The limiting beliefs of business

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

We rarely see it like this, but the entire way we do business today is based on a very specific worldview.

This worldview is about seeing the world as :
1) scarce
2) untrustworthy

Scarce :

This one is difficult to argue against. Everywhere we look, we see proof of how scarce the world is : finite ressources, finite time to accomplish what we want, finite attention.

So, few people question this. Yet this is a worldview.

The other way of looking at things could be that the world is an abundant place. You just need to look at nature to begin to be convinced : food grows on trees (so the food problem is more about how we humans have decided to control and distribute food : nature in and of itself is abundant).

Human potential is infinite. No-one knows the bounds of it, and the more we stretch ourselves, the more we see that we can stretch ourselves further.

This scarcity mindset dominates business today and is stark when we look at how we deal with competition.

The prevailing thinking about competition is that it needs to be killed, bought out or dominated else we will be the ones to get obliterated.

A lot of business decisions are still taken with the competition is mind in a bid to get the upper hand and not get snuffed out.

However, there is an emerging thinking in business today that is going counter to this dog eats dog mentality.

The new focus is on the customer rather than the competition, with the belief that there is enough to go around for everyone if each business is able to focus on its ideal customer and serve it the best it can.

This shift in focus makes businesses do radically different things than they would’ve had they been solely about getting ahead. Things like ungating content and demos, providing free access to amazingly valuable ressources and collaborating with the ‘competition’ if this means that the customer is the winner.

And by and large, this is proving to be a winning strategy for those businesses that are focusing on providing value to their customer rather than making sure their business secrets remain guarded lest the competition replicates them and gets ahead.

It might sound paradoxical, but not focusing on getting ahead of the competition is somehow causing these businesses to achieve just that.

Untrustworthy :

The way business is conducted today rests largely on the assumption that the world is an untrustworthy place. So it needs to be controlled into predictability. Things need to be put in place to make sure we get the outcome we want, else something is going to happen that we don’t want.

This is a fundamental mistrust in the world.

The flip side of this worldview is a belief that everything that happens in life happens FOR us, rather than against us, so that there is nothing to control, but rather to listen to, adjust and follow some sort of universal flow.

So the world isn’t some cold, alienating place that seeks to screw us over the moment we lose ‘control’ (if we had it in the first place that is) but a highly intelligent system that’s constantly interacting and co-creating WITH us for our own greater good.

So our fate doesn’t need to be controlled. It needs to be listened to, and the cues coming from it need to be acted on without necessarily knowing the full picture of where it’s all going to go, while all the time trusting that the ‘end point’, if there ever was one, is going to lead us to something so great that our mind could’ve never conceived of it, let alone brought it about.

Yet everything put in place in business today is about control — or the illusion of it. We plan, strategise, budget, analyse, review incessantly, and once we do this, we then micro-manage people to make sure things are going ‘according to plan’.

Don’t get me wrong : I’m not advocating throwing all of this out of the window and somehow just trusting the flow and letting things happen while sitting in vipasana retreats all day.

What I am talking about though is that the creativity and innovation we love to talk about so much in business have been stifled because we’re so controlling that we don’t let the chaos in from time to time, chaos that’s indispensable for something new to emerge.

Creativity emerges when the right amount of structure has been put into place to give it space to emerge while at the same time giving it a sense of direction once it does. That’s it. Too much structure stifles it; too little causes chaos to take over and cause mayhem.

So what if the best way was to drop the rigid, arbitrary goals we set for ourselves and for our business, and instead learn to tap into the intelligence of the world, listen and adapt in micro-ways to dance with it, rather than try to dominate it with over-planning, over-strategising, over-managing ?

The level of complexity of business, and of the world at large, is so big today, with enormous challenges looming over us, that we just cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend that business doesn’t need a major transformation if we are to successfully steer society in a better direction.

And the first step in any transformation, be it personal or collective, is an honest review of our beliefs and mindsets that have brought about the world we live in.

Everything starts with a thought. So we need to start thinking new, radically different thoughts if we’re to get out of the mess we got ourselves in.