In this episode of No Easy Choices, Brooke Struck explores how the search for certainty can paradoxically slow down decision-making in fast-moving environments. The conversation covers strategic approaches to talent acquisition during uncertain times, emphasizing the value of investing against the cycle when competitors are frozen.
Brooke introduces the concept of "cultural fingerprints" - moving beyond generic "good culture" to understanding the specific cultural DNA that attracts the right talent. The discussion culminates in Brooke's philosophy that decisions which are "strong but not necessarily totally optimized" yet get implemented are superior to methodologically perfect solutions that never see the light of day. Throughout, the conversation demonstrates how behavioural science principles can inform more effective organizational transformation by prioritizing collective commitment over individual optimization.
- Cultural Fingerprints
"One of the most valuable unlocks is to just get past that and to say: we're not looking to build a ‘good’ culture or an ‘excellent’ culture or an ‘amazing’ culture. It's to look at the fingerprint of WHAT culture we want to create." - Implementation Over Perfection
"A decision that is strong but not necessarily totally optimized, but gets implemented, is a superior decision to one that is methodologically and factually optimized, but around which there is no alignment and that doesn't have sufficient backing internally for it to actually see the light of day." - Momentum Over Certainty
"We don't need to get a decision perfect right away... we can ratchet up our commitment over time." - Counter-Cycle Talent Strategy
"If you're investing against the cycle, when everyone else is freezing hiring or laying off some of their staff, that's a moment when there is some outrageously good talent available out there on the employee market that a lot of people wouldn't have access to in normal times." - Creating Value through Strategic Acquisition
"This company that you're thinking about potentially buying, why is it more valuable overnight in virtue of you being its owner compared to its current owners or compared to other potential buyers out there?" - Cultural Self-Assessment
"Taking a hard look in the mirror and asking, what is the culture that we currently have? What have we traditionally done well for our teams, for our clients, for the communities that we work in? And what are the missed opportunities?" - The Speed-Certainty Paradox
"As the cycle time of the environment around you gets faster and faster, what's going on in your own internal decision making is that it's going slower and slower because you're looking for more and more evidence." - Facilitating Implementation
"The evidence demonstrates that when groups reach decisions together, they're just much, much more committed to seeing those decisions through."
The Search for Certainty vs. Momentum
Isaac Koenig-Workman: Hey, Brooke. How are you doing today?
Brooke: Doing well. How are you?
Isaac Koenig-Workman: Pretty good. Thank you so much for being here.
This is No Easy Choices with the Decision Lab. I'm your host, Isaac Koenig-Workman. And today we have Brooke Struck, founder at Converge, also, of course, a director at the Decision Lab before. And today we're going to talk about the messy human side of organizations. Uncertainty, ambiguity, those kinds of things. And why with transformation so often those things get in the way. Thank you so much for being here, Brooke.
Brooke: Yeah, it's my pleasure.
Isaac Koenig-Workman: So off the bat, Brooke, a lot of your writing talks about this search for certainty, and especially in terms of decision making, this can actually slow down leaders quite a bit. In your experience, what do you think are some common places where people search for this confidence, but it ends up hindering the decision making overall?
Brooke: Yeah. So people are looking for certainty because, at least in my experience, that brings them comfort. What they're looking for is to feel confident about the decisions that they're making. And when you're in situations where there's a lot of uncertainty and things are moving quickly, it can feel like the stakes for decisions get higher and higher. And so as the stakes go up, people's natural reflex is often to look for more and more evidence to show that the decision that they're looking to make is the right one.
What ends up happening there is as the cycle time of the environment around you gets faster and faster, what's going on in your own internal decision making is that it's going slower and slower because you're looking for more and more evidence to give you that feeling of comfort, that feeling of confidence that this call is the right one. And so the places to watch out for that are spaces where the penalty for moving slowly becomes higher and higher.
Isaac Koenig-Workman: With that being said, I think another way of thinking about it is people really want familiarity. They don't want decisions to feel unfamiliar. There's a lot of fear there. So how do you think leaders especially can shift from that idea of we're going to have certainty and familiarity and find a way to have momentum with those decisions instead?
Brooke: Yeah, I think that concept of momentum is really a thread to pull on here. And it's the idea that we don't need to get a decision perfect right away. It's the idea that actually even if we think about some decisions as pretty substantial one way doors, we can ratchet up our commitment over time. And getting very intentional about saying, well if I were to do a small thing that moves me in the direction of taking that decision, what would that small thing be? What would that first increment of commitment to the decision look like? And in order to feel comfortable with that increment of commitment, what would I need to see?
Strategic Talent Acquisition During Uncertainty
We can even think about this through an example buying a new technology for your company or looking to bring in some new senior talent. It's not something that goes from 0 to 100. Overnight talent acquisition is a big one here. And in fact that's a use case that I've talked about often is if you're going against the grain, if you're investing against the cycle, when everyone else is freezing hiring or laying off some of their staff, that's a moment when there is some outrageously good talent available out there on the employee market that a lot of people wouldn't have access to in normal times. It's just those talents are too sought after, the prices are too high, the processes are too competitive. Now all of a sudden with people shedding that talent, that opens a door for some players who wouldn't be in that game otherwise to all of a sudden consider bringing in a caliber of talent that they didn't have access to previously.
And so understanding, well I want to go out and bring in this kind of top tier talent into my organization. One of the mistakes that we can make is to say, and with this process, I need to identify the best person for this role. And so if you can say I'm happy enough taking the number two or the number three talent, because I don't actually know exactly which one is the best fit for my organization or who beats out the others. And I can make that decision of top two or top three really quickly. Compared to taking a lot of extra time to home in on exactly who is that number one talent in your pool, that's a huge competitive advantage that you can give to yourself.
Isaac Koenig-Workman: Going back to the momentum piece for a moment, do you think that in that pursuit of the best talent, that's when some uncertainty comes and you might not have the very best person, but being more open to having a range of that top talent, do you think that in those downtimes when you said, hiring freeze or economic uncertainty that's when there's actually a lot of really talented, strong, employable people out there. What's a good starting point where organizations can invest during those times when there's limited resources by going against the grain in that sense?
Brooke: So one of the things is to get clear on exactly what it is that you need and what would be transformational for you as an organization. It's understanding what makes a huge difference for inside of your organization. What makes a huge difference for your organization. Having clarity on that question before the downturn comes means that you're positioned to act really quickly when the moment arises. Also, understanding where you can create value or you can derive value that others don't. So this is something that I think about from a talent perspective. It's also something that I think about when people are working with me on mergers and acquisitions and thinking about buying entire companies.
When you start looking at companies and thinking about acquisitions, one of the questions that I'll often ask is, this company that you're thinking about potentially buying, why is it more valuable overnight in virtue of you being its owner compared to its current owners or compared to other potential buyers out there? That's really the strategic play to understand. This company that I'm going to buy would plug into my ecosystem and these in these ways, and in virtue of fitting into that ecosystem, this asset becomes more valuable as opposed to this company generates a certain annual recurring revenue. And I put a multiplier on that ARR. And then I come up with a purchase price without thinking about the additional value that comes from bringing it into your ecosystem.
So thinking about what are the needs of your organization and flipping that as well and saying what are the needs of prospective suitors? Be those companies we're thinking about buying or talent that we're thinking about hiring, what does their need profile look such that being hired by us or being purchased by actually creates more value for them as well compared to being hired by someone else or purchased by somebody else, because that gives you more surface area to work with in terms of negotiations.
Cultural Fingerprints Over Generic "Good Culture"
Isaac Koenig-Workman: I think that speaks as well to organizational culture. Also with strategy, it's not just about strategy. If someone really wants to work at a certain place, they might take that salary cut. Because of the work culture itself, I think that's something we're seeing more within our own generation or what people are looking for at work nowadays. It's not just about money. It's about what we're doing at work and how we feel at work. And if we can really be ourselves. I think it's a really difficult thing to pull off. A lot of companies are trying to do it. But I think as someone who's been looking at work and when you have, say, an experience where the culture really doesn't align with your value system, regardless of the money you're making, how do you advise leaders to develop those narratives? It has the emotional side that includes the work culture, but it still makes sense with the rational side of these numbers.
Brooke: Yeah. So one of the things that I think is a bit of a trap here is these lists of the best workplace cultures and asking whether a culture is better or worse in one place compared to another. Because what that does is it just levels off all difference into just one scalar variable. The only question is whether you're better or worse. And there's no deeper conversation about for whom are we a better fit. When we say that a culture is better or worse and we level off that difference, we also level off all the difference in prospective employees. We think that we start to act as though all employees have the same kinds of desires, that they're all looking for the same kind of culture. One of the most valuable unlocks is to just get past that and to say, we're not looking to build a good culture or an excellent culture or an amazing culture. It's to look at the fingerprint of what is the culture that we want to create.
And along with that, the mirror image is what is the kind of candidate who will be really attracted to that. And that way we can find these opportunities, these diamonds in the rough where we say, well, this talent that's prospectively available to us. There's this handful of people who are really, really incredible in this pool, and we are going to be able to win disproportionately with that talent pool because they're such a strong match for our culture. Not just because culture in this blanketed way is important to them and our culture is good, but because there is a specific cultural fingerprint that they are looking for, and that's what it is that we have to offer.
Isaac Koenig-Workman: How do you think we identify that fingerprint when it's unique for everyone now, maybe more as unique than ever. There's a lot of different cultural and, let's say, workplace fingerprints. How can we find that as organizations when everyone's needs and identities have so much variety now?
Brooke: Yeah, well, one of the things that we can do is just start not from the demand side, but from the supply side. Even just taking a hard look in the mirror and asking, what is the culture that we currently have? What have we traditionally done well for our teams, for our clients, for the communities that we work in? And what are the missed opportunities? Where are those moments where we miss the boat in terms of leaning into the best versions of ourselves? And that's a good balance between these stories about our organizational past and our organizational future.
I think a lot of culture exercises can stumble when they become either entirely descriptive of just this is what we are and what we do and how we do it, and they're simply cataloging what is already the case, or on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, aspirational strategy or normative strategy, where we say, this is what we ought to be, this is where we're going. If we don't have a balance of those things, either we do a good job taking a snapshot of our current culture, but it doesn't end up being a lever for change. It's not bringing us anywhere. Or we have this great North Star, this great aspiration that we've articulated, but there's no connection back to where we are now and how it is that we can go from where we are to where we want to be.
So starting there and taking that inventory of what is our culture, our past, our present, and our future, that's a really helpful way to say, okay, now I know where to start this conversation. If this is what our culture currently looks and the trajectory that it's on, then I can ask the question, who are the kinds of people who are going to resonate strongly with that strategy? Who are the people for whom, the prospective employees for whom that culture is going to create disproportionately more value than just any old person that I might pick out at random from a pool of candidates.
Implementation Over Optimization
Isaac Koenig-Workman: And I think tying everything together here as we wrap up this speaks to this balance that's so hard to strike between the messy, emotional, uncertain side and then this rational, measurable side that we speak to. Bringing in the behavioural science note. How do you think, from a behavioural science perspective and trying to be evidence based, we can forget about that sometimes and we just have to look at the emotional side when we look at the decision making for organizations.
Brooke: Yeah, that's a great question. And really that gets to the crux of what it is that I'm trying to do with Converge. I take this very facilitative, engaged, experiential approach to helping leadership teams to come together and make decisions as a group, specifically because the evidence demonstrates that when groups reach decisions together, they're just much, much more committed to seeing those decisions through.
And so the approach that I take is really oriented towards a decision that is strong but not necessarily totally optimized, but gets implemented, is a superior decision to one that is methodologically and factually optimized, but around which there is no alignment and that doesn't have sufficient backing internally for it to actually see the light of day.
I've seen lots and lots of optimization exercises that reach great solutions, great conclusions that ultimately don't get off the page into real life. And far fewer times have I seen the opposite happen where we take a methodologically well informed approach, but really focus on the messy human stuff first and arrive at something that is worth implementing but is actually just a bad idea.
Isaac Koenig-Workman: Well, perhaps for our listeners out there, if you are interested in that messy human side, go and chat to Brooke or us at the Decision Lab here. This has been No Easy Choices. Thank you so much Brooke for coming back to the Decision Lab for this conversation. We're so happy to have you be a part of this.
Brooke: Yeah, for sure. Pleasure to be here.
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