Читать книгу The Fox Trilogy - Chantell Ilbury - Страница 13

Because scenarios are stories that unfold in a sequentially organised manner, they can be viewed as multiple pathways into the future. Each path denotes a hypothetical condition of the environment to which an option for action can be attached: if the future turns out this way, I will do that. According to David Ingvar, the head of the Neurobiology Department at the University of Lund in Sweden, these paths are stored in the prefrontal lobes of our brain. The more we walk down them in our minds, the more we remember them. In other words, we are continually forming a “memory of the future” in our imagination and revisiting it time and again.

In his research, David Ingvar addresses the question as to what function this “memory of the future” might serve and why it would have evolved. Apart from giving us a filter to help us deal with the mass of information that we encounter, it prepares us for action once one of the visited futures materialises. In other words, it gives us the best possible leverage in advance to deal with a wide range of future developments and outcomes. A good example of where this theory is applied in practice is the use of simulators to train pilots to fly aircraft. By the time they pass the final exam, it must be second nature to them what to do. In all situations but especially emergency ones. In the latter case, they won’t have time to scroll through an instruction manual like the one they have for landing. The rules of the game for flying, the key uncertainties during flight, the range of scenarios that you may have to face as a pilot, the options open to you to respond and the selection of the correct option must be ingrained. It’s a pity that CEOs don’t go through simulator training before they fly their businesses into the future. Of the largest 100 companies in the world in the 1950s, 70 have disappeared without a trace. Imagine taking a flight where there was only a 30 per cent probability of landing safely!

Few things are certain in this life, but especially in business. In many ways uncertainty, the natural field of operations of the fox, offers a real challenge for business, but it also opens up the doors for development. It is sad, therefore, that big business today is a century behind the physicists who in 1900 embraced uncertainty in that most “certain” branch of science – physics. The study of elementary particles has given rise to the exciting field of quantum physics that takes the deterministic picture of the universe offered by Isaac Newton and blows it wide open. According to Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Adelaide in Australia, even the common-sense rule of cause and effect that we referred to earlier is suspended at the atomic level. The rule of law is replaced by a sort of anarchy or chaos where things happen spontaneously and without certainty. Particles of matter may simply pop into existence without warning, and then equally abruptly disappear again. Or a particle in one place may suddenly materialise in another place, or reverse its direction of motion. If you think this is odd, please answer the question: do you believe in miracles? If you do, then you also believe that things occasionally happen for no earthly reason.

In contrast, modern-day business is positively Newtonian in its outlook and trails behind science in its rate of development. Business still takes a deterministic view of the world. It pictures it running like clockwork. As long as one can analyse the inner workings of the clock in minute detail, one can predict exactly what the mechanism is going to do in the foreseeable future. Actually, there is so much competition, so much discontinuity in the markets and so many new horizons that are opening up as a result of technological change that the only thing that is certain is uncertainty. Businesses therefore have to work within this uncertainty and require a complexity-reduction process to do so. In this respect, our foxy matrix offers an ideal way to gather all the relevant information, sift it like sand running through an hourglass and use it to focus on the most realistic options available at any one time. The final decision is more informed; but if it proves to be wrong, the decision maker can return to the matrix for another round.