Living in the question - Next!

Physician Executive, July-August, 1999 by Joe Flower

Listen to this voice:

"I want to beg you, as much as! can, dear sir, to have patience with all that Is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books that are written in a very foreign language. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, Perhaps then, someday in the future, without noticing it, you will live your way into the answer."

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet

I've brought Rilke here, to a conference at the La Costa Resort near San Diego, to read in the odd moments between sessions, on my balcony overlooking the fairway. The conference is "EnterTech," Silicon Valley meets Hollywood--digital special effects, digital distribution. 3-D modeling, virtual entertainment worlds, producers trading business cards with effects wizards, coding geniuses, and venture capitalists. Against the digital clatter and rush of high-speed, big-bandwidth startups, IPOs and stock swaps, Rilke seems merely quaint, a wan romantic litterateur. It's the summer of 1903. and the sickly 28-year-old poet, fled from Paris to Bremen for his health, is writing a letter to a younger friend. In fact, Rilke sounds unutterably romantic, poetic, and utterly 19th century.

A tougher world

We live in a world that is faster-moving, and much tougher, than Rilke's. Business has accelerated to breathtaking speeds in the 1990s--and in the last few years the afterburner has really kicked in. The speed of change is overwhelming. A major technology investor, former Microsoft Vice President Jonathan Lazarus, told me over lunch that he finds the speed of business today 'frighteningly fast." Geoff Yang of International Venture Partners in Orange County, California, a veteran venture capitalist who invests about a half a billion dollars of other people's money in an average year, told me, "I've been in the venture capital business for 14 years. The first 10 cycles were pretty much the same. The last four seem like an entirely new business."

Especially in health care, who has time to "live in the question?" We need to decide things quickly, get the decision out of the way, and move on, right?

Maybe. But let's live in this question for a minute. Rilke came to mind once again the other day when I talked to someone who could hardly be more different from him. Carl Stern is the Managing Partner of Boston Consulting Group, a company with thousands of employees, hundreds of clients, and more than 40 offices scattered through the world's major cities. More than anyone else I know, he has his finger on the pulse of industries throughout the world.

I asked him how people seem to be reacting to the great speed of change. "They don't think as much," he said. "There used to be time built into the system to consider decisions. Now the minimum rate of polite response is so foreshortened that there is no time to consider. People make decisions differently, with less care. There is a perception that you have to move faster. Yet while the time allowed for decision-making is so much shorter, the uncertainty built into each decision is much greater. As a result, especially in the industries and sectors that are deepest in change, people try to structure their decisions differently. They give up on predicting. Instead of making irrevocable moves, they think in terms of buying options."

Instead of restructuring their business from top to bottom, they do a lot of little things. They make a minority investment in some company with an emerging technology. They license a technology. They form a strategic partnership with someone who Is trying out a new business model. They hire a few people to try out something new, They give a few people in the company the permission and resources to set up an experiment. They feed the new thing, see how it grows. If it works, they feed it more. If it doesn't, they can it and move on to the next thing.

They live in the question.

Live in the question

They have to. Stuart Kaufman explains why. Biologist, physician, complexity theorist, certified genius (recipient of one of the famous MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants), founding general partner of the BIOS Group, on the faculty of the Santa Fe Institute, Kaufman has spent years designing mathematical formulae, based on biological theories, to model such abstruse human behaviors as learning curves, organizational flattening, and supply chains. He and his group have been hired to apply these insights to clients as diverse as Boeing, Texas Instruments, Procter & Gamble, Honda, Johnson & Johnson, NASDAQ, and the U.S. Marine Corps.

"One of the things we're looking at in BIOS," he says, "is: 'what does it mean to be an adaptive firm in a changing environment?' One message we get out of biology is that you can't plan ahead very far. New things come along that you don't even have a category for, and therefore you don't even see them. Could Nestle, the world's largest purveyor of inexpensive coffee, have imagined Starbucks, a chain of coffee stores where people pay $3 per cup? Biology shows us that things are going to happen that you literally have no notion are even possible--so five-year planning horizons are really stupid."