What We Believe

At GBN, we believe that the world is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain. Yet, a variety of cognitive and behavioral constraints impede the ability of almost all organizations to make adequate and timely sense of their changing context. But doing so is critical as strategic decision-making increasingly depends upon the ability to develop contextual intelligence, exercise well informed and creative judgment, and achieve adaptive, as well as competitive, advantage.

1. Complexity and uncertainty are increasing globally.

The human drama has always played on an uncertain stage. Yet today's organizations face unprecedented levels of change, both in nature and scale, which generate significant and global challenges and opportunities. The critical factors include:

  • Complex Global Systems: Our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world is fraught with far-reaching, interdependent uncertainties. These shape and cut across myriad global systems: governance, financial, environmental and climatic, social and cultural. Events that used to be localized or isolated now have systemic global, often unintended, consequences.
  • Time Compression: Everything is accelerating from mutually catalytic technologies and geopolitical tensions to fast-moving global markets and collapsing product lifecycles.
  • Shift from Uni-polar to Multi-polar Globalization: Non-Western nations and regions are asserting themselves in product, service, capital, and talent markets — and their capabilities as innovators rather than fast followers are now emerging. Moreover, inter-regional alliances and a proliferation of new actors (including NGOs) are forging new norms, rules, relationships, and values that challenge the West's historic lock on establishing the global terms of engagement.
  • Flexible Organizational Models: Businesses and other organizations are changing their shape, structure and boundaries through processes of decentralization, empowerment, alliances, outsourcing, networking and virtualization, becoming more nimble and flexible — and less predictable.
  • Knowledge Work: With value increasingly driven by the creation and application of knowledge, work is more ambiguous and intangible — hard to attribute, bound, measure, and "complete" and with long, fuzzy feedback loops. This further increases uncertainty and ambiguity.

GBN strives to help organizations achieve a deeper, more systemic approach to understanding, reducing, and navigating increasing external and internal uncertainty, and addressing critical global challenges while creating new opportunities for themselves.

2. There are significant cognitive and behavioral constraints on our capacity to recognize and address mounting uncertainty.

Human cognition is profoundly influenced by two related phenomena: mental models and cognitive biases. Both counteract our risk of being overwhelmed by sensory stimuli and input (filtering the signal from the noise), but they also skew our selection and interpretation of information. When dealing with novel, complex circumstances for which our experience and knowledge are flawed guides, they can lead to serious error and misjudgment. Within organizations, these cognitive traps become greatly amplified. This leads to decisions based on shared, often hidden assumptions and unstated or untested "official futures," making us vulnerable to blind spots.

Our natural cognitive limitations are further compounded by learned behaviors to which we often default when faced with uncertainty and ambiguity. Three of these stand out:

  • Scientific management and control. When confronted by messy, complicated and ambiguous issues we often respond with strict roles and responsibilities, metrics and measurements, simplification and focus, forced accountability, standardized processes, and an emphasis on efficiency and cost cutting. The human instinct to impose our will also plays out organizationally through centralization and hierarchy. Short-term benefits are often outweighed by reductions in adaptive and creative capacity.
  • Change. Initiatives to change and transform organizational structures, cultures, leadership, behaviors, and processes proliferate. While significant value is often realized, these initiatives also increase, rather than diminish, our levels of uncertainty.
  • Busyness. Action and the avoidance of "paralysis by analysis" are vital to sustained business success. But in the process, we can reach closure prematurely, focus more on activity than results, launch big initiatives when small learning-oriented experiments make sense, and become addicted to busyness — skipping vacations and enslaved by "crackberries."

GBN's tools, tradecraft and co-creative intervention models help our clients explicitly address their cognitive and behavioral constraints at both the individual and organizational levels.

3. Decision making and choice of action are increasingly a function of well informed creative judgment

Robust data and information are key factors in strategic decision making, but alone are insufficient. In an increasingly complex world, perception and judgment are critical. Moreover, as transparency increases, data becomes ubiquitous, sources of competition multiply, and intellectual property rights are challenged, value derived from exploiting the known and the certain will decline. Growth and margins will increasingly be found in exploring and gaming the unknown and uncertain, driving down the value of traditional research and analytics, and increasing the value of sense-making, pattern recognition, intuition, and insight. As a result, creative judgment is becoming an ever more essential underpinning of strategic decision, choice, and action.

GBN helps inform the creative judgment of our clients by introducing and socializing knowledge, challenging and reframing perception, and stretching and liberating thinking.

4. Adaptive advantage through the mastery of uncertainty will be increasingly critical to sustainable growth and success.

Over the last 25 years the concept of competitive advantage has been central to corporate strategy and success. Competitive advantage derives primarily from superior understanding of and excellence within the domain of the known marketplace. Over the next 25 years, this focus will expand significantly to include adaptive advantage, based on superior understanding of and ability to respond to an increasingly complex, dynamic and uncertain world. To complicate matters further, a widening array of stakeholders is involved with different — sometimes conflicting — visions and agendas, requiring unprecedented levels of authenticity and transparency. More than ever and faster than ever, we must make decisions and take decisive action with confidence and alignment, even as every choice becomes a bet for which the odds are harder and harder to calculate. In a self-reinforcing loop, those who master this will raise the stakes — and deliberately boost the level of uncertainty — for others, confident that their ability to cope with the resultant ambiguity and confusion will exceed that of their competitors. The informed strategic agility that supports adaptive advantage — and an ability to shape the future — will become an increasingly valued and sought after capability.

GBN helps clients to achieve sustainable growth. We do this by helping them secure adaptive advantage in an increasingly uncertain world while connecting with a compelling moral purpose that enables them to shape the future for their own, and our collective, benefit.