Leading People
Gerry Murray talks to leading people about leading people. Get insights and tips from thought leaders about how to bring out the best in yourself and others.
Leading People
Embracing Uncertainty: How to Lead and Thrive in an Unpredictable World
In this episode…
Margaret Heffernan joins the Leading People podcast to challenge our dangerous addiction to certainty and predictability. Drawing from her latest book "Embracing Uncertainty," she reveals why the traditional management approach - forecast, plan, execute - is fundamentally broken in today's volatile world. When the first leg of this three-legged stool collapses, everything else follows.
What makes this conversation so compelling is Margaret's unique perspective, bridging her experience as a CEO with deep research into how creative professionals - writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists - naturally thrive in uncertainty. These creators don't just tolerate the unknown; they actively seek it out as the fertile ground where breakthroughs happen. The stark contrast with today's corporate environments is telling: we're producing highly credentialed professionals who excel at following instructions but freeze when asked to navigate ambiguity.
Margaret offers practical wisdom for leaders wanting to break free from this trap. She examines how WL Gore's elegant three-question innovation framework makes idea development accessible to everyone, why performance management systems often strangle creativity, and how companies can build innovation into their everyday operations rather than relegating it to specialized departments. Her insights on efficiency are particularly provocative.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when discussing technology and AI.
Margaret cuts through the hype with characteristic clarity, questioning whether these tools will deliver the promised benefits and examining the often-overlooked costs. Her perspective isn't anti-technology but rather a call for technology that genuinely serves human flourishing rather than diminishing it.
Curious?
Whether you're facing uncertainty in your leadership role, struggling with innovation challenges, or simply curious about how to thrive in an unpredictable world, this episode offers both inspiration and practical guidance.
Subscribe to Leading People and join our LinkedIn community to continue the conversation about embracing uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat.
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Welcome to Leading People with me, Gerry Marais. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights and tools that drive personal and organizational success. And in between, I bring you one simple thing short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought thought-provoking ideas, Leading People is your guide to better leadership. Is your desire for certainty holding you and your teams back? Can creative disciplines teach business leaders how to thrive in the unknown, and what if uncertainty was the key to your next breakthrough?
Speaker 1:In this episode of Leading People, renowned author, thinker and former CEO, Margaret Heffernan, joins me to talk about her latest book Embracing Uncertainty. She makes the bold claim that our collective obsession with predictability is not only futile but limiting. Drawing on powerful examples from artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians and educators, Margaret shows how creative disciplines are ahead of the curve when it comes to leading in uncertainty and why it's time for business and HR leaders to catch up. And why it's time for business and HR leaders to catch up. In this episode, you'll discover why the pursuit of certainty is a dangerous illusion and how to break free from it, what leaders can learn from the way artists and creators navigate ambiguity, and how to build resilience and confidence in the face of not knowing. If you've ever struggled with uncertainty or ambiguity, or felt pressure to always have the answers, then this episode is for you. Margaret Heffernan, welcome to Leading People.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for inviting me, Gerry so we were just having some chat before we started and I was just reflecting on. I first met you at an event in Brussels somewhere around 2018, 2019. And I've been following your work ever since. In fact, I watched your 2019 TED Talk last night with my wife and we thought how prescient that was. Some of the stuff you talked about. In that Little did we know what was coming around the corner and you've published is it six or seven books, margaret?
Speaker 2:I published six, and my seventh is due out at the end of march okay, and so we're actually here to talk about your uh, your latest book.
Speaker 1:But before we get to that, just so our listeners can get to know you a little bit better, how did you get to being this leading thinker, author, author, speaker and mentor to CEOs, and what people, places or events stand out in your journey to where you are today, and were there any epiphany moments?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I'll try and keep this as brief as I can, otherwise we might be here all day and all night, which wouldn't be unpleasant, but probably people have better things to do. So I was born in Texas. We moved to the Netherlands when my dad, who's an engineer, started working in the North Sea. We then left and moved to the UK when North Sea oil on the UK side was being developed, and by the time I'd finished American high school in London I'd been out of America longer than I'd been in it.
Speaker 2:So I stayed in the U UK, went to university at Cambridge, came out not knowing what I was going to do with my life, like I think most people do, and worked for the BBC as a dictation typist and thought well, it's a horrible job, but I really like the people.
Speaker 2:And so I, you know, applied for various jobs and kind of climbed the height up the hierarchy from from that to being a radio and drama producer, to being a commissioner of programs for radio four, to then moving to television where I produced drama and documentary for BBC one and BBC two and um. And then I thought everybody I'm meeting with is at least 10 years older than I am, so that means I'm going to be sitting here just kind of waiting for people to retire, and I'm not the most patient person in the world and I also felt I didn't that there wasn't a lot more for me to learn. Um, and so I left and ran the trade association for independent program and filmmakers and um, and by then I guess this was about 1992 in the uk in the uk things were very miserable. I it was hard to see other country would recover.
Speaker 1:I lived in the UK at that time. Yeah, it was miserable.
Speaker 2:People forget, but some of us don't forget. Anyway, because I had an American passport, I said to my husband you know, we're too young to die, let's get out of here. And he is a research scientist. So he got a position at Harvard. We moved to Boston. I dabbled in PBS in Boston and thought it was too slow, too bureaucratic. But what was really going on that excited me was tech in Boston, and I started getting involved in kind of what the relationship between multimedia and tech would be or could be. And I was then hired by some venture capitalists to run a company based on a big investment of software that they had bought from BBN, which was pretty much the research organization that had built the internet originally. And from then on I continued to run tech startups until 2002, and I had a fantastic time. I mean, I thought America was hands down the best place to work I'd ever been. But I also felt I really wanted my kids to grow up in Europe and that if we didn't go back pretty soon, we'd be in America for the rest of our lives. So we moved back to the UK.
Speaker 2:I was pretty burned out by then, it's fair to say, and I thought well, now what am I going to do? I want a job that has no employees. I have now hired, fired, promoted, demoted, managed so many people and I have quite strong opinions about how to do that. So, um, I was, I pitched and, uh, wrote an article for false company magazine about the fact that, in all the time I worked in tech, I met only one other female ceo, and that caused a bit of a rumpus, on the back of which my first book was published, and I just went on from there to write more and more and more books, which are a kind of blend of my own firsthand experience, a lot of research and a lot of interviewing of people in different countries, different companies all over the world, and along the way, I became an advisor to chief executives, primarily in large global businesses, and what I like to say is that I think that the combination of my experience, plus my research, plus what I'm hearing from people live, as it were, in large corporations, gives me a pretty good sense of what's going on, what are the issues we're tackling, what are the issues we're not tackling and what needs to be said that everybody isn't saying.
Speaker 2:And I would say, roughly speaking, that's kind of what I do now. Along the way, I wrote six plays, I think, which the BBC broadcast, and a whole, you know scad of articles here, there and everywhere.
Speaker 1:I'm sure there's lots of people out there wondering how Margaret makes time to do all this.
Speaker 2:Margaret wonders that too.
Speaker 1:So the new book is, you can announce it. The new book is called.
Speaker 2:The new book is called Embracing Uncertainty how Writers, artists and Musicians Thrive in an Unpredictable World.
Speaker 1:So I was particularly intrigued by your book because, in addition to my own personal work and experience in leadership and talent development, I've also spent many years as a professional musician composing, arranging, recording and performing in front of thousands of people. So one thing I know from that experience is that uncertainty is a constant companion in live performance and the entire creative process. You never really know what's going to work until you start looking on it, and so how does this resonate with what you found in your research for embracing uncertainty? On Leading People, the goal is to bring you cutting edge thought leadership from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in leadership today. Each guest shares their insights, wisdom and practical advice so we can all get better at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share a link with friends, family and colleagues, and stay informed by joining our Leading People LinkedIn community of HR leaders and talent professionals.
Speaker 2:Well, I think I mean. First of all, I would agree absolutely with what you've just said about the nature of creative production and working in the arts. I think there are a couple of things that led to this path. The first was when I wrote my previous book, uncharted. You know that was very much an attack on the notion that everything had become predictable. That, you know, we're so smart and the technology is so smart and now we have data on everything, we can predict everything, so everything can be certain. So kiss uncertainty goodbye.
Speaker 2:I thought, you know, intellectually, that was false. And when I went out and started talking to people who researched a very, very fine art of forecasting, they definitely didn't believe it. And the world kept conspiring to agree with me, you know, not least with COVID. And the more I thought about this, the more I thought that our traditional ways of managing could not work in this context. Because, to put it simply and the way we've taught management you know pretty much since the industrial revolution is it's a three-legged stool forecast plan, execute Well, once the first leg breaks, you're going to have a very uncomfortable seat right. And so I thought, okay, if you can accept and I think I made a very strong argument that forecasting has lots of flaws and certainly does not misdose certainty, then you have to start thinking about management and leadership differently and you have to start thinking. Instead of waiting for the future to come and run you over, you have to start thinking about okay, how do we start to get ahead of the game? And that means that the whole notion of innovation just races to the top of the leadership agenda in my book. And if that's the case, then how well suited are our organizations or our leaders for that new way of dealing with uncertainty? And what I found and continue to find all around me is they are very, very, very poorly equipped to do so. We are still hanging on to the notion that forecasts can be reliable. We still imagine that we can plan three, five years ahead and in many, many areas we're still extremely poor at innovating or innovation as a continuous process within any kind of organization.
Speaker 2:And I launched this argument in Uncharted. Interestingly, the American editor of my book suggested we dump that chapter, which I thought was kind of hilarious. But the more I thought about it and the more time I spent with companies, the more I thought was kind of hilarious, but the more I thought about it and the more time I spent with companies, the more I thought this is becoming a very, very serious problem. And the chief executive know it. And what they're telling me over and over and over again is that they're hiring really great, very well-educated, highly credentialed people. They turn to them for creative ideas and they can't find them, that what we're producing from our educational system is a whole bunch of people who are extremely good at following instructions, extremely good sometimes in writing instructions and enforcing instructions, but because they are so used to knowing how to succeed in doing exactly what they're told, they have become the opposite of what we need right now. Now, in a more predictable environment, let's say, you know manufacturing in the 1970s, this was not a fundamental strategic problem, I would say. Today, with everything volatile and on the move, it is the critical discussion to have today, and what everyone I'm hearing from in all sectors around the world is that we don't have the creative and critical capacities we need to lead the way that is now relevant. So I thought, okay, so if these people who are being recruited and hired don't have it, who does have it? Because somebody must, I mean either the human being isn't capable, which I don't believe, but some people are definitely better at this than others.
Speaker 2:And having spent a good half of my career working in film, television and music, I thought the people I worked with there did this all the time. They had ideas all the time. They started things without being asked. They weren't particularly fussed about what the brief was, they explored all the time. They had a high capacity for risk, high tolerance for risk. They were very patient. They were excellent editors of their own ideas, knowing that if you're truly creative, you have 100 ideas a week and most of them have to be thrown out. And they're very good at change before change is required.
Speaker 2:And then I also found, when I talked to historians, that they said oh well, if you want to see where a moment of change begins sort of step zero you always go to the artists. They're always there. They are the first people to notice, the first people to respond. You know, it's why we think of avant-garde, because it's in front, literally. And so I thought so. There is a way of being and a way of working and a way of living that artists embody and live with that we have a great deal to learn from.
Speaker 2:And at the same time, I was very aware that people who only consume the arts have an idea, a kind of stereotype, of artists as kind of flaky, childlike, undisciplined, erratic, chaotic. And the reality is completely different. You know these are people with a deep sense of initiative drive and motivation. You know their TV people with a deep sense of initiative, drive and motivation. You know their TV shows get shown on time. Their exhibitions, you know, are full of objects that they created and insured and completed and so on that end up opening on time. Musicians are some of the most adventurous users of technology. You will know this.
Speaker 2:And even so, you know they do shows where, incredibly, everything actually works, even though they're always kind of pushing the boundaries of the technology which they've got. And I thought, who would not want these people in their workforce, who would not want these characteristics in their workforce? This is exactly what I'm hearing people cry out for, but the stereotype of art and the artist is so entrenched it doesn't really occur to people that maybe those graduates with you know English degrees and arts degrees and music degrees and painting degrees. Maybe they have a lot of what you're looking for. And so we need really quite desperately, I think A to get rid of the stereotype and B to understand on a much deeper level, not just the skills but also the attitudes that will equip us to deal with a very, very uncertain future. And the good girls and boys who are obedient, waiting for orders, um, we're going to have to change their education system so that they have a broader range of capacities than they are currently graduating with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I hear echoes of the late Ken Robinson coming through. He was trying to convince people that they needed to start to embrace the arts in a different way, needed to start to to embrace the arts in a different way. My own personal experience of this is um, yeah, everything you say resonates. Um, during covid, some of my friends who make a living out of music became so creative and inventive. But they were doing the paypal jar, for example, which was literally you can't put money in my thing, but you can put money in my paypal.
Speaker 1:Every little thing they were they they became live performers, they were doing concerts for free over the internet. They were doing whatever it took, but the degree of ingenuity they had just to be able to survive was impressive, I mean. And they were creating on speed at that stage because they were literally doing stuff. And then, if we look at, juxtapose that with just to mention the Taylor Swift's of this world, who have shown also how you can, I mean, in some ways, her success is an example of how a young woman goes out there, takes her craft and pushes it to the boundaries and, of course, becomes phenomenally wealthy as a result, right, right. So yeah, also, there's so many things echoing there. Harold Wexworth work on fixed minds yes, absolutely. I mean waiting for orders is I don't want to get it wrong, you know, and that type of thing.
Speaker 2:And I see this very early sometimes in my mba students, which is they'll say well, how many words does the essay have to have, and do you want it single spaced or double spaced? And do you want me to indent paragraphs, and does that include footnotes? And how many references do you want? And all this sort of stuff. And increasingly, with the assignments that I hand out, I just say I don't care, I want it to be excellent, but it needs to be your concept of excellence. I want you to take an idea and develop it, and I'm as interested in how you do it as in what you do. And, of course, for some people this is just totally ambiguous and they're frozen and paralyzed. And for some I mean the look on their faces they're so happy, it's like at last. Here I am, you know, in the master's program, and I'm being treated like an adult and I have some freedom at long last yeah, go, go do it and show us what you can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, show me what you're made of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my kids go to a secondary school where they basically just tell them in their last two years they have a project to do Fantastic, that's it. Yeah. And at the beginning they struggle because they go well, couldn't you give us like three or four subjects or topics? And they say, no, go do something that interests you. Maybe it's something you want to study afterwards, maybe you're going to find that you want to study it, maybe you're going to find you don't want to study it. And basically it's this notion of the discipline you're bringing all subjects together and they do the most amazing things. It's, yeah, it's unbelievable. They struggle really stretches them. But you see, these young people emerge in their graduation, when they're coming up to 18 years old. They're like flowers have bloomed, you know. They just blossom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And you just see this emergence of that person who's now ready for adulthood. They've just grown through something. But let's get down to the so. Artists seem to be able to embrace uncertainty as part of their day-to-day creative process. So what can leaders and organizations start to learn from this, apart from employing lots of them, perhaps? But, um, what can they start to to learn, and what have you gleaned from your conversations? Are there some important principles or things that you could say? You could transpose this into an organization and it'll work, because it works for these artists. It's going.
Speaker 2:It would work for you yeah, well, I think there are a couple things I'd say, um. The first is, I think all organizations need need to take a hard look at their performance management system, because if there's a big culprit beyond education, I think it's there. You know this very elaborate bureaucracy that most companies have developed, which is a job description and KPIs and targets, and all of this really heavy lifting bureaucracy, and all of this really heavy lifting bureaucracy that wasn't intended to, but it fundamentally stifles creative thinking. People are so busy hitting these targets and measuring their KPIs or working around them that it leaves very little time for any creative thinking whatsoever. So I think of this a little bit as a game of Jenga, which is how much of this stuff can you throw out? Because, for one thing, it's super costly to craft all of these things you know, with pages and pages and pages of detail, and then monitor it all and then you know, estimate its worth.
Speaker 2:I would think how much of it can you get rid of? I think you then need to think about innovation as a constant process, not just something that's inside an R&D department. I think that has to be part of the annual budget or whatever the budget cycle is, and I look at some companies that do this very well. So most of them, what they'll do is they'll do a forecast with all the caveats required, and then they'll say, okay, so if we're estimating a profit of X, we will take 15% of that and put that towards new initiatives, and that money and those resources will be devoted to people who come up with ideas of what we need to be doing to secure our longer-term future.
Speaker 2:I would then look at some of the very good processes that companies like WL Gore have, which make it really simple to pitch new ideas. They have a really beautiful heuristic, which is if you've got an idea, you need to be able to answer three questions, which is, first of all, is it real? Do you have some evidence that it could work? Secondly, does it matter? Is the market for this thing important enough financially? And the third is can we win? In other words, are there such huge barriers to entry that we have no chance, or is it very disaggregated or untapped?
Speaker 2:In which case, let's go right, and what I love about the way that Gore does this is that those are three rules that are super easy to remember. This is not a 57-page application form, right, and everybody kind of carries it in their head, so when they have an idea they can quickly run through and say, yeah, it's a great idea, it probably would work, we probably could do it. But you know, after we've done it we've made 10 and sixpence. So it's a kind of cool idea but it's not worth it. It's just not worth the effort. On the other hand, you can go through it and say, hey, actually, actually this is a really disaggregated market. We really can make a huge improvement and there's a lot of money in this market. Now let's go for it.
Speaker 1:You've given them simple criteria against, as you say, you know you haven't stacked it with 25 variables or anything. You just said these three.
Speaker 2:If you can answer these questions well, then let's think about it seriously. If you can answer these questions well, then let's think about it seriously. So I think that has to become a process that anybody in the company can go through. Frankly, is to do with, I mean, leaving more time for reflection. I remember working with one company where a one-hour meeting was a 50-minute meeting, and the last 10 minutes people just sat there and thought about what they heard, what they discussed. Were there reasons not to do it? Were there reasons not to do it? Were there better reasons to do it? But they scheduled in reflection time.
Speaker 2:I write in my book about two habits that Andy Haldane, who was the chief economist at the Bank of England, used to adopt. One was to go for a lot of walks to get a sense of what's going on out there in the real world. Right, chief economists spend their time with models, right, and he was really interested in reality, thank God. And so it's not just that he would walk around, but he would also, you know, go and talk to groups that economists don't typically talk to. You know, whether it was charities, whether it was homeless associations, whether it was entrepreneurs to get a sense of outside of my bubble, what is on people's minds. I can look at the research into it, but I want to hear the quality of their lives as it's expressed through people directly. And the other thing he did, for which he was initially quite widely derided, was he would invite artists into the bank to come and talk about whatever they wanted to. Because he said you know, it's so easy in any kind of organization to get highly institutionalized, become very rigid, very, very narrow. Highly institutionalized become very rigid, very, very narrow. And these are people who, just you know, allowed everybody to lift their heads up and think more broadly and have very different kinds of conversations.
Speaker 2:I'm also seeing companies that are using the arts specifically to enable different kinds of conversations, higher levels of collaboration, just to provoke a different discussion about what's going on in the world and what do we need to be doing.
Speaker 2:I remember taking a whole bunch of CEOs this was not my idea, I have to say, this was not my idea, I have to say who were on a sort of you know, two-day executive away day and they kicked that off in a museum in Texas where there was an exhibition of Jackson Pollock's black painting, and in groups of two or three.
Speaker 2:They would sit in one of the paintings and simply talk about what they saw in the painting. It's a very different kind of conversation, really trying to free the mind up, relax it a little bit. And it's very interesting because you know what the neurobiology will say is that while you might feel your brain is relaxing, the reality is it's still very busy, but in a different way. Different parts of the brain are being recruited and in this mode you're capable of seeing connections between ideas in ways that when you're super busy or web surfing or glue to netflix, your brain's working, but it's not wandering around and thinking that's right. So we need to have a big rethink about what's the valuable work, what's the necessary work and how do we get those into a better kind of proportion.
Speaker 1:You're listening to Leading People with me, gerry Murray. My guest this week is renowned thinker and author, margaret Heffernan, whose TED Talks have garnered millions of views. Coming up next, margaret explores how artists, composers and even actors prepare to embrace the unknown, how they deal with risk and how they achieve breakthroughs. You'll hear why she believes the creative world offers the most useful models for future-ready leadership and what you can do to start learning from them today. And it seems that we can also learn a lot from chickens. So let's get back to our conversation. So I'm going to. There's a huge amount in there, margaret, I guess. I guess. I guess that just means, ladies and gentlemen, you're just going to have to buy the book, get the rest of it, but I, I, there's one thing you talked about which artists are really, um, good at tolerating, and if I could just reflect back a little bit what you just talked about there, you used WL Gore, right? Well, tom Peters wrote about that in In Search of Excellence, if I'm not mistaken. So that company's been doing this stuff for for a long time and you know, I, I've also hung out with people and you know we've got big AI stuff. Maybe we'll come to a bit of technology in a few minutes and that, and there's this whole view that this is just going to sweep the world.
Speaker 1:But I worked in finance for a while and financial people can be very cautious and you talk about this way in which artists embrace risk, about this way in which artists embrace risk. So it strikes me sometimes that it's not an understanding of what needs or could be done. It's this inability to take the risk, that that, because a lot of ceos are saying, well, if it goes horribly wrong, then I'm, I'm dead meat right, which is fixed mindset again, it's like it has to be right or wrong. So what could you say to people out there who are saying, ah, it's just too risky, I get it, I get it, but it's just too risky. What can artists in?
Speaker 2:that world. Teach a CEO who's afraid of taking the risk. Well, I mean, I think what I would say is there's an asymmetry of visibility right, which is kind of a horrible phrase, but by which I mean you can see the risk of doing something you can't see the risk of not doing something that I read about or know well firsthand. The biggest risk they are all taking is their refusal to change or adapt, their refusal to invent. I think this is hands down the most dangerous thing they could possibly do, but because they're used to it, it doesn't feel dangerous. Yes, right, it's like, well, if I've been doing this every day, it'll be fine.
Speaker 2:And that kind of takes me back to one of my, you know, favorite lessons in philosophy, which was Bertrand Russell talking about, um, chickens. You know I can become a bit obsessed by chickens if you know my work, but, but you know he used to talk about, you know, the chicken gets up every morning when the sun rises and does his cock-a-doodle-doo, and the corn gets thrown in front of him and he has his breakfast and that's great. And he does that day after day after day, thinking that's going to go on forever. And one day the sun rises and he steps outside and the farmer comes over and breaks his neck Right. So this is the fallacy of Russell's Chicken.
Speaker 2:Russell's chicken thinks well, if it worked before, it'll work today. You know, it's the classic if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, I think the environment we're in right now is one where, if it ain't broke, break it now, break it yourself. Do you know? Think ahead and think about what do we need to be five years from now? And how do we start yesterday? Because sitting around and just imagining that someday things will settle down and in the meantime I have all this data which gives me a deep level of deceptive comfort is not leadership. You know? Can we just say this? You know, leadership is about being ahead. It isn't sitting on the sidelines waiting to see what happens next. And although there is a gigantic library of books on leadership, there is a shockingly small supply of it in real life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean there's a lot of people who've done statistics on this and said, like most of the money is wasted. They said if you took the same approach to medicine as you took to leadership, you know, then doctors would be dysfunctional because nobody would ever get kid. There will be no standards, there would be no common practice, etc. And so there's a. It's a big industry, but an industry that perhaps doesn't produce a lot of quality output in the end of the day and and we're surrounded by incrementalism, you know, which is okay.
Speaker 2:We manufacture a chocolate biscuit, let's make one a bit smaller. Let's make one with white chocolate, let's make one with darker chocolate, you know, let's make one that's square, and they call this innovation, but it isn't, and it's not thinking much more deeply about, well, what could be possible. The other thing I'd say is I think it's quite interesting this notion that people have, which is, you know, the arts are very soft and squishy and science is very kind of hardcore, and real Scientists definitely don't recognize that in the slightest. And one of the things that was kind of interesting for me, especially as I'm married to a scientist, you know, talking to scientists about much, about actually how creative that you were thinking has to be to make any kind of breakthrough, and that actually and Carlo Rovelli writes about this absolutely brilliantly he says artists are drawn to uncertainty because that's where the breakthroughs occur.
Speaker 2:If you cling to certainty, you're never going to discover anything right. So you have to move towards the unknown with the creative confidence that you can find something. But if you just hunker down with certainty, all you're going to do is repeat yourself, and that's what a large number of organizations do. It's also the case that you know we're fixated on efficiency, and have been ever since the Industrial Revolution. And if you want to be really efficient, then what you take is a process you already know and you just tighten it up a bit a bit less money, a bit less time, a bit fewer resources it becomes more efficient. Fantastic if you're just repeating something, but it's exactly the wrong mindset for something new. Innovation is not efficient, is not efficient. There's a huge amount of waste of time, of ideas, but actually, if you try to apply efficiency to innovation, you guarantee failure, because you know, after about two failed ideas, everybody's going to jump to the sure thing. Well, guess what? The sure thing is an old thing in new clothes, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean, your TED talk in 2019 really brings that out very strongly. I have a friend who's a professor at the Calwell University here in Leuven and he's a professor of customer experience and he's banging on constantly about how over-efficient or over-engineered the customer service experience has become, to the point where customers are just totally frustrated by the lack of customer experience they're getting. And he's he's very vocal. He was on this program, I think a year or two ago as well, talking about this. But uh, it's true, and and you reminded me when you're talking about the different colors of chocolate and making them smaller I had a professor when I was at Manchester Business School and he he used to talk about fiddling at the margin and he said, don't, like anybody can fiddle at the margin and say, but if you and we were doing advanced market strategies, so we were looking at what was called the PIMS database and all that stuff in those days and it was like he was saying, no, you have to really go way beyond that you.
Speaker 1:He was saying, no, you have to really go way beyond that. You have to really look for something new. You have to be prepared to explore and to to really try and find those things, otherwise you are just fiddling at the margins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and and eventually that will kill you because it's not interesting enough. It's not interesting enough to consumers. And to go back to your example of customer service, customers learn to hate companies with poor customer service. You know it's super fast, it's super cheap, it's run by bots. You can't talk to a human. The data probably looks great.
Speaker 1:What's not being measured is the degree to which people hate your business now it's a bit like what you were saying earlier about the things you don't do. You don't know what you're not knowing about what you're not doing. You don't know about all those people who aren't coming back Right, there used to be I mean, I wrote my master's thesis on customer service and the importance of people to that and there used to be an organization at the time called TARP and they used to look at not just the amount of people who were unhappy with your service, but who who came back. If you solve their problem and and the statistics were mind-blowing they like if you, somebody could be really pissed off with you, but if you, if you treated them and there's respect and listen to them and did something to try and help them, they became loyal customers. Not only that, they became advocates and they promoted you by saying actually you know what. They got it wrong a few times, but actually they sorted it for me and I was pretty happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now you can turn complainers into evangelists for you.
Speaker 1:So you speak a lot about innovation. I'm just looking at my notes here and I'm looking at the time and I'm thinking, you know, I suppose something that might be on the listener's mind out there is, when they think of innovation, they think of technology, and you know we've got a lot of that stuff going on at the moment and you've written a lot about, I think, this idea that technology should be in service of people and not the other way around. Technology should be in service of people and not the other way around. What would you say about the? You know, is there an increasing risk of leaders losing their ability to think creatively and deal with uncertainty because they think technology is going to do it for them, like chat GPT is going to jump up in the morning and answer all their questions, for example.
Speaker 1:So what are your thoughts on that? Because the last time as I said, 2019, you were doing the TED thing and you were already seeing things that have started to come to. What are you seeing today? Now, in the last two years, has been accelerated quite a bit, because now it wasn't that AI wasn't there, it's just that AI became more accessible to the ordinary person through an app, for example. So what are you seeing now and what leaders need to be wary of?
Speaker 2:I'm certainly seeing a classic hype cycle coming out of Silly Valley, which is, no, it's not new, but it's much more vicious and aggressive now than it's ever been before. I'm seeing a lot of senior executives not really understanding what AI is, how it works, what it can do, what it can't do. I'm seeing an under coverage of its costs, both environmental and financial and certainly in terms of capital investment, and, as a consequence, I'm seeing kind of chaos Like, oh, we've got to do AI, we've got to do AI. We don't really know what it is, don't really know where it is or when it is, but we have to do something. And not very much very clear strategic thinking. I'm seeing very little in terms of understanding where does it genuinely add value and not?
Speaker 2:And I think the most interesting thing I saw recently was an analysis and I think, to be fair to him, it was a sort of slightly back of the envelope analysis by Paul Krugman about you know, when the dust has settled, what will the contribution of AI be to the economy? And his back of the envelope calculation was approximately 1% of GDP. Now, why is it so low? Well, one reason it's so low is because of how much value it's going to destroy. So that should give everybody some pause in terms of thinking okay, is this what we want to do? And if we do want to do it, how do we reduce the cost of it? Because you know, if you told me I was going to invest billions and billions and billions and billions in something for a 1% return, I might at least slow down and do some better thinking yeah, there is a, I suppose, but you lived through this echoes of the dot-com yes, I've been there.
Speaker 1:I've been there, yes well, I mean, I knew people who did this craziest of things and started businesses and you know, we're coming back to my old alma mater maybe six months or 12 months later asking for their old jobs back, because everybody thought that it's just a question of the Internet will do everything for us and didn't look at. Perhaps what you're referring to now is what the net impact of all of this is.
Speaker 2:And what Krugman estimates, the net impact of the Internet was is a half to one percent. Impact of the internet was is a half to one percent. Um, ai it may well be less than that, because ai is formidably more expensive. And so you know the people who made out like like bandits, so to speak, in the internet transition, with the people building the infrastructure.
Speaker 2:So the telcos you know certainly the data center people are going to do very well, as are the energy companies, but this is always painted as though it's free money. You know that we're going to have AI and it's all going to be fabulous and there's going to be tons of money rolling around. There's going to be tons of debt rolling around and, yes, some companies will do very well, many will be destroyed, and we should be thinking not just about the upsides, which is, of course, what Silly Valley wants us to think about, but the downsides in terms of cost, not just cost to businesses, which are ginormous, but cost to governments who are somehow going to have to deal with the unemployment consequences of taking millions of jobs off the table. Yeah, and who is going to pay for that? Because those people aren't going to be customers if they have no income, no right.
Speaker 1:So could we all just slow down and start thinking about this in 3d instead of you know, just some kids game yeah, and that whole discussion around the, where Altman was coming out more or less saying that it's not scaling like normal tech and then DeepSeek comes out and sort of puts a blip on it and says look what we did for less money. And so it is a very, at the moment, a very unknown world. And at the same time then, if we cycle back to embracing uncertainty, how does how do what you learned in that, in that research, apply to people who are looking at this, this whole technology ai thing? What are the things that an artist would do? Um, with something like this?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, it's interesting because I talk to artists and, of course course, some of them think it's the worst thing that's ever happened. Many of them are simply playing with it to see, ok, what can I do with this technology that I couldn't do before? And so musicians, for example, are using it to get a quick sketch of you know, if I put these things together and add this and take this away, roughly speaking, what do I get? And they're doing that because what it means for them is that something that maybe it would have taken three or four hours to write to here and decide actually, no, I don't want to go down that road. They can do more quickly now and say, okay, well, that recipe doesn't work, so let me try something different.
Speaker 2:So the trial and error process, which is fundamental to most art, is accelerated. Now, in many cases, that's great. In many cases, it might not be great, because actually the thinking time between trial and error is really important. So you don't just want to be able to make music faster, but certainly that's what I've seen artists using for it for a lot. In terms of writers, I've seen people using AI for research warily, because the research is not always very reliable, and the pretty fundamental problem with it is it tends to rely on the most cited sources, which means it's very generic, and if you, as a researcher, are looking for something uniquely interesting, it's probably not going to do that for you, no. So I think we have to understand better how it works and where it delivers real rewards, and certainly many of the early examples.
Speaker 2:It's not just that they're not delivering anything at all useful to me, they're wasting my time. The summaries I get from Microsoft Outlook are a total waste of my time. I mean, I didn't ask for them. They're absolutely valueless to me and all they make me do is hate Microsoft. You know this may be their experiment. Don't experiment on my time. You know this may be their experiment. Don't experiment on my time. You know it's just too aggressive, it's too invasive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and actually breaking news. This afternoon I noticed that a news story that a very, very large amount of prominent artists have brought out a silent album of musicians, a silent album in protest at the ai copyright potential to infringe. And these are serious big names, from kate bush to paul mccartney to name it. So who's who basically, of saying enough is enough, you know, yeah and they're, and they're right to do that.
Speaker 2:And I've written this on this in my sub stack, as you probably know, which is um it's. It's an extraordinary idea that I create a piece of intellectual property and it can be ripped off by every tom, dick and harry using ai. I didn't allow that. I don't get any upside of whatever it goes on to produce. I mean, this is just automating shoplifting essentially.
Speaker 2:And of course the counterargument, certainly here in the UK, is but if we don't do AI, you know we won't be a leader in the world and we better just never mind the cost to everybody else. We have to go forward. It's like no hang on a second. You know the Financial Times has a deal with ChatGPT. They are remunerated for the intellectual property that they allowed ChatGPT to scrape. So there is an intrinsic contract that says we get some of the upside.
Speaker 2:I don't understand why a big publisher I mean I understand politically, of course, but from a legal or justice perspective, why that can be true of an article I write for the FT but not for an article I write on my substat. Yeah, you know, it should be up to me to decide whether I want AI to scrape it. And you know, one of the proposed compromises in this space is okay, well, you should be able to flip a switch to say don't scrape. Well, that's a very nice idea, but there are two problems with it. The first is nobody anywhere has shown that that's doable.
Speaker 2:And secondly, you know the elegance, the sheer elegance of copyright law is the minute I write a sentence, it's my sentence and it's covered. I don't have to do anything. It just is the minute a painter does, a visual artist does a scribble. It is their work. So this is turning copyright on its head, saying, no, every single thing you create, whether it's a calendar entry, you know, or the entire, I don't know, lord of the Rings you have to copyright it every time you add a sentence to it. This is lugubrious, it's expensive, it's not workable. The AI companies know it. They think for them, of course, it would look like fairness and it would actually be theft.
Speaker 1:Right, there's a lot, a lot of great stuff there. Margaret is there. Is there anything I should have asked you about your book that I haven't asked you, that you'd like to share with our listeners?
Speaker 2:um, I don't know. I mean, I think I think there's a lot in it for for people a who love the arts and want to understand better how artists work. I think there's a great deal in it about how to make oneself more creative, which was partly a kind of part of what propelled me to write the book, because I thought I was getting very dull and boring and I wanted to spend some time talking to different kinds of people. And so I think there is as much as I'm interested in organizations because they have a lot of power and influence in the world. I think there's a great deal about the way we live today which makes us much less creative than we innately are. And I guess, in this context, the thing I'm thinking about is, you know, we've become very addicted to the promise of certainty.
Speaker 2:So I've noticed this with friends of mine who booked a city break, you know, going to Barcelona, and of course, they found the best restaurants and booked them, the best hotel and booked it, you know, a guided tour and booked it, you know, before they got on the plane. The whole thing was scheduled and planned, and I looked at that and thought I don't even know why you need to go now. You have allowed you allow nothing serendipitous, accidental to happen. You're not going to explore, you're just going where everybody else has been. What is what is going to be new for you in this?
Speaker 2:And what you know is that when people come back from their holidays, you know what do they remember most? The unexpected conversation, the shop they found when they made a wrong turn and found themselves in this little alleyway that somebody made you know really cool bags. It's the unexpected, and I think our apps and all of our technology have really shrunken our capacity to regard uncertainty as opportunity, which is I get a chance to explore. I get a chance to think for myself, to do for myself. I am free if I allow myself to be, but the more I fall into the hands of the peddlers of certainty, the less free I become. Of course, I'm also generating vast amounts of data for them, not for me, and I'll never know what I missed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I met my wife on an airplane and it was the greatest unexpected gift I ever had. It's. You know, these things can happen. You never know what's going to happen.
Speaker 2:But they don't happen if you don't leave time and looseness for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the same way that if you walk to work every day the exact same way, you will see nothing by the second week. So you know it's also that these addictions and habits really limit what we experience and ultimately who we are. Yeah, and ultimately who we are, unless we're able and curious enough to change them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so coming to the end as a final reflection, so looking back on not just the work and research you did for this book, but all the work you've done, if you could leave leaders with just one key insight about uncertainty, what would that be?
Speaker 2:I think it would be that, if you truly want to lead, and be skeptical of efficiency and don't hire a single person without an overweening sense of curiosity.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, margaret, how do people get in touch with you? And I believe you may even have a special offer for a few lucky listeners who reach out to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have a website which is just wwwmheffernancom, or one word. It's just wwwmheffernancom, or one word and I would say that if they want to write to me either through that website or via LinkedIn the first 10 people I will sign up with free subscriptions for my sub stack, which I started about a month ago now.
Speaker 1:Great, and then they'll get regular updates from you on your thinking and everything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and some of the interviews with artists that are in my book will be will appear on the within the sub stack as longer form interviews, because they're phenomenal, phenomenal people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'll put links in the show notes so anybody who wants to reference them. As ever, thanks, margaret for sharing your insights, tips and wisdom with my listeners here today.
Speaker 2:Super Well, thank you for inviting me and thank you for your great questions.
Speaker 1:Coming up on Leading People. In our upcoming episodes, we'll delve into groundbreaking research that reveals some of the universal traits shared by the world's most effective leaders and how you can cultivate them in your own leadership journey. We'll also explore the strategies and practices that set top employers apart, offering practical insights into how organizations can create environments where people truly thrive. And we'll investigate how AI is reshaping organizational dynamics from who gets recruited to who gets promoted, to how employees are monitored, raising new ethical questions for leaders about stress, well-being and the future of work. If you haven't done so already, be sure to subscribe to Leading People on your favorite podcast channel to stay ahead of the curve with fresh insights on leadership and organizational excellence. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another One Simple Thing episode waiting for you A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast Until next time.
