Managing With Ignorance
The world will always be more complex than our limited brains can grasp. Still, business decisions need to be made without all the facts. Here are three ways to do it right.
When I started my first job as a management consultant in the late 90s, my manager had a Dilbert cartoon posted over her desk, entitled “How Estimates Become Facts Through the Miracle of Communication.”
It depicted Dilbert’s infamous Pointy-Haired Boss asking his hapless colleague Wally to find out how big a certain market was.
Wally turned to Dilbert for help.
“I don’t know,” Dilbert responded. “It could be anywhere from one to a million.”
“It could be a million,” Wally told his boss.
“Experts say one million,” the Boss wrote in his report in the final panel.
The cautionary tale was particularly important at a widely-respected organization like The Boston Consulting Group. No sooner might we share our own heavily qualified estimates — typically a blend of Internet- or client-sourced factoids and “BCG analysis” — in a public or even private client report that the same might begin to appear elsewhere as an unqualified “fact” grandly labelled: “Source: BCG”.