Welcome, luminaries.

Congratulations on being a part of the community.

We think you've chosen wisely.

Absolutely.

Now, this week, our big question, Ian, where are we starting off?

Well, starting off really from where we left in the regular episode, we're thinking about ambiguity and certainty.

Here's a big question.

Are the best consultants the ones who can look at the world from a dozen new perspectives and see something useful every time and wrestle with the ambiguity productively?

Or are the best consultants the ones who do exactly what the standard methodologies say and who are good at matching up really well characterized problems with really tried and tested solutions and use systematic approaches and clearly defined parameters?

Mike, I've met consultants who were very near the ends, the far ends of that spectrum, and it's really interesting to wrestle with this.

Which one should we try to be?

Now, if I'm the kind of client who wants to find new trends and patterns in the world, I think I want the first kind of consultant.

That's pretty clear.

If I'm running a nuclear power station, I'm concerned about risk and uncertainty, so I probably want the second kind of consultant.

But somewhere in between, there's room for a lot of other permutations and combinations and possibilities, and just sticking to one end or another of this line might not be enough to help us through every situation.

What do you think?

No, I think you're absolutely right, Ian.

And there's an interesting perspective all around this too.

You pointed out Tom Shorney's article on LinkedIn, which gets us even deeper into the meat of this question.

Tom writes, dealing with the ambiguous is often listed as a requirement of the consultant profile.

I've worked on projects where the line between client and consultant was commonly accepted as the ability to comfortably deal with ambiguity, a skill reserved for consultants.

What the client pays for, right?

Something valuable to attain.

I find this narrative quite dangerous.

He writes, undervaluing the skills consultants bring to their clients and the abilities of clients themselves.

Yeah, it's a really good take.

I started out our thinking for this episode, Mike, thinking that most of the time we'd be valuing a consultant's ability to deal with ambiguity and we'd be gently mocking the consultants who strive for certainty and specifics the whole time.

But maybe, Tom, there is onto something and maybe there are things that have happened recently in the world that remind us about this.

It's really true.

I agree, Ian.

I think that there are situations that require both.

But I've got to admit that for me personally, I'm certainly leaning heavily in one way.

I don't think anybody who doesn't believe this is a critical dichotomy didn't live through the pandemic and isn't paying attention to its ongoing impact on our business and personal lives.

Now, for me, I add to that I've not long ago moved to western North Carolina and I'm still selling my home in Florida.

So I just dealt with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton simultaneously here in both homes and I think so many other people facing climate disasters.

I'm just a short way out of Asheville here.

My sense of the importance of uncertainty and ambiguity is now even higher than it was what it accounted for a lion's share of my work in consulting.

I moved from turnaround consulting to working during a sea change in the use of technology for competitive advantage.

So there was a lot going on there.

But I think it's not just me and I think there's a dollars and cents impact here as well.

It's true, Mike, we found this quote recently from Kellogg School of Management.

To say it says that we are in uncharted seas must be an understatement.

The problem with uncertainty then is that it leads to paralysis.

And Kellogg call this uncertainty shock.

And it goes on to say that the uncertainty shock generated by the covid19 pandemic just a few years ago would likely account for around half of the fall in GDP that took place in the US in 2020.

The shock of not knowing took away all that economic activity.

Now what they're saying is that when things become uncertain, everything grinds to a halt.

People suspend their decision making processes, they suspend certain kinds of activity while they try to work out what's happening now and work out what might happen.

And unfortunately, stopping to look around and think hard and second guess could well be the worst thing that a business can do.

And the article says in times of uncertainty, the only thing to do is to keep moving as fast as we can.

And Mike, there's a message for us consultants.

Getting businesses moving and on track in those uncertain times is absolutely our domain.

It's what we're here to do.

We help our clients to get back on track.

This uncertainty and ambiguity thing has a lot at stake for us.

Where are we going to be headed in this episode?

I think we're going to talk about what it means to be certain about something and why consultants should even care about that.

We already know, as you just mentioned, that uncertainty is costing our economies and our clients a huge amount.

We're also going to look into social psychology and find out Something surprising about consultants and individuals themselves, our need for closure.

And it turns out we're pretty vulnerable creatures in that dimension sometimes.

Oh, Mike, even you and me.

Even you and me can be vulnerable.

Who would have thought?

We also need to ask ourselves, why are consultants so often expected to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity?

Like Tom Shawney was saying just a moment ago, we are going to rediscover in this episode a familiar acronym, the acronym vuca, which we'll dig into and define and explore.

And we'll talk about how it drives the kind of work that clients often ask us to take on in uncertain times.

And finally, if we chose one over the other, how much could that be holding us back from doing great work for clients?

What opportunities might we be missing out on?

We'll see what we can learn from one of our favorite models over the last couple episodes, the World of Super Communicators, and ask whether we always reach for the right tools, the right approaches, and the right team for every job.

So, Mike, let's talk about what it means to be certain.

Now, we talked in our main episode a bit about the definition of the different kinds of certainty.

And if you're the kind of consultant whose clients prize precision, if you're that nuclear power station client that we talked about before, if you're any kind of client that wants to set clear goals and to be able to measure them, then certainty certainly helps us.

At the beginning of any undertaking, at the beginning of a change program or a project, we can see that setting a goal that is clear and unambiguous is motivating.

Like people will drive themselves to action when they can see a clear goal in front of them.

So that has that kind of psychological power.

Setting a goal that you can measure yourself against allows you to track your progress and to celebrate when you reach a goal.

So that kind of precision, I think, is helping us.

And to be able to be clear about goals, to be unambiguous about what we're trying to achieve, is a great way to express something that we or our clients care about.

And, Mike, I know you and I have done this a lot in our consulting skills work.

We've talked about how you can show the client that you empathize with their goal, that you understand the outcome that they're aiming for, and to be able to do that clearly and unambiguous, it helps the client to believe that we are on the same page as them.

Yeah, and it's interesting.

He had this whole idea of uncertainty, ambiguity, and everything.

I'm Fascinated by the thought that our two sister professions, we won't go into that oldest profession may have been consulting, but these professions of law and accountancy, which consulting seems to be so much like and to bottle itself so much after, both seem to have a very high need for certainty.

And I wonder how much of that kind of prints across into consulting, which came on the scene arguably as an evolution of the other two.

Yeah, and in consulting, I'm old enough to remember the thought that it seems like consultants dress themselves in the clothes a little bit of lawyers and accountants.

Our senior people are partners and we all wear smart suits and we all talk about engagements and fee letters.

There's quite a lot of cultural print through, if you like, from those two professions, and those are two.

Spend some time in a bar over a beer with a lawyer or an accountant and ask them how much they appreciate and value and love ambiguity and uncertainty, and you won't get very far down your first pint before they run away screaming.

There's something about certainty that I think appeals to something in people who give advice.

There's certainly, I think, a kind of working culture that leans towards the avoidance of uncertainty.

One of the oldest and most familiar books about culture is Hofstadter's book Dimensions of Culture.

He talks about the uncertainty avoidance index, the extent to which a particular group of people or a working culture prizes having things in clear categories with clearly defined parameters.

And certainly I think that lawyers and accountants work in cultures that have a high uncertainty avoidance index.

I think as well, Mike, there are some clients that have that kind of culture, the kind of slide rule mentality, and chatting to consultants about clients that they've appreciated or clients that they've had a hard time with.

Consultants who've had a hard time might be often those who've encountered a client that has one of those uncertainty avoiding cultures and they're seen as very tough, I think, by consultants who want to write nice, short, airy, fairy PowerPoint decks and move on to the next thing.

And the clash that we have with these tough, very uncertainty avoidant clients is probably something that brings out the worst in us as a group of people.

Good point.

And it's interesting.

You've got Hofstede's cultural dimension.

You've also got a personality dimension.

Social scientists have looked at this for a number of years here, this idea of the need for closure, this kind of like this need for certainty here.

And there are some people who we talked earlier today about how staring at uncertainty, we're unable to make a decision.

But for some people that need for closure is so strong that they want an answer and they want it quickly.

And almost any answer will do.

We can measure ourselves on where we are on this dimension of need for closure and we'll point you to a scale that you can do that for yourself with as well.

So this need for closure scale use subscales which include a need for order, the need for predictability, decisiveness, avoidance of ambiguity and close mindedness.

It can help us to see a little bit into ourselves of where are we along this kind of continuum of need for closure versus we can be a little bit more open or a lot more open here.

And we'll include in the show notes will direct you right to that scale as well as some information about that.

And so we have this possibility though that people who have a high need for closure.

I need an answer, almost any answer.

You can have clients and consultants who are feeling that way to your point earlier, Ian.

And if they're unable to get comfortable enough with ambiguity and uncertainty, they may be the kinds of people that move to quickly adopt conclusions without enough data and they fill in the gaps by just adding things that aren't there.

And I'm thinking back over my history, these are people who may undervalue orderly problem solving.

Some of what they jump to is without supporting evidence, they actually reject precedent in history.

And sometimes it causes them to jump into new or risky things at the expense of really getting to the right answer together.

That's really fascinating.

So it seems if we get too stressed about ambiguity, we sometimes let ourselves get trapped into just inventing certainty for ourselves by filling in the gaps.

Mike, does the ever reliable fallback that 97% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

You know that as well.

That's exactly right, Ian.

Oh my gosh.

So there are loads of articles online about dealing with ambiguity.

You'll find that lots of the quotes lead back to some of the same sources.

And one of the sources, if you guys are all interested, is a book called the Upside of Uncertainty.

A guide to finding possibility in the Unknown by a lead author is a guy called Nathan Fur.

And the big Idea.

The big takeaway from Fur's book is that actually uncertainty is something to be embraced.

If you're the kind of person that feels that anxiety and is maybe at risk of kind of being stressed out by uncertainty, there's something that you can do to cultivate resilience and adaptability by embracing the uncertainty and making it part of your working life.

The key, he says Lies not in erasing or covering over or hiding uncertainty, but reframing it.

So imagine, he says, that you're not just enduring the unknown, but you're actively exploring it and you're seeking out hidden opportunities.

Now, Mike, if my client was one of those big global Internet brands looking for futurology, I think they'd love that.

I think nuclear Power Station guy might not love it so much.

I think, to be honest, it's good life advice.

And this idea of reframing uncertainty is great for leaders.

I'm still not sure it completely hits the spot yet for consultants, but I read on a little bit through Nathan Furr's book, and he says actually there is some value in taking a look at decisions that you made, hoping that your data is true or certain.

And actually, most of our decisions that we make and consulting projects are a good example of this.

Most of the decisions that you make as a consulting project manager are absolutely laced with uncertainty.

He says it's a good habit to look back at decisions that you made and say, just how impacted was I by uncertainty?

What can I learn not just from whether I made the right call, but from how I made the decision and how I dealt with the uncertainty that was before me at the time.

And that looking back and reflecting on your decisions, Mike, I think that does sound like good advice for consultants.

It is.

And it's funny, Ian, I'm thinking about that too.

That number one, Nathan's co author, by the way, is his wife Susanna.

And I think that's one of the ones where, you know, Nathan and Susanna say, look back at some of those decisions that you made under complete uncertainty.

I have no idea whether this is going to go well.

There's no data, if you will, that I can use for this.

And think about that.

Bad uncertainty, good, perhaps uncertainty.

How many of those really were pivotal in changing your life in really positive ways?

You've got to hope so, right?

Right.

Before we move on from certainty, let's look at a term that people have been using for a long time now, since the mid-90s, and talk about, if you will, how scary, or perhaps a better word, how ripe with opportunity this uncertain world is today.

This term is Vuca V U C A and you mentioned that earlier here.

And I think that Vuca, every business and an increasing number of consulting engagements, and as you say, it might depend on who they're for and where they're at, but increasing number of them must deal with Vuca.

This volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous set of situations that we find today.

This thing comes down to the idea that the volatile speed of change, often perceived as negative.

And on all of these we're going to say, but there's an opportunity, right?

Uncertain.

A lack of knowledge about the impact of our actions.

I don't know how it's going to go.

I don't know what the result's going to be.

It's not risk.

It's not like we've got odds.

No, we don't have the data to even have odds.

Complex.

You're talking about the number of parts and the interconnection of parts we've got.

Because of that information overload.

Hard to predict and control interconnected systems.

So that stuff that's far off has impacts that we couldn't have anticipated and then ambiguous.

This whole idea of the lack of clarity about how to interpret a situation, it's open to one or more than one or many interpretations.

We used to say, every once in a while, you know, you put three consultants in the room and you'll get six different opinions.

There might be the ambiguity that we brought to it ourselves, but this ambiguous world, as we can well see today, how many people have seen what seems to be the very same thing and see it completely differently.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I like Vuca, not only because it's an old tool that we can reuse, speaking as an old tool who's getting reused, but also that it breaks down something that we tend to think about as a bit of a generality.

Oh, life is uncertain, the world is full of risk.

Stuff is complicated.

Actually, there are four quite distinct things here about unpredictability, about interconnectedness and about lack of certainty.

And I think breaking those down and addressing them differently, it's a great little model for getting started with any kind of project about the future.

So maybe we're going to get a new trend of people coming back and using this word, Vuca.

I hope it's helpful.

Models like these, I think, Mike, are the kind of thing that we've often used in the past to help ourselves and help clients look forward and do scenario planning and I think of scenario planning and kind of strategy tools like that.

And I think you're my guy.

It's funny, I've got myself listed on P31's website as a former futurist.

And that refers back to many years.

Exactly.

So I've now used the crystal ball enough to eat enough ground glass that I'm a former futurist.

Best days are now.

Definitely behind you.

Yeah, no doubt about that now.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

I did a lot of work in scenarios and scenario planning.

One of the things that it does so well or it did so well, and we helped so many clients with, is that we could say we're not sure about what the future is, but we can pin the corners on the future, at least around some critical uncertainties that they were facing.

If you look at that VUCA world, it was there.

Vuca, a term again, mid-90s from the army War College.

I wonder a little bit today about how well scenarios would work.

We used to joke about, anybody who's not been to the future can't complain about being surprised by it.

And we felt like we were taking people in a diverse enough view of the future and its potential impacts and bringing so many people across, their firms and others into that exercise that they were so much more sensitized to the possibilities, to sensing road signs, to see different perspectives.

So we were dealing with all those components of vuca, but it was more manageable, I think.

So even when you look at historic examples like Royal Dutch Shell and the Arab oil embargoes, when you look at examples like the future of South Africa, I mean, there are great things to say, wow, these were pretty uncertain and pretty unexpected, but in fact, you could start to anticipate that.

But I look back now and I think about a story that one of our best friends, one of our best consulting friends, used to tell about a military group being sent out on an early training exercise where they were to take no maps with them.

They were going to be dropped blindly in some position, have no idea where they were relative to the headquarters they were to make themselves back to.

And this was a training in the wilderness and orienting and figuring themselves out, dealing with a lot of uncertainty.

Turns out they dropped one team and a very unexpected storm came in a blizzard, high conditions.

Everybody was very worried.

And it was.

They couldn't get out to them.

They were worried about the kinds of losses they would have, only to find out that this group made its way back and in pretty good time.

And everybody was astounded.

One of the top officers there was talking to the leader of this group, going, how did you do it?

And the guy said, I have to admit, sir, the only way we made it back, while I know that is absolutely against regulations to have a map, one of the men actually had smuggled a map with him and he handed it over to the commanding officer.

And the commander looked down at this map and then looked up and said, yeah, this is nowhere near where you were.

So it turned out that the map had given them, I would say, an illusion of certainty that, as you were saying about goals earlier, that gave them this confidence to move forward.

So I think part of what we're doing here is to say, how do we overcome that shock?

How do we move forward in the midst of this that is only getting more volatile and only getting more uncertain and only getting more complex and only getting more ambiguous.

You know, some of that.

And we're going to talk about the kinds of processes that we can adopt as consultants.

The right teams, the right tools, the right approaches to make that happen.

So, Mike, we're going to spend some time now thinking about ambiguity.

We've talked ourselves into it a little bit with Vuca and scenario planning.

But let's talk about why are consultants expected to become with ambiguity?

Why is it such a natural thing that we might suppose our clients are going to value?

And I can see right away that the world is full of ambiguous stuff, right?

There are problems that are ambiguously defined.

The world's populated with partial and unreliable data that points in turn to ambiguous meanings.

There are humans in groups, and all of the misunderstandings that happen there give rise to its own special kind of ambiguity.

So for consultants, maybe it's obvious.

Certainly anybody involved in doing strategy like you were when you were doing your scenario work, needs to be able to give strategic direction and to make the potential of the future look clear enough for our clients that they can make decision, that they can give strategic direction.

I also think that some of the tools and techniques that we use in these situations are about helping the client to adapt, to keep in touch with what's happening and adapt as it evolves.

And lots of clients and consultants, I think, end up using processes that end up being iterative.

Like, relatively few places really do a really big review of strategy and make it a big deal more than once every five years.

But lots of places will have a very iterative picture of what's happening in the market, what's happening with our customers, what's happening with our capabilities.

Let's go back and keep adjusting the direction.

We're still headed in more or less the same path, but we're going to adjust the track based on what's happening.

And this iteration, I think, is something that is really important in helping clients and consultants to adapt and survive.

It's possible also, Mike, that it's at the root of another old piece of consulting survival, which is keep the clients on their toes and doubting themselves.

There's the old consulting maxim, sell a man A fish and we eat for a day.

Teach a man to fish, and we'll never make our revenue targets.

And I think that speaks to this old idea of I'll develop a strategy for you as opposed to we will work together to find ways to do strategy that was one of our best ever wins at a Fortune.

Not only a Fortune 100, this was a Fortune top 20 firm.

Was it came over because of a consulting firm that kept doing that.

They would give them a strategy.

It all went well, went into the ditch.

Don't worry, we're back.

We'll give you another strategy into the ditch, don't worry.

As opposed to let us teach you and work with you and work together with you to develop what would work best, if you will, to teach you how to fish, or to have you develop the way that fishing is going to work best in your organization.

To use a line that I used to have on a wall poster in my office, if you're not part of the solution, there's really good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

Maybe some of our predecessors were good at that.

Now, Mike, we promised ourselves a couple of episodes when we came across this model of super communicators.

It seemed to be really fruitful.

And I've got a feeling that there might be something in the world of the super communicator model that might shine a bit of a light on this combination of clarity and precision.

On the one hand, comfort in ambiguity.

On the other hand.

Yeah, I loved in if we went through Charles Duhigg's book, we thought about what would his take be on this idea of more comfortable with certainty or ambiguity.

And it appears that super communicators are these catalysts who could make such an outsized influence on the ability of groups to work together.

Super communicators change their minds frequently and let themselves be swayed by groupmates.

They were open to learning in every conversation and designed many of their conversations specifically to learn from others and the situation and what everybody's interests were.

They recognized different types of logic, if you will, the practical conversations, empathetic conversations, social conversations.

Different types of logic may be more persuasive to different individuals at different times.

You know, definitely for super communicators, it sounds like ambiguity and flexibility and thinking is much more valid than a rigid certainty to move to better solutions.

Yeah, Mike, I can see the clock ticking around towards the end of the episode here, so maybe we can start to gather some closing thoughts.

What's the real problem here?

I think we've established that we can learn from both ends of the spectrum, from the, the skill and the discipline of trying to nail things down and be motivating and clear and decisive at the kind of certain end of the spectrum and also being able to be adaptive and flexible and open and curious about the world at the other end of the spectrum.

Maybe consultants just need to keep trying to do both and keep growing their repertoire.

What else do you think could be going on here?

What could hold us back if we don't get a hold of this?

Well, I would say, Ian, that if you're right at the beginning of your career, you might have expectations now that over time you're going to be more certain of what you know and that it will make you a better professional.

But, but actually that's a false expectation.

Partly because experience tends to yield more things that you're not certain of, not fewer, and partly because all the really interesting new problems you'll chew over in your career are going to come from something in the world that we currently don't know about and can't describe with certainty.

There was that stat, right, that kids born this year, 60% of them are going to do jobs that we have never heard of today.

Like the amount of turnover in the world of work and just the sheer amount of change and complexity in what's happening in the world is really striking.

And Mike, I'm also thinking of a bit of self examination here about your attitude to ambiguity and uncertainty.

Think back to that need for closure discussion.

If you recognize yourself in that need for closure, that kind of anxiety, then maybe what's holding you back is a little bit of fear, a little bit of fear of failure.

Maybe you might even say to be very tough about it.

Fear of shame, fear of having your ignorance exposed.

And I think that's a real crippling handicap for some of us sometimes.

If we end up stuck, paralyzed, doing nothing for the fear of being shown to be wrong, how much do you think then that fear might be stopping you from making progress or from learning something that's new and useful?

And I think analyzing our fears is a healthy thing for us consultants to do, at least from time to time.

Yeah, yeah, I agree, Ian.

And I think we have to be mindful of balancing this in our own lives, balancing this in our jobs, balancing it where we are when that partner says, or the client says, I want you to have me this by Thursday.

Maybe we only think about the clear and certain stuff.

That's when within reach.

Maybe we get ourselves paralyzed by uncertainty.

Maybe we see some opportunity here, maybe we see some opportunity here.

And let go and know that whatever happens, we're going to be learning.

We're going to be learning.

And learning is going to be what gets us further ahead on this.

Mike, you've got me thinking about this already.

I'm going to go and do the survey and look at my need for Closure index and just see what that tells me about what's really going on in my head right now.

Finally, Mike, I think we can look back at projects.

We're in the world of consultants who do things by the project.

Think about your last 10 projects and you're probably going to think about the nine out of 10 that were roaring successes.

Think for a minute about the one out of the 10 that was a spherical disaster.

You know what a spherical disaster is, right?

It's a disaster that looks like a disaster from every conceivable angle.

Those projects that.

Those are the ones, Mike, for which we're probably sitting here blaming the team, the analysts, the data sources, the client, the weather.

But maybe the disaster wasn't the result of a faulty team or a faulty client.

Maybe some of those projects that really put a spoke in the wheel for us are projects where there was a mismatch, where there was an ambiguous nebulous problem being tackled by a bunch of consultants who love certainty, or maybe a certainty loving client trying to filter through the advice being brought to them by consultants who will have PhDs in ambiguity.

That, if you've had that experience, was probably pretty tough, but it's probably also one that you can learn from.

So final big question for all of us luminaries here, I think.

Ask yourself the question.

Does your future look better if you stick to what you know, or does it look better if you try something new?

And are you quite sure about your answer?

Very good.

Join us next time then, as we try to shed a little bit more light with the luminaries.