Tactics and Strategies
More than monkey business

Banks face challenges they’ve never seen before. So why use the same old thinking strategies, asks DUNCAN BURY, to deliver banking of the future?

We are in unprecedented times. The issues we face have not been seen before. So why are we assuming we automatically know the answer to the problems?

Here’s an analogy. Four monkeys are placed in an enclosure and, from time to time, a banana appears in the middle of the enclosure. If any monkey goes for the banana, all the monkeys are sprayed with water. Pretty soon they all learn that, when the banana appears, they leave it in place.

Eventually, one of the monkeys is replaced by a new monkey which quickly learns from watching the others that “we leave bananas alone”. Over time, all the original monkeys are replaced by ones that have never seen the water response, but they all leave the banana alone. The monkeys will soon develop elaborate rituals about not picking up the banana.

It’s a classic evolution in response to the environment in which they’ve found themselves. In our organisations, we all do things because it’s just the way it has been done. How often do we stop and ask why? What’s more, we probably consider our role is not to challenge the why but to challenge the how.

Most things we deal with daily are problems and, on a scale of, say, one to ten, we can estimate how close we are to solving the problem. We use strategies we’ve used before and know they’ll work. If a tyre bursts on the way to work, we know how to fix it, how long it’ll take, and when it’s complete.

In these complex times, however, we’re often not solving problems but gaining insight. We’ve never seen the challenge before, so we cannot judge how close we are to solving the issue. We often try to solve insight challenges with problem-solving strategies that have worked before because we are cognitive misers. We don't like to think harder about issues, so we re-use information we know and ignore facts and evidence that doesn’t support our point of view. It’s normal.

And the more senior you become in an organisation, the more you make decisions on attenuated (filtered and averaged) data. Your problem-solving prowess is recognised and it’s your role to give instant answers to challenges using your experience (by definition backward looking) of similar problems.

So, faced with challenges we’ve NEVER seen before, why use the same old thinking strategies to deliver banking of the future? What’s the conscious or sub-conscious rule-set that restrains your thinking that leads you to problem-solve rather than gain insight?

Change and transformation are not the same. Change – like moving a chair, altering a policy, introducing ATMs – is reversible in action and in time. Transformation is not reversible. Transformation parks the past and creates a distinct and unrecognisable now. What are you currently doing to transform your organisation, and ensure you take your people with you? Are you changing behaviours rather than changing thinking? It is evident that the thinking of the general public has changed with regard to banking and your staff are the general public.

So you suspend your thinking strategies and develop The Bank of the Future through insight. How do you get your staff to buy-in to the model? One option is to place water pistols throughout the organisation and work on aversion therapy. The other is to engage them in the transformation through transforming their thinking not changing their behaviours.

Unfortunately you cannot transform their thinking, they have to do that themselves. All you can do is provide the space for them to do this. This means giving them time to REACT to what is being proposed, REFRAME their mental models to develop new thinking strategies, ALIGN with their organisation, team and colleagues and then EMBED the transformation.

How will you know it is embedded? Well, there is no talk of the past. They understand the why of the organisation and someone will be saying on a frequent basis “Hey, why does no one eat the banana?”

Thinking Harder: Being Smart about Transformation by Duncan Bury and Jane Buick Published by ManagementBooks2000

Dr DUNCAN BURY is Managing Director of Miascape, which thinks harder about personal coaching and Board interventions.