It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

Isaac Asimov

And vice versa.

 
‘Someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ is one of the main tenets of TRIZ. There are some in and around the TRIZ community that appear to operate under the misapprehension that it is an expression that will encourage everyone to want to use TRIZ. ‘Who wouldn’t want their problems solving?’ they will very rationally argue. And they might have a point, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s rarely the rational argument that carries the day in any walk of life. The glaring absence of TRIZ use around the world is probably as good a piece of evidence to illustrate precisely how rare.

Tell some people that someone, somewhere already solved their problem and they’re not going to look at you with a smile on their face. You’ve just created an unhappy person. Someone who’s not going to be giving you a call wanting to know more any time soon. In extreme cases, you might just have created a person who has every incentive to make sure no-one else in the building hears what you’ve been saying either. Especially their management, who, the unhappy person probably quite rightly surmises, would very much like to know who this other ‘someone, somewhere’ might be.

And, hey presto, we just found ourselves another thorny contradiction: ‘someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ is both a good thing to say and a bad thing to say:

Which side of the good/bad divide you find yourself depends on who you’re talking to, and when the words leave your mouth.

In terms of the ‘who’, you can make a fairly safe bet that the person tasked with solving a problem won’t want to hear what you have to say. The person who does want to hear is the person who merely wants the answer. Why would the problem solver not want to save themselves some hard work? Answer: because the work your ‘someone, somewhere’ statement has just questioned is the best part of their job. People love solving problems.

That’s why the newspapers of the world all have a crossword and puzzle section in them. They give us all the opportunity to solve a problem every day. We are Homo Sudoku.

When we use the ‘someone, somewhere…’ expression with a person in problem solving mode, what we’ve just done is pretty much the same as the annoying know-it-all dick looking over your shoulder shouting out the answer to 7 Across.

It’s not what you want to hear right now, thank you very much.

The only time you want to hear what 7 Across is, is just before tomorrow’s paper arrives. Only then can you admit defeat, because only then do you see you’ve also just been given a whole new problem to work on.

Actually, that’s not quite true. If you look at what a lot of crossword puzzle solvers do (I’ve visited Gemba!) when the tension of not-knowing 7 Across has reached a threshold level of agony is they’ve gone and had a sneaky peek in their dictionary. Or on Google. And rest assured, it will be a sneaky, highly covert operation. Having to admit you needed help to solve a puzzle rarely feels good to most people. And if you do find yourself in the position of needing some help, far easier to admit that need to a computer than to another person.

Which might just be another clue to the problem of knowing if or when to come out with your smart-aleck ‘someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ introduction to TRIZ. You can use it when:

1. You’re talking to the person who wants the answer but won’t be doing any of the solving
2. You’re talking to the stuck crossword solver, waiting for today’s newspaper to arrive (with a new problem to work on!)
3. You want to wind somebody up or shock them out of some kind of paradigm paralysis (provided you can give them a sneaky, covert get-out-of-jail-free card).

If the situation is not one of those three, you probably shouldn’t let the ‘someone, somewhere’ words leave your lips. And in reality there’s a fair amount of doubt with Option 1 too if you’re the outsider, because the person is in all likelihood going to go ask the person they thought was working on the problem what they think. Option 1), in other words, is really nothing more than an indirect version of options 2) or 3).

Aagh, damnit, probably easiest to just not use it at all unless you’re absolutely sure what you’re doing. Careful with that axe, Eugene.

“anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Robert Benchley

Eagle-eyed readers of my ramblings may have noticed an increasingly apparent contradiction. The contradiction exists between two pieces of consistent advice to innovators. One side of the contradiction says, ‘run towards the barriers’, or, put another way, ‘there’s little point working on all the easy problems if you never get past the difficult ones’. This is a piece of advice borne of watching organisations waste literally millions of dollars having project teams skirting around the potential project killers, only to then fail miserably when they can no longer put off the inevitable tackling of the real problem any longer.

The other side of the contradiction is the piece of advice discussing the critical importance of achieving a ‘sense of progress’ within innovation teams. People will keep going on a project when they feel like they’re moving in the right direction. No matter how slowly. The best way to create this sense of progress is to work on problems that are easy to solve, and allow everything to cross something off their job’s list at the end of the day.

So which is right? Quick wins or big wins?

Trick question, right?

No-one wants the either/or answer. Innovation is about solving contradictions, and achieving the both/and solutions. And the reason we spend time drawing pictures like this…

…is it allows us to tap in to the breakthrough solutions that have already been derived by others that have travelled the same road before us.

The generic solutions we can observe from others then need translating into something that works for us as individuals. From a personal perspective, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years working on my own walking-on-the-shoulders-of-giants solutions to the quick-win/big win conflict.

A lot of it starts from the state of mind I find myself in. Some mornings I wake up thinking I can change the world. Others I have a strong suspicion I’ll be lucky if I manage to get the breakfast cereal from the packet into my bowl. Some days will end up being big win days, and some won’t. The critical thing in the ‘won’t’ days is that you can still nod your head at the end of the day and say to yourself that some kind of progress on something has occurred. Even if it was just a tick in the box marked ‘cereal in bowl’.

One way to tackle the conflict, in other words, is to tailor what you work on during a given day to your prevailing mood. I’ve taken to keeping a pair of jobs lists in recent times, one for all the important, run-towards-the-difficult, ‘big win’ stuff I want to do, and the other for all of the handle-turning grunt work I don’t manage to foist on other people, but that I know needs to be done. The second list is the one designed to allow me a few easy ‘sense of progress’ wins during the day.

It’s a start, but then there’s the procrastination problem. We all have a tendency to procrastinate I think. The trick with procrastination is to allow yourself to procrastinate over some big task without feeling guilty because it meant you didn’t procrastinate over a cluster of lesser tasks. It’s amazing just how much you can get done this way. It all boils down to making the thing you allow yourself to procrastinate over bigger than anything you actually want to get done.

The other reason I allow procrastination is that I’ve learned to stop thinking of it as a bad habit, and started to reframe it as ‘situations where we don’t have enough information to meaningfully solve yet’.

One of the things that working with TRIZ for the last twenty-some years has taught me is that there is no such thing as a problem that can’t be solved. It has given me an absolute – really, absolute – confidence that anything is possible.

In parallel with that, one of the things that working through all of Edward Matchett’s ‘5M’ equation discoveries has taught me is the amazing power of the human brain to make sense of seemingly random clues and ideas. To the extent that, once you’ve piled in the requisite number and quality of inputs, you won’t be able to stop meaningful answers from popping out.

Taken together, I’ve grown in to the habit of piling as much information about a problem I’m working on into my head just before I go to bed or before I head out on a run, knowing that there’s a fairly good chance that, when I wake up in the morning, or get into my running stride, the answer or some important new question will appear. Sometimes it won’t, but mostly it will. Those times it doesn’t, I interpret the lack of progress as a sign that I just haven’t included sufficient clues yet. ‘Creating a ‘sense of progress’ in this situation becomes quite easy: ‘find something new to add to the mix today’.

Rethink your perspective on ‘procrastination’ and pile enough information on enough problems into your head, and I’d be willing to make a fairly safe bet that you’ll have found yourself a highly effective way of ensuring you get a regular supply of big wins, and a daily sense of progress.

One of the main reasons the divergence-convergence job doesn’t get done well in the majority of organisations is that the divergent part often feels very inefficient and a round-a-bout way to get to an answer that will – if its any good at least – will look completely obvious in retrospect. Edward De Bono talked a lot about this irreversibility in his early work. But, it appears, not too many people took too much notice.

Maybe it wouldn’t be such a big issue if it weren’t for the fact that such a horrendously high proportion of complex problem solving exercises end in abject failure.

One of the things we always try and impress upon delegates working in the session we run is that there is a very strong causal link between how much time people spend in the divergent parts of the process and the likelihood of a positive outcome. Similarly, the extent to which a team allows themselves to diverge, is also very closely related to the likelihood of that same positive outcome.

F Scott Fitgerald once famously said, The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. In divergence-world, the idea is to turn two into ten or twenty. Or more. The more you can force yourself to keep on diverging, the more you start to feel sick with confusion, the higher the likelihood something good is going to come from the session. ‘Diverge until you can’t see straight any more’ is my usual instruction to the SI team when we get to work on our own complex problems. It’s not easy, because it’s not supposed to be easy.

I once ran a session for a client where there were a bunch of people I’d never met before. I figured because it was a big multi-national organisation and the team was quite senior, that I might be able to get them to diverge more than the average. By morning coffee break it was clear I’d got it wrong. ‘Why would we use a process that didn’t make life easy for us?’ one of the delegates asked me during the break, ‘if it’s not going to be easy, no-one will adopt it.’ Needless to say, I don’t do much work with that client any more. After a while, running sessions that deliver mediocre ‘easy’ results can get a little bit soul-destroying.

These days, rather than guess about the extent and duration of divergence that a team I’m about to work with is going to be up for, I try and assess where the team might be on another 2×2 matrix: 

Knowing that I have a room full of lions, cheetahs, vultures or wolves (or combinations thereof) before we get going means we can adapt how we do things.

Lions – like my ‘easy-life’desiring multi-national client – are not good at spending much time diverging or generating lots of divergent thoughts. This is a category with lots of multi-national organisations in it. Especially ones with lots of MBAs prowling around the building. Like lions, they’re already top of the food chain and, frankly, they don’t often have to try that hard to do anything. I try and avoid running sessions with lions, unless I’m allowed to bring a whip and a chair.

Next up, the cheetahs. These are the people – a lot like the ‘creativity consultants’ I ranted about in the previous diatribe – that love a Post-It party. Guaranteed they’ll fill any wall you might care to point at in under an hour. They’ve been there, done it, got the t-shirt as far as divergence sessions are concerned. In all likelihood they’ve become a little bit cynical about the process, due to the knowledge that they’ve done these kinds of things a million times before and nothing tangible ever came out of it, so why will this time be any different. I’ve even see one group sneak over to a cupboard and retrieve some of the Post-It posters they’d generated during a previous session. Cheetahs can put on a terrific busrst of speed when they have to, but don’t have a lot of staying power. Try to get a group of cheetah’s filling up Post-Its for more than an hour and you might have a mutiny on your hands.

The opposite end of the spectrum finds the vultures. These are the people that can circle around a divergence session until the sun goes down, probably thinking about stuff, but not actually getting that much done. They’re the ones looking for the already-dead prey. They’re definitely not going to bust a gut to fill you a wall of Post-It’s any time soon.

At least, though, the vultures have a solid understanding of the importance of biding your time. In complex problem solving world, ‘biding your time’ is better known as incubation. Incubation is really important in the complex problem solving world. Incubation is a skill that the final segment of the matrix, the wolves, have in abundance. Wolves represent the top of the evolutionary tree when it comes to stamina. They will chase prey for days if they have to. They’ll also work together. It shouldn’t be a great surprise to learn that it is the wolf groups – top-right hand corner of the matrix = best per convention – that are the ones generating the outcomes that are most likely to deliver meaning and success. They’re the dream groups to work with if you can find them. They’re the groups that will still be there at 6 o’clock in the evening, loading their brains up with stimulus so they can incubate it all over night, then come back at 8 the following morning all set to diverge some more.

In my experience, about 5% of groups have wolf-like characteristics. It’s a lucky day, in other words, if you find yourself working with one. Unfortunately, I haven’t reached a position in life when I can say no to 95% of my potential clients. Which means I find myself carrying around lots of wolf-suits for people to wear. For the duration of a session at least. Generally speaking, I find it’s easier to squeeze the cheetahs into them than the vultures or the lions. I’ve had some success taking a pair of clippers to lion manes, but am still at something of a loss with the vultures.

There isn’t much that the ‘creativity community’ agrees upon, but one thing that seems as near universal is it’s possible to get is the importance of divergence and convergence in the creative problem solving process. Divergence being the parts of the process where we open ourselves up to a greater number of possibilities and options; convergence being the parts where we home in on ‘the’ problem or ‘the’ answer. In our version of the divergence/convergence story there are a minimum of two divergence-convergence pairs in any problem involving a complex problem. There may be more, of course, as a project iterates its way out of the fog towards clarity, but, if a team gets really lucky, they might get away with a divergence-convergence pair to define what the right problem is, and then another pair to get to the best answer:

Irrespective of the actual number of divergence-convergence cycles might occur in a given project, one of the things that is often overlooked is the relative amount of time spent in each of the divergent and convergent phases of the cycle.

Based on our experience facilitating sessions over the years, it is a really good idea to have a prior indication of the preferred working practices of the team you’re working with. We’ve identified four main kinds:

The most frequent kind of group is the type we might think of as the MBAs. These are the people that have been taught at one business school or another, that complex problem solving requires the same laser-like focus as any other kind of problem. Anything that feels like it’s deviating too far away from ‘the point’ of the exercise (i.e. is ‘diverging’) isn’t going to be looked upon with much positivity from this kind of group. And woe betide the facilitator if a clear answer hasn’t been delivered at the end of the session. From an innovation perspective, as well as being the most frequently encountered type of group it is also the one least likely to deliver any kind of useful output once the cold light of tomorrow arrives. Solving complex problems is not at all like the ‘usual’ MBA problem. Actually, neither is real life. Which is a whole other problem, albeit one that is beyond the scope of this rant.

The rarest type of group – unless you’re fortunate enough to work in the aerospace or other industry that innovates at glacial speeds – are the philosophers. These groups are the ones that totally get what Einstein was getting at when he said, ‘if I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem’. This is the group that will be very happy to spend a whole day drawing intricate function analysis diagrams, wall-size perception maps or any other kind of problem definition tool you might care to pass their way. They might well have a point. But they’re also very prone to ending the ideation parts of a project with a single ‘answer’. This is the type of group that, during the rare moments when solution generation can be contemplated, usually has the greatest amount of difficulty with instructions like, ‘I don’t care about the quality of the ideas at this point, let quantity come first’. The facilitator of this group might accrue – if he’s really lucky – half a dozen Post-It’s come the end of the session, and chances are all six will contain some well-thought through ‘competent’ answers. Sadly, however, they are very unlikely to have anything at all in common with ‘wow’ or ‘breakthrough’. What the philosophers find hard to grasp is the idea that wow comes from combinations of partial ideas and that you only get to make the combinations if somebody wrote down the dumb partial ideas in the first place.

The second most frequent type of group is the opposite of the philosophers. This is the group that will typically wish to spend no more than twenty minutes working out what the problem is, and then the rest of the day re-decorating the walls of the room with Post-It’s full of solution ideas. I tend to think of these types of groups as the ‘creatives’. Mainly because it tends to be the style adopted when a group is being facilitated by a ‘creativity consultant’. By all accounts a group of people that has fallen under the collective delusion that the reason most innovation attempts fail is that ‘people don’t know how to be creative’.

Looking back through the last two decades I think I’ve only ever experienced two groups that really didn’t know how to be creative. One was a session I ran with the UK Treasury, where approximately 5% of the delegates had heard of brainstorming. The other was a session with a group of Belgian automotive engineers. The look of panic in their eyes when we announced we were looking to spend the next hour using the TRIZ Inventive Principles to generate a target of 50 solution clues was a joy to behold. Their scared-out-of-their-wits cry of ‘but what would we do with all those ideas?’ can still bring a smile to my mouth fifteen years after the session.

Anyway, Treasury officials and Belgian automotive engineers aside, the problem of having ‘too many ideas’ is one I never experience. Which probably goes a long way to explain why I spend so much of my time avoiding and distancing myself from the ‘creativity consultant’ world. Never, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, have so many been so deluded for so long. To all intents and purposes their belief that ‘people don’t know how to be creative’ is one of the most damaging collective delusions of the last 80 years since Alec Osborn wrote ‘brainstorming’ on his forerunner version of a Post-It.

I have a sneaking suspicion this ‘creatives’ segment of the 2×2 matrix is the most dangerous one of all in terms of failing to deliver anything remotely resembling innovation (i.e. ‘successful step-change’). Probably in no small part because, having brought in a – the more expensive the better – creativity session facilitator and filled several walls with great solutions, management are lulled into a false sense of security. Or, failing that, at least a warm, fuzzy plausible-deniability answer for their bosses when everything goes pear-shaped six months further down the line, ‘we brought in the best consultants on the planet, what more could we have done?’ Well, how about, ‘spend more time making sure you’re working on the right thing’?

Which, finally, leaves the top-right hand box of the matrix, the ‘innovators’. As per usual 2×2 matrix convention, the top-right hand corner is the place everyone is supposed to aspire to. The box that means we get the balance right between divergence in the problem definition and divergence in the solution generation tasks. Or rather – again per convention – solve the contradiction between them. This is the box we’re always trying to get clients to operate in. If we say that 2% of all innovation attempts work out, you can place a safe bet that 1.999 of that 2% were groups that operated in this box. If more people knew that, maybe we might all stand a better chance of living in a world that was able to meaningfully tackle what lies ahead, as opposed to our continuing propensity to kick ever more dented tin-cans along rutted roads.

I enjoyed my first Trip Advisor navigated holiday a few weeks ago. The idea was that we’d go where the wind blew us, booking accommodation on the fly based on Trip Advisor reviews. After the third night we gave up and reverted to ‘turn-up-at-the-door-and-sniff’ instincts. When you find yourself confronted with a couple of hundred reviews of a hotel, many of which seemed to conflict with one another, it becomes very easy to conclude that we were dumber when we’d finished than we were before we’d started looking.

Much as Trip Advisor and the growing number of ‘Big-Data’ providers might not like to hear it, beyond a certain point, the more data there is, the lower its value inherently becomes. It’s a pure fact of nature. Data fundamentally wants and needs to be free.

The converse of this story emerges when we look at wisdom. The more data we have available to us – as I experienced on my holiday – the greater the potential for confusion, and consequently the more we are willing to pay for somebody or something to understand our context and our real needs and have the wisdom to be able to point us to a solution that meets those needs. The core paradox is that the more data we produce – the more hay we add to the haystack – the more difficult it gets to find the needle. The more available and freer data becomes, the greater the value of wisdom.

In the needle-in-a-haystack metaphor, wisdom is all about being able to find the needles. One of the biggest misconceptions of the Big Data industry is that adding more hay to the haystack also increases the quantity of needles.

Not only does this sound nonsensical, it is nonsensical. The reason this is so is because wisdom is all about the ability to contextually distinguish the important from the trivial. And what’s important in life comes from our extremely finite set of needs and desires.

The TRIZ/Systematic-Innovation methodology, unbenknownst to the original researchers as it happens, was the ultimate study of the difference between the important and the trivial. Sixty plus years and 4 million case study analyses later, we can vividly see that the world spends most of its time and energy re-inventing wheels. Which is to all intents and purposes the same as making more hay. The total number of problems in life is measurable in the hundreds. The number of effective solutions to those problems is measurable in the tens. There are, in other words, tens of needles in the haystack. And, moreover, we’ve already found them.

Now the NHS, and much of the rest of the public sector has been tasked by their government masters to ‘measure the experience’ of their patients, staff and customers we’re very likely to see an exponential growth in Big Data projects in the coming months and years.

After that, if I had to make a prediction, someone is going to start asking difficult questions like, ‘now we’ve measured all this data, what are we going to do with it?’ The only point of measuring anything, in the real world at least, is to allow us to improve how things work. We measure patient experience in order to improve patient experience.

And it’s only at that point – the point where we switch from merely measuring to actively intervening to make changes to the system – that we really learn the truth of the Big-Data-Small-Wisdom paradox.

The NHS, being ‘ahead of the game’ is already drowning in Big Data. Terabytes of meaningless hay.

Actually, I suspect the situation is considerably worse than that. The meaningless hay is also toxic hay. Toxic because it hides the truth. Three months before the Mid Staffs debacle hit the public, a Big Data ‘Review’ of the Trust had been given a full set of green lights. Everything, according to the Data, was fine.

Except, of course, it very clearly wasn’t. The needles that would have revealed the real set of problems – and their solutions – had been hidden. The real tragedy when we consider this truth, is that we didn’t need a review at all in order for us to know what and where the needles were, and what could and should have been done to make a meaningfully positive impact on the experience of the patient.

Many of us inadvertently shoot ourselves in the foot once in a while. Occasionally – and usually rather more spectacularly – we get to observe large groups of people embarking on a collective foot-shooting extravaganza. The expenses scandal by British politicians a few years ago was one of the most visible examples of such synchronized stupidity.

Not surprisingly, the aftermath of that scandal saw the introduction of a more rigorous set of expense-claiming guidelines. And thus the pendulum swings from ‘it’s okay to clean your moat on expenses’ to ‘itemise everything down to the last penny’. An outsider might nod at this point and say, fair enough, they’re public servants and they need to be punished for their excesses. What better way than forcing every politician to cram their pockets with receipts? Especially if we then make all of their transactions available for public scrutiny.

And so now, as a population, we’re able to sleep at night safe in the knowledge that David Cameron’s recent claim for the cost of a £4.68 glue stick and 8p for a box of clips has been duly claimed and paid. Or that Vince Cable legitimately spent 43p on scissors (which Poundsaver did he got to for them??), or that Kenneth Clarke charged the taxpayer 11p for a new ruler.

I don’t know about you but this is the sort of thing that tends to make me think the UK government accounting system is dysfunctional. Not because of the perception I have that the cost of processing the claim is likely to be much more than the claim itself, but rather because it demonstrates such a fundamental lack of understanding of human psychology.

People do things for good reasons and real reasons. We all look at the world through tangible and intangible lenses. The tangible lens is the rationalizing lens, in this case, of the accountant. In the accountant’s eyes, accounting everything down to the last penny is the absolute right thing to do in order to demonstrate scrupulous honesty. The intangible lens, on the other hand, is the lens of emotions and difficult to quantify things like common-sense and gut-feel.

Looked at through this lens an expenses claim for 8p begins to look quite different:

• How petty-minded does a person need to be that they even contemplated making a claim?
• Did this person have so little common-sense perspective on the bigger picture costs of processing a claim?
• And if so, and I extrapolate to everything else, what damage must they be causing to the country?
• And, anyway, how incompetent must the Downing Street office staff be to have a stationery cupboard so poorly stocked that there was a need to pop-out to Staples to go buy a box of clips?
• Bearing in mind his £142,500 salary, what possible difference could 8p have made to David Cameron?

All in all, what this tangible scrupulous honesty plus intangibles-blindness combination does is creates a perception that claiming for an 8p box of clips might be a far worse crime than the multi-thousand pound moat-cleaning claim. Looked at through the intangible lens, an 8p expense claim is likely to make people trust politicians less rather than more.

Any normal person would, I think, have been too embarrassed to enter such trivia on an expenses claim form. A normal person sees the world through both tangible and intangible lenses.

Not only that, all the research also tells us that we see things through the intangible lens before the tangible one. It’s our inbuilt instinct. Looking through this lens first is a really good way of avoiding shooting yourself in the foot. For some difficult to fathom reason, people in public life – or the pencil-licking, more-than-my-jobs-worth bureaucrats they recruit to look after them – seem to re-train their instincts to ignore the intangibles. On one hand, overriding ones natural instincts is quite a feat. On the other, the day you start believing that your rightful claim to that 8p is more important than the possibility that everyone around you might think you are a petty, no-common-sense dick is probably the day you should contemplate withdrawing to a quiet life of pottering in the shed at the end of the garden.

 “It could be a terrible long, frustrating summer if we don’t get it right on Thursday,’’ Gerrard told the players. He underlined the significance of these 90 minutes. “There is no hiding place for a player when you go out of a tournament. You go home earlier than you expect. It can be tough as a player and it can take an awful long time to get over it. A lot of people know that in the dressing room but a few young lads – it was important for them to realise what is at stake and how important this game is. We all need to leave everything on that pitch. If a defeat was to happen it is probably the most difficult place to be in as a footballer.

“I’ve been there. I’ve had that feeling. So I know what that feeling is about and that is the feeling that I don’t want to come Friday morning. But it wasn’t a message to scare any of the lads but a wake-up call to everyone in the room, staff, players. Me and Frank have been there and done it so I suppose our experience at times is very important in the dressing-room. It wasn’t to scare anyone or intimidate anyone but that is the reality of where we are and we need everyone focused and right on it to perform individually and collectively on Thursday otherwise it will be a terrible long summer.”

England Captain, Steven Gerrard, interview before the Uruguay game

World Cup fervor was somewhat short-lived in England this summer when England’s campaign fizzled out after less than six days. Not since 1958 has the team done so badly. Not surprisingly, every footballing pundit in the country was asked by the media to express their views about what caused the trio of dismal performances by the team. Everyone, from the manager to the players to ex-players to the ‘man on the street’ had an opinion. Nearly all appeared to have it figured out quite clearly. The only problem was, everyone had a different opinion.

And – worse – everyone, as is so often the case in these post-trauma, soul-searching activities, was operating under the illusion that it was possible to isolate the failure of the team down to a single ‘root cause’ reason. Meaning that the poor old viewer or radio listener was subjected to hour after hour of meaningless, ‘yes it was, no it wasn’t’ debate, that ultimately left no-one any clearer than they were at the beginning. To repeat something we find ourselves saying a lot, ‘there is no such thing as a root cause in a complex problem’. Complex problems are the emergent outcome of a conspiracy of causes.

The best way to untangle what that conspiracy of causes might be is to take all of the different opinions and use the Perception Mapping process to map the relationships between each of them. So, in the interests of national well-being, that’s what we set about doing. Here’s what we found.

First up, here are all of the different reasons we were able to glean from the tera-bytes of media coverage that’s emerged since the initial defeat against Italy in the first game of the campaign. In all we found 39 different perception statements:

The next part of the process involved mapping the relationships between each of these perceptions. The key to doing this in a meaningful way is answering the question, ‘which of the other perceptions does this one lead to?’ In situations where a perception potentially leads to several other perceptions, the process requires us to choose the perception that is lead to first.

The following perception map illustrates the overall result of completing this leads-to analysis for the 39 different cited reasons. The map helps to reveal the ‘conspiracy of causes’ by highlighting loops and collectors. The loops in particular represent the most important part of a conspiracy – being, in effect, the downward spirals or ‘vicious circles’ that inevitably emerge in systems of all kinds.

The picture reveals one big loop. The good news this reveals is that the England failure has a single overall conspiracy of causes. The bad news is that when we zoom in and look at the details of what’s happening in the loop, we see that it contains many elements that are ‘non-trivial’:

Before getting in to some of the details of the loop, however, it is also worth noting another, less well known aspect of perception maps. The reason we are able to say that there is no such thing as a single root cause in any complex problem is that anything on the periphery of the map is in effect a root cause. All of these ‘peripheral’ perceptions have been placed at the top of the main perception map image. Thus perceptions 25, 24, 38, 15, 29, 3, 27 and 10 might all be legitimately described as ‘root causes’ of the England team failure.

The problem with multiple ‘root causes’ is simply that there are lots of them. There’s no option to just work on one or two since it is the combination that is driving the behavior of the system. Far better, according to our last fifteen years’ experience of constructing and using these maps to focus on the vicious circle and try and somehow try and break it. Possibly, for those new to the Perception Mapping process, taking account of the ‘collectors’ (perception statements that have multiple ‘leads-to’ arrows pointing to them) that are leading in to the main loop. In this case the main collector can be seen as perception statement 7, ‘not playing together as a real team’. We often describe these collectors as accelerators of the downward spiral. It is always useful to be cognizant of their presence, but ultimately, it’s the downward spiral that we need to focus our attention towards.  

When looking at these loops for possible solution strategies, it is often the case that some of the perception statements are more actionable than others. Some of them require long term strategies to resolve. Others, on the other hand, are amenable to a much more rapid solution. Looking at the loop close-up picture suggests to us that the heart of this problem has its foundations in a generational problem. Namely the fact that the two most senior players – Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard – are of a different generation to the rest of the squad (see next figure). While this might not have been a problem in its own right, the Alienated Nomad version of a pre-match motivational talk to the other players and what the Heroic Hero and Protected Hero players would actually be motivated by were a considerable distance apart. While there can be no doubt neither Gerrard or Lampard had any intent to cause a problem, much of what they said, when listened to through Hero ears, would most likely be interpreted as ‘this is not going to go well, look after yourself’.

The good news for forward-thinking England supporters is that in two years’ time, when the next big competition comes along, this generational mis-match problem will have solved itself. Gerrard and Lampard’s retirement from the squad, in other words, will be a good thing… irrespective of the prodigious playing talents of both players.

The bad news is, when we remove them from the overall perception map gives us a much more insidious downward spiral that will involve the Hero generation players having to tackle some difficult personal questions. But that’s another story. In the meantime, we can at least say we understand what’s gone wrong this time, that it will be a different set of problems next time and that – most important of all – we have a process for reliably working out what they are and for really getting to grips with them.

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