In the last couple of weeks I have had the incredible good fortune of listening to two of the most inspiring people I may ever get the chance to listen to. It’s a big call I know.
In a recent client workshop Naked was privy to the gifted (if somewhat eccentric) economic musings of Alan Schoenheimer. The Asia Pacific, CEO of Russell Investments. Alan is one of those brilliantly to the point people who seems to be able to cut through the myriad of factors that influence marketing decisions and come to the single point that actually matters.
One of the funnier things that Alan said that day, whilst the room was in a full flight conversation about points of differentiation, was that “extinction is differentiating, but that doesn’t make it a good idea”. The comment smacks with frankness and good sense and this kind of clarity reminded me of something. You know those meetings, we’ve all been in one, where you end up in a circular discussion, generally driven by too much data and not enough time, that ends with the entire room more confused than when the meeting started and almost invariably further from the solution?
Why do they happen? How can a room of above averagely intelligent people, who know a huge amount about their given area, collectively dissolve into irrelevant and unhelpful drivel?
Whilst pondering the investment landscape (out loud) Alan blindsided me with a comment so true and obvious that it could only be brilliant.
He said that everyone in the business of investment advice has access to the same information but what use is information analysis without synthesis. What he was getting at was that it’s not how well you paw over the data but how well you take action that counts.
Excuse my jumping around but this brings me to the other incredible mind that Naked has been exposed to recently. Dr Woody Brock, a leading American economist whose specialty is to understand the future better than his competitors in an information-soaked age. The founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions, Dr Brock is recognized internationally as one of the foremost thinkers on the "economic aspects of complexity" in international currency and credit markets. Sounds impressive. He is.
Dr Brock shared many thoughts with us; the theory of bargaining, thoughts on American politics, the real driving force behind the current oil crisis as well as his thoughts on the existence or otherwise of god. I couldn’t possibly do the man justice but I do want to try to share something of his colossal brain.
Dr Brock shared with us what he thinks makes a genius. He talked about a genius being able to understand that there may well be a raft of variables that could make a difference to a particular outcome but that a genius can see the 3 or 4 factors that actually matter and how they interrelate. They then build this into a hypothesis and then get someone else to spend the time testing it.
There’s a theme emerging here and it applies squarely to that meeting scenario that I mentioned earlier.
To my way of thinking information is not the answer to the problem. All the information in the world won’t give you the right answer. The only thing that will yield you what you need is investing the time in thinking about what really matters, not investing the time in uncovering everything that possibly could matter.
I’m not saying that data analysis is a waste of time but I am saying that the notion that simply having and understanding data will give you the answer, in the absence of critical thought, is nonsense. Surely that’s why marketers talk about the power of ‘gut instinct’ and the notion that you ‘just know’ when you’ve hit upon a truly powerful insight or an incredible idea.
You can’t justify instinct or creativity with numbers but you can stifle it with them and in turn end up in endless meetings where the variable become more critical than the solution.
Ultimately in the communications landscape we live in there is no such thing as the one right answer. The best chance we have is to understand the context, but focus on those factors that are critical to the issue and critical to consumers and then leap head first into the risk of a genius idea.
- Imo
