Provoke. Geoff Tuff

      After glancing at his colleague, Steve asked, “Are you curious to learn more about the behavior of this group of customers? It seems as though if the group became more prominent, it would challenge the way you make money.”

      It was at that point the executive responded with his why would I care response and arrogantly stuck his hand in his pants.

The behavior of this executive is part of a pattern that we have observed time and time again with leaders of all kinds – and it's one of the core reasons we wrote Provoke. When an anomaly emerges in their space, something that might be important, the vast majority of humans behave in a persistently predictable pattern. It's as if executives are riding that roller-coaster but fail to recognize that they are in fact going up a steep slope that will at some point tip over into the ride of their lives – and not in a good way. The potential of the trend – if it might happen – shifts to when it will happen. Too many executives fail to anticipate that phase change. They:

MISS THE TREND

      The first issue that people seem to have is that they don't even see things that are happening under their noses. In the case of the cord-cutting behavior described above, the consulting team might have missed it themselves if there had not already been some reporting of the then-fringe behavior. But they also had the benefit of having a team of young people, many of whom were themselves contemplating cutting the cord because they simply could not understand why anyone would want to pay for something that forced them to watch a show at a scheduled time versus when it was convenient for them.

In general, we miss trends not because we aren't looking, but because our brain processes the raw data of what we see through an unconscious filter of our own experiences. Unless you consciously learn how to turn that filter off, it can be hard to see something right in front of your nose.²

DENY THE TREND

“1.75%. Why would I care?” The preceding experience with the executive is an example of denial. Denial can take many forms. Steve saw a subtler form of denial, which was to question and discredit the observation. We've seen with other trends (e.g., humans' impact on climate, vaccines) that denial can include just an outright refutation of the findings. But after missing something for a long time, having it pointed out to you frequently sparks a negative response and deniers will dig in. The lesson? People don't like to be shown they have missed something important.

(OVER)ANALYZE THE TREND

      After a period of denial, some will turn to analysis. Executives will start to ask lots of questions about how big it is, how fast it's moving, how many people it will impact. And there are meetings … so many meetings … and all with their requisite PowerPoint decks. We frequently find that some analysis leads to more analysis. The more you look at something, the more you find other ways you could look at it. This is all designed, of course, to give executives more specificity on the problem (or opportunity) their business faces. Rarely do we see meetings that focus on analysis end with a decision to take action in the market; most of the time, the conclusion is that the action required is to go do more analysis.

RESPOND MEEKLY TO THE TREND

Sadly, in the rare cases where we do see executives take action – after an unduly long period of study – it's often too little, too late. Just think about the efforts of brick-and-mortar department stores to respond to the long curve of the online shopping trend. Instead of making deliberate choices to make what we call “minimally viable moves” in the face of early signals, they instead waited for evidence of the trend to hit them in the face and then had market forces dictate their path forward. There's often a theoretical debate in boardrooms about whether to pursue a “first mover” or “fast follower” strategy. Unfortunately, the fast follower position is almost always framed as “wait for someone to be successful in the marketplace to get started.” This is a choice that is increasingly doomed to failure given the degree to which markets are becoming more “winner take all.” And, let's face it, most “fast followers” are really dawdlers.³

      This pattern of behavior, which we've seen over and over again, prompted us to write Provoke. There are many trends we see in our line of work as strategists and consultants that are labeled as “uncertain.” A chasm separates if something will happen (what we think of as true uncertainty) from the uncertainty of when something will happen. This difference matters immensely. It dictates how you act in the face of the trend, and the failure to recognize this nuance in meaning is what leads most leaders to miss, deny, analyze, and respond meekly, following the pattern of our hand-in-his-waistband executive.

THE SOLUTION IS TO PROVOKE

      Our executive, and the organization he represented, had blinders on – blinders that we all wear, to one extent or another – that narrowed its organizational peripheral vision and ability to evaluate the importance of the changes found on the periphery. These blinders – constructed of basic human biases that we all share – mean that the playing fields we observe are narrower than the real world. Our maps, as the saying goes, are not the territory.

      Combined with organizational dysfunction – overanalysis; meetings with no end or, seemingly, any point; and so on – they lead to systematic inaction. That inaction means that rather than setting our own course, we let others make decisions for us or limit the range of our choices – just as brick-and-mortar stores did. Our momentum (really, our inertia) will drag us into a predictable series of choices that will lead