The Power of Imperfection

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Robert McLean, who is a director emeritus of McKinsey & Company, a trustee of the Nature Conservatory in Australia and Asia, and a director of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, Australia's largest philanthropic organization.

He is the former dean of the Australia Graduate School of Management, and he was a Fulbright Scholar to the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. And today his latest book, which has a very intriguing title. I must say, Rob, is called The Imperfections Strategic Mindset for Uncertain Times. Let's start with something, because I would say I once had a conversation with a student and she said, I hate ambiguity. I don't like it. I don't see why it has to be there. And she was very adamant about it, and she was really considering moving into consulting. And if you think about it, consulting, even in more certain times, it's filled with ambiguity. So this isn't an alum, maybe it's the student who graduated, and this person said, I'm not all that comfortable with ambiguity, yet for the leadership roles I aspire to, I need to be able to succeed when there is uncertainty and incomplete information. How did you build the ability to manage ambiguity?

Robert McLean: You know your colleague is not alone. There's a lot in our education system that doesn't really reflect ambiguity and is based on uncertainty. But I have a friend now who I used to work with at McKinsey, and he heads recruiting for an international consulting firm, and he hires people based on three criteria: curiosity, a tolerance for ambiguity, and their humility.

And I think it's not a bad not a bad list. But the question is how do you cultivate it? One of the things we recommend in the book is if you're evaluating a new product or entry into a new market, we suggest, and we're not the first to suggest that that you do a premortem and a premortem is to say basically, if this went wrong, why would it go wrong? That allows you to tease out and unearth a bunch of the major uncertainties and then to say, what do I need to believe for these particular things to be true, to give me the confidence to go forward? It's not just a matter of I like uncertainty or I don't like uncertainty. It's how we deal with uncertainty.

Anita Brick: Okay, so give us your top tip to become a nimble and perfectionist.

Robert McLean: To us, it really does start with curiosity. We take quite seriously the psychology research that says that curiosity is aimed at reducing uncertainty. It's not just a matter of being puzzled about something. If you're going to be a good problem solver and a strategist, you've got to turn that curiosity into what we call an audacious question. When you resolve that question, you're well on the way towards having a way forward, despite the uncertainty.

Anita Brick: So having an audacious question is a starting point. But you also talk about about how curiosity grows from the safe and the familiar. We are not in safe and familiar times. How would you advise someone to build on even a little bit of safety and familiarity? Because you can ask that question. But if you don't feel safe to answer the question or even contemplate it, how do you create safety and familiarity when things are not very safe?

Robert McLean: Well, the safety that we're talking about, you have to have an environment where it's okay to question.

Anita Brick: I understand the notion of safety and psychological safety, but the challenge in today's world is that a lot of cultures do not have safety. If you look in the last few months where thousands upon thousands of people went in to log on and boom, they couldn't get in because they were fired. They were laid off. So how do you create even a little bit of that safety that you describe? And I agree with you. I think you need to have that psychological safety. What if it isn't present where you work in your company? How do you create it so that you can move forward?

Robert McLean: It's hard to say that in those environments, you are going to have an ability to innovate. When you know you're worried about whether you got a job tomorrow. I think that that almost goes without saying.

Anita Brick: Right. But I guess what I'm saying is you don't even have to be wildly innovative or creative in an environment in order to actually solve a problem, even very conservatively, solve a problem. There needs to be some safety. And I guess what I'm asking you is, is there a way for me as an individual to create my own safety within the area that I control, even if the macro state is not set?

Robert McLean: That's hard. And that's why what we recommend is that you do the things that give you time and space that are going to allow you to tackle really difficult problems with high levels of uncertainty, or where you've where you've got to innovate. You do seek to have an environment where audacious questions are allowed. We talk, for example, about structured curiosity, where at the end of the week you run through all of the the open questions team members had raised that hadn't been answered at that time.

You start tweaking processes to allow this kind of thing to happen. And we're very conscious that, you know, teams are under huge amounts of pressure with deadlines, with tight time tables for deliverables. There are also environments if you don't watch out as I do, squeeze out a curiosity and innovation.

Anita Brick: Well, it's a really good point and I think that goes back to someone who was saying he wants to actually pivot out from his very technical role, that doesn't allow for a lot of innovation to focus more on strategy, kind of your area. Mine, too. And he said he was at a loss with so many changes. His key skills, knowledge and experience don't seem to be as relevant as they were when he completed his MBA. This is an alum from five years ago. How would you advise someone to evaluate and present relevant career assets when making a pivot?

So I guess it goes back to some of the things that you talk about in the book about when you go into a situation and things have changed. How would you suggest that someone get a handle on what is most prized in a place, say, like a McKinsey today, and then reconfigure how they position themselves?

Robert McLean: That's a really good question. And you've got to assess the lay of the land and the setting that you're going into. To me, one of the important things that you should be carrying is a set of problem solving skills. The ability, as we said out earlier, to define the problem and break it down and so forth. What we're saying is that there's now a premium on doing a bunch of other things, just bringing different lenses to bear, learning how to experiment, bringing collective intelligence, including AI to bear, and figuring out how you take these small steps.

The person that we talk about making a pivot has to get agreement about what expectations are for the first 3 to 6 months. It's a little bit of like, this is the way that, you know, I see the situation. This is the plan that I've got for the next period of time, and then we'll reassess it based on what happens from here.

And to me, that's a key part of what we talk about as the way forward and not unreasonable to get expectations right, you know, with the people that you're reporting to and, you know, more senior people in the organization.

Anita Brick:  It seems like that is really crucial because I've seen two people in particular who are very, very capable and not have that established. And then when the markets change, there was no foundation. But one of the things you mentioned that you talk about is about using collective intelligence to solve different dilemmas. There was another Boothie who wanted to know, how do you create collective intelligence? How do you collect that intelligence from people that you're probably competing with? Promotions for funding for roles? How do you get people to collaborate with you when you are really the competition?

Robert McLean: And I didn't really see it that way. We've got a number of examples of where people have used AI to good effect. For example, we gave an illustration of the first drone that used AI to spot sharks and beaches in Australia. This was just an entrepreneurial company with no more than 3 or 4 employees, but they linked up with a university with good AI capability and then got a world first in no time that we're working with Amazon to bring the the latency of what people were watching down to less than a second.

And so suddenly here they were playing on a world stage, you know, from just having thought, who could help us with this problem and who, who's in a position who they could bring some capability that we don't have. If I can give another example in the Nature Conservancy, we're very concerned about the loss of tuna stocks and unregulated fishing in Asia Pacific.

We don't have discretionary money to pay people to build new capabilities for us in the Nature Conservancy, or at least not very often. So we started off by applying for a Google Impact Challenge, a significant amount of money there. Then we put the problem of being able to identify different species of tuna and volumes, landing on fishing boats with the boat rocking from side to side and water spraying everywhere. And we put that competition up on Kaggle, which is owned by Google, for a prize of $150,000. Using the money that we got from the Google Impact Prize, and we got 2293 entries to that machine learning problem. And now that's being trialed on an Indonesian fishing boat with something like 95% accuracy of detecting of species. So you can actually start with very little resources, but being resourceful yourself and figuring out who can help you is the way forward.

And for MBA students, we tell a story in the book about taking different lenses, and it's the story of how Invisalign was born, the company that's now valued at 15 billion for straightening teeth. And that was set up by two Stanford MBA students.

Anita Brick: Yeah, it's a good story.

Robert McLean: Yeah, just you just asked the question. He noticed you didn't have the middle braces on and that his teeth seemed to be moving. So he had a he just took a customer lens. What he did there and Kelsey do, they called every orthodontist in the Bay area in the Yellow Pages and said, we'd like to work with you, you know, to help us figure out, you know, whether there's a product here that we could develop. And guess what? No orthodontist returned the calls, that eventually they found researchers at the university of Pennsylvania that allowed them to do the trials. So many of these stories start with very modest beginnings. People like the student we just talked about, who had not much in the way of resources, particularly compared to incumbents and people already in the business and people innovating already.

Anita Brick: I could see how this applies to entrepreneurs. How would that apply to me if I were inside an organization or wanting to enter a new profession? How do I gather that collective intelligence when now the people I'm competing with, I'm sitting in the interview room with them, or in the interview center with them, or I know that they're coming down the line. I can see it with an entrepreneur, but what if I'm competing with you to get that associate position, or I'm competing with you to get promoted? Where would I find my collective intelligence? Let's just say that I am an engineer, and I want to go and work for a global strategy firm. How do I tap into the collective intelligence when I'm one person and I'm not seeking to discover a new product? I want to figure out how to get hired by a top global strategy firm.

Robert McLean: With the example I gave earlier of a colleague of mine that puts an emphasis on curiosity and tolerance, ambiguity and humility. I had an instance once where I ended up hiring a person, largely because what he told me that he did in his spare time, that he taught blind people how to sell. And I thought, this is just extraordinary.

Here's a person who cares so, so deeply about people that he's prepared to share his time and his expertise, with people that you just don't think are in the realm of selling that I could ever have an extraordinary and have an experience like that. There's a lot of things that happen in the interview room. You know, it may often be things about just the ability to bring agreement on a course of action with teams, just human capability or, I'm really taken with this individual.

And, and I think they're going to make, you know, an outstanding consultant and longer term great partner of our firm. And that should happen with that individual that I just described who taught the blind people to sail on Sydney Harbor.

Anita Brick: This is brilliant. What you just said is brilliant because and whether it's consulting or whether it is a startup or whatever it happens to be, we need to lead with who we are. It sounds like he led was what was important to him. And one of the things that was attractive, certainly he was doing something that most people would have missed, that we never even thought of it, which, of course is incredibly important in most environments. But it also sounds like what you saw in him. It was also your ability to see that as well. But he came in as he is, as he was at that time, and that allowed you to not only see wow, he puts things together in different ways that could be really useful, that his humanity was shining through. And not only could you see him being an asset to the firm in the hard core way, sitting in a room at midnight, knocking out something really important to a client, but you'd want to be there with him.

So it seems like the other side of being an imperfectionist is being yourself. So yeah. And if when you're yourself, people want to be around you and they'll maybe even cut you some slack if you're not always right with who is right.

Robert McLean: That's right. In that instance, I found that reference to how he spent his time on weekends. It's sort of like the bottom of page three of his resumé. it was sort of tabled there as part of. How do you spend your leisure time? Whereas I think we've all seen lots of resumé building these days where, yes, I work with homeless people at the local shelter because there's an expectation that you'll put something of a not for profit nature as a resume builder.

Anita Brick: But you want it to be real. And you can tell, I mean, you want it to be.

Robert McLean: You want it to be real. And and you only have to ask a couple of questions, usually to figure out, you know, whether it is real or not.

Anita Brick: It's a very interesting point. One of the students asked, she said, moving from curiosity, which is super fun, and I think you and I probably both agree on that interaction, which may be a little bit more boring and tedious even when you know it's essential. How does taking curiosity and moving action decrease uncertainty? Or is it the curiosity that decreases the uncertainty which moves you to action? How do you go from curiosity, which you may want to live with forever, into action in a way that you can take small risks without it being catastrophic if it fails?

Robert McLean: That really, well, remind me of we had a half a dozen road scholars as our research students when we wrote Goal of Problem Solving, and just for an exercise one morning in the team room, we said, why don't we take a wicked problem? And so we decided to take the problem of obesity. We're not experts. We don't really know anything about it, but how can we figure out what's going on here? So we were curious. But that only takes you so far. Oh, yeah. Like to stand where we're settings where child basically wasn't a societal issue. So we started off by saying, well, let's look at the US compared to Japan and what's different, the calories in a lager in Japan and the calories out each day a higher in Japan. Why is that so? Well, at the same time, to do a little bit with the structure of the cities and the fact that people work, walk to the train station rather than drive to work, quite a lot going on here. Then we we said, well, look, the U.S. isn't just the US. So we looked at 65 U.S. cities and ran a regression equation, and it could explain 82% of the variance with it.

But we found that there were income, education, mobility and a comfort index that explain, you know, 82% of the variance. So we were suddenly on to things like socio economic factors that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation talked a lot about. And then recently we took that work forward, and we talk about this in the book in perfectionists, where we looked at a data set in Australia, child obesity. And guess what we concluded. We concluded, when I say we, the the researchers concluded, the largest causal explanatory variable for whether a child was obese at the age of eight was whether or not the mother had completed her high school education.

Anita Brick: Right. And remember that.

Robert McLean: Yeah. So we took a health issue and flipped it around by taking different lenses, by generating new data or new insight through the Bayesian analysis that was done, and then came up with a basis for action that was totally different to where we started there, like a detective hunt. And it just doesn't stop with curiosity. Curiosity is just the beginning of the process.

Anita Brick: It sounds like what you said when you talked about from curiosity to outcome. If you frame it as a detective would, it becomes a game. If it's just like, oh, now I have to give up the curiosity part, which is so much fun. I have to do this boring stuff. It's hard to move into action, but I think what you were saying is that if you're a detective, then the puzzles keep going and you still have to use the same muscle that curiosity comes from, to keep iterating the different stumbling blocks or bottlenecks where you can go back to creativity. It's almost like you start with creativity and you get where you get, and then you say, all right, I'm going to approach this, this game. I'm going to be a detective. It's a game to me. And I'll allow myself some more curiosity. Play time when we reach a stumbling block and then we'll move on again. And that sounds like it would be much more palatable to someone who loves curiosity. And I think that's a really good point that you made.

Robert McLean: Yeah. And this is why we've we've organized these, six mindsets in the book. We call them mutually reinforcing. And I love the point you make about iterating, which is something we believe in very strongly, but it's that notion of of starting with a problem or audacious question, trying different lenses on it, thinking about how new data and experiments can figure out, you know, whether the lenses is important or right. Then turning to collective intelligence, which can take a number of different forms as we've described, then figuring out the imperfection is part, which is the initial steps that you can take, and then figuring out a way to induce actions.

We see a degree of linearity about it as mindsets, but as you point out, you keep on going from one to the other and you terminate the process when you know some results just aren't, you know, favorable to what you needed to know, to continue. And then you try another step and try another way.

Anita Brick: And being curious. You mentioned something else, and I think this is really important. And I like the different examples that you gave. But I'd like us to get pretty concrete with this. It's hard to get past the noise with senior leadership, but one of the things that I was really impacted by when I was reading the book, it comes down to making sure that if you're senior leadership and I'm presenting and I am able to uncover the values that are important to me that we share.So one of the questions from a student was, how do you find the shared values on which to build the story, which will actually help the other person achieve their goals?

Robert McLean: Very well put. But it is this question of framing and reframing. We use an example from The Nature Conservancy, where the work to rebuild Appalachia is very much framed around jobs of the future. It isn't viewed as being anti-coal. We've got a new energy revolution underway, you know, in wind and wind and solar. And that's going to create value and well-paid jobs of the future. So it shifts you from having debates of the of the past and arguments of the past into something you know, where you are linking to, to values and what people think is important for their families.

And you know, it isn't, for the most part, what we learned in college about how to be persuasive. You know, you really do need quite a different armory. If you're going to feel confident, you can persuade someone to take action when the your starting point is, well, I'm pretty happy with where I am, or I need some convincing.

Anita Brick: So how do I find the values that you and I share?

Robert McLean: We want to find those things by talking to people, if not just always what they say, but what they do, how they spend their income, how they spend their leisure time. You know, how they support different causes. So, you know, you've got to do quite a lot of work to figure out what those what those values are.

Anita Brick: It sounds like it's dialog. It's dialog in the sense that I have a conversation with you. And I can't go into that conversation with my mind made up about what I think you're going to say and how I view you. I need to go in with an open mind to create the space for me to think differently, which will then allow me to learn more about you and ultimately help you not only listen to my solution that would create a better outcome, but because we share that exchange for you to fall in love with my solution because you've been heard.

Robert McLean: I think that's an excellent way to put it.

Anita Brick: Okay, good. Do you have time for one more question? I sure do. Okay. What are the top three things that you would advise someone to do? Who wants to use the power of imperfection to create something of positive value in their careers and lives?

Robert McLean: Well borrow a process that we're using it one of the university colleges in Sydney where when they're learning and problem solving, they work in groups of three, and each of them brings the problem, or the audacious question that they feel they'd like to see saw. These problems can be societal problems. They can be problems relating to entrepreneurship, or they can be related to law. Then they have to go through the process with each other, explaining what lenses they've thought about and which ones that they're preferring to use. And then they set up what experiments that they would do and how they would bring collective intelligence to bear.

So, for example, one young female lawyer is looking at whether AI could be used to speed up small claims, you know, that are small in dollar denomination, take like 912 months times to get cleared up where people could elect to have an AI determined process rather than a judicial process. But what I love about this, this example, is this is a young law student that thinks, you know, there's a whole lot of good that can come, you know, if we were to solve this problem. Yes, there's curiosity, but it's all of the the mindsets that we've been talking about that come into play through the, the lenses and then through taking small steps and figuring out how this problem get solved, this process that I've just talked about, you listeners can stop today with that process, with a small team thinking about an audacious question or problem that they face and and then working their way forward, they're going to be small steps. Initially, they may be on successful at first, but, I can't think of a better way.

Anita Brick: I agree, is there a number two?

Robert McLean: Number one was the audacious question. Number two was just starting the process of figuring out which lens to apply. And then the third thing you've got to do is then figuring out how you test it with data or how you put an experiment together, that's going to tell you, you know, whether in that example I go before, you know, that I might be a really bad case to use with small claims. You can't prejudge what the trial or the experiment is going to be. So it really is that the first three steps of getting started to be in a in perfectionist.

Anita Brick: Sounds like I if I were making a career pivot, but also have a team of three. We each come with our own audacious question about our own careers and apply the same process.

Robert McLean: Exactly. And I'd even maybe give one refinement of that. I often talk with students and people I talk to virtually every problem that I work with, and they range from problems in, startups and private equity and, philanthropy. I have a team of two, and that's myself and my wife Paula, who I bounce, you know, all kind of crazy ideas off and, and proposals and put audacious questions to her and say how I take it forward, having somebody to be able to bounce your thinking off calibrated test reasonableness and resources is always the place to stop for me.

Anita Brick: It's a really good point, and it's good when both parties have questions. So that they can get feedback from each other and encourage one another. Okay. Good. One final final question for now, is there a question I didn't ask you that you wanted me to?

Robert McLean: The question that we've been wrestling with a lot, and I think particularly for MBA students, is we used to think of strategy as being like elaborate frameworks and being very prescriptive. We've actually boiled down to strategy being fairly pragmatic, problem solving under uncertainty. We've actually had to go back to work. We did quite a long time ago to rethink that and to think about the kind of settings we're in in today. Now, so many of your students, you know, will have learned an awful lot about strategy. What we're saying is we think uncertainty demands that you go about strategy quite differently. And and it is this measured step by step process, but always starting with a big problem that has to be addressed.

Anita Brick: I love it, it's great, and it could be used for anything. So I love the fact that you said that you work on really broad things, from tech to private equity to environmental issues, and more. Thank you for continuing to give yourself and your talents to a variety of areas that benefit greatly from it. And thank you for making time for us today.

Robert McLean: It's an enormous pleasure. Anita.

Anita Brick: Well, I'm glad we could do this. And I know how early it was this morning, so I double thanks. It was really very helpful. And your insights, I'm sure, will be valuable to students, alumni, and friends of career cast. So thanks again.

Robert McLean: Thank you, Anita.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.