The Advantages of Strategic Unpredictability in Businesses

The Advantages of Strategic Unpredictability in Businesses

Sean: In the pre-show, I remember that we talked about being strategically unpredictable. I’m going to be honest with you, I have no idea what you’re meaning when you say that. I am super interested about what that means because again, we’re business people here. I’m running a business.

Len: Yeah.

Sean: I always say that branding is about consistency. And integrity as a leader has something to do about consistency. And when you’re consistent, it also means that you’re in a way predictable, like they know what kind of Sean is coming in the door, and what kind of Sean they’re going to be dealing with for the day in terms of my people, in terms of clients. So what do you mean about being strategically unpredictable?

Len: Yeah, absolutely. Great question. It’s something that can be confusing. You know what we’re not talking about as being willy nilly crazy, you know, because you do want to be consistent in terms of the brand that you deliver? Right? But like you said, you can become so predictable that you become vulnerable. So what this comes down to, and one of the things and what I talk about in this chapter in the book is what’s called the OODA loop.

Len: So it’s O-O-D-A, It’s an acronym. O-O-D-A right, OODA. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This was born from the military where they were trying to come up with How do we understand how fighter pilots make their decision process and how do we win more fights in the air? And so what they began to understand is that we all, everybody goes through this OODA loop. Every time we make a decision, we go through the OODA loop. But here’s the trick. If we’re going through the OODA loop, we observe, we orient, we decide, we act. If something happens that disrupts us. We have to go back to the beginning. We have to re-observe, reorient, re-decide, and re-act.

Len: Are you a sports fan?

Sean: Before, basketball a 100 percent.

Len: Basketball? OK, well, let’s talk about basketball. So you’re a basketball player, right? The guy you’re guarding is coming straight down the court, going right towards the basket, you’re in the corner somewhere. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to figure out at what speed and what angle to run, to intercept him or her. Right?

Len: Now, when you get up to that person, if they juke, if they dribble behind their back, if they fake or feint and move, that’s when we start seeing those ankle-breaking videos where people fall all over themselves, right? Because what’s happened is when you observe, you orient, you decide, and you act. You’ve observed you’ve oriented yourself. You decide and then they move and everything changes, and your brain goes back to the beginning. It’s too late for your body. It’s already moving. It already has inertia and momentum, and then you fall over, right?

Len: It’s the same thing in any sport, football, whatever it is, if you’re running in a straight line and you’re predictable, you’re easy to intercept. If you’re moving around, your goal is still the same. That basketball player’s goal is still to get that ball in the hoop, right? Football players’ goal is still to go to the end zone or for the goal, depending on what football is yours. The reality is, though, that the way that you get there, so you can still be predictable in terms of what your brand is about, your brand is still about scoring you know, a three-pointer or a hoop or whatever you want to do, right?

Len: But how you get there can dictate how successful you are, based on how predictable you are. In business, if we’re doing the same things all the time, the same way. And we do and it’s all the same, how hard is it for our competition to be able to meet us?

Len: But when we’re strategically unpredictable and so I talk about in the book how you can be that – one of the biggest ways you can do that. So you’re the type of guy I can tell. Next question is, how do we do that right? Yeah. One of the things that you can do is self-disruption. The best type of disruption is self-disruption. As an example, I use Netflix. Everybody knows that Netflix disrupted the movie rental business, right? And you know, that’s a big story about what they did to Blockbuster and all that and Blockbuster’s gone and all that. But to me, the bigger story with Netflix is what they’ve done since. Because they did not stop, they could have stopped and just been this company that delivers DVDs through the mail. Yeah, but they did. They moved to streaming, right?

Len: And then did they stop there? No, they didn’t. They then moved to original content production where they’re producing their own content. And did they stop there? No. Now they’re getting into game development and gaming. Every time they do that, they force their competition to rethink what they’re doing. You know, the competition at first was like, OK, how do we deliver movies through the mail? And then the competition was like, Wait, that’s not the game anymore now we got to figure out how to do this streaming thing. Wait a minute.

Len: Now we got this figured out and now we’ve got to figure out how to do our own content. The more that you force your competition to move by disrupting yourself before they can disrupt you, the best type of disruption is self-disruption. That is a concrete way that you can remain strategically unpredictable. You are not unpredictable in terms of what your goals are, but you’re unpredictable in terms of how you get there, which forces your competition to slow their decision process down.

Sean: Let’s put some parameters because when you say disrupt yourself, that’s good, that could easily go out of hand. That’s how I’m imagining it to be. I mean, there are entrepreneurs by definition. I see entrepreneurs or people who try to solve real world problems in their own way. It might be a new way, might be a way that’s existing, but it’s never been used before in a certain way to solve this kind of problem.

Sean: People just copy businesses – I don’t consider them entrepreneurs. I consider them business people. Right? When you say entrepreneur and you talk about disruption, there has to be parameters because they can disrupt themselves in a way that’s way out of hand. I know that Netflix, they started with mailing DVDs in the mail and they went to streaming, but it still has to do with video all the way and entertainment. They even went so far as to say that our competition is not really other streaming platforms. Our competition is whatever else you want to do in your life that for you, you consider as entertainment, could be eating popcorn is our competitor, or it could be spending time with family at the dining table playing board games. Maybe that’s why they get into gaming.

Sean: So there is that kind of straight line of where they know they are in business. Yeah, and the disrupted their ‘how”, but the their ‘why’ is pretty much the same. Now the question is, and you’re talking about disrupting yourselves as a business? Yeah. What are the parameters that we should be looking at?

Len: Yeah. So you sort of answered your own question along the way. So, you know, the answer is you have to understand where your threats are coming from. This all plays together. Everything I talk about plays together, right? So threat awareness, understanding where your threats can come from feeds into your self-disruption, right? So you want, you can see, you know, Netflix is out there understanding their customers, understanding their industry, understanding technology, and understanding where are those threats potentially going to come from? Where you want to self disrupt if you want to get to those threats before your competitors can. You want to understand that this is what could disrupt me down the road. Now, do I want to wait for somebody else to do it to me or do I want to do it to myself? Because either way, it’s coming. Either way, it’s coming. But one way I get to control it, and the other way I have to react.

Len: And you know what? As a sports fan, you know that action is always faster than reaction, right? Because of the OODA loop. Right? So we have to build an understanding of where our threats are coming from, where the danger is coming from, where our customers, or consumers, or our vendors, or employees are going to. And how do we get there first and when that requires a disruption in the way we do business, when that says, you know what? We’re Netflix, we deliver things through the mail. The future of consumption of media is online. Do we want to milk this delivery by mail thing as far as we can go and wait for somebody else to develop it and then try and catch up? Or do we want to take the lead and disrupt and make everybody else figure it out along behind us, right where we get to set the gold standard right? That’s the difference. That’s the parameter.

Len: The parameter is not just to disrupt for the sake of disruption. Strategic unpredictability requires us to understand our strategy, requires us to understand our purpose like you said, and requires us to understand where the threats and the changes could come from, so that we can get there first.

Sean: Wow, that’s pretty tough. I mean, like as a business, yeah, pretty tough. But I could see the importance of it, I could see the importance.

Len: Yeah, listen, all this stuff is tough, right? But what I can tell you is you can’t let this be intimidating, right? Because at the end of the day, the place to start the little nugget that will get you ahead of your competition is all based on this idea of awareness. All these things are built around building that awareness, building that understanding so that you process stimuli. You get to decisions faster. You slow your competition down. Threats don’t surprise you. You measure the right things. All these things play into building awareness. So if you just start with that nugget of awareness, like how can we build a little bit more awareness into our business? You can build everything from there. This is not an all or nothing type thing. Vigilance is about fighting that complacency every day, right? And building those those processes. And it’s not something that you go from zero to 100. You know, in a millisecond, it’s something where just by thinking about it, just by understanding that you could be complacent, you’re already fighting the battle.

Sean: And I guess Len, you know time just flew by already. I couldn’t believe it. And I’ve learned a lot. I think I’m super excited to read your book and this podcast recording. I got the most value out of it actually. I guess my last question is about comfort and complacency, whereas we talked about you as an entrepreneur, when you get successful? You can become confident, overconfident, and there’s a lot of time, you know, as an entrepreneur, you just want to get to that point where the business is running on its own and you’re working on the business, rather in in the business and comfort could be so attractive.

Sean: What is the main difference between being comfortable that, you know, “I’ve done this, I’m here finally, thank God” and being complacent? Is there a fine line between what the major differences are, and what’s OK? Is it OK to be comfortable if it’s not OK to be complacent?

Len: It’s a great question because it’s okay to be comfortable, but you don’t want to be comfortable to the point where you’re overconfident. Right? So, you know, think about it this way. Going out on a boat, you go out on a boat. You can feel comfortable being out on the boat and enjoying that, but also understand that the ocean or the body of water is a dangerous thing, right? And you know, when you get to the point where you’re so comfortable that you’re overconfident, then you start drinking, and you leave your life jacket behind, and you don’t do the things that you need to do, that’s when it becomes dangerous. Right?

Len: So it doesn’t mean that you can’t be comfortable. Comfort is a great thing. Comfort is something that we all crave and we all deserve. We all deserve comfort. But what happens is when you build this into your life, you can be comfortable and vigilant at the same time. Right? Because you have built in those protectors that make sure that you don’t take comfort to the level of overconfidence, where it obscures your vision of threats.

Len: So you can have a good time on the boat and still be aware of the fact that the ocean is a dangerous place. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can do them both. And that’s kind of the goal in business, right? The goal in business is to enjoy yourself, enjoy your life, enjoy your success, but also understand that there are still threats out there, right?

Sean: Hey Len, thanks so much for being here on the show, sharing your wisdom with us. If people want to get more from you, where is the best place to do that?

Len: Yeah, so two things. Number one is just look me up on LinkedIn. I respond to everybody unless you’re, you know, just trying to sell me something crazy I don’t need. But you know, Len Herstein, L-E-N H-E-R-S-T-E-I-N, just look me up on LinkedIn and reach out.

Len: The other thing is you can go to lenherstein.com and that’s where all the information on the book is. The book is called Be Vigilant: Strategies to stop complacency, improve performance and safeguard success, is a super easy read. That was one of the things that was, you know, important to me. Because I can’t read complicated or difficult books. So I wrote the book the way I talk. When you read this book, if it doesn’t sound like me, I want you to tell me, Sean, I want you to tell me that I’m not being it.

Sean: In the next podcast.

Len: When reading this book, it should sound like me. It should sound like me. And so this is – which may be good or bad. I don’t know. But it sounds like me, it’s authentic. It’s a quick and easy read, and you should get a lot of it available on Amazon or Barnes Noble wherever you buy your books for e-books. Lenherstein.com or just look me up on LinkedIn?

Sean: Fantastic! Hey Len, thanks so much for being here. We are better for it.

Len: My pleasure. My pleasure Sean. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.