On Premortem, Flexi-Business Plans And Reframing
Edition #70
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
It’s Not You — It’s Your Goals: Knowing When to Quit
In this article from Knowledge At Wharton, Annie Duke, corporate consultant, co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, former professional poker player, and best-selling author, writes about learning the art of knowing when to quit from the best poker players.
Annie writes, the most critical skill separating great players from amateurs in poker is what she calls ‘Optimal Quitting’. She further reinforces this point by reiterating that it is far harder to let go of a goal today because quitting is stigmatized.
Here are some hard-hitting points that she makes supporting this thought and idea and how to overcome this goal-focused mindset:
Goals often work, but they can sometimes cause us to over-commit, ignoring clear signs that the goal is no longer worth pursuing.
Set intervals to rerun the cost-benefit analysis of your goal: Ask yourself this question - ‘Knowing what you know at the new point in time, is it still worth pursuing the goal, or should it be modified or abandoned based on the current situation?’
Add “kill criteria” to your goal: ‘When you set a goal, create a list of kill criteria that give you some outer limits, post which you need to be more rational about when it’s the right time to walk away.’
Acknowledge incremental progress: Incremental progress could be learning a valuable lesson or hitting a specific benchmark — important details that matter even if the original goal is not worth meeting.
Learn to do a ‘premortem’, like the technology company that McKinsey describes, as to how that firm analyses potential reasons a new advanced-analytics system for an aviation program they were designing might fail.
Read more
Whole Foods Founder John Mackey Doesn’t Follow Business Plans
John speaks with Adam at an Authors@Wharton live event about his Whole Foods journey, from living in his first store to selling the company.
Some of the topics covered in this conversation:
Beating Walmart and other supermarkets with a service mindset when the rest were focussing on prices and efficiency
Leadership lessons learnt
Conscious Capitalism
The importance of purpose, mission and value.
Why does John not believe in business plans and not get attached to them
How John mediates conflict
John’s view on life, the worst advice he got, and his advice for young students
The reason he sold his business to Amazon
On his new start-up, Love.Life
How To Make Mindsets Matter
Watch this talk at the Nobel Summit 2023 by Nat Kendall-Taylor, Chief Executive Officer at the FrameWorks Institute. Nat is an expert in psychological anthropology and communications science and uses methods from the social and behavioural sciences to measure how people understand complex socio-political issues and tests ways to reframe them to drive social change.
Nat brings forth an important finding from recent research - there needs to be more trust in Science among people. Some people believe science is inconsistent; therefore, there is a flip-flop of findings or scientific studies, too fast-paced and changing frequently. The other one is nefarious, where there is a hidden agenda. These mindsets create a lot of distrust in science.
But, on the other end, people believe science is a source of awe and wonder, helping uncover mysteries and is the engine of innovation. Therefore, how we say what we have to say, has a way of activating the foreground of thinking and acting as a dominating force in how we see the world. Therefore, the importance of how scientists communicate within their fraternity versus the public must be measured, well-crafted, and clear to avoid confusion or contradictions. While taking within the fraternity, qualifying confidence and being careful about probability is essential while sharing with the public - Nat puts out three crucial questions that must be clearly articulated about findings or scientific studies:
‘What we are finding?’
‘ Why it matters?’
‘What remains to be learnt?’
Nat talks about some fundamental principles or frameworks that can be followed:
Leaning in it with the power of examples and sharing how science has had a social impact and outcome. This dramatically increased funding for science increased by 25%
Focus on Explanation - The value of the explanatory approach and using metaphors
Leading with shared values and resonant principles
Understanding cultural mindsets and their impact on how messages are absorbed and processed is critical to building trust with science.
Watch the video on YouTube.
On Premortem, Flexi-Business Plans And Reframing
When and how to do a ‘Premorterm’?
Reading the article about goals and knowing when to quit a goal was very interesting and refreshing. Typically, there are a lot of articles and write-ups around grit, focus, perseverance etc., when it comes to achieving your goals. But knowing when to quit a goal is an art and a very nuanced thought.
It is common to find people pursuing a goal and not being able to give up. It even happens to careers, executive positions that they hold and staying in the chair or a job longer than they ought to.
All the above situations are also intrinsically linked to goals, as your goals and aspirations determine your behaviour. You become so attached to that goal or have an entitlement mindset even more after achieving that goal. Therefore, with the power or position or recognition that you get, you will find it challenging to give up. There are two aspects for you to think about when it comes to quitting a goal:
It is knowing when to quit a goal because it becomes a drag on your time, mind, and health.
Knowing when to quit after achieving your goal or resetting your goal once you reach it for the next phase of your life and the timing of this is also very important.
Hence, this idea of ‘Premortem’ is worth considering and practising. What is postmortem? It is an analysis or discussion of an event held soon after it occurred, primarily to determine why it failed. ‘Premortem’ is the exact opposite.
A ‘Premortem’ can provide answers to the above questions that are worth thinking about:
Looking into the future, what does success or failure mean, or what are the markers of success or failure regarding our goals?
How do you break down the timelines and interim progress markers of success or failure of these goals in the future?
How much time, resources, effort and tangible value are you willing to give and get back to determine the failure or success of your goals?
Do you take time to pull back and look at these occasionally - be it the failure or success of your goals?
‘Premortem’ is an excellent idea for putting these down and referring to them w.r.t the progress of your goals from time to time.
When do flexi-business plans make sense?
Like product lifecycle, there are phases in a company’s lifecycle, and in some of their product lines, flexi-business plans work or may not work.
When a company is in its early stages of growth, flexi-business plans make imminent sense. Similarly, when there are new segments, categories, or innovative products that a company may be dealing with, adopting a flexi-business plan is a great idea. The concept of a flexi-business plan intuitively works for entrepreneurs as they consider the achievement or even non-achievement of a business plan as success to improve the results further. For them, the purpose and mission come ahead of a business plan, and they are willing to rescript a plan many times over depending on the success or failure of their initiatives. However, for professionals, when they join or start or switch from large, established or mature product categories or company set-ups to a new business concept or start-up, they are, over the years, naturally tuned to achieving a tight business plan and getting their rewards or seen as successful by the outside world. They have built an inherent inability to handle failure or change of business plans as they are often evaluated against achieving their plans. This switch from a large, established company to a start-up needs a significant change in their mindset. Similarly, if the company has a mature business or product category, then flexi-business plans may not work.
Therefore, flexi-business plans need to be looked at from the context of the person - being an entrepreneur or a professional and also from the lifecycle that the company is in.
Appreciating the power of reframing
While ‘Reframing’ was discussed in the context of science and trust, ‘Reframing’ has several applications and uses when dealing with conflicts, managing people and instilling belief and conviction in an idea.
When it comes to conflict, when you reframe a problem from the context of the receiver vis-a-vis the person who spoke, then it opens a new thought process in those people’s minds to help them resolve it faster. Similarly, when it comes to managing people, a leader needs to reframe the problem constantly in the context of the project, team, company status, costs, profit, margins, client etc. Also, reframing helps build deeper beliefs and convictions, as new ideas don’t get traction as quickly as the entrepreneur or a company envisages. Hence, reframing the idea in the context of market maturity, acceptance, changing habits and culture etc., can make a big difference.
Premortem, Flexi-business plans, and Reframing have some common boundaries and principles; combining them judiciously can hugely help influence outcomes and success.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Quitting a goal - be it non-achievement or giving up the recognition or rewards after achieving the goal- is an art of deep contemplation and self-awareness.
Being flexible with your business plans helps you look at opportunities and challenges through a new lens.
Reframing the problem is a critical skill to gain the attention of the stakeholders or people involved and helps them contextualise the situation from their worldview.