The Tyranny of Best Practices: Why I Ignore Trends, Most Data, and the Cult of Consensus
Companies exchanged alchemy and imagination with risk-free rationality, and we’re being rewarded with pedestrian results.
Most conversations in the business day are a farcical game of corporate bingo. Best practice. Data driven. Measure what matters. Trend analysis. Seek consensus. Find alignment. Growth strategy. Blah, blah, blah.
These mantras, which would feel right at home in the satire Silicon Valley, are repeated with the conviction of gospel in meeting after meeting. Rational decision making has become the new corporate religion. Data-driven decisions, presented as the bedrock of business as science, have the effect of producing staggeringly predictable, painfully boring, and entirely unremarkable results.
I’ve learned the hard way not to subscribe to trends, overly analytical navel-gazing and obsessing over consensus. Not because I’m a contrarian, but because I’ve seen what happens when people mistake conventional wisdom for universal truth. Gathering insights is important. Relinquishing your taste to the design-by committee circle-jerk is not. “If everyone else is doing it, then we should do that too” is the type of madness that denies you the opportunity to stand out and be different.
More Inputs, Less Magic
Perhaps the most seductive trap of all is the desire for consensus. We’re so careful to include every single voice that we’ve reached a the point where we think the good idea is one that everyone agrees on. We’ve groomed every decision down to the local maximum in an effort not to offend anyone. Consensus often requires abandoning breakthrough ideas so we can have a watered down agreement. This agreement is inevitably something which no one likes, but to which no one objects. As Seth Godin says, “Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree.”
Consensus only works in a world where extraordinary results are achieved by ordinary ideas. All great ideas are divisive at first. The best competitive advantage you can have is a belief that others don’t share (at least, not yet). If everyone thinks your idea is brilliant, it’s probably too obvious to be valuable. Very few people like new ideas because they require change and discomfort. A friend once remarked on an idea I had, “If that was such a good idea, then everyone would be doing it already.” Spoken like every person that never did anything bold or courageous.
Consider the obsession with data. People talk about data as if it’s some kind of oracle. Yet most companies are drowning in numbers while starving for insight. Data doesn’t tell you what breakthrough idea will open up new markets. Data is entirely backward-looking. Still we use these mountains of data to predict the future. This is like using your tail lights to navigate your car along a dark road.
Everything To Know About Nothing
When you leave data and consensus to make your decisions for you, you’re contributing to the disease of more. An all-you-can-eat obsession with more data means more tools to capture, store and analyze the data, which needs more data analysts, and more reports and of course more meetings to discuss the reports. It’s a hollow pursuit. As my professor used to say, “we’re learning more and more about something, until eventually we’ll know everything about nothing.”
Take trends, for example. The business world treats trends as if they are self-evidently good things to chase. But chasing trends don’t help you; they only exist to help the people who create them. By the time something becomes a trend, the real value has already been extracted. Following trends is like joining a queue without knowing what it’s for — by the time you get to the front, all that’s left is scraps.
We collect endless metrics, focus group ideas to death, run A/B tests into oblivion, and yet somehow, these data crunching deeps dives are still no better at coming up with breakthrough ideas than anything that’s come before. Great ideas and brands are still built by people with taste, vision, and a deep understanding of what their customers actually care about.
The same goes for tools. Every week, a new productivity app, AI-powered software, or workflow management system promises to revolutionize how we work. But tools are only as useful as the people using them. If better tools made better companies, Microsoft Excel would have eliminated bad decision-making decades ago. The difference between success and mediocrity is not the technology. Only the willingness to think independently can make something worth noticing. A world-class chef doesn’t need a smarter frying pan to make an extraordinary meal.
This is not an argument for recklessness, nor is it a romantic plea for gut instinct over reason. It’s simply a recognition that efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. More data won’t make you more insightful. More tools won’t make you more creative. More planning won’t make you more decisive. More meetings to seek agreement won’t make for better decisions.
Thriving On The Unpredictable
If you live long enough you’ll see that the business world doesn’t proceed with any predictability. Over the three decades that I’ve been working, I’ve witnessed a dot-com boom, and bust, the banking crisis of ’08, an offshoring revolution, a pandemic, and the rise of automation in the form of AI. None of these were predicted by the pundits and self proclaimed futurists. These are black swan events and that are characterized by being highly improbable, unexpected events with severe consequences. While seemingly obvious in hindsight, they have a habit of kicking our butts.
We have fallen in love with data because we think it gives us a hedge against risk. But speculating about the future can only work if you have a universal and precise model of how the world works. Spoiler alert, we don’t. Saying the universe is complex would be gross understatement. It’s impossible to predict the future with the tools we have. While we have a general idea of how physics and biology works at scale, these explanations can’t accurately explain how humans will behave predictably day-to-day, or month-to-month.
Rather than try to out-data the reality of the universe, consider an antifragile approach. When you can not only withstand unexpected events or volatility but actually benefit from them, that’s magical.
What does work?
If your ideas can grow stronger in spite of the changes in the world then it probably thrives on uncertainty and unpredictable situations. The best way to find ideas like this are to look at what already thrives despite the changes around it. Nature gives us lots of clues; systems that collaborate (and thus no single point of failure), strong communities, adaptability, diversity of ideas, optionality, and avoiding things that will hurt you.
For a business this also means a relentless focus on creating something you can focus on. If that last sentence sounds recursive, it is. Being focused first requires doing the work of reducing the noise, so you have something worth focusing on. To do that you also have to understand what not to do. Avoid doing things that don’t work.
Here’s a few things that I’ve used repeatedly to break through the noise and make something valuable.
- Instead of trying to be many things to many people, pick something you can focus on to be the best. Find ways to make this one thing fun, remarkable and original.
- Instead of obsessing over speculative models we can be obsessed with taste, with originality. Embrace a willingness to be different — not for the sake of it, but because the alternative is mediocrity disguised as best practice.
- Instead of doing more, do less. You don’t need millions of customer data points, you need a handful of meaningful conversations with your most important customers. A small set of high quality data is way more useful than a mountain of vanity metrics.
- Instead of big meetings and attempts at consensus, make hard choices. Trust your discernment and taste. Less meetings chasing agreement mean less distraction, less group-think, less imitation, and less fear of being different.
An ability to cut through the noise isn’t something that comes from poring over data. It comes from meaningful conversations and thoughtful observation of people (your customers). Talking to ten or twenty customers and getting them to talk about their real pains, will garner more insights than a billion data points languishing in an AWS server.
If that sounds risky, it’s because it is. But what’s riskier? Taking a bold stand or blending into the sea of sameness?
