Sustainability, Innovation and Strategy with Geoff Tuff

Vacation with the kids and what have you. I was the guy who did all the research and kind of wrote it all down and did the pros and cons. And what I've learned to do over time, in part because a lot of the time that analysis actually did not lead me to make the right decision, is— and in part, by the way, influenced by my wife— I've learned to do less analysis and do more kind of— I wouldn't say go with gut instinct, but go take more chances, but take smaller chances than are— take smaller chances than would expose me to massive Massive risk. And actually, that's, that's another part of it.

Welcome to Innovation and Leadership, where I interview uncommonly high achievers like top investment fund managers, elite special operations soldiers, startup CEOs who sold their companies for billions of dollars, pro athletes, Hollywood filmmakers— really, as many different kinds of experts as I can. The whole idea is to hear how they did it and then what advice they have for the rest of us that can be applied to the organizations we're trying to grow and innovate. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy today's show. Today on the show, we've got Geoff Tuff. Geoff, thanks for doing this.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

So I'm interested in how you introduce yourself with so much time at Monitor, now Deloitte, author, all these things. What do you tell people?

How long is this podcast? Because it takes me a little while to explain it. No, I, I think probably the easiest way to explain it is I am a lifelong strategy and innovation consultant. And, you know, the thread through all of the various different roles I've had over time, and as well as my writing, is helping clients grow in nontraditional ways. That's taken on different terms over time, but that's what I've built my career around. Yeah.

And let's talk about your books for one second. Then I've got some questions for you.

You want me to just talk about them? So our second book, Provoke, is coming out in September of this year, 2021. Our first book— when I say our, my coauthor is Steve Goldbach, who's the Chief Strategy Officer at Deloitte. We wrote a previous book called Detonate: Why and How Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices to Survive and Bring a Beginner's Mind to Survive. You'd think I'd remember the subtitle by now, but that was published in May of 2018, and it essentially was a book about looking beyond the playbooks of the past and what we've learned over decades and decades of management thinking and on-the-ground learning in business in order to do something different in the future. And we can come back and talk about why I think it's so important to do things differently and what forces are impacting the markets we play in and the world that we live in today. But that was a book about blowing up the playbooks. This new book, Provoke— and let's see if I can get this subtitle right— How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws. This book is about looking forward and facing the same forces that require you to blow up the playbooks. This is about looking forward and saying, how can we take action to provoke the future that we want for our organization? And it's a book that's intended for businesses, but also for just about any organization that is trying to actually impact the world in a positive way.

Writing a book is such an investment. Why was it that you guys thought that's the book worth all of the time and anguish and rewrites and editing?

Honestly, the first book, Detonate, it came about— Steve and I are friends and we often will get together and chat about our experiences. We've gone different directions even though we've been with the same organizations. We've gone different directions in our careers. And we used to get together and reflect on the stuff we were doing at any given time, what we liked, what we didn't like. And Detonate really came from several conversations we had about the observations that our clients actually know when they're doing the wrong thing, but they can't stop themselves from doing it. And it came down to some just basic human tendencies around following the playbooks in order to protect ourselves. And we said, yeah, there may be something interesting there that that others would like to hear about, and thankfully, Detonate did pretty well on the bestseller lists, and people seemed to like it, in part, I think, because Steve and I don't take ourselves too seriously. Provoke, on the other hand, was, as I described before, it's a book about looking forward. So I think even though we did a good job in Detonate, I think, making the case for why we need to blow up the playbooks in order to operate effectively in a world of uncertainty, a lot of our readers said, okay, so I've blown them up. What do I do now? How do I look forward? And it felt like the right time for us to start exploring a new book. Interestingly, actually, we had the idea for the book before the pandemic hit, but we went through the experience of writing the book over the course of 2020. And it was amazing just how resonant a lot of the ideas that we had and that we've had historically on the subject of uncertainty, just how resonant they were. with people that we discussed them with as they were living through the pandemic, where the world came to viscerally understand what uncertainty really means. And so that gave us the confidence that now was the right time to bring this book into the world.

Interesting. So I'm going to change gears for a minute. I'm interested in, you know, how many years have you been in the Boston area now?

That should not be the most skill-testing question, but I'd say something like going on 30. Yeah.

I'm interested in any advantages you see having grown up in Canada but doing business in the States.

Well, Canadians are just so nice, we naturally get along with everyone, right, Geoff? What advantages I see? So I would say first of all, and I actually can't claim this is true for all Canadians, but I know it's true about myself. I have come into the US, into the US business environment actually reasonably uneducated about US history, about a lot of the American way and a lot of just— well, I'll leave it at that, the American way and all facets of it. And so I've had a natural orientation since I first came to the US for college. I've had natural orientation to like observing and listening and trying to understand without necessarily, you know, jumping in first. And I think just the— for me, the learned trait of being— of observing first and trying to understand a situation and then being ready to do something. Whatever the move may be, has been really beneficial. And that actually sounds antithetical to the book we just wrote, Provoke, which is all about taking action in the face of uncertainty even before you have all the data. But I still believe very strongly in the power of observation. And it would be a massive oversimplification to say that many Canadians are the same way. But I do think there's a common trait where, you know, Canadians are interested in people. They're interested in understanding what makes people tick. So I'd say that's one advantage. I'm sure there are many others.

Yeah. So I'm an American born abroad. My dad's American, but I grew up in Alberta, right? And so I'm a citizen, but same thing. I didn't take any US history in Alberta school system or whatever. And what's funny is I feel like outside of the US, it's almost like a sport to not be American. I have so many Canadian friends or European friends who like, it's like a point of pride that they're not American.

Believe me, I was the guy who backpacked around the world in my, whatever it was, early 20s with a huge Canadian flag on my backpack, which is now a, I think, a bit of a laughingstock move.

But what's funny is these years down here, like, I've like got quite patriotic. Like, I'm— there's so many great things about the US, like, that so many Americans take for granted. And just, I don't know, if you If you're willing to take personal responsibility and you're looking for opportunity, I— anyways, I love it down here.

I absolutely believe that's the case. And I don't want to tread into dangerous territory comparing some of the experiences that each of our countries have had, because I too am naturalized now as a US citizen and all of my kids have been born in the US as well. But it's interesting looking at the experiences that each country has had over the course of the COVID pandemic and the way that they've reacted to it and what's come from it. And there's good and bad on both sides, but it's a different approach for sure.

Well, except I will say one thing. My years in California, I paid higher taxes than Alberta, but I didn't get healthcare. So I think that was a little—

That seems a bit of a raw deal. But California is not the entirety of the US, for all the rest of your listeners.

Listen, I'm fascinated with this subject. And I will say it scares me in some ways because I'm like, I'm such an overoptimist, like natural quick starter entrepreneur guy that I might— some of my biggest failures are looking before I leap, you know, like the ready, fire, aim.

Yep.

As well as my biggest successes, you know, but it's created like, You know, I turned 41 last week and, and like, yeah, I made it. I mean, which is definitely not a guarantee, which is not a guarantee when you did as many action sports and had as many near-death experiences as I did. But I do have like severe inner conflict about going on my gut too much and speculating, not following like Warren Buffett style compound interest investing principles. Right. And, and then And then I will say in the last few years, being overly timid, like, ooh, you know, like that bit me too many times and being overly timid and, and not achieving and really feeling like I've lived below my potential in many ways lately. So I'm interested in any thoughts you have about this. I think of it as a balance beam of like underdo it or overdo it is so easy.

Yeah. So I have a number of thoughts. I don't know if they're going to come out in a, in a linear and connected way, but let me give it a go. So the first thing I'd say is, What I hear you describe is a bit of a whipsawing where sometimes you go with your gut a little bit too much, sometimes you're too timid. And the reality is that any of us as individuals and certainly as organizations need to be exercising both those muscles simultaneously, depending on the situation and depending on the decision that we need to be able to make. And so this is actually one of the concepts we explored in Detonate, that there's really 2 different types of opportunities that any of us have. And I'm using the term opportunity very broadly for any sort of decision we need to make. There are some that are governed by risk, and there are some that are governed by uncertainty. Risk is by definition measurable and therefore manageable. Uncertainty is not measurable, and the only way that you can start to add contours to uncertainty is to go and do something and to provoke a reaction from the market or from your employee base, whoever it is that you're trying to get to do something. And so the first key I'd say is to recognize When you are working in that domain of risk, where the lessons from the past and a lot of the management systems we have used to manage businesses over time are actually really well suited, because the history of the business world in particular, which is the audience that we write for predominantly, is a history that is built on taking risk out of making decisions. What we built up as institutional capabilities and playbooks over time works really well in managing risk. And those are ones, by the way, where actually doing the analysis, collecting the data, you know, being measured in the way you make your decisions is the right way of approaching things. However, there are other situations that are actually not governed by risk, they're governed by uncertainty, and in some ways, if you follow the old playbooks and follow the old instincts, not only are you going to get it wrong, you may actually end up destroying value. And so a lot of what Steve and I write about is the ability to recognize situations that are governed by risk versus governed by uncertainty, and then to know which of the approaches to making a decision to put into place. The second thing I'd say is that when you talk about gut instinct, I actually think that gut for most people, especially successful people who have grown up in a successful business with a proven business model, gut usually means what we've learned over time. And so the gut instinct to go and do something is usually just a really quick version of making a measured set of steps to take risk out of the decision. And sometimes the gut is just, you know, it's not entirely right because we're not perfectly expert in everything that we've learned over time. So what we talk about in Provoke and really the whole premise behind how you act in the face of uncertainty is first of all to recognize in the world of uncertainty, so now we're not focused on the world of risk, but in the world of uncertainty to recognize when The uncertainty that you're dealing with when it turns from being a matter of if to being a matter of when. Because what you do to provoke the future is very different depending on whether it's really a question of whether or not this trend you're trying to take advantage of or a potential disruption, you're really not sure whether it's going to happen, to a question of it being— it's probably happening, we just may not know everything about it. And so a lot of what we write about in Provoke is actually Setting the table for what those 5 different acts of provocation might be as you recognize the shift through what we call the phase change from it being a matter of if to a matter of when. So I'll pause there to see if any of that made sense or if the thoughts were actually connected.

Yeah, why don't you give us an example of the if-when?

So I do a lot of work in the energy space and I know it may be remarkable for some some to hear this or believe it, but there was a period of time where we actually didn't know. And I know that there are still pockets of the world who are still wondering if climate change is an issue and if we as humans can do something about it or if we've caused it. But it's pretty incontrovertible at this point that we as humans have actually impacted the climate and that we have a need to decarbonize. What we're living through right now, through what's broadly termed the energy transition, is not a question of if we are going to take carbon out of our energy system. It's happening. And there's a lot of investment, there's a lot of capital being piled into new sources of energy, lower carbon sources of energy, etc., that will eventually, you know, if you roll the tape forward 40, 50, 60 years, we'll live in a fundamentally different world when it comes to energy than the one we live in today. That's happening. That's not a question of if. It's a question of when, which technologies will come out on top, what localized energy structures might look like, etc. So that's an example of something that's changed from being a matter of if to being a matter of when.

You know, we, we produce a podcast for Bloomberg called Switched On from Bloomberg New Energy Finance Division. It's, it's like the renewable energy and energy transition division of Bloomberg. And it's interesting because regardless of politics or opinions about, you know, whether there's groupthink in science and all this kind of stuff, right, the, the policies are changing. And the BlackRocks of the world are saying they won't invest if you, if you don't do this. You know what I mean?

Like, absolutely.

Like, they're— and not that some of that stuff couldn't, couldn't change. Politicians change, stuff like that. But really, like, there is such significant forces there that regardless if you subscribe to it or not, this is changing your business. When Japan announces they're net zero, if you're making your revenue in Japan, you better adjust.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Sorry, carry on.

No, no, no, go ahead.

Well, I was gonna say the interesting thing, and to build on that, is that I think we're now living through— and I don't know if it started 18 months ago, 2 years ago, beginning of COVID whatever it was— but I think we're living through a period of time where we're going to see a system effect of the underlying drivers of demand for energy fundamentally changing in a way that will accelerate the energy transition. So I think for a long time, a lot of the world sat back and waited either for policy to shift and force people to do things or force businesses to change their business model, or for new technologies to arrive on the, on the scene at a, at a, you know, low, low enough down on the cost curve that they could actually be competitive. And the reality is those supply-side mechanisms— when I'm using that term broadly— supply-side mechanisms absolutely can contribute to the outcomes that we should expect through the energy transition. But when we see the demand start to shift, consumer demand, investor demand, all the various different things that power our economy actually start to shift in a way where there is proactive support for decarbonization and climate change and addressing climate change. That's where I really think we're going to see the acceleration. And that's, for me, that's why I'm so excited about this energy space over the course of the next decade or so.

So I know we won't have time to go in depth, but can you give us the list of the 5 The 5 Things to Provoke?

Sure, yeah. So I'm imagining one of the pictures in our book. Our book, by the way, is fantastic. Both books have been fantastically illustrated by a guy by the name of Tom Fishburne, who runs an outfit called Marketoonist. And he's literally saved our readers thousands of words over time. So he drew a picture of that phase change from being a matter of if to a matter of when. So before you know whether or not you've entered the phase change, so you're just still kind of dealing with it, The first act of provocation, the first provoke move is something that we call Envision. Envision is really— and that's really meant to be an always-on capability, always-on set of actions that's built on essentially the idea of scenario planning, where we don't look to the future with a singular version of how the future is going to unfold. We actually look to the future with multiple plausible, equally plausible versions of how the future might look. And it's only if we have that, it's only if we have those multiple different competing versions of the future that we can then take action in the other ways that I'll describe in a moment. So that envision capability, that envision provocation is really fundamental to dealing with uncertainty. We cannot deal with uncertainty if we have a singular version of how the future is going to unfold. And, you know, a lot of the time we hear people talk about quote-unquote scenarios as this is our dominant version of the future and here's a high side and here's a low side and, you know, those are our scenarios. But that's not— aren't scenarios, it's a sensitivity analysis. And if you believe there's only one vector of change that is going to impact some future, then sensitivities are fine. But the reality is, for any meaningful uncertainty, you need to consider multiple versions of how the world is going to turn out. So that's the first one. The second thing we need to do almost simultaneously to envision is one that we just named position. So if you've got multiple different versions of the future, then you should be investing according to your relative beliefs about which of the futures is going to come true. And I don't want to bore your listeners with a lecture on how to do effective scenario planning, but usually scenarios, you know, the maximum number of scenarios we've discovered over time that any organization can plan against is 4, which is one of the reasons you see scenarios usually depicted on 2 different axes. And so if you've got 4 different competing versions of the future, you need to be spreading your bets in a way where you are accounting at any given point in time for what your organization's relative belief is for each of those 4 scenarios. So think of it as a spreading of 100 points or spreading of $100, for example. Like, depending on where you are and the future you think is going to come true, where would you place your bets based on the likely outcomes of those? Really interestingly, and this is— we did a study within Deloitte on the future of energy scenarios, and it's actually one of the examples we use in the book as well. But really interestingly, when we've talked with clients, like individual client executives, about the relative beliefs they have as individuals about which of our scenarios is going to come true and what their organizations are investing against, they're fundamentally different. So, and my hypothesis is that anytime someone's done an effective job of scenario planning, actually what they think internally as an individual is actually quite different from what their organization is doing. And so I think one of the most interesting challenges I have in client service these days is how to get those 2 worlds to map a little bit better, because ultimately we're only as good as the individuals making the decisions in our organizations. So those are the first 2. I'm going to pause, see if you have any questions, but vision and position are what set you up then to enter the phase change from if to when.

Okay, well maybe we should save the next 3 for part 2 of the interview. Okay. And I think maybe a question I've got here is this idea of the positioning and the like, am I actually investing my time or dollars into the future I think is going to exist? Or am I— I don't know if I'm characterizing this correctly, but basically, or am I just staying the course of what somebody decided a long time ago without the information I currently have?

That or investing in the future I hope exists. Usually the disconnect is between an organization's hopefulness about one future because it creates advantage for them. And the reality is of what they as individual executives believe is going to happen.

Okay. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, wishful thinking causes a lot of problems, doesn't it? So I'm interested in your own career. As you think about what you specialize in, what you write about, things like that, how does that show up in your personal—

That actually, interestingly, I've never been asked that question, but it is a great question. I will say that when I was younger, when I was growing up, even though I I was a reasonably free spirit. I really did do a lot of analysis before I went and did something. And, you know, everything from financial planning all the way through to trying to pick the right vacation with the kids and what have you. I was the guy who did all the research and kind of wrote it all down and did the pros and cons. And what I've learned to do over time, in part because a lot of the time that analysis actually did not lead me to make the right decision, is— and in part by the way, influenced by my wife. I've learned to do less analysis and do more kind of— I wouldn't say go with gut instinct, but go take more chances, but take smaller chances than would expose me to massive risk. And actually, that's another premise. I don't know if I learned it in my real life and then applied it to my writing, or learned it in my writing and applied it to my real life. But I think that the times that I have put myself into any sort of personal risk, and I think this is true for organizations as well, is when I've gotten the confidence to go and do something with all the data, but I do something that's just too big. It's too big a step, and it actually does expose me to falling on my face, sometimes quite literally. So that's probably— it's been a long and slow and gradual change, but I'd say that's probably the part of my persona that has shifted the most over the course of my career and what I've learned from my own writing.

Okay. I love it. Well, where can people preorder the book? Where are the best places to connect with you?

So I'm pretty easy to find on any of the social platforms. Provoke is available for preorder on Amazon right now, and I would encourage you to go have a look for it. We'd love to, love to get the word out there on the book and also hear how you're— hear how you feel about it when it does come out. The publish date is mid-September. Great.

Okay. Everybody, please stay tuned for part 2. I got a lot more questions for Geoff.

Bye everyone.