Forget agonising over what to do - there's more luck to success or failure than we'd like to admit.
When I get stuck I try to live my life according to lessons learnt from Finding Nemo.
It's a kids' film about Marlin, a father fish trying to find his lost son. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.
In one scene, risk-averse Marlin and his friend Dory are swallowed by a whale. He is in the whale's mouth and the whale is sucking in a whole lot of water. They are desperately trying to hang on. Dory says she speaks whale language and the whale is telling her to get to the back of his throat. Dory: "He says, 'It's time to let go!'. Everything's going to be all right." Marlin: "How do you know, how do you know something bad isn't gonna happen?!" Dory: "I don't!"
Marlin ends up letting go and the pair are whooshed out through the whale's blowhole to safety. No, it isn't anatomically correct - in a real whale they would go into its stomach - but that's not quite the point. For an animated kids film it is a profound Zen-like message about freedom and detachment. The oddest ideas are sometimes what gets you unstuck.
They gave out the Ig-Nobel prizes this week at Harvard University, celebrating "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think". The economics recipient was a group of researchers who used the Peter Principle to suggest that it may make sense to select leaders randomly.
The Peter Principle, based on some 1960s research, is the idea that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence".
The Ig-Nobel economics winners, a group of Italian mathematicians, concluded the best way to improve the efficiency of an organisation is either to promote an employee at random, or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
The Ig-Nobel prize was a bit of a laugh; the physics one went to some University of Otago academics for demonstrating, that, on icy footpaths, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes. However Stanford Professor Bob Sutton (author of The No Asshole Rule) suggested randomness is no joking matter; it challenges our assumptions about the rationality of what we do in life.
Personally, I am rather fond of, but alarmed, by "self-perception theory" - the idea that we behave in certain ways and then after the fact decide which of our attitudes or feelings must have caused that behaviour. Scary huh? So much for all that solid management research.
Professor Sutton writes about a simulation being carried out by 2002 Nobel Prizewinner - the real Nobel, not the Ig - Daniel Kahneman, showing that if the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were randomly reassigned to different companies, there would be no significant impact on the firms' performance.
In the Wall Street Journal Kahneman said we believed people with certain characteristics would produce certain consequences. "But we're wrong, because there is way, way more luck involved in determining success than we're prone to think."
So if you are are a manager who is agonising over whether to do A or to do B, and worrying about which option to take, just listen to the whale and let go. Remember, all drains lead to the ocean.
dhc@deborahhillcone.com
