Introduction  

You need to make a decision but don’t want to make a mistake. For decades, Dr. Constance Dierickx has helped leaders make wise decisions. Now, she’s sharing how to see what others don’t and make great decisions when it matters most. So come on in and have a seat. It’s time for your appointment with The Decision Doctor.

Constance Dierickx

Hi, guys. I am so excited to see you. I am so thrilled to have two people with me today. This is a first for the Decision doctor podcast where I have two guests: Christian Hunt and Ben Cattaneo. I am really thrilled to see you all. And I think the listeners are going to really enjoy this because we’re going to just wrestle some ideas to the ground in this podcast. And just for the listener, I want them to know why I had the two of you join me on this podcast. That’s because we have something in common, which is we are fascinated by the dumb decisions that smart people make over and over again. And the way that shows up in our practices varies, of course, by our expertise. But we share an interest in the research on human behavior, and one of us actually went to school for a long time for that. And I managed to be in graduate school all that time without ever hearing the name Daniel Kahneman. So the three of us love to wallow around in this research and then make it useful for our clients. So, I’m so excited. Let me start with you, Christian. At what decision point did you make a pivot or enter into this idea that the way human beings make decisions has so much to do with compliance? You focus so much on compliance and people’s efforts to install compliance in their organizations and how they go wrong. How’d you get here?

Christian Hunt

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having us on the show. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I had a really interesting experience that drove me to what I do now. I think, like all people that really enjoy their jobs, there’s some sort of intrinsic motivation for doing it. In my case, I had accidentally become a regulator. So most of my career was in financial services. I became a regulator, I always have to stress, post the 2008 crisis. I was part of the cleanup operation. So I became a regulator, did that, and then moved into the firm that I as a regulator had spent most of my time looking at, which was UBS. And it’s an unusual move. In many countries, you’re not allowed to make that move between regulator and regulatee, but in the UK, you are. I ended up in this really weird set of circumstances where I was eating my own regulatory cooking. In other words, I was having to implement the stuff that I as a regulator told the firm to do. And when it landed, particularly in the bit of the business that I was responsible for covering, which was the asset management business globally, the way it landed was terrible. And I wasn’t really getting it, because I would get emails from myself inviting me to go on training courses that I didn’t really understand, I thought were pointless and stupid, policies I thought were irrelevant. And I’m sitting there going, I know where this stuff is coming from, because that was me imposing a lot of it, and I understand the direction of travel, but this is not landing. Something’s not quite right here. And I realized that the reason it wasn’t landing is we were not thinking about the people that were at the receiving end of all of this stuff. The more I looked at this, the more I thought, actually, compliance is all about humans, because you can tell an organization to do something. But ultimately, it’s the humans within the organization that will determine whether or not that happens or it doesn’t happen, and so compliance is the business of influencing human decision-making. And once you make that leap, you suddenly start to go, oh, a load of the techniques that we’re using are not things you would ever dream of using otherwise. There’s a whole load of presumptions behind that. For example, I employ you so I can tell you what to do that leads you to make decisions about how you try to influence those people and how you manage them and how you conclude what the motivations are. And so if you want to do this job properly, if you really want an organization to be compliant, you need to understand why humans do what they do, and therefore you can influence that more effectively. And then the second part of my role was something called operational risk, which is non-financial risk. And as I was doing that, I also realized the largest single cause of that was human beings either screwing things up in the first place or, probably, more typically, by the way that they reacted or didn’t react to something. And so suddenly this job of compliance and operational risk, which sounds very technical, all about, rules, I suddenly went, this is all about people. That side interest I have of why the people do what they do and how can we influence that suddenly takes front and center. So it was this visual experience of suffering under my own regulations that led me to where I am today.

Constance Dierickx

That is profound and hilarious all at the same time. But maybe we should write a prescription: People who are writing the rules should have to abide by the rules or have the experience before the ink is allowed to dry on the rules. What a great story. So Ben, how about you? How did you come to your practice? You have a company called the Decision Studio.

Ben Cattaneo

Decision-Making Studio.

Constance Dierickx

Decision-Making Studio, sorry. Thank you. You and Christian have something in common, well, you have a lot in common but you post really wonderful content on LinkedIn. So I want to encourage the listener to go there. It looks to me like you spend a lot of time creating that content, and I read a lot of it and comment sometimes. How on earth did you get here? And of course, you can tell us how you got here in the literal geographic sense as well as professionally.

Ben Cattaneo

So there’s a lot there that’s probably got some parallels with how I got to where I am geographically as well as just in terms of my career, which is not by design. I think, like a lot of us, I steered my career, well maybe not, I steered my career into a dead end recently. That effectively led to deciding that I needed to do something different, which was setting up the Decision-Making Studio. For many years, I worked in this thing called risk management, which I always thought was all about making good decisions under uncertainty. And I started along that path a long time ago when I studied international relations and how politics and how the way in which regulatory and political environments affect business decisions, particularly in the oil and gas and the mining sector. I worked in the Philippines and Southeast Asia and a number of areas. But the people I was working with were not political scientists. They were people that were economists or engineers or people that just didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about things that really mattered and should spend much more time thinking about. It’s a long way of saying that I think that that continues. There are a lot of things out there in the world that, if you just look to your left and your right and just spend a little bit more time looking at your peripheral vision a little bit more, then you can uncover lots of insights. But people typically don’t do that. I worked in risk management and in a corporate setting, most recently at BT groups, British Telecom, the largest telecoms firm here, but I came to the conclusion that the practices of risk management and the practices of decision making are separate and they shouldn’t be. I think we just need to get a lot better at the basics, which is just, what is a good decision? The more that I spent time with senior leaders, the more I realized no one’s ever taught them what that looks like. I think we’re all a little bit self-taught in that space. I mean, you wouldn’t put a leader in charge of a large organization, if they didn’t know very much about that organization. It would put leaders in charge of these organizations and they’re not trained in decision-making. Effectively, that’s a long-winded way of saying this is how I got to where I am.

Constance Dierickx

But you don’t sound like you grew up in England.

Ben Cattaneo

I did not. I grew up in Canada. I was born in Argentina, so actually, if I look and sound a little tired it is because I was up last night watching the Copa America. The semi-finals. Yeah, I grew up in Canada, was born in Argentina, but I found my way to the UK where I got my start, my professional start at a British company that does geopolitical risk consulting. It’s a very sort of British kind of thing, so not very many organizations – now there are a lot, but at the time there weren’t very many that did that. I spent some time in Southeast Asia and then got transferred to the UK, and I effectively stayed.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah. So it’s so interesting how our paths have a lot in common. So I came to this because I was a stockbroker long ago, and I did it for less than five years. I absolutely loathed the job, but it was a good paying job and I was able to pass the exams, so I sort of ended up there because I hit a dead end, similar to you, Ben. I noticed over my time there, that although I hated the business, I liked my clients. I was utterly haunted by why on earth people that were very smart, that had money to invest made such stupid decisions and would insist on making them for the most irrelevant reasons. Uncle Joe gave me this hot tip, the guy over the fence in my backyard told me to do this. Oh, here’s a good one. I’m a math professor, I’ve done the analytics. That guy actually went broke. And it made me so sad and frustrated. I would be like, this is really sad. I was like, how could people be so stupid? And then I thought, well, whoever teaches people about how they make decisions? And so I started reading books. I was reading books on decision science and business and economics. And then I was like, well, that’s not explaining what I’m seeing. Then I’d run to the psychology section and go back and forth and back and forth. And then, of course, later, I learned about Kahneman and Tversky and Richard Taylor and people like that. Research the three of us are all familiar with. So it’s fascinating to me how we all came to it in such a similar way, but the path between the realization and what we do now was crooked and different.

Ben Cattaneo

If I could tell a little story, my very first consulting project was something that I never came across ever again, but I got thrown on this project in the Philippines for a Japanese construction firm and they had an extortion attempt. I was just kind of thrown on. I was very young and quite naive. All these senior security people were involved in this project, and the fundamental problem was that the company didn’t consider the social impacts of what they were doing and then that led to an insurgency getting fairly close to the little community where they were operating, and then that allowed them to do the extortion attempt and it became successful. They ran into all kinds of problems. I was really young but I could see that no one asked the question about what could piss off the people around the project. That is a really simple question that no one that no one asked, and that ended up being kind of the root cause that they needed to address. I thought management consultancy would be great because what an interesting project that I got thrown in as a very young, new professional, but unfortunately that’s not the industry. But it’s a problem that I saw right at the beginning, and it’s problem I just continue to see, that we tend to get fixated on certain ways and certain paradigms, certain ways of looking at the world, that if we actually just stepped outside and looked at the same problem from a different lens, we see something completely different. And that’s the skill set that I think leaders need to develop now, much more than before. But as we’ve all shared here, this is a problem that seems to repeat, and it’s a skill set that most people have never really been able to fully develop. I think that’s why we’re on this call and having this discussion, because this is –

Constance Dierickx

I joke a lot and say this is why I have work.

Christian Hunt

Yeah. There was something interesting you pointed out, whether it’s in my case, looking at the plans or you look at how people make decisions, we need these flaws to exist. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have an opportunity to talk about the thing.So I recognize that. But I think there’s something really interesting, Ben, in what you were saying there, because I think a lot of the processes that we have actually perpetuate dishonesty. Politicians are required to have narratives, that this is the silver bullet that’s going to solve things. Businesses are required to make perfect decisions every single time. And the world is messy as hell, and we make mistakes, and we screw things up, and we come with biases attached, all those kind of things. And so I think what’s interesting is that we’re combating a very dishonest – we all know it’s dishonest. We know that when a politician says, here’s a simple solution, we know it’s a bit more complicated. At least intelligent people do. We know that every decision we make, there is a pro and a con. And so when we look at all of these things, ultimately, if we could be bit more honest about things, we could tackle this easily, but there is a requirement, I think, to pretend that we’ve got perfect decision-making processes, that we have all the data, and therefore, when something doesn’t go the way we thought it ought to go, or the way we told everybody it would go, somehow we then have to create more lies and dishonesty. And the bit I find funny is that we know as kids, we’re told to tell the truth, and that’s the bit we’re not allowed to do as adults. Actually, I think if we were able to do that, we wouldn’t have some of these challenges. It’s because we have to maintain narratives of expertise, of simplicity, and all these kinds of things. So, for me, this goes to, yes, the structures and the processes and the skills aren’t there. But I think fundamentally, some of the structures that we have make this a lot worse.

Constance Dierickx

They do. And as you were talking, Christian, it reminded me of when I was a baby consultant, I was assigned to become a coach. I have to say, when I was told I was going to go coach someone the first time, I didn’t know what that meant. I had a doctorate in clinical psych, so I knew how to be a therapist. But I went to see this guy, he was in the western part of Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains, he talked like this, and he called me sweetie multiple times in the first five minutes. So we were off to a rip roaring start. And he didn’t want to meet with me. He thought I was irrelevant. So I started asking what I thought were obvious questions, but things that would allow him to show me something that he might be proud of. So the clinical stuff was very useful. So I thought, I’ve got to get on the same side of the table with this guy. So I said, I’ve never been in a distribution center this big before. Sucking up. I said, can you show me around? Can you show me how things work? And so we got in a golf cart and we go around a huge, huge distribution center for a well-known brand, which I shall not name. And we’re going around and I looked up at a stack of big TVs. This was when televisions were big, horizontally and also they were very deep. There was a stack of these eight televisions, I’ll never forget this, and the stack was crooked. I looked, I said, is that a problem? And he went, oh, you have no idea. And then he started telling me about the total losses in his distribution center on a monthly basis, because stacks of inventory would fall. A bunch of big screen TVs fall over. That’s it, you got to throw them in the garbage. And so I said, well, what are you doing about it? And he goes, well, we have a lot of rules. You’ve seen this before. He said, the forklift drivers don’t care about what they’re doing, how do I make them care? And I thought to myself, I really have no idea. I said, well, let’s think about that little bit. So the rule was, if you saw damage and reported it, you were immediately removed from the site and taken for a drug test. If you caused damage and admitted it, you were immediately taken off without pay and drug tested. This was such a fearful thing for people that people didn’t report the damage. So I would like to ask each of you what advice would you have given this general manager to improve this?

Christian Hunt

I mean, there’s a clue in the thing, right? So if we look at, what are the incentives to come forward, the disincentive substantially outweighs the incentives. I’m going to get into trouble. My way of solving that particular problem is to do two things. One is to look at the psychology of what do you want them to do that they’re not currently doing or not do that they are currently doing? And what are the psychological drivers of that? We can start to recognize what that looks like. The second thing is we can try and solve the problem by borrowing what somebody else has done in a completely different context. And so I would also be looking and saying, okay, what analogous situations, it may not be in the same type of environment, but you want somebody to come forward when they might not otherwise come forward, right? So how do we incentivize people to do that? That may be everything from we offer them rewards, we give them some sort of financial incentive to come forward, or we remove the friction that stands in the way. So I’d be looking at all of those things. But the key bit here is – you outlined it in what you were saying. We’ve got to start thinking about this from the perspective of the people whose behavior we’re trying to influence and not how, and my classic cliche is always, we mustn’t think about how we would like people to behave, we need to think about how they are likely to behave. In other words, recognize the realities of the environment that they’re in and then we can start to solve that. So I don’t know specifically whether this is about rewarding them for doing it. I don’t know whether it’s about removing the potential punitive elements. I don’t know whether we can have some kind of league table competition for people to report stuff. Any or all of these things and a load of others I think come to mind. But the key bit you identified is like why the hell would you come forward if you’re one of those people? There was absolutely no upside. You might as well just staged them. It’s so blindingly obvious that that is what you would do if you were in their position that it’s almost astonishing somebody thought that was a good idea in the first place.

Constance Dierickx

Well it might have been someone in compliance, I don’t know. But this is a large company and you know they have their rules. I think the rule was made in the human resources department in consultation. But Ben, how would you handle this or what advice would you have given to this general manager? And then I’ll tell you what I did. It might not be what I would do today. This was about 25 years ago.

Ben Cattaneo

Right, right. I’d offer similar advice to what Christian has said. I’d look at the day in the life of a forklift driver and try to figure out, when and how do these guys work? And when are these guys making these kinds of decisions? And what happens when they don’t say anything? What happens when they spot something? And reverse the pyramid. Maybe a narrative would be useful here, right? So a day in the life of a forklift driver. I’m just going to riff off of what Christian said, paint a picture, paint a story around whether it’s Joe or Jim whatever these guys’ names are and start showing how one thing adds on top of another and what the cumulative effect of everything is. And I think try and make it stark or try and put a little bit of a motive. If this continues, what could that look like? Maybe a little bit of fear in the thoughts and minds of your client, if you felt comfortable doing that. I don’t know if you did, but something along those lines.

Constance Dierickx

I’m not averse to that. Yeah. Turn up the heat a little bit. So what I did was I asked him if there was any other circumstance in this distribution center, where, and I started calling it messiness or sloppiness. Does this show up anywhere else? He almost blew a gasket and he goes, yeah, the break room. It’s a mess. People leave their dirty dishes. I said, well, I’m thinking two things. First of all, why don’t we change the venue of the problem? Keep the problem the same, messiness, lack of neatness, tidiness and see how that goes. So there was a reward system set up where everybody in the place got a reward if the break room was neater by some measure. He put a team together of employees and they decided what the metrics would be and they got invested in this and the break room began to get a little neater. Now, I said, how have you been handling the break room problem? He goes, well, when I find things that aren’t in their place, I throw them in the garbage. That’s not working. The second thing I did was I said, could you spend more time with the forklift drivers helping them learn, and are there any other disincentives like time? Are you measuring their effectiveness by how fast they unload these trucks? And he’s like, well, of course. And I go, well, I think there’s a problem with that. So he started a program where he, again, formed teams in the distribution center. They didn’t get financial rewards, but he got people invested in tidiness again. But he started in the break room where it wasn’t so threatening and then moved it. The long and the short of it is his losses due to the problem that he was talking to me about decreased by 80%. Now, this was all guessing on my part. I was not involved in the execution. So this was his leadership, it was his team. But you’re alluding a bit to the work of Amy Edmondson, which wasn’t even out at the time this was happening, that if it’s impossible for people to report mistakes because they’ll be punished, guess what? They won’t do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an operating room or a warehouse. So Christian, I love what you said about you looking for examples. I’m sure the two of you have heard this from potential clients. Well, I don’t see how you can help us because you’re not a fill in the blank, right? You’re not an engineer. I hear that. Or they’ll say to me, you’re not an MD, which is code for you’re not a real doctor, right? But I think that the transferability of knowledge is wonderful. The other thing I want to highlight that’s a theme in what the two of you’re saying is actually part of a new course I just developed to teach leaders how to be strategic, and I call it Wondering, Wandering and Thinking, get out of your office, get out of your usual environment, and pay attention because you’ll see connections and start connecting dots. But I want to ask each of you to talk a little bit about cognitive biases. And I know, Ben, you posted something on LinkedIn a while back where you drew this distinction between a cognitive bias and an unconscious bias. I didn’t say this when I responded to you, but I have a hard time separating those. I think that cognitive bias, and I did say this in my response, cognitive bias is more acceptable because unconscious bias sounds too psychological, right? We don’t like it. But each of you are very familiar with the research on behavioral economics. And yet, you might hear, as I do, people will name a bias as if naming has any sort of positive. It’s like, look how smart I am. You’re overconfident. And I’m so sick of it. I just want to say, people, what good does it do? So what sort of traps do you see people get in because they read three pages of thinking fast and slow.

Ben Cattaneo

So first of all, cognitive versus unconscious, I’ve never studied this formally as a doctoral student or anything like this, but I just kind of see it as cognitive biases are stuff that we’re just kind of hardwired to be and do, ways to think, and subconscious bias are are things that maybe we’re kind of taught, prejudices that we might have developed. I’m sorry, unconscious bias. So cognitive bias or unconscious bias. Maybe we become a little bit agist in our thinking maybe because of something that we’re not even aware of, whereas the way in which our brains are wired to dislike being ostracized because of evolutionary reasons, maybe that’s a little bit more that’s more hardwired in us. I tend to draw that distinction, but I agree with you. I think when people start to – there’s 300 cognitive biases out there. It’s like, it’s doing what we were talking about at the beginning of having a plan for confirmation bias, and then, how do you deal with confirmation bias versus activity bias versus optimism bias. What is the plan? Like, you can just see like some software company really running with this in completely the wrong direction about, we have our confirmation bias control plans in place now. Now, we’re moving on to activity bias, like, stop, right? So it’s madness. But there are ways in which, I think we’re all instinctive. We can make instinctive decisions and I think we can also lean into that, right? So you can train. Just like you train how to serve a tennis ball, hard wiring certain things or leaning into certain things. There’s certain senses in which we want to get people to use their instincts, want people to make connections that they didn’t realize were there, that is walking the floor. That is actually leveraging cognitive bias. Like we want people to actually be able to make connections that they may not realize that, oh, just like you did, the boxes are slightly slanted. Is that a problem? It’s because you went on that tour. If somebody walked around a little bit and just started to notice stuff, that’s actually a great way of leaning into this sort of idea of using our instinct. I think there’s some really valuable things that we can do there. So I think good decision-making integrates both of those things. It’s not that cognitive biases are bad and we have to manage them into oblivion, which you can’t do. We need to just recognize and play with our sort of humanity and how we decide.

Christian Hunt

I think that’s all super. This is like a pet topic of mine because I think the cognitive bias thing, you get these people that will go, let me just stop you there. That’s an example of confirmation bias, and then you get this very patronizing explanation. I always think, what is anybody supposed to do with that? There will be people for whom it is useful to know that this is called confirmation bias because I want to go and research it, read some more, gives me an entry point into reading research. But the vast majority of people are not passionately interested enough in this subject to memorize them all, and need to know what they’re called. They just need a handle on how they can navigate the world more effectively. So how can they make better decisions, whether that’s an organization or whether that’s individuals. So I try to take it to a slightly different level where I go, “Let’s have a look at the factors that come into play, and don’t worry about what these things are technically called.” Let’s look at the fact that we are heavily influenced, and I cite three of them. There are others. Number one is ourselves, so our own experience of things, so what we have experienced in the past will determine how we react to situations in the present and the future. Equally, other people will influence us because if we don’t know, maybe they do. So we can copy from them, hence you get things like groupthink, British people stand in line even if they don’t know they’re standing in line for. All that kind of stuff, right? The third factor that I cite is the environment, right? Where we are, and we know that we behave differently in different environments. So if you just take those three factors, that for me is a pretty good guide to some of the things that we could be thinking about that may be influencing us or may not be influencing us enough. Maybe we’ve got the wrong people in the room, right? We should be being influenced by other people. And therefore, we start to think about how we get cognitive diversity in the room. Or maybe, are we over leveraging our own experience and we don’t actually know what we’re talking about, and we should think about things slightly differently and get some other influences on us. Or maybe we’ve misjudged the environment, right? I spend half my time in Munich, half my time in London. If I were to react in Munich to certain situations, the way that I would react in London, I would get weird looks and vice versa. I put myself in danger in certain situations. And so I have to bear that in mind. And so if we take it at that level, we don’t need to go into all this vocabulary and tick it off and like, which bias is slightly more prevalent here? I don’t know. And the bit that kills me about all this stuff is the word unconscious gives you a really big clue here, because this stuff is happening whether we know it or not. And so the idea that we can just train this bit out, let’s just eliminate that problem, we can’t because it’s unconscious, right? It’s literally like, if we look at people who are addicted to things, we don’t just say to someone, hey, I’ll tell you what, you have an alcohol addiction or whatever it is, right? So we’re going to send you on a two hour training course and that will solve the problem. We know that that is nonsense because that’s not the way we work. So why do we do that with other processes that have a similar cognitive dynamic? And so for me, this is around saying we need to make this easily understandable. And I think one of the things that people who focus on behavioral science that stop at the technical terms and try and wow people who don’t try and translate it, it’s ironic, right? We know if you’re a subject matter expert, you understand how humans operate in theory. So you should be taking that and translating it. One of the reasons I’m delighted to have this conversation is I think everybody in this call understands that what we’re in the business of is translating, taking the technical stuff that other people don’t have the time or interest to look at and translating that into something that is practical and usable. We are not trying to turn everybody into behavioral science geeks because they don’t want to be that. Well, some people might suddenly realize it’s there and be interested in it. But the vast majority of people are not as interested as we are. And we know that because if they were, they would be doing what we are doing. And so as I look at it, I think there’s a translation service that we need to do. And so I get really frustrated when I get people talking about it. Scientists and academics can talk in scientific and academic terms. That’s fine. But if you’re working with the general public, with people whose day job business doesn’t involve this stuff and trying to help them to improve whatever it is they are doing and whatever scenario they’re doing it in, then we have to kind of meet them. We have to translate it for them, make it relevant to them. And so the more we use technical language, the more we lean on that, the less we’re doing them a service. We’re not delivering something that’s user friendly for them.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, I completely agree. I will be in the audience sometimes, and there’s someone on stage, and they riff off all these labels and things. The one that really grinds my gears quite a bit is when people talk about the lizard brain, and I’m like, that’s the trying theory of brain development, which has been debunked for a couple decades. It’s nice that 98% of people sitting there don’t know that, but I know that. And I need to get over this a bit, or a lot, I suppose. But I think that the idea that you can name something and that naming it is the same as being able to use it, translate it, as you say, Christian, into something pragmatic, is just absolutely ridiculous. Yet, people do it and that leads me to want to ask you about the idea of – and you, Ben, you talked about this a lot, and Christian you’ve alluded to, that somehow there’s a way that we can use our minds to get rid of human tendencies and things like that. When I’m coaching other consultants to help them grow their businesses, I say to them over and over again, you need to divorce your methodology. Stop leaning on your methodology. You have to lean on your brain and your experience. Christian, when you were talking about you need to think about who else do we need, this is something you have to do in every case. You’re not asking technical questions, you’re asking big questions. What’s the environment? What are the disincentives? It starts out almost as an anthropological expedition, if you will, where curiosity is incredibly valuable. I had a client once that was doing a big acquisition and they had paid a very famous consulting firm two million dollars to develop a strategy, and the head of strategy handed me their deck. Guess how many pages it was? 82. Guess where the strategy was? Page one. It was page one. It was like, this is our strategic direction, and this is why. So it’s Roger Martin’s, where do we play? How do we win? It’s very simple. The rest of it was analysis, right? So the head of strategy who I’d worked with before on another acquisition said, I need you to write a blueprint for us for how we integrate, and I went, I don’t know anything about the organization you’re acquiring. I need to go there. He goes, oh no, we don’t want you to do that. So how do you help your clients avoid this trap of worshiping at the altar of plans and blueprints and methodologies? It blinds people, and I’m actually reviewing a strategic plan right now for someone and I’m very allergic to the phrase strategic. I see that this has fallen into the trap of following a process to develop a document. How do you help people not do that?

Christian Hunt

It is worth just reflecting. You’ve talked about methodologies and processes. I think there are certain situations in which it makes sense to have, in my world, it would be rules, but you can talk about methodologies and processes. When we’re dealing with Mother Nature, for example combining electricity and water, it is predictable what will happen when those two things meet, and then good things don’t occur. Well, maybe they do, if you’re looking for a specific outcome, but generally speaking, we want to prevent that from happening.

Constance Dierickx

And we want a plan for when it does, which makes complete sense.

Christian Hunt

Right. There are certain processes, I think, particularly where we can recognize that humans might not be thinking straight. If you’re in an emergency situation, maybe you do need specific instructions that you can follow and environments where things are predictable. I think it’s really important not to say all methodologies are useless or processes are useless or checklists are useless. There are situations in which those things make perfect sense. But often, we deploy them in situations where they don’t, because they kind of feel comforting and nice. There are going to be times where you need people to use their initiative and to think. Even sometimes in those checklist situations, you might need to actually be thinking, does this apply, right? There may be a really good reason why following protocols is a stupid idea. So we have to recognize where overrides might be required, recognizing, of course, the more overrides you have, the less effective the methodology and the checklist is. But if we look at those sorts of situations, that’s an area where we would want that, then there’s other areas where you’d say, it’s less applicable. And so what I’m doing with my clients a lot of the time isn’t to come in and almost be like a contrarian and go, get rid of all your methodologies and all your rules, because they’re all stupid. It’s about saying, just look at the substance of it and let’s think behaviorally and say, okay, if we’re asking people or telling people to follow a particular protocol, why are we doing that? How is this helping them to do that? And the answer might be because this is a situation that they really don’t understand where there’s a massive amount of risk here and we don’t want them doing something stupid because the consequences of that stupid error are that they will die. So we want to avoid that at all costs, and we’ll put very strict rules around that and we will punish the hell out of anybody that doesn’t follow those rules because that is a matter of safety. There are going to be other things, I think about ethics, customer service, that kind of end of the spectrum, where it’s harder to define. What’s right in one situation might not be right in another. We need people to use their judgment. That’s a very different behavioral outcome, and so we need to be looking at the structures and the tools and the processes we put in place for those. So I’m all about saying to people, let’s think about, behaviorally, if we’ve got a set of rules or a process, it is human beings that are following that. So let’s put ourselves in the position of the person going to be using this and say, what would be the most appropriate tool to get the outcomes that we are looking for? I think, often, organizations conclude that all rules are the same or we need standardized approaches to everything. Actually, that’s not true. So that’s how I start to look at it because I think if you turn around and go, everything you’re doing now is useless and rubbish, and we’d never say that, but that’s kind of the message that you get, is people don’t like that. We need to help them to understand where what they’re doing is smart and intelligent and makes sense and where it doesn’t. And so I think if you take a behavioral lens on this stuff, it gives you an opportunity, I think, to engage with people on a human level, because you can say, let’s put ourselves, to Ben’s point earlier, put ourselves in the shoes of the people who are actually having to follow this, right? And not theoretically, what should they do because we’re sitting in a boardroom thinking about it, but actually on the ground, in the factory, on wherever it happens to be. And I think if you start to talk in those terms, then you can have a conversation that is less threatening, but also, you’re engaging them in thinking about solving the problem. So as they approach the world, because generally speaking, one is brought in to look at one specific challenge. I like to give them a skill set in a way of looking at the world that’s useful for other things, right? So that you can solve a ton of other problems if you start to look at the world this way. And therefore, I haven’t been one of those consultants that solve the problem, it goes horribly wrong, oh, guess what? You’ve got the same problem, better call me back in again, because I think that’s unethical. I think we should be helping organizations to think and adapt for themselves, so when they bring an external expertise, I want to put them in a stronger position in terms of the skill sets they have and the approach they have.

Constance Dierickx

I think that your comments, Christian, it’s important to call out a distinction here that the work you’re doing where you’re, and I love what you just said about, you want to teach people how to think well enough that they can transfer knowledge to different situations. I agree with you. When you set up a client to need you, that’s when you get paid because you’ve made them dependent on you. 

Christian Hunt

You’re a drug dealer, basically.

Constance Dierickx

Yeah, exactly. When I think you can tell people to divorce their methodology is when they think of that as their value. So the people I’m recommending that to are people who go into a new prospective client, plant, and they have a conversation about their methodology, which is doing the opposite of what you’re saying, which is to say, let’s look at what the situation is, what are the needs here, how do we think about this together, instead of going in and say, well, you know, first we’ll do assessments, and then we’ll do 360s, and then we’ll do six months of coaching with everybody. I know organizations that do this, a large pharmaceutical company that hires coaches, and I am not one of these people, but they hire coaches, and they have a protocol that the coach goes through, and they’re supposed to meet on some cadence that’s prescribed, and guess what? The coaches don’t do it, and no one cares. It’s a total and utter waste of money, instead of allowing the people with some expertise to say, what is this executive need? How do we address it? So I think that it’s an important distinction to say, do you see your value as your methodology? Or are you operating like I do, like you do, like Ben does, where you’re looking at what does the client need first? And you’re not boring them with your accolades, credentials, academic degrees, because they don’t care. They really don’t care. Does that make sense?

Ben Cattaneo

Yeah, I think that makes sense to me. By the way, when I was at Accenture, and we did those big slides, I spent some time as a management consultant, we had a little internal equation, which was how much you billed a client versus how many slides you gave them. Just a little bit of fun, for kicks, right? So it’s, whatever, 20k per slide, whatever the thing was, right? Anyway, it’s a bit of a crutch that we feel like we have to offer a methodology, we’re worthless unless we offer your coaches. I’m saying we because I was like this and I’ve had many colleagues like that in the world of management consulting. There is that feeling that we have to have a methodology that’s proprietary, that’s better than the competitors. It’s all bullshit. They shouldn’t be paying you for that. I have frameworks, and when we spoke, Constance, we talked about frameworks and I think you made a very important point about getting to the emotional heart of any problem with regards to decisions, right? What’s the emotional thing that’s going on with clients? And a methodology doesn’t give you that. So I just try to ask very basic questions.

Why are we doing this? Can we reverse this? Is another way of doing what you’re trying to do and try and jar the client into thinking a little bit differently about why they’re doing something in the first place? But it’s almost that bullshit job thesis of we’re all wasting everyone’s time by implementing stupid processes that just makes us feel good. But we’re not actually doing anything and we’re not making decisions in any way that’s based on good principles. It’s one of the reasons why I felt like I steered my own career to a dead end. I think just by asking slightly different questions, that’s a good place to start.

Christian Hunt

I think there’s a really interesting thing there about one’s ability to ask questions when you’re external, either because you have the firepower to be able to do it, you’re not going to lose your job because you’re asking awkward questions because if they’ve hired you, you have your permission to ask silly questions and so I think we can exploit that. But I also think you would think of questions they wouldn’t think of asking, right? So why do you do it that way? Nobody is going to know how to answer that, because, of course, we know why we do that, because that’s way we’ve always done it, right? Nonsense excuses like that. For me, it’s about a child-like ability to just go in and to to think about problems in a way that they can’t because, back to these biases, they look at things the way they look at things. If you’re steeped in an organization, that’s all you’ve seen. All of us work across sectors with different organizations and it’s amazing that we’re all humans in different sectors. They always go, “We’re very unique,” and in some cases, that is correct. So I work with the UN chemical weapons inspectors. That is a very unique set of circumstances. There is no competing proposition there. There’s not a sort of alternative agency that people go and work for. It’s a thing on its own. On the other hand, they are going and doing inspections, and there are lots of other people that go out and do inspections and things, and there are lots of other people that have a dynamic of a head office in one location and lots of people out in the field. So you can borrow from other contexts. So, how do I help people like that? Well, the answer is I bring in things I’ve seen elsewhere. I bring in a child-like curiosity and I use the fact that I’m not from within the organization to perhaps encourage conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen. I think back to your point, Constance, around, you know, well, why should we have you? What do you know about our industry? I front that out and I say, I will never know more about your organization, your industry than you do by default, because I’m not in it. That’s not what I’m bringing. I’m bringing a fresh pair of eyes and a fresh perspective and permission to challenge orthodoxy. And I say, if you don’t want that, don’t hire me. Right? If you just want somebody to produce a consulting report that’s going to confirm what you’re already doing is the right strategy, which, there are plenty of big strategy consultants out there who pretend, we’ll go work out the – no, you won’t, you’ll just confirm what the boss has already decided is going to happen at a great expense. That’s them justifying the decision. I think it’s about coming in with that differentiated perspective. And so, I don’t work with people if I have a sense that the questions I’m going to ask, not with an agenda in mind, but just from sheer curiosity, I’m going to cause some problems in the sense of they’re not going to want to answer them honestly. They’re not going to want to front this. They’re hiring me, right? Because I’m not interested in producing a report or something at the end of it that’s just going through the motions. I want to actually try and help you solve the problem and we have to do that by being honest about the world that we’re in. But I think this ability to ask questions, one, because you have the skill set and the aptitude and the external experiences, but secondly, because you’re not steeped in that world, is super powerful.

Constance Dierickx

Yes, yes. And I think you bring up a very important point. Childlike curiosity and an enthusiasm to find out is very important, but it needs to be married with horsepower and enough past experience that you’re weaving together observations, you’re connecting dots. And then you’re asking a question. I’m trying to think of a recent question I asked a CEO who was going on and on about this fabulous person outside the company. They’re great at this and they’re great at that, and wow, there was this great – and my reflection was, it sounds like you got a lot of good advice in that conversation. Oh yeah, I did. And I said, can you hire them? And the CEO looked at me and said, I never thought of that. To me, it was blindingly obvious. And the relationship I have with the CEO is a couple of years long and there’s a lot of trust. That person takes that sort of question from me, not as a criticism that they hadn’t thought of it, but rather helping them see what they’re not seeing. And that’s, for me, a big theme. I’ve talked to this person before about how you help people learn to be strategic by helping them learn to, Ben, this reminds me what you said about story earlier, I said, do you want people to think so clearly that they can see what they’re thinking and they can show other people what they’re thinking. And that’s very helpful. And sometimes wandering around and noticing out loud when you’re a leader is helpful in that way to get people to see what they’re not thinking. I’m curious about how you help people, you talked about this Christian, help people learn transferable, I want to say skills, but it’s almost not a skill, it’s about capability and mindset and things like that that are a little more amorphous than a technical skill. How do we help people get that?

Christian Hunt

So I think my answer to that question would be I have to show them, because sometimes people don’t know what it looks like or it feels ridiculous. And one of the things that I’ve found super powerful, I do this thing on LinkedIn called compliance in the wild, which is basically me taking real world scenarios that you wouldn’t necessarily think of as a compliance situation, but that we can learn from. So how do they funnel us through airports? How do people write signs well or badly that instructs us to do things and give us information? And I use those in order to get people to think about the problem they’re solving slightly differently, and there’s two benefits to that. The first one is if I go into an organization and go, “You’ve got this all wrong, you idiots, you’re thinking about,” I would never say exactly that, but that’s the sort of implied message, or I don’t know anything about the reasons behind the way they do things. But what I can do is point to other things, and I’ve had people go, oh, that’s really interesting, because that’s similar to how we do X, and I’m like, oh, is it? And of course, I’ve led the witness. But what I’m doing is making it okay to go, you know what, we can look all around us. And I think one of the things that’s magical is when we are all influenced by the world around us, we’ll wander around, see what other people are doing, we go to movies because they’re popular, and other people are talking about them, we might go on vacation to locations because of other people. There’s lots of influences on us that we know. So what I’m trying to do is to showcase to people that we can use that same skill that we use in our personal life, which is getting inspiration from other people, other things around us in the work context. So I’m simultaneously giving them permission to think like that, but also demonstrating how you do it. Because I think a lot of work logic is that we must think logically and rationally and justifiably. Best practice kills me. Who says this is best practice? Just because everybody else is doing it, doesn’t make it intelligent or high quality or necessarily suitable for your organization. So I’m trying to infuse this, saying, let’s just show you some things and hope to kind of demonstrate to them that there’s another way of looking at it. For me, I don’t think the issue is the skill set. I think it’s permission to use it. I think it’s drummed out of people, serious subjects need serious examples and serious content.

I’m like, we know from school that the best teachers are the ones that enthuse you, tell you stories, that get you excited to play to your visceral senses. So I look at it as an exercise in reawakening and trying to get people to use those skill sets that they have they don’t think to use, or they don’t think they’re allowed to use. And so that’s why I’m trying to pick these external examples, as I say, it has the benefit of it not being me commenting on their world, which I’m not necessarily qualified to do. But that’s how I try to do that.

Ben Cattaneo

We had Christian come in when I was at BT Group. The response was interesting. I think I shared this with Christian. There were two groups of people. Christian would come in and give these two examples. I think one of the ones was the simple sort of pathway, I think it was, “You shall not ride your bicycle through certain…”

Christian Hunt

Yeah, it’s one of those classic ones where they’ve tried to control what people can do in the physical world, and it’s obvious from the scenario that it’s not working, right? You can see that people have not followed the rules.

Ben Cattaneo

So we had one camp of people, and maybe those are sort of reawakened people, or I don’t know how you describe them, but there’s a curiosity that’s been maybe nurtured, and they can kind of see the connections. And then we had another camp of people that were just, well, this is an example from the world of urban design, and I’m sitting here doing anti-bribery and compliance, so I can’t make that connection. It’s just really interesting to observe that. I think they’re just the same thing. For example, one red flag for me for clients would be, tell me and show me how other companies do this thing. To me, that’s a red flag. Number one, because I don’t know what all these other companies do. But number two, getting me to why? Why is that relevant to you? I think it’s far more interesting to look at parallel industries or parallel practices or examples as Christian does in his compliance in the wild from other domains that may be applicable, and you take a principle and a nugget. The thing about connections is it’s really up to that person to be able to make those connections. You can kind of show and maybe it requires three or four, I don’t know how many different examples, for people to start to connect a couple of things. It takes a little while to prime people to think creatively, right? It doesn’t happen automatically. We can’t mandate it to happen at a certain period of time and so you’ve got to create environments. I think this comes back to Christian’s environments. There’s biases around individuals, others and environments, and try to create some of those environments so that people can start to make connections that they might not have seen otherwise. It’s not a linear process.

Christian Hunt

When you talk like that, Ben, it’s fascinating because I’m not saying everybody in an organization needs to be creative. There are roles for people that aren’t necessarily creative. I think we are all creative. There’s that piece. Some people need to have it brought out and people who say I’m not creative, that’s not true. But there will be people that don’t necessarily want to be creative in the workplace. But when I look at a lot of the interactions I have with people, they’ll say, well, I deal in anti-bribery and corruption or something, or I’m in a compliance function and I’m about the rules and whatever. And I’m like, if you go back to my framing of your job is to influence people to follow rules and processes and get the right outcome, then your job is influencing humans. If you don’t have the creative wherewithal in that space, then you’re never going to be capable of doing that job to a very high standard. So maybe you’re in the wrong slot. So one of the conversations I’m having with people, I’m not saying fire all these people, but I’m saying, it’s dangerous actually if your design outcome is a change in human behavior or a particular behavior outcome and the people that are pulling the levers to make that happen are doing things and don’t see why the results that they’re getting are not working. They probably shouldn’t be pulling those levers because they’re dangerous. They’re not helping to solve that problem. It would be like somebody in the marketing function, and you went, so what do you know about people? Oh, I don’t know. All we do is advertising marketing. We just run the same ad campaigns we’ve run for decades. Why are you doing that? Oh, I don’t know. We just do what we’ve always done. We do what our competitors do. That seems to work. You’d be fired because you’re not understanding, you’re not being very effective at your role. So as I look at it, I think one of the things that these sorts of conversations start to expose, and this is why it can be awkward, so be careful which clients you go with, but it can start to expose, are people in the right slots? Do they have the core skill set? Maybe they’ve hired the wrong people into some of these functions. I think the challenge, back to your point then around risk, or even, actually, if we look at the C-suite, sometimes people have got to a level they’ve been promoted into a level because of technical skills. But that doesn’t mean that you’ve got the decision-making skills or the leadership skills or any of the things that you need in that particular role. So I think when we start to demystify some of the stuff and we move people away from process and protocol and rank and all those kinds of things, I think we might recognize that we’ve got some badly deployed people in many organizations where they’re doing jobs that they’re not capable of doing. So it’s awkward, but I think if we want to get the best out of people, then we have to start recognizing that.

Constance Dierickx

One of the perpetual problems that CEOs tell me about is exactly what you’re speaking about, which is they’ll say to me, I’ve got a team of, let’s say, six people, they’re all EVPs or C-something or others. Yet, they can only think in their own domain. So the CFO thinks about the numbers, the HR person thinks about the people and likes to use big amorphous concepts while the CFO wants to know what that means, and you have the operations, then you have marketing and sales budding heads. The CEO will often say to me, I am the only one in the room that thinks about the whole. So it’s this perceptual problem of how do you help people become synthesizers of information, rather than segregators of information? That’s the problem I’m currently working on, which the two of you I know would have a lot to say about that.

But I wanted to add to your comment about benchmarking. Boy, that’s another teeth grinder, right? It’s like, let’s be as good as everyone else. No, how about you aspire to be the only that does X? But worse than that, worse than that is we’re better than we were last year. When my grandson was much younger, he said to me one day after he didn’t speak for four years, and then now he hasn’t stopped talking, but he said to me, I know we’re going to go to this, we were going to this theme park. He goes, I know that when we go there that I’m taller than I was last year, but I still might not be tall enough to go on the ride. That’s criterion based evaluation of oneself, and I just looked at him like, how can a seven year old say this when I have clients that don’t. But I know we’ve been talking for a while and we could talk twice as long as we have, but we all have things to do. I hope the listener is actually going to feel disappointed right now that I’m moving us to wrap up, and I bet they will, but I wanted to ask each of you, what is the best business decision that you’ve made in your career?

Christian Hunt

I think, for me, and I’m still working on this, by the way, for me, it is the realization, and this is in the context of working for myself, but I think I wish I had pursued this earlier when I was working for other people, to recognize that if you really want to be on top of your game, you need to be true to yourself, right? You need to do a career or find a job that really inspires you. And I have the luxury of doing that now where I’m able to job craft. I can do things, I can work with clients I want to work with, I can do interesting things. If there are things that need to happen that I’m not good at, I don’t want to do, I give them to someone else. And that decision to recognize that and to embrace who I am and recognize what I’m good at and what I’m not good at, and, therefore, get involved in things that bring me joy, and fulfillment, and satisfy intellectually and financially, of course, and just recognize that and be honest. And I think so often I’ve compromised on things. And sometimes you have to. I’m not saying it’s all free for all. But that willingness to recognize where I am compromising and to try and minimize that, and to be honest about that and to recognize certain things I was chasing in the past that just don’t fulfill me because I felt I had to. That’s been so powerful. And the best way to defend yourself against AI and everything else is to recognize that because all we’ve got is ourselves. Just focus on what do I want to do? Where can I bring value? What motivates and drives me? I wish I’d done this 20, 30 years ago. I would have had a slightly different path, but I would have been much more fulfilled.

Constance Dierickx

Well, I think you would have been a child. I think that’s wonderful advice. I’m reaching back in my bookcase, that’s what that noise was, to show you a cover of this book, which you may know, Design the Life You Love by Ayse Birsel. And this seems like it wouldn’t be related to our work, but it actually is. It is a beautiful pathway framework for people to do exactly what you’re speaking about, Christian. And I’m happy to say that Ayse is the guest on my podcast that will be released in August. So I’m very excited. I never expected this conversation would make me think about that, but it just goes to show you that things are connected. So Ben, what’s the best business decision that you’ve made?

Ben Cattaneo

Well, I’m a little bit further, I guess this is an awful way of putting it actually, further behind Christian in the journey of working for myself and being who I am. But I would say something along similar lines. Whenever I felt like I’ve had to contort who I am to whether it’s to fit in or to offer a view that is expected of me, then I’ve always felt there’s just something inside of me that just didn’t really sit well. But I’ve done that a lot over my career, contort myself to kind of fit in. With age, maybe I’m not as flexible. I can’t contort. So now, it’s far more, I say what I mean, which interestingly, when I left my recent role, one of the leaving gifts that they thought of giving me was a swear jar because I ended up using quite a lot of curse words. But that was just part of just being straightforward, and I don’t know if it will lead to more financial success, but certainly being more comfortable in my own skin is something that I’m already noticing from my more recent decision to start the Decision-Making Studio. And yeah, similar to Christian, I wish that I was truer to myself earlier in my career. The way in which organizations and careers work, that’s harder to do. But I think it’s a skill that we should teach younger people how to do, because I think everyone would be much more fulfilled if they were able to do that. I’m still working through that decision, but it would be to go out on my own. The formal decision happened maybe nine months ago. But I think the decision was actually made. a few years before.

Constance Dierickx

I agree. That would be my own answer, which I hadn’t really realized until the two of you were talking. I never imagined from a young child that I would work for someone else my whole life.

And I left my former consulting firm 14 years ago, and it has just been a much more joyous ride for the reasons you talked about, Christian. I work with CEOs and boards who I respect, who I enjoy being with, and with whom I can co-create things that are helpful to their organization and to them personally. I think it’s a really important thing. I also want the listener to understand that, for all kinds of reasons, sometimes we do jobs that we don’t like because we’re early in our career, we have to make the mortgage, and things like that. Those are real. Those are very real things and it’s no criticism. But you can be in that job and still be learning and acquiring some capabilities that will serve you later when you leap out of the nest and flap your wings and soar.

And then we know that’s the direction that you are headed. Meanwhile, I hope the listener will check out the compliance in the wild feature on LinkedIn, which is profound and hilarious. I’m always laughing out loud. My husband’s office is next to mine. He goes, what’s so funny? And I’ve started to use the phrase, which I checked with you, Christian, because I didn’t want to be swiping your idea, decisions in the wild. As I said before, Ben posts wonderful content from the Decision-Making Studio on LinkedIn, so I hope the listener will check that out. You will be able to find each of these brilliant and insightful human beings on LinkedIn and on their websites and the details of that will be in the show notes. And also check out their books. Each of you has a reasonably recent book to check out. Humanizing – tell me, Christian.

Christian Hunt

Humanizing Rules: Bringing Behavioral Science to Ethics and Compliance.

Constance Dierickx

Humanizing rules. Thank you. And Ben? 

Ben Cattaneo

Decision-Making in the Polycrisis Era. Co-written.

Constance Dierickx

That’s a thick book. I have it. It’s downstairs. I think that a really useful way to look at that book is to see which part you want to look at and then go after it. So I hope the listener to this will follow each of you because they’ll learn from you, and that is a gift that you give to people. And thank you for doing that and thank you for joining me.

Christian Hunt

Thank you so much for having us.

Ben Cattaneo

Thank you very much. Really enjoyed this great opportunity. Thank you.

Outro 

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