009 Nat Greene –– STOP GUESSING!

My friend Nat Green is the author of a powerful new book, Stop Guessing: The 9 Behaviors of Great Problem Solvers, and that's what we're going to be talking about today on Walking the Walk.

Welcome to Walking the Walk, the program for people who want to become better leaders and leaders who want to become better people. Start walking the walk with your host, renowned leadership speaker and author of The Sensei Leader, Jim Bouchard.

Author Nat Green spent over 20 years solving hard problems and developing and leading great problem solvers. In this time, he's found that great problem solvers consistently exhibit certain behaviors when solving hard problems. In his book, Stop Guessing, you'll learn what the behaviors are and why they're so important to success and how to begin adopting them. But we're not going to wait for the book. We've got Nat with us now. So Nat, welcome to Walking the Walk, and let's kick it right off. What are the behaviors that keep us guessing?

Well, there's a bunch of them. And well, that keep us guessing, it's fascinating. I mean, it's something I've been thinking about for a long, long time. But why do people guess? And I think there's 3 real reasons why they guess. One is there must be some sort of evolutionary pressure built into it. For sure. You know, the sort of the standard idea that like a tiger, you come around the bend on a path and there's a tiger stood there and you're looking at it. And you can do one of two things. You can set up a table and chair and start to think what to do and maybe chat to some friends and study the problem. Or you can jump into a bush. And I think over time, with that sort of a problem, jumping into the nearest bush is the answer. Now, of course, you might find something worse in the bush. But on average—

But you don't know about it yet.

No, you don't know about it yet. And on average, it's probably better than standing there on the trail looking at the tiger. And anyway, survivor bias would say The person who jumped into the bush and found something worse, you're not talking to. So we end up with this sense that, "Hey, I guessed at something. It was an immediate sort of problem and I made progress." Another thing is businesses don't like people just to stop and think. People tend to value people who are doing something. There's a huge bias for doers. Even if someone's doing the wrong thing, and you'll hear this all the time, "Well, Bob's working hard. He's trying." You know, that's great. That's what I like to see, people doing stuff even though they're doing the wrong thing most of the time. Especially in crisis situations, people seem to just jump to things and do the wrong thing. And then the third reason I think people guess is that it's actually trained into us formally in school. So imagine you're sat there and you're in some high school class and the teacher asks a question. Well, you know, everyone has to put the hand up or people put their hand up and they have guesses, right? And someone might come up with something that's just ridiculous and you're sat there in class rolling your eyes thinking, "Well, that's just crazy." But how will the teacher respond to them? Well, they're not going to say, "Boy, that was the stupidest thing I've heard all month." Not often, right? Most people would think that's inappropriate for teachers.

I did have a couple of teachers like that, by the way.

And that might have been the best thing for me.

Right, sure.

The thing is, in most cases, they're going to say, "Hey, we've got to be nurturing." They'll say something like, "Oh, great try," or "Good idea," or "Try to think of something else." So there's not reinforcement that maybe you shouldn't just guess at stuff. You should think— I'm not saying that we shouldn't ever guess. I'm just saying the problem when it comes to hard problems is the chance that your guess is right is really slim, but the chance that your guess wastes resources, time, distracts people is very large.

Well, there's a vast difference, right, between guessing, what we're calling guessing, and really taking a calculated risk based on your training and your preparation, right? Because I know one of the greatest problems that we still run into in the leadership space is, you know, the lack of confidence in dealing with uncertainty. So, sometimes we have to take that calculated risk, but it should be based on something real, right? I know that's a —big theme with you, isn't it? No, absolutely.

So if you look at something like hiring somebody, when you hire someone, you always take a risk. But you don't just randomly go, "Oh, maybe this person will be great at sales," or "Maybe this person can balance the books." You take a look at the facts and the data. Then in the end, you don't have perfect information. So I accept that, and especially in a lot of leadership and management decisions. So you have to take a risk, but you analyze it as much as you can with a reasonable trade-off for time and return.— so that you make that choice. So yeah, you can't have perfect information. In some problems you can. You can analytically solve it. A lot of hard process problems with an existing process you can't. But with something like a hiring decision, yeah, you're going to have to take a calculated risk.

It's scary though how ill-prepared people are. One of the pet peeves that I have right now, I've seen the figures on the lack of people reading after they leave formal schooling, that people don't study. Read as much as they used to. So, you know, to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, please, please argue this point, but I think one of the big problems is just out-and-out laziness, just complacency, that people just don't want to do the hard work they need to prepare themselves to take it, to separate a calculated risk from just guessing. Isn't it just easier to guess sometimes?

Yeah, well, it's interesting on the reading thing, because as an author, you know that almost nobody who even buys your book will read it. And the editor, my editor for my last book, you know, from the publishing company, he said to me like, "Nah, you just got to get over that." Because I want people to read the book. If I write it and they buy it, I want them to read it. He goes, "Nah, you just got to get over that. You got to design the book so that people can understand the key idea without having to read all of it." Exactly. Yeah, and so, yeah, do people guess because they're lazy? The ironic thing with that is that for harder problems, it creates more work to guess. So we'll see, you know, in my professional life, in consulting, we help large industrial businesses solve hard problems. And, you know, a typical problem will look something like, hey, you know, Walmart said we need to reduce our costs by another 5%. What on earth can we do? Or we've been selling like gangbusters on this product. We can't make enough. It'll take us, 12 months to gear up a qualified co-packer or 24 months to put in capital. So what are we going to do? And what we'll see is we'll come along and we'll find a group of people, professionals working really hard, but they'll often just be guessing. And they'll have sat down and they'll be like, "Oh, we've really got to increase production." And so they'll get everybody involved. And everybody will put their ideas in place. And they'll give it fancy names such as brainstorming or ideation or those kinds of things, right? But all it is is guessing. And they'll have a list of like 500 things to increase output when if you analyze the situation, there's maybe 3 key levers and they're not even in their list. And so what they do though is they start working like mad, spending resource time, spinning the wheel, trying all these things which of course creates disruption to their process. People often, I think, look to guess because they think it'll be easier, but with a hard and important problem, it almost never is easier or quicker.

I'm so glad you keep pointing back to, you know, bring some facts, if I'm reading you right, because again, another pet peeve of mine is, you know, someone, anyone can argue with me, that's fine, I enjoy it, but when someone comes to me and says, "I think," or, "I feel," I say, "No, no, show me some facts. I'm willing to change my mind," right?, but I don't want to change course just because you feel something or you think something. I actually have come to really hate those two words.

Well, yeah, and the only— I mean, it's not that how people feel is invalid. Sure. I mean, it's very valid. It's just how you use that in decision-making. No, no, exactly. It's how you use that in decision-making process. So if someone says, if you're trying to decide what to have for dinner and you ask your partner or something, you go, "Hey, what would you like? What do you feel you'd like for dinner?" and they say, "Hey, I feel I'd like to grill something." Well then that's the fact of what they want for dinner. As opposed to if I, without asking, go, "Oh, I feel my wife would like to grill for dinner." Well, I'm just guessing. Now it might be based— in that case it's a simple sort of problem to solve, what to have for dinner. There's lots of history. I mean, I could probably guess 3 or 4 dishes that she'd definitely want one of them for dinner. But there's a difference between someone's opinion where that is the fact and where it isn't.

Or, or I think we should, uh, adopt a new marketing approach. It's going to cost us a quarter of a million dollars. Oh yeah, based on what, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Let's get it, you know, is there a difference between the way, uh, the manager or an executive in a large organization is, is operating? Uh, are they guessing as much more or less than a small-time entrepreneur? Because one of the pro— well, one of the great, I think, advantages and can can be a detriment to the small-time entrepreneurs, that we can be very nimble, right? And so sometimes if we guess and we're wrong, we can change course very quickly. We're not trying to steer the Titanic. So is there a difference between the two that you see, or are there any more dangers or less dangers in one or the other?

Well, staying true to my latest book, I'd have to tell you, look, I'm going to be guessing because I haven't studied. I haven't done an extensive study on these two things. I appreciate your honesty. We all have an opinion and can make up stories. I would say that I think that large corporations tend to have more complex problems. So I think that— I think everyone guesses. And I think they guess all the time. And I think almost everyone's first instinct is to guess. And until you train yourself to sort of suppress that, that's just what your default's going to be. When confronted with hard problems, you're more likely to find them in— I mean, you're going to guess, but you're more likely to find them in a larger organization simply because The processes are more complicated. There's more people involved. There are different layers of management, different subject matter experts. If you contrast that with sort of a smaller business like say you take a local restaurant in my town in Marblehead, Massachusetts run by the owner, well there's only so much complexity. There's only so many people. There's some pretty simple processes. They have to order in food. They have to make sure the credit card system works when they— people pay. There are some very important processes they need to follow and make work, but it's not that complicated compared to managing sort of some international supply chain and serving 5 million customers across the US every day. So I think that maybe it's not that people are guessing or not. I just think that with a small business, the problems are simpler and also probably the loop to take action is quicker. So in a more complicated situation when you put a guess in place, it's probably longer to recover from that, whereas with your small business you go, Hey, I think if I wear a blue hat at work, maybe people will tip more. Well, you could try it out for 2 days. If it doesn't work, you're going to take the hat off. But in a big business, if you like order 100,000 hats and have everyone wearing a blue hat, it's going to be a pretty hard political decision to reverse. So I think the correction loop is slower.

Well, what surprises me too, and again, correct me if your experience informs you differently, It seems that there's not a direct correlation between the, the risk and the tendency for somebody to, to take a wild guess sometimes. Sometimes I've seen that more direct correlation is someone's authority, someone's position of authority, or their self-confidence slash could be crossed into arrogance at this point. Do you find that, that there is a lot of difference or not too much difference between Do people really consider the risk at a certain point when they're guessing or do they just get addicted to it? Sometimes I think they get lucky enough that they build up some kind of false confidence in that.

Well, two things there that jump to mind. The first is when people are in a more pressing situation, they seek comfort by having a group of people guess. Confirmation bias, right? Yeah. But it doesn't make it any better necessarily. In fact, it can make it a lot worse. It's a classic problem you find in investing. If you're going to do angel investing or something, If you're going to do it on your own and someone has this idea, you're going to look into it really hard. But if you team up with 1 or 2 friends, then it turns out that none of you look into it. You all assume the others are. Okay? So is it a good investment or not? And people end up guessing whether it will be. So I think that's a big problem. The other thing is, is you talked about sort of the authority vector. But that's interesting because when you drive problem-solving using guessing, again, which most people do all the time,— there's no way to differentiate between the proposed solutions, because I mean everybody's guess is equally valid. I mean look at even the rules of brainstorming. You know, people are brainstorming and you know you can't criticize or challenge anything while it's happening, everyone's idea is equally valid, which of course is just nonsense. I mean of course everyone's idea isn't equally valid, or rather everyone's idea isn't equally valid. I mean it's a bunch of nonsense written up. And I realize that that's during the sort of creative process, although recent research says that brainstorming doesn't increase creativity, it reduces it in a group. Because people gravitate to some of the ideas, it actually limits the creativity. You're better off having people come up with ideas in isolation and then sharing them. Brainstorming is, I think, largely been debunked. The problem is once you have that list up there, how are you going to decide? Because it's not based— that list hasn't been developed by an analytical fact-based approach which would lead you to an answer. It's just people's opinion. If everyone's opinion is equal, then you can't decide. —what ends up happening is the loudest, most aggressive person or the person with formal authority— Charismatic, right? Yep, ends up making the decision. And it drowns out the sort of smarter but quieter person. And it means the lesser voices, the less powerful voices are not heard, which is another reason why guessing in these situations is so damaging. It's damaging because it doesn't allow the best and brightest sort of ideas to float up in an equal way.

You know, I hope people appreciate the weight of what you're saying because I was thinking about you the other day. I'm an avid student of history, and I've been delving more and more into the conditions that led us to World War II. And what you're talking about can literally cost millions of lives. There were people, you know, when I'm reading the rationale behind decisions that were made, you know, why did groups allow Hitler to gain so much power and whatnot, and a lot of people were guessing. You know, I kept coming back to that simple, simple answer. They were guessing. They were hoping, guessing, and supposing that he was going to go into a different direction. And of course, that thinking was flawed. I thought for a long time, I said, well, these were world leaders. These were people that had access to the information. They were brilliant thinkers, yet they guessed so terribly wrong. And, you know, when I— like I said, when I read their personal accounts, you see that's really what they were doing with decisions that were that important. They sometimes, they knew otherwise, right? They had data that would inform them in a different direction, but yet they still guessed or they just cast the dice, so to speak.

Yeah, and I think that that's an interesting point. I do think there are situations where you just can't know the future. And it's very hard to know what's in somebody's head, for instance, unless they tell you. And of course, even if they tell you—

Yeah, Mr. Hitler made it kind of obvious. Yeah, exactly.

And so then there are, yeah, there are some In that case, you see that there's some clear facts and data that you can research and go find out. But of course, you know, people don't want to believe stuff, the people don't want to make the hard decisions. And, and, you know, we could go into 15 examples. You know, we don't need to look back to World War II or look at a figure like Hitler. We can just look at the common age, you know, and, and where we are in the, in the US and some of the decisions that we're pushing off. People just don't want to look at the facts, and that's another Another problem is sometimes people aren't even guessing, they're just ignoring stuff and ignoring valid options because sometimes implementing the solution is painful or it's painful to a vocal or powerful group. I can't speak to the distant past. I think it's a good example you paint there though where with Mein Kampf and things like that is that there are facts available and they were available at the time. To look into, you know, the mind of sort of the political leaders at the time. And yeah, people often ignore that.

Yeah, it's obviously an easy example because in hindsight it's so striking, you know, how much was available and what decisions were made. But now we're actually facing it. This is a question I've been dying to ask you. Well, the— now there were so many cases recently where there were folks that committed acts of violence or acts of terrorism, and there's a lot of weight brought down on law enforcement because they knew these folks, they knew the perpetrators, they had interviewed them, right? And yet, at a certain point, they have a dataset, they have some suspicions. Of course, we don't want to go around arresting people for what they're thinking or possibly doing, but still, in hindsight, we criticize law enforcement. We say, "Well, you guessed wrong." you know, this guy went out and, you know, the Tsarnaev bomber in Boston is obviously one example where he was on their radar, he was warned, and yet for some reason the decision was made to at least look the other way. Is that really guessing, or are we really trying to hold these folks to a very, very difficult standard?

Ah, see, you know I love politics as well, Jim. I think you framed up the problem in a way that makes it seem like people are guessing. The problem that people are trying to solve in the aftermath of this is a political problem. I love the expression, "What's the first rule of problem solving? It's establishing blame." Interesting. So when you have an incident like that, it's terrible and it's tragic and people are afraid. What they want is they want someone to blame. So you've got to solve that political problem. The political problem is you need to shift negative attention to somewhere that's not you, okay? If you're a politician, that's rule number one. It's got to be not you and therefore anywhere else will do and you pick what's an easy target. Most people don't understand and we probably will never be told the data. I mean maybe the CIA, maybe the FBI, maybe the police have 10,000 people that they're interviewing and checking out and they make the right decision. On 99.99% of them. There you go. Maybe that's the case. We don't know, right? But that's not the problem, because I don't think people would say, like, that our policemen have to be perfect, or that, you know, our teachers have to be perfect, or that we have to be perfect ourselves. But the problem you're dealing with there is a political one of someone has to be at fault. Otherwise, I have to accept one of two things: bad things are going to happen, and they're unlikely to affect me personally, but but they're going to happen. I have to live with that, which is scary and I don't want that.

Not a lot of people do want to accept that, right?

No, and yet terrible stuff happens every day. I mean, if you look at the resources spent by our governments and by ourselves as individuals protecting ourselves against certain risks, other risks are much, much more likely to happen and take you out. And yet we happily ignore them because they're not forefront of mind.

Sure. Sure. And that's, you know, again, you mentioned a very important word, that idea of perfect, right? We don't live in a perfect world. And I believe that our expectations sometimes are just, they're hyperhuman. I mean, we expect so much out of the different folks that are dealing with these difficult situations. But I don't want to get off onto that. We can save that for another day. I really appreciate your insight there. Let's get back. Let's bring it back to earth and help leaders stop the this process of guessing? Because like I said, you know, there's a lot of negative habits that we all fall into. To me, and please, I really appreciate your response to this, my martial arts imprint always comes back to discipline. You know, discipline is nothing more than the adoption and cultivation of meaningful and purposeful habits. And in the absence of those things, we can get in a lot of trouble. A lot of negative habits fill the void. And I believe that's what happens a lot of times. Does guessing fall into that category? If so, or if not, Just how can we help people stop all this addiction to guessing?

Yes. I mean, that's why I've written the book. I mean, I spent my career helping people solve some really hard problems and helping my team, you know, help our clients do that. I sort of become a bit frustrated because there's so many problems out there and so many opportunities to improve things that I need to find a way to help a larger group of people than just through, you know, the sort of commercial practice. So I wrote the book to help people understand better what to do. And you're absolutely right, it takes discipline. So you have the 9 behaviors. The first one is to stop guessing. That's why I titled the book that. Simple, not easy, right? Yeah, and you've got to stop making excuses. You've got to stop dressing it up and you've got to understand when it's okay to guess and when it isn't. It's rarely okay to guess, to be quite honest. So that's the first thing. You've got to drive that discipline.

Are people always aware that they're guessing or is it sometimes they've convince themselves that they're engaged in more of a process than they really are.

No, no. Guessing has sort of a slightly negative connotation, which is why it's easiest to start by observing others than yourself. So observe others and you'll see when they're guessing. By training your mind to be aware of it, you can then be self-reflective. I think you'll learn stuff. That's an easier path than just starting with yourself because you're dealing with two barriers at once, whereas educate yourself to recognize guessing and how we camouflage it with polite language and then turn that lens on yourself. And then there's 8 other behaviors that you can use and that you need to train yourself in to be able to— because then it's, well, what do you do when you stop guessing? You've got to fill that void. You've got to start doing a bunch of other things that will allow you to stop guessing and that takes discipline. Absolutely.

And I imagine a lot of that has to do with just training yourself to go out and find the facts and find as much information as you can. Is that a big part of it? Yes, and to do that—

absolutely to find the facts and I'd say to find the relevant limited information you need. A lot of people get swamped by trying to figure out everything and you know in a complex problem, there's a lot of data. I mean even if you just think, "Hey, I'd like to eat a little more healthily." I mean you could spend 5 years just researching what it even means to eat better. So you've got to be you know, you've got to narrow that quickly if you want to solve a hard problem.

Yeah, yeah, you got to put your boots to the ground as quick as you can. But also really, you know, I appreciate the direction going in as well because I believe people to make a change, people have to get enthusiastic. And I don't mean that in the kind of new agey soft way, right? We sometimes have to make ourselves or find some enthusiasm, right, where there seems to be just nothing but discouragement. And that's a problem that I see kind of lacking in our culture in general. That would take a whole other show we'd have to talk about. But, you know, how do— I think you're— the tone of your book and the tone of your teaching helps people find that enthusiasm. Do you think that's— am I way off base, or are you, you know, because I saw your videos, I've met you. I, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say I'm cheating. I've met Nat several times and have come to like him, and I appreciate his communication style. But Is the enthusiasm part of it? I'm not going to ask you because I know you're helping people get enthusiastic about this, but anyway, you can respond to that mess.

Yeah, I think becoming a better problem solver is an iterative step, and along the way are great rewards. As with anything, for most of us, we become enthusiastic when something helps us or we see success and a higher likelihood of success, and that builds. It's sort of unreasonable to ask people to change without some way that it's going to benefit them. What I'd say is get out there and look at a simple problem differently and see if you can, you know, use some of this to help you and some of the advice in the book to help you solve that problem. And as you make more progress and you recognize that or as you're able to use it to help others solve some of their issues, then you're going to build momentum and you're going to study it harder. And that's how we help people. Become better problem solvers is you sort of show them the money. I mean, help them have some success and then they want more.

Thank you for that because that's where I was hoping you were going. What is the greatest change you see in the people that you've helped through this process on a very personal level? How do they transform when they stop guessing and really start to apply the principles you're teaching?

A much more abundant view of the world. So the belief that much, much more is possible and reasonable to have and that it can be done in an easy way. I like helping people become lazy. I mean seriously, I see people working really hard. But they're working really hard, really, really hard. People are dedicated. Every business I've worked in, people are working hard and they don't need to be.

But you mean lazy in that Fred Flintstone sense, right? The feet are moving but the car is not going anywhere. Yeah.

And so I call it picking up crumbs. They have a to-do list with 400 things on it that all add up to— like each one is teeny and that's what businesses are doing.

No, I hate to-do lists. So many people, I mean, you know, functionally there's nothing wrong with it, but so many people create them for the wrong reasons and create them on the wrong premise. You know, let's tick off how many things that are easy to do that aren't necessarily getting me anywhere. But anyway, that's another show too. We've got 3 or 4 shows we have to do together. That'd be great. Listen, before we wrap up, we're almost out of time. Let's make sure people understand how to get in touch with you and how to access your service and talk a little bit more about that because you have an awful lot to offer. On top of this book as well. Yes.

So with the book, if you go to stopguessingbook.com, you'll find links to learn more about the things that I'm interested in and specifically this effort to improve how people look at problem solving. And from there also you can find Stroud International, which is the consulting practice I work in. Excellent.

Hey, you know what? Thank you so much for being with us today. I'll give the last couple of minutes to you. Parting shots, what would you like to share with us? What are some final thoughts that you think would really make a difference for folks?

Yeah, it's more complicated than it might initially, you know, than you might initially think, but it's also a lot simpler. You can become much, much better problem solver and you can get much better results simply by taking the first steps and stop guessing. It's as simple as that. And recognizing that in those around you. And once you do that, you can then get— pardon me— much, much better at problem solving, use some more complicated methods, and just have a better life. So my parting shot is just grab it by the horns and see what you can learn. And it doesn't take long. If you invest 15 minutes in this and you don't see some benefit, then stop.

What a perfect way to end it. Nat, thanks so much for being with us today. I hope we talk again soon.

Cool. It's great chatting with you, Jim. There you go.

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