Wasting Time, Strategically
One night last year, I had dinner with a friend and former college roommate. When the conversation turned to work, he mentioned that most of his friends from medical school no longer enjoy practicing medicine. He cited exhaustion in the aftermath of the pandemic and corporate ownership models that make practices overly focused on financials as the primary culprits of their dissatisfaction.
The problem is that regardless of their frustration level, it's hard for these doctors to shift their career strategy. They’ve worked for years to build capabilities in one area, and it’s not obvious how they would apply them elsewhere.
I was recently reminded of my friend’s story when reading The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (and What to Do About It). In the book, author Michael Raynor defines the strategy paradox as this: “strategies with the greatest possibility of success also have the greatest possibility of failure.” He expands on the drivers of the paradox:
“The strategy paradox [...] arises from the collision of commitment and uncertainty. The most successful strategies are those based on commitments made today that are best aligned with tomorrow’s circumstances. But no one knows what those circumstances will be, because the future is unpredictable. Should one have guessed wrong and committed to the wrong capabilities, it will be impossible to adapt—after all, a commitment that can be changed was not much of a commitment. As a result, success is very often a result of having made what turned out to be the right commitments (good luck), while failed strategies, which can be similar in many ways to successful ones, are based on what turned out to be the wrong commitments (bad luck).”
Raynor’s argument is obvious when applied to the doctors my friend mentioned. They probably wouldn’t have reached their goals if they hadn’t been committed to becoming doctors. But that commitment required making decisions like foregoing the interesting Art History 101 course in college, pursuing outside interests during medical school, and taking on a random assortment of jobs that might have built other skills.
In the book, Raynor describes several technical solutions to the strategy paradox that are primarily focused on scenario planning and developing strategic options.
However, successfully developing those strategic options requires a willingness to accept failure. You have to invest in companies, knowing that some will be losers. You have to dedicate teams to investigate new products or services that may never launch. You have to launch ventures outside of the fields and geographies the company has the most knowledge.
We have experience with this in our personal lives. We buy insurance for our cars, homes, health, and lives, but we don’t think the premium is a waste of money if we don’t use the insurance. Still, most of us are more comfortable with “sure bets” than strategies with a known high risk of failure.
Yet the strategic paradox's resolution—professionally and personally—is always to have a portfolio of activities that retrospectively include “wastes” of time and effort. Those are the very activities that create the potential for learning and growth and can become insurance against an unpredictable future.