The mind of a fox. Clem Sunter

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СКАЧАТЬ What he was possibly suggesting is that eliminating what one can’t do provides a more revealing insight into what is possible. By approaching the cognitive process in the Sherlock Holmes way, we will not only be more accurately informed but also make more effective decisions. Often the best way of choosing your favourite person or thing is to start at the bottom and reject your obvious dislikes. Then you gradually work upwards until you’re comparing your top two preferences to make your final decision.

      Cluedo, the popular detective game, illustrates Holmes’s point perfectly. The way to win the game and identify the murderer of the owner of Tudor Close is to eliminate all the other suspects. If Colonel Mustard didn’t do it with the candlestick in the conservatory, then it might have been Miss Scarlett with the dagger in the study – and so on. Another example is this well-known riddle: if you come to a crossroads and meet two locals, one of whom always tells the truth and the other one always tells lies, and you don’t know which is which, what question do you ask to ensure that you get to St Ives? The answer is: “What would the other fellow say if I asked him?” Whichever person you asked, you would know that the answer is false, discard it and take the opposite route. As Holmes would say: “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.” In the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? it is as important to be adept at eliminating wrong answers as it is to have a feel for the right one, especially when you’re close to the million!

      Foxy parents get their young children to do something by telling them not to do it. In a similar vein, Nelson Mandela once gave a very foxy definition of leadership:”A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go on ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realising that all along they are being directed from behind.” So once again, are you a hedgehog or a fox? Or maybe a bit of both? If you’re the last, you’re lucky to be so special. In the business world, hedgefoxes play the crucial role of bridging the gap between hedgehogs to whom they easily relate and foxes for whom they act as corporate crusaders.

      Tiger and the Titanic provide clues

      As Tiger, the fox of the fairway, navigates the hallowed greens of the world’s greatest golf courses, the philosophy of Kaizen has equipped him to optimise on every bit of fortune and misfortune that comes his way. He is an obsessive student of both the game and his play. He continually reviews video footage of old tournaments – even those he has won – to criticise his play and to look for any information, no matter how trivial or apparently contradictory, that will allow him to make more accurate decisions when playing any course, under any conditions and against any other player.

      The result: as he prepares for a tournament, he has a firm understanding of what lies inside and outside his control. For a start, he has a thorough knowledge of the rules of the game of golf and any recent revisions governing not only play but also the range of equipment that can be used. Obviously, he knows that he has no control whatsoever over the content of the rulebook: it controls him. No individual golfer, however awesome, has the power to change the rules. He can submit a proposal for a change if he thinks a particular rule is ridiculous; but until the relevant governing body in golf has considered it, he must abide by what’s laid down in the book. So what Tiger does control is his knowledge of the rules: what he doesn’t control is the content of the rules themselves.

      The same applies to the layout of the course. Tiger can’t change that. But he can play practice rounds to get a feel for each hole; and he and his caddie can measure the yardages and decide on the optimum strategy to be adopted for each hole. Again, he has no control over the strengths and the weaknesses and the overall capabilities of the other players. However, he can make himself familiar with their style of play; and he knows that, on the last day of the tournament, if he is breathing down their necks going into the final stretch, many of them will wilt under pressure! The weather: that’s an important element during a tournament that is outside everybody’s control. Tiger may have a general idea of the kind of conditions that will probably prevail; but he certainly won’t know until the actual day, and sometimes only at the time of his actual shot, whether the wind is blowing or not and in what direction; whether it’s sunny or raining; and what the temperature is.

      Broadly, in the lead-up to the tournament, he classifies everything into those things he can control: his swing, his selection of clubs, his state of mind, his knowledge of the course; and those things that he cannot control: the rules of the tournament, the layout of the course, the quality of the other players, the weather conditions. Equally, he divides all factors into those of which he is certain and those of which he is uncertain. Of the things he doesn’t control, he can be certain of the rules and the layout of the course; but he can’t be certain about the weather and the level at which the other players will perform on the actual day. Of the things over which he has control, he can be certain of the number of clubs that he will have in his bag; but he won’t know the actual club that he will choose for a shot until he has examined all the options before he plays the shot. More importantly, he doesn’t know in advance what score he is going to shoot because there’s many a slip between cup and lip. The decision he takes for each shot after weighing up the various scenarios may or may not have the desired outcome. There are no guarantees, even for Tiger Woods. He is sometimes in the rough and sometimes even out of bounds.

      Hopefully, this exposition on Tiger’s cognitive processes is giving you a clue as to where our thoughts are leading us when we explore the mind of the fox. But, like the good foxes we are, in order to make the trail even clearer, we want to provide a negative example – something which exhibits all the worst traits of hedgehogs. We can think of nothing better than the events which led up to the sinking of the Titanic at 2:20 am on 15 April 1912. It was the ship’s maiden voyage; and the disaster, which occurred at the zenith of Britain’s imperial authority on the world stage, was never entertained as a scenario by the company that owned the ship, the engineers who constructed it or the captain who sailed it. The ship was deemed unsinkable. After all, it had a double-bottomed hull that was divided into sixteen watertight compartments; and for the ship to sink, more than four of these compartments had to be flooded. It followed from this overambitious reasoning that the Titanic was not equipped with a sufficient number of lifeboats, and the crew did not properly conduct lifeboat drills for the passengers at the beginning of the voyage. Moreover, at the time of the disaster, the ship was steaming too fast in view of the fact that the bridge had been warned of icebergs in the vicinity. The consequence: five of the Titanic’s compartments were ripped open in a glancing blow with an iceberg; 1 513 souls went to a watery grave; and a terrible price was paid for the conceit of the imperial hedgehogs who literally believed that Britannia ruled the waves.

      In retrospect, the participants in the Titanic project should have done an analysis of what they could and could not control. No way could they control the state of the ocean; yet they definitely controlled the safety features of the ship. Secondly, while they could be certain about the performance parameters of the liner under normal conditions, they couldn’t be certain about all the possible conditions which the ship might meet on its voyages. Hence, all those eminent minds fell into the trap of ignoring the unthinkable – and that’s how accidents happen. Today, a growing number of companies are hiring risk management experts, with the specific objective of painting “unthinkable” scenarios for the SHE (safety, health and the environment) aspects of their business. Four key questions are normally asked. What are the types of accidents that can happen? What is their probability of occurrence? What will the severity of the impact be if they do? And what are we reasonably going to do to minimise or eliminate the risk of those accidents? In light of tougher SHE legislation being introduced everywhere in the world to hold companies and individuals accountable for their actions, answers to these questions are as important as the examination of the risks of fraud, corruption and theft in the financial area, which is usually done by internal audit departments. The silly thing is that there is no trade-off between good SHE practice and the bottom line. When workers believe management care, they work harder.

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