 3.5 million copies, no other solo jazz album nor piano solo has matched it”, “Jarrett really had to play the piano very hard to get enough volume to the balconies”, “ ….”handed a mess, Keith Jarrett embraced it, and soared”.

Toyota Business Practices (TBP) – A problem solving model

Toyota has a rich and deep history of instruction, values, actions shared, practiced, experienced and refined by many staff across many cultures around the world. Its Best Practices are constantly evolving. Toyota Business Practices are an example of tangible approaches to daily work, the essence of TBP is a problem solving model. Whilst a mastery is achieved across time and through daily work and with a mindset of drive and dedication, a basic summary includes the following elements;

Toyota defines “a problem” as a gap between the current state (as is) and future/ideal state (to be). The concept of problem is not viewed as a negative, as to find problems and to take countermeasures to eliminate them leads to continuous improvement.

““No one has more trouble than the person who claims to have no trouble””

— Taiichi Ohno (Having no problems is the biggest problem of all)

A summary of the basic steps of Toyota Problem Solving, 2006 includes;

1.     Clarify the Problem: requires understanding and pre-emptive thinking around: Ultimate Goal (what is the contribution, the purpose, how is it realised and for whom?), Current Situation ( talk to people involved, observe, concrete terms) & Ideal Situation ( a clear standard result to be achieved after problem is solved, it is a concrete & achievable and contributes to the ultimate goal)

2.     Break down the Problem: requires qualitative and quantitative analysis, prioritise and break down bigger problem into smaller and more concrete ones to observe and find the point of occurrence

3.     Set a Target: A target is measurable & states by when & is challenging in nature

4.     Analyse the Root Cause: look at the point of occurrence & cascade thinking through asking why & seek peer review. If the countermeasures are applied to something other than root cause – this leads to wasted effort and resources  

5.     Develop countermeasures: develop many versions, select highest value-add & compliance, build consensus , make clear action plans

6.     See countermeasures through: implement with concerted efforts, speed & persistence, share information, inform, report and consult, trial and error to expected results

7.     Monitor results & process: ensure targets achieved, understand reasons for success or failure and accumulate continuous improvement knowledge

8.     Standardise Successful Process: establish new standard and start next round of continuous problem solving / PDCA

““I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.” ”

— Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio – Principles & Problem Solving in Investment Management

In 1975, Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates which went on to become the world’s largest hedge fund by 2005. He is known as a successful investor, innovator and aimed to structure global portfolios with uncorrelated investment returns, with allocations based on risk analysis rather than by asset classes. In 2011, Ray & Barbara Dalio established a philanthropic foundation and pledged to donate more than half their fortune in their lifetimes. In 2011, he self-published on-line his philosophy of investment which evolved to be an acclaimed 2017 book “Principles” on corporate management and investment. An overview of the framework Ray Dalio approaches problem solving includes;

1.     Have Clear Goals: You cannot have everything – prioritise, don’t conflate your goals with just desires and decide what you really want, setbacks are important to making progress – in bad times you may need to modify goals to preserve what you have.

2.     Identify & don’t tolerate problems: a useful mind hack if that painful problems are usually a good signpost you have a problem worth diagnosing and improving, don’t avoid problems as they are rooted in harsh and unpleasant realities, be precise and specific with your problem description, pull apart causes and the real problem, fix problems that yield biggest returns and take care small problems are not symptoms of larger ones, failing to address a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it.

3.     Diagnose problems to get at their root causes: don’t jump immediately into solution mode, identify “what” before commencing “what to do about it”, you must identify the root cause – not proximate ones, sometimes you will find the root cause is people or system or process, it can be a painful journey to resolution

4.     Design a Plan: visual what you need to do to achieve goals, what needs to change to produce better outcomes, there are possibly many pathways – you just need to find one that works, create a narrative and time lines, identify tasks that connect to the narrative to achieve goals.

5.     Push through to completion : you will need self-discipline, good work habits (well organised, to-do lists, priorities) are vastly underrated, establish clear metrics, have another monitor your results, as you discover new problems – repeat

Dalio’s problem solving mental models also covers: self-awareness (knowing your weakness & staring into them is a first step to success), seek to understand what your missing, be humble & radically open-minded (address ego and blind spot barriers), beware of harmful emotions, first learn then decide, simplify, use principles, determine who you should be listening to and what is true, be very specific about problems – don’t start with generalisations, convert your principles into algorithms and have these make decisions alongside you.

“The Waggle Dance” – Nest site selection & group decision making

In the 1950s, Martin Lindauer published a study on house hunting by honey bees and observed that bee scouts perform “waggle dances” on the surface of a swarm to advertise potential new nest sites. Advancing this research Cornell biologist Thomas Seeley noted the process was “complicated enough to rival the dealings of any department committee”, as potentially 10,000+ bees will relocate and need an efficient process to narrow alternatives and mitigate risks of bad decisions. When a hive gets too crowded, its queen and half the hive will swarm to a nearby tree and wait for several hundred scouts to go  house hunting. Seeley notes “the bee’s method, which is a product of disagreement and contest rather than consensus and compromise, consistently yields excellent collective decisions”

Let’s explore the bee’s problem to solve;

• The bee colony survival is as stake, so an accurate decision is required. New home must be suitable for rearing brood and storing honey and offer protections from: predators, thieves and bad weather.

• A speedy decision is required, as the more hours the entire hive is exposed to elements it loses energy and reserves

• A unified choice is required. Communications and contestability are crucial, a split decision could be fatal

What can bees teach us about problem solving & decision making?

• Whilst the problem to solve is of a clear and stable nature, information may be incomplete or inaccurate

• Information in a complex environment may be constantly evolving and changing

• Bees use hundreds of independent, widely distributed scouts who return with heterogeneous information (differing constituents, dissimilar components, non-uniform in composition) which may be better or worse and is shared with other scouts by way of a waggle dance, no scout is stifled & the swarm leverages its collective intelligence.

• So, how do they find consensus as any individual scout has only direct experience with select potential sites, yet many are examined and considered?

  • It is in the friendly competition between scouts and the various coalitions all vying for favoured sites, the exercise is not solved with “group-think”, rather a scout may leave the swarm cluster and go to examine potential site to judge its merit. There is no need for an individual scout to have a macro global view of all alternatives, nor a need to tally and compare votes – it is the smarts of the swarm working as individuals or collectives making speedy, accurate and unified assessments.  

To recap

As we have seen across multiple domains and across several mental models, problems are not necessarily a bad thing – sometimes they are a pathway to travel to deliver quality strategic outcomes, sometimes they are a link in a chain of continuous improvement (kaizen), if they are material they must be addressed to mitigate severe consequences (Flight 173, Investment Returns and bee hive nest selection), a structure and process is very useful, to solve problems will often reveal some uncomfortable truths about the nature of the individuals, the group, power structures, communications and these must also be confronted and resolved.

Yet, as Keith Jarrett demonstrated bringing passion, intelligence, skill, pragmatism and persistence to problem solving, can yield your teams greatest moment. White Ark is here to help you.

When Richard Feynman faces a problem, he's unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinks... He was so unstuck --- if something didn't work, he'd look at it another way." --- Marvin Minsky, MIT

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LOOKING TO CURATE YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY? REACH OUT.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes.

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Article written by Mark Easdown

Forecasting

Article written by Mark Easdown

Decision Making & Planning, Ways of Working with Uncertainty

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“Forecasts usually tell us more of the forecaster than of the future.”

— Warren Buffett

“There is great value in bringing together people who attempt to address a common problem of forecasting from different perspectives and based on very different kinds of data.”

— Chris Wood, Sante Fe Institute

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”

— Isaac Asimov

“For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”

— Philip Tetlock

“I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

— Friedrich von Hayek

“The Lucretius underestimation, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain there is, should be equal to the tallest one he has observed.”

— Nassim Taleb

A forecast is a statement about the future. (Clements & Henry, 1998)

As authors of “Forecasting” (J.Castle, M.Clements, D.Henry) note; a forecast can take many forms;

• Some are vague and some are precise, Some are concerned with near term and some the distant future

• “Fore” denotes in advance whilst “Cast” might sound a bit chancy (cast a fishing net, cast a spell) or might sound more solid (bronze statues are also cast)

• Chance is central to forecasting & forecasts can and often do differ from outcomes

• Forecasts should be accompanied by some level of certainty/uncertainty, time horizon, upper/lower bounds

• The domain in which the forecast occurs matter, especially if no-one knows the complete set of possibilities  

The authors consider the history of forecasting;

• Forecasting likely pre-dates recorded writing with hunter-gatherers seeking where game of predators might be, edible plants and water supplies. Babylonians tracked the night sky presumably for planting and harvesting crops

• Sir William Petty perhaps introduced early statistical forecasting in 17th Century and thought he observed a seven year “business cycle”

• Weather forecasting evolved with Robert Fitzroy in 1859, who sought to devise a storm warning system to enable safe passage of ships and avoid loss of vessels &/or ships staying in port unnecessarily. Forecasting of nature extended to hurricanes, tropical cyclones, tornadoes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

• Yet, history is littered with failures in forecasting, large and small;

  • Ambiguous forecasts from Oracles of Delphi and Nostradamus

  • UK storms 1987, with lives lost and approximately 15million trees blown down

  • Failure to predict 1929 Great Depression or severity of Global Financial Crisis, mid-2007 to early 2009

  • “When the Paris exhibition closes, the electric light will close with it and no more be heard of it” – Sir Erasmus Wilson & “a rocket will never be able to leave the earth’s atmosphere” – NY Times 1936

What do we want from forecasts ?

• Do we want just accuracy? To what degree is that even possible across complicated and complex domains?

• Do we want cognitively diverse teams to make us more aware of extreme events? Thus, minimising downside risks?

• Do we just want comfort, ideological support and evidence of our existing beliefs? Do we want entertainment?

• Do we want to influence a target audience, shift consensus or established beliefs?

These answers may differ if you are a CEO, CFO, Head of Sales, Head of Innovation, an Insurance Actuary, Epidemiologist, Politician, Economist, Intelligence Agency, Shock Jock or Sports Commentator.

For example, it was a mainstream view of epidemiologists across last 20 years that a pandemic was a prominent risk;

“The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the re-emergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.”- David Epstein 2007

https://davidepstein.com/lets-get-ready-to-rumble-humanity-vs-infectious-disease/

https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/20/4/660.full.pdf 

So, is COVID19 perhaps SARS2?  Clearly, forecasting a pandemic is desirable. How do we give prominence to diverse voices & data and what are the better practices to observe and implement?

SUPER-FORECASTING

In October 2002, the US National Intelligence Estimates (a consensus view of the CIA, NSA, DIA and thirteen other agencies with > 20,000 intelligence analysts) concluded that the key claims of the Bush Administration claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were correct. After invading Iraq in 2003, the US found no evidence of WMDs. “It was one of the worst – arguably the worst  - intelligence failure in modern history” notes Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner in their book “Superforecasting : The Art and Science of Prediction”

In 2006, IARPA was formed to fund cutting-edge research with the aim of potentially enhancing the intelligence community work. IAPRA’s plan was to create a tournament-style incentive for top researchers (intelligence analysts, universities & a team of volunteers for the Good Judgement Project (GJP)), to generate accurate probability estimates to questions that were;

• Neither so easy that an attentive reader of the NY Times could get them right , nor

• So hard that no one on the planet could get them right

Approximately 500 questions spanned: economic, security, terrorism, energy, environmental, social and political realms

Forecast performance was monitored individually and in teams, and Tetlock’s GJP team proved 60% more accurate in year 1, 78% more accurate in Year 2.

• What did these forecasting tournaments learn about the attributes of super-forecasters that may be of relevance in Commercial or Government organisations? Here are a few;

• Superforecasters spoke in probabilities of how likely an event would occur (not in absolutes : yes/no), this better enabled them to accept a level of uncertainty – it made them more thoughtful and accurate

• Superforecasters were often educated yet ordinary people with an open-mind, an ability to change their minds, humility and an ability to review assumptions & update forecasts frequently, albeit at times by small increments

• Actions which were helpful included;

  • Breaking the question down into smaller components and identifying the known and the unknown, focus on work that is likely to have better payoff, actively seek to distinguish degrees of uncertainty, avoid binding rules. Consider the “outsiders” view, frame the problem not uniquely but as part of a wider phenomena

  • Examine what is unique about problem and look at your opinions and how they differ from other people’s viewpoints. Take in all the information with your “dragonfly eyes” and construct a unified vision, balancing arguments and counterarguments, balancing prudence and decisiveness – generating a description as clearly, concisely and as granular as possible

  • Don’t over-react to new information – a Bayesian approach was useful

• The GJP found that while many forecasters were accurate within a horizon of 150 days, not even the super-forecasters were confident beyond 400 days, forecasts out to 5 years were about equal with chance.  

• What about forecasting teams versus forecasting individuals?

o   With good group dynamics, flat and non-hierarchical structures and a culture of sharing – teams were better than individuals – aggregation was important. In fact teams of super-forecasters could beat established prediction markets.

o   The note of caution around low performing teams came when people were lazy, let others do the work or where susceptible to group-think.

“Unchartered : How to map the future together.”

— Margaret Heffernan

Daryl Plummer of Gartner, a technology advisory firm who produces forecasts for customers who wish to discern hype from reality.

The prediction process starts with propositions, then verified, quantified and made actionable. A robust peer review occurs and 95% of predictions are modified along the way. Plummer routinely scrutinises predictions with actual events and these results are highlighted at conferences – championing the successes and sharing insights across those that were wrong. “Nobody here is hired because they’re psychic; they’re hired to generate insights that are useful – even if they turn out wrong. It’s useful to get you thinking”.

The author notes “that what matters most isn’t the predictions themselves but how we respond to them, and whether we respond to them at all. The forecast that stupefies isn’t helpful, but the one that provokes fresh thinking can be. The point of predictions should not be to surrender to them but to use them to broaden and map your conceptual, imaginative horizons. Don’t fall for them – challenge them.”

“How to Decide” : Annie Duke – Simple Tools for making better choices

The author presents some useful tips that teams can use to elicit uninfected feedback and leverage the true wisdom of the crowd in decision making. This is especially useful where key forecast & value chain insights and institutional knowledge is held across multiple SMEs and stakeholders;

The Problem;

• “When you tell someone what you think before hearing what they think, you can cause their opinion to bend towards yours, often times without them knowing it”,  “The only way somebody can know that they’re disagreeing with you is if they know what you think first. Keeping that to yourself when you elicit feedback makes it more likely that what they say is actually what they believe”, “To get high quality feedback it’s important to put the other person as closely as possible into the same state of knowledge that you were in at the time you made the decision”, “Belief contagion is particularly problematic in groups”

Tips to elicit those insightful cross-functional perspectives;

• Elicit initial opinions individually and independent before the group meets. Specify the type of feedback or insights required and request an email or written thoughts be provided before meeting. Collate these initial opinions and share with group prior to meeting. Now focus on areas of “diversion”, “dispersion”, avoid using any language around “disagreement”

• Anonymise feedback to group – this removes any influence from the insights or opinions of higher status individuals

• Anonymising feedback also gives equal weight to insights and opinion and allows outside-the box perspectives to be heard

• Anonymised feedback will also allow mis-understandings to be discussed and the team to grow in knowledge together

• If the team needs to make a decision within a meeting; try

  • Writing down insights and passing to one person to write on a whiteboard – maintaining anonymity

  • Writing down your insights and pass to another person to read aloud to the group

  • If you must read your own thoughts to group – start with most junior member and work towards most senior

“Radical Uncertainty: Decision Making for an unknowable future”

Authors: John Kay & Meryn King  

“The belief that mathematical reasoning is more rigorous and precise than verbal reasoning, which is thought to be susceptible to vagueness and ambiguity, is pervasive in economics”& Jean-Claude Trichet of the 2007-2008 GFC; “As a policy-maker during the crisis, I found the available models of limited help. In fact, I would go further: in the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools”

The authors draw a number of helpful lessons in the use of economic and financial models in business and in government;

• Use simple models and identify key factors that influence an assessment. Adding more and more elements to a model is to follow the mistaken belief that a model can describe the complexity of the real world. The better purpose for a model is to find “small world” problems which illuminate part of the large world radical uncertainty

• Having identified model parameters that are likely to make a significant difference to your assessment, go and do some research in the real world to obtain evidence on the value of these parameters to customers or stakeholders. Simple models provide flexibility to explore the effects of modifications or scenarios.

A model is useful only if the person using it recognises it does not represent the world as it is really is, rather it is a tool for exploring ways in which decisions might or might not go wrong. 

Uncertainty : Howard Marks : https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/howard-marks-memos/

In his May 2020 newsletter to Oaktree Clients, Howard Marks notes the field of economics is muddled and imprecise, there are no rules one can count on to consistently show causation, patterns tend to repeat, and while they may be historical, logical and often observed, they remain only tendencies. Excessive trust in forecasts is dangerous.

When considering current forecasts, he notes the world is more uncertain today than at any other time in our lifetimes, the ability to deal intelligently with uncertainty is one of the most important skills, the bigger the topic (world, economy. Markets, currencies, interest rates) the less possible it is to achieve superior knowledge and we should seek to understand the limitations of our foresights.  

A forecast is a statement about the future, a future we cannot know everything about , yet it remains a useful tool for decision making, scenario modelling, stress testing and planning. The map is not the territory, so with forecasting we should learn from better practices around collating diverse views and data, building cognitively diverse teams, constantly challenging assumptions, leverage the wisdom & insights of your subject matter experts, maintain intellectual humility & resiliency facing uncertainty, use models wisely and adopt a bayesian approach.

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.”

— Ian Wilson. Former GE Chairman

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LOOKING TO CURATE YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY? REACH OUT.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes.

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Article written by Mark Easdown

Resilience

Article written by Mark Easdown

Individual, Enterprise & Ecosystem Strategy & Planning, Ways of Working

““The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.””

— Ernest Hemingway

““Resilience is the capacity of any entity – an individual, a community, an organisation, or a natural system – to prepare for disruptions, to recover from shocks and stresses, and to adapt and grow from a disruptive experience.””

— Judith Rodin

““Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will-then your life will flow well.””

— Epictetus

“Kintsugi”: Kin meaning golden & tsugi meaning joinery, so “to join with gold”. In Zen aesthetics a different perspective emerges with broken ceramic pieces repaired using gold leaf and with great care thus highlighting the damaged history rather than hiding it. The object is given a fresh start, proudly wearing the flaws of its accident. Origins attributed to shogun of Japan,  Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408)

According to the Oxford English & Australian Concise Oxford Dictionaries, resilience is a noun, with key attributes;

• Capacity to recovery quickly from difficulties, toughness

• Ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape, elasticity

• Recoiling, resuming original shape after bending, stretching, compression, shock, depression

Yet, the quotations above highlight a unique resilient frame of mind: “strong at the broken places” & “a fresh start, proudly wearing the flaws” & “don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would”. Judith Rodin believes “Resilience isn’t an inherited characteristic, it really is a skill” which would then enable you “to prepare for disruptions”.

Let’s explore some scenarios across individual resilience, ethical resilience & the resilience dividend.    

At the individual level, the global pandemic, economic downturns, recessions and increase in uncertainty and anxiety highlight the need for resilience. As Diane L Coutu “How Resilience Works”, (HBR May 2002) observes, resilient people have certain defining characteristics;

• They take a sober and down to earth look at the reality of the current situation

• They search for and construct meaning for themselves and others, they build bridges to a better and fuller future

• They continually improvise, they imagine new possibilities & put resources to new uses

Are resilient companies filled of optimistic people?  Jim Collins in researching “Good to Great” sought counsel of Admiral Jim Stockdale to learn more…

“You must never confuse faith that you prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be”

Admiral Stockdale was a pilot whos’ plane was shot down over Vietnam in 1965, he endured 7 ½ years of captivity and torture and a POW. He organised a system of discipline & communications with fellow POWs, refusing even under torture to offer his captors any intelligence. He earned the Congressional Medal of Honour. He observed the POWs who broke fastest where the ones who deluded themselves about the reality and severity of their ordeal, they were optimistic they would be out by next week, next month, Christmas ..

The Stockdale Paradox, is that in the face of hardship you must;

• Maintain clarity about your reality  ….. however at the same time … Find positivity and hope for the future

In turning around demoralised workforce or lagging business performance, executives and teams must maintain a sober analysis of current state and conjure up a sense of possibilities and brighter future states.

Constructing meaning out of circumstance, continually improving and staying future focus

Austrian psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor in his book “Man’s search for meaning” realised that to survive the camp, he created an imagine of himself delivering a lecture after the war on the psychology of the concentration camp to help others understand what they had been through, he constructed concrete goals and endured to deliver his vision.

In “Resilience: Hard won wisdom for a better life” by Eric Greitens, the story of Emil Zatopek shows us happiness and resilience can co-exist. In 1940 at age 18, he was forced by a coach at a Czech shoe factory to run his first race. Yet in adversity and during the race he discovered a love of running and a passion to succeed which set the direction of his life. Within 4 years he held Czech and world records. In the 1952 Olympics, he won the 5km and 10km and decided to run in his first marathon. He was an unorthodox runner, he wore his pleasure and pain for all to see, he crossed a line a winner in a world record time.

In our workplaces, mistakes are made, lack of frameworks and preparation, poor judgements and unintended consequences emerge. In “The Power of Ethics : How to make good choices in a complicated world”, Susan Liautaud gives us the following two real world examples and the need for frameworks around Ethical Resilience, the need for preventative measures, swift action and measures to recovery across leadership team and an organisation.

““Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better””

— Maya Angelou

Natasha’s Law (UK) & Ethical Resilience

On July 17 2016, Natasha Ednan-Laperouse aged 15 boarded a plane at Heathrow with her father and best friend for a vacation in south of France, they stopped to buy breakfast at Pret A Manger. She meticulously examined food labels as he had allergies to nuts, sesame seeds, dairy & bananas, her father double checked the label and there were no warning signs around the store. Tragically Natasha suffers a severe anaphylactic shock, her medicines nor shots of epinephrine would assist, French paramedics rushed her to Nice hospital where she died.  

Sesame seeds had been baked into the dough of the baguette, this was not listed on the package nor visible on the bread. In September 2018, a coroner’s court found Pret A Porter have previously received 21 other instances of allergic reactions, 9 of which involved sesame seeds. Pret A Manager director or risk and compliance testified that the chain had acted in accordance to the law, highlighting differing labelling rules for food prepared in-store and off-site. So, the chain had adhered to food-labelling laws but fallen short of a higher ethical standard.

In October, CEO issued a public apology and instigated wide spread labelling of individual packaging, posted full ingredients online, promised to respond to allergy-related incidents and vowed to work with government, charities, peers to improve the law which emerged in 2019 was known as “Natasha’s law”.  

The CEO was asked by author what steps might have been taken to have built ethical resilience and recovery; his response acknowledged earlier labelling expense concerns, preparing food in-store was to deliver quality and freshness to customer, there had also been concerns about complexity in compliance and in-house labelling with many vulnerabilities and potential points of error in value chain. The CEO acknowledged they should have delivered more than the law required, they should have been proactive and once they saw missteps – they should have told the truth, taken responsibility and moved forward with a plan to recover.

Microsoft conversational AI bot called Tay ( T= Thinking, A=About, Y=You) & Ethical Resilience

In 2016, Microsoft launched a social experiment in Tay, with the intention that the more people chatted with Tay the smarter its learning and natural language would evolve. In less than 16 hours, a particular type of attack saw Tay posting thousands of racist, sexist and anti-semitic comments via Twitter.

Microsoft immediately deleted posts, took Tay offline and apologised for “unintended offensive and hurtful tweets .. which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay”. The company acknowledged it had not anticipated this sort of attack, but should have and outline lessons learned moving forward and the complexity of managing positives and negatives of AI systems.

The author highlights the very public cycle from resilience to recovery; Tell the truth, take responsibility and have a framework and make a plan to fix the problem or flaws.

Trends emerging at the start of the 21st Century have highlighted many crisis; pandemics, cyber-security attacks, storm damage, wildfires, systematic and structural failures that impact communities, cities & ecosystems. These trends can be amplified by;

• movement of populations and urbanisation (stressing social cohesion, infrastructure and services) 

• complex adaptive & evolving systems, with both;

  • globalisation advancing and vulnerabilities for problems to spread quickly across the globe

  • climate change impacting fires, floods, storms & greenhouse gases

In response resilience is being studied across an ever-increasing landscape including: health & wellbeing, psychology, psychiatry, community & human development, change management & workplace, medicine, epidemiology, nursing, education, software and distributed systems, engineering. Infrastructure, economic development, environmental, leadership & strategy.

““In the twenty first century, building resilience is one of our most urgent social and economic issues because we live in a world that is defined by disruption. Not a month goes by that we don’t see some kind of disturbance to the normal flow of life.””

— Judith Rodin

In her book “The Resilience Dividend”, Judith Rodin describes Resilience noting the thinking of ecology, engineering, psychology, systems thinking and adaptive cycles.

“Resilience is the capacity of an entity – an individual, a community, an organisation, or a natural system – to prepare for disruptions, to recover from shocks and stresses and to adapt and grow from a disruptive experience. As you build resilience, therefore you become more able to respond to those you can’t predict or avoid. You also develop greater capacity to bounce back from a crisis, learn from it, and achieve revitalisation. Ideally, as you become more adept at managing disruption and skilled at resilience building, you will be able to create and take advantage of new opportunities in good times and bad. That is the resilience dividend”

So, what attributes might an individual, community or organisation develop to be more resilient ? 

• AWARENESS : must be aware of strengths, assets, liabilities, vulnerabilities, the infrastructure, human and natural systems and a willingness to constantly re-assess, take in new information and adjust settings

• DIVERSE: draw from a diversity not any core critical function (individual, organisation, community, capabilities, information sources, technical elements, people and ideas)

  • William Saito served as CTO of NAIIC and deeply involved in Fukushima power plant disaster with 2011 earthquake and tsunami. He maintains it was “group-think” that saw highly skilled and experienced engineers and administrators ignore warnings and place back-up generators in basement and susceptible to flooding.

• INTEGRATED: The left hands must know what the right hand is doing & have alignment of goals, across systems, sectors, divisional or government silos. It needs to presence of feedback loops.

• SELF REGULATING: these domains can withstand disruptions, anomalous situations and will not fail catastrophically. It is enhanced due to elements, planning or design

• ADAPTIVE: capacity to adjust to circumstances, taking new actions, modifying behaviours, making improvements even before s disruption to avoid or mitigate effects.

  • The Vietnamese communities living in public housing in New Orleans had social and community networks in place for their >5,000 people which meant that roughly 80% had left the city before Hurricane Katrina arrived. The community showed resilience and adaptability in emergency accommodation solutions and then in the return, re-build and re-establishing of church and community.

The author provides a large number of real-world examples of what good looks like spanning: Readiness, response and revitalisation (which is a much fuller forward experience than just recovery), the need to get ahead of the threats (what can be reinforced? What can be practiced?), coordinated leadership and well-trained resources,  acknowledging that a crisis will confound all plans and preparation and the importance of social cohesion – as friends, neighbours and colleagues are usually the first asked to respond.

The concept of resilience dividend has a dual meaning;

• It shows the difference between how a disruptive incident, shocks, stresses affects communities / ecosystems who have made reliant-related investments & those communities who did not

• Demonstrates the benefits to communities / ecosystems accrue such as jobs, social cohesion, infrastructure, equity , reduction of poverty and crime

Around the world, this co-benefit & resilience dividend is noted in the design of co-purposed infrastructure for example;

• Amphitheatre, Cedar Rapids, Iowa is both flood control and an entertainment space & community gardens.

• SMART Tunnel, Kuala Lumpur (SMART = Storm water Management and Road Tunnel) is a designed 3 section tunnel combining storm water flood drainage & motor vehicles on differing levels. In category 2 storms, which occur approximately 10 times pa, the tunnel transports both cars and flood waters in lower section. Whilst in category 3 storms, the road is closed and tunnel used for flood water flow.

Building resilience is key at the individual, enterprise and ethical levels. The resilience dividend is an important strategic concept.

In May 2018, the National Resilience Taskforce was established which sought to develop a national disaster mitigation framework to reduce the impact of disasters. A report emerged “Profiling Australia’s Vulnerability: The interconnected causes and effects of systematic disaster risk.  As the report notes on page 41, “ More focus is needed on the intersections & interdependencies in the systems that support us, from local to global levels”

““We need to remember that the future is not pre-determined in any important sense. It is not an unknown land into which we totter unsteadily one day at a time, but an extension of the present that we shape by our decisions and our actions. The future is not somewhere we are going but something we are creating. We all have a role in shaping Australia’s future.””

— Professor Ian Lowe

Source: https://www.aidr.org.au/media/6682/national-resilience-taskforce-profiling-australias-vulnerability.pdf

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LOOKING TO CURATE YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY? REACH OUT.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes.

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Article written by Mark Easdown

Prospective Hindsight and the Pre-Mortem

Article written by Mark Easdown

Business Strategy, Leadership, Collaboration, Ways Of Thinking & Working

““We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” - Greek lyrical poet, Archilochus.
Or restated: ‘you do not rise to the challenge, you fall to the level of preparedness’”

““If you want a man to keep his head when a crisis comes you must give him training before it comes” ”

— Seneca

““Hope for the best, plan for the worst” ”

— Lee Childs (Character Jack Reacher)

In a nutshell, What is Prospective hindsight?

It is the generation of an explanation, reason, narrative for a future event (as if it had already happened). As if one had taken a time machine forward and looked backwards.

A simple and effective example this shift in thinking is provided in the below 1989 study: ……. “ consider predicting the winner of the first basketball game of a championship series. Before the game predicting the winner is based on general factors: match-ups between key players, team strengths and weaknesses, etc. Even past games are used to identify factors relevant to the imminent contest. After the game it's a different story. The defeat of one team is explained both by these general factors and by specific events like Player A's early foul trouble Player B's 'off night', too much inactivity since the team won its previous series, etc. Such events are too numerous to anticipate beforehand and to relevant to ignore afterward.”

Your executive and team makes sense of its environment by observing what happens and reasoning why these things have happened. Your CFO or COO may have a deeper understanding of business drivers and processes and possess greater explanatory skills whilst your new recruit may generate a new fresh insight with less knowledge of the context.

We usually explain the past (why did this occur) and predict the future (what if scenarios). We analyse the past often to draw meaning and insights to apply to forward thinking. Strategically, it would be very beneficial if we could improve how we anticipate future events and help us make more successful decisions and next steps. 

Back to the Future : A Prospective Hindsight study, 1989

In 1989, Deborah Mitchell, Edward Russo and Nancy Pennington undertook a study: “Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events”;  on how people think and what role does certainty play in people generating reasons, explanations, narratives about an event? If people generate more explanations about past events, is this because the event had happened in the past? Or because of the certainty with which people think about things in the past?  The experiment findings were;

• Certainty matters more than past of future in itself

• People who thought about a future event with certainty generated more reasons and explanations than those who considered a past event with uncertainty

• Adding certainty added 30% more reasons and twice as many action-based reasons than abstract reasons

“Winning Decisions, Getting it right the first time”, Russo & Shoemaker, 2002

An experiment found prospective hindsight generated 25% more reasons for the following questions;

“How likely is it a woman will be elected the leader of your country in the first election after the next one” Think about all the reasons why this might happen. For specificity, provide a numerical probability.

&

“Imagine that the first election after the next one has occurred and a woman has been elected the leader of your country. Think about the reasons why this might have occurred. Then provide a numerical probability of this actually occurring”

Given the importance and value of improving the decision-making process, researchers, social scientists and psychologists set about leveraging the findings of prospective hindsight studies and try to identify a framework upfront to identify your decisions that might lead to poor outcomes and create a safe environment for dissent in views. In 1992, Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist developed a pre-mortem risk assessment approach.

The Pre-Mortem

The pre-mortem framework and strategy;

• Considers the reasons around why something might fail, enhances collective intelligence of the group

• Encourages prospective thinking (rather than retrospective thinking) , leverages findings of studies in field

• Consider upfront future events before a decision is made (things within your control and outside your control)

• Considers factors that have resulted in the failure of a project or initiative, all voices are equal

• Creates a safe environment for participants to utilise expertise, experience and intuition to aid decision making  

If you choose a multi-disciplinary and cross functional team of participants what will fall out of this process are valuable insights into weaknesses in current state business environment and processes, the new initiative and any integration concerns. This exploration of the initiative, the pre-mortem findings, the countermeasures proposed will also likely reveal the positivity and attitude of participants to the project. The process liberates participants to speak up whereas in other situations they would feel they were not seen as team-players.

The basic steps

Gary Klein suggests some basic steps;

• Bring together a diverse and informed team familiar with decision or initiative

• Imagine a worst-case scenario (embarrassing & devastating), Imagine a crystal ball good enough to see failure but not the reasons

• Ask team members to spend some time independently and silently generating reasons for the failure

• Collate and consolidate a comprehensive list of concerns and issues

• With a prospective viewpoint, the team is now able to reconsider plan/initiative and countermeasures

• Keep revisiting the list, which keeps the possibility of failure alive and reduces overconfidence or group-think   

It is not the steps followed, the importance of pre-mortems is in the ability to switch thinking and the prospective hindsight viewpoint. 

Daniel Kahneman (2002, Nobel prize winner and expert in judgement and decision making) describes a simpler version;

…. When the organisation has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering a brief group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster”

In which domains might pre-mortems be valuable?

Program and Project Management

• Ongoing risk analysis, risk mitigation measures, addressing weaknesses and integration issues

• Improving structural integrity of initiative and identify opportunities, quicker responses through project lifecycle

• Pre-emptively, in any domain that a “Post Implementation review” or “Post Mortem” is undertaken

Product Development and launch

• Workshop 6-month ahead scenarios ; “Product failed to launch”, “Product failed to deliver”

• Flawed beliefs may emerge, may be an alternate way to deal with ambiguity, highlight potential failure points, enhances greater collective awareness

• With findings run mini experiments on pilot, devise risk mitigation and test app, take small bets, perhaps UX professionals can de-risk initiative

Investment Opportunities

• Mitigate group-think, ensure a sufficient range of alternative model input assumptions, approaches and viewpoints considered, enhance investment business case, mitigate downside risks, poor practices and avoid making material mistakes, record findings and revisit frequently

Strategy, Resilience and Risk Management

• Workshop “Kill the company” or “Kill the budget” or “Kill the forecast”, “Risk Management: BCP, DR, Contingency Planning” identify ways in which these could fail, identify the challenges, points of failure, assumptions and develop mitigation plans

• Complement a HAZOP; Hazard and Operability Study to see how system and plant deviate from design intent and may create risks to manage 

• Workshop new strategic partnership proposal covering pricing, inventory, distribution, commercial size and acumen of partner, mutual ways of working

• Strategic planning tool for innovation and risks for domains such as : environmental, social, ethical, economic or empowerment

So, is this pre-mortem just another to-do list or a glass half empty view of the world?

Certainly, throughout history success has derived through good mental models, pre-empting and avoiding mistakes, inverted and switch thinking and leveraging prospective hindsight;

““... prevention is worth a pound of cure” ”

— Benjamin Franklin

““The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way””

— Marcus Aurelius

““When I begin my work in the morning, I expect to have a successful and pleasant day of it, but at the same time I prepare myself to hear that one of our school buildings is on fire, or has burned, or that some disagreeable accident had occurred, or that someone has abused me in a public address or a printed article, for something that I have done or omitted to do, or something that he had heard that I had said—probably something I had never thought of saying.””

— Booker T Washington

““Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead–through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. Tell me where I’m going to die so I don’t go there.” ”

— Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway)

Pre-Mortems might be a useful tool business hack that could take as little as 30-90 minutes or multiple sessions, perhaps it might be your unfair advantage, your “low-cost and high-payoff kind of thing” (see below).

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/strategic-decisions-when-can-you-trust-your-gut

Gary Klein: “The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. “

Daniel Kahneman: “The premortem is a great idea…  in general, doing a premortem on a plan that is about to be adopted won’t cause it to be abandoned. But it will probably be tweaked in ways that everybody will recognize as beneficial. So, the premortem is a low-cost, high-payoff kind of thing.

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LOOKING TO CURATE YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY? REACH OUT.

Whiteark is not your average consulting firm, we have first-hand experience in delivering transformation programs for private equity and other organisations with a focus on people just as much as financial outcomes.

We understand that execution is the hardest part, and so we roll our sleeves up and work with you to ensure we can deliver the required outcomes for the business. Our co-founders have a combined experience of over 50 years’ working as Executives in organisations delivering outcomes for shareholders. Reach out for a no obligation conversation on how we can help you. Contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Article written by Mark Easdown

Practical Wisdom: Making sense of the eco-system

Article written by Mark Easdown

Business Strategy, Leadership, Collaboration, Ways Of Thinking & Working

““It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.””

— Richard Feynman

““Without this texture of experience, the data shoved before these executives’ eyes loses any truth. Context and colour are absent; all that remains are abstract representations of the world rather than the world itself.””

— Christian Madsbjerg, Sensemaking

““Practical wisdom,” Aristotle told us, “is the combination of moral will and moral skill.””

— Barry Schwartz

What is it when you encountered an executive team, your boss, a colleague, a team member, a peer displaying these following characteristics;

• Understanding the context, the enterprise strategy and how to serve the common good

• A balancing of conflicting directives, interpretation of rules in light of the situation

• Perception, sharing others views, see the shades of grey, can apply practical solutions to particular problems

• Does the right thing because it was the right thing to do, with the interest of the common good in front of mind

• Applies wisdom, knowledge and experience, learnings from previous mistakes to a specific context

 It is Practical Wisdom in action…

Aristotle (384-322 BC) in the Nicomachean Ethics distinguishes between three types of knowledge:

• Episteme (universal, theoretical understanding),

• Techne (skill, craft, technique understanding)

• Phronesis (practical wisdom, prudence, ethical knowledge, rational, linked to the senses, to perceive, to deliberate and action orientated).

  • His basic ingredients of Practical Wisdom were: Knowing one’s role or objective, perception of particular situations, an informed intelligence, learning from experience, deliberation on the best course of action, it is not enough just to be wise, you must actually do it. 

  • Practical Wisdom has evolved through time with the writings of Thomas Aquinas and many modern-day scholars, thought leaders and business schools.

So, Why (Where) is Practical Wisdom still relevant and of interest today?

Practical Wisdom within law-making

In 2019, the final report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry was handed down by Commissioner Kenneth Hayne. The report underscores many fundamental themes;

• Importance of boards getting the right information and challenging management (yet adds the caution:  “Often, improving the quality of information given to boards will require giving directors less material”)

• A call to arms to fix corporate culture (assess culture and governance, identify problems, deal effectively with problems, set the tone from the top, ensure ongoing and robust reviews)

• Remuneration and Incentives tell staff what the company values

• Best interests of a company is not a binary choice between the customer and shareholders

Commissioner Hayne offered the following practical wisdom/principles to guide a review of ethics and conduct for boards and business leaders;

• Obey the law

• Do not mislead or deceive

• Be fair

• Provide services that are fit for purpose

• Deliver services with reasonable care and skill

• When acting for another, act in the best interests of that other

Practical Wisdom and the role of leaders

Wisdom, knowledge and experience are required for leadership and managerial decision making in; goal setting and an integrated view (including an ethical, moral and societal view), pricing policies (fair & equitable outcomes, supporting strategy (grounded in data plus context), budgeting (dealing with uncertainty, unpredictability, models and assumptions), leading through crisis (need for eco-system thinking) staff wellbeing ( the individual needs and the common good), strategic partnership balanced scorecards (ability to see through conflicting scores at what is really important in relationship).

Leadership should not wait for a crisis, for revenues and budgets to go off-track to engage the wider views. Pandemic of 2020, has been a great example of leadership teams who have been forced to stop, listen and reach out across their ecosystem (customers, employees, suppliers, relationships with banks and government) and to re-invent and re-imagine themselves.

Often when things start going wrong, there is an inclination is to either make more rules to prevent certain outcomes occurring or to put in smarter incentives to encourage the right outcomes. Practical Wisdom can be a guide when many conflicting rules appear at odds with the underlying principle & enterprise strategy  (see Starbucks example).

https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/comment-what-aristotle-and-confucius-can-teach-todays-csr-professionals

““The problem with a rule-book based approach is that it actively undermines practical wisdom. When people become used to complying with policies, they stop thinking for themselves. This is probably in part behind the terrible incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia when a manager called the police to remove two black men. Racism was clearly a factor, but the incident began when the manager refused to allow one of the men to use the restroom, in accordance with company policy that they were for customers only. Had the manager followed the principle of hospitality, which should be at the heart of the coffee chain’s ethos, rather than one of its policies, the situation would probably not have escalated””

Practical Wisdom and desirable characteristics of individuals and teams 

How might your organisation better consider virtues and practical wisdom in the recruitment of individuals, the building and binding of teams, project sprints or cross functional collaborations?

Practical wisdom would be demonstrated in the masterful blending of knowledge and experience, an understanding of both the specific context of a situation and a wider more integrated perspective, wisdom and action. The ability of individuals and teams to  work for the common good and do the right thing at the correct time because it is the right thing to do, suggests a balance: a challenge of group-think and dominant assumptions, awareness of limitations and willingness to seek inspiration externally, ensure cognitive diversity and balance creativity/breaking through thinking with obedience to rules and resistance to change.

Yet, nurturing practical wisdom may even appear add odds with our enterprises and societies which are becoming more complex and interconnected, more specialised, more bureaucratic with rules, regulations and letter of the law compliance focus. It is balance to be found for each sector and enterprise (see Timpson example).

https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/comment-what-aristotle-and-confucius-can-teach-todays-csr-professionals

“UK key-cutting and shoe-repair chain Timpson; “Under founder John Timpson’s principle of “upside down management”, all staff are authorized to do whatever they judge is necessary to give the customer the best experience. This empowers everyone in the organization to think about how to do the right thing on a daily basis and never hide behind the policy book. The company does have some specific policies, too, but these reinforce rather than replace the emphasis on principle.””

Practical Wisdom and thinking about data and analysis

In 1973, Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist characterised his field notes and data as a “thick description” which was a multi-faceted examination of human behaviour (facts) plus how it related to the deeper cultural context. The aim was to observe, record, analyse and interpret a “thick description” to gain a deeper understanding and meaning.

Practical wisdom may be applied to your data in the steps you take to understand the enterprise strategy and desired outcomes (What do you want to achieve? Be direct and specific), How you engage across business to understand the source of data, cost/benefit and data integrity, whether any recent material changes in technology, enterprise practices, calculation or collection of time series of data. A constant reflection on choosing meaningful metrics, ask yourself “how do I know that” and “why is that important?”. The willingness to sense-check data analysis with subject matter experts, review lessons learned from prior errors, periods or external eco-system or industry benchmarks.

https://www.marketingweek.com/adidas-marketing-effectiveness/

““Adidas is on a journey to shift from marketing efficiency to marketing effectiveness, admitting a focus on ROI led it to over-invest in digital and performance marketing at the expense of brand building.” ….
Wrong metrics “ led Adidas to over-invest in paid search ….. an error it uncovered in its Latin America market when a breakdown at Google AdWords and therefore inability to invest in paid search didn’t lead to a dip in traffic or revenue coming from SEO.””

The purpose of an enterprise is evolving rapidly and is no longer just to “maximise shareholder value” declared the Business Roundtable in 2019. In 2020 CEO Larry Fink of Blackrock informed clients of a new ESG standard: “making sustainability integral to the way we manage risk, generate alpha, build portfolios, and pursue investment stewardship, in order to help improve your investment outcomes”. In 2020, the Pandemic forced business to re-examine and re-imagine themselves. As these trends continue there is a need for something fresh and new (or perhaps revisit something rather old).

Practical Wisdom; making sense of the eco-system is a “secret sauce” for individuals, teams , management and enterprise. As a way’s of working and thinking, it remains highly relevant today. Read deeply, reflect, listen, build cognitively diverse teams, collaborate and play it forward. Whiteark is here to assist.

“ “Virtue makes us aim at the right end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means””

— Aristotle

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Article written by Mark Easdown