Psychologist Alison Gopnik has pointed out that “young brains are designed to explore; old brains are designed to exploit.” In a prior article we wrote about the distinction between exploring and exploiting as business strategies. Established businesses seek to exploit the market they have developed whereas explorers are the innovators seeking to uncover new ground. Explorers are like children in that they’re wired to be curious and to touch and explore anything and everything. Exploiters are like those of us that may be a bit older and set in our ways. We comfortably cling to our routines and stay closer to home. Exploring to the elderly may be trying a new restaurant or, more likely, going to the same restaurant at a slightly different time than usual. The young need novelty more than the old do.
Our businesses live on borrowed time where our strategic decisions are made based on exploiting. Henry Ford is credited with suggesting, “Businessmen go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change.” Demise is no prize and death by serving the status quo is no way to go. Gary Hamel put it another way writing, “The single biggest reason businesses fail is that they overinvest in what is.” Having found success in a market, it’s natural to cling to the strategy that has proven itself. Unfortunately, this leads to what has been referred to the NIH syndrome or “Not Invented Here” syndrome. It shuts down consideration of ideas that come from outside the organization. The organization knows what’s what, it has the balance sheet and income statements to prove it. As undeniable as a past track record of success may be, as the disclaimers on investment prospectuses warn us, past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Exploiters happily act in accord with axioms, whereas, explorers axe axioms.
Robert Greene and Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent) wrote The 50th Law. In it, they note, “In any venture, people quickly create rules and conventions that must be followed. This is often necessary to instill some discipline and order. But most often these rules and conventions are arbitrary—they are based on something that was successful in the past but might have little relevance to the present. They are often instruments for those in power to maintain their grip and keep the group unified. If this goes on long enough, they become stultifying and crowd out any new ways for doing things. In such a situation, what is called for is the total destruction of these dead conventions, creating space for something new.”
The jazz artist, Miles Davis, noticed that established and older musicians became set in their ways. He observed, “The old musicians stay where they are and become like museum pieces under glass, safe, easy to understand, playing that tired old sh!t over and over again. … Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn’t about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.” Writing of Davis in The 50th Law, Greene and Jackson note, “In general, you must be less respectful of the rules that other people have established. They do not necessarily fit the times or your temperament. And there is great power to be had by being the one to initiate a new order.”
In the biography of UFC legend Michael Bisping, Quitters Never Win, he recounts a story told to him by an eye specialist as he navigated his way back to fighting after suffering a detached retina. “’Michael,’ the doctor added, ‘my father always said to me there are two types of people who live in the jungle. The first are the kind who go steadily when they’re swinging through the trees; these people don’t let go of one vine until they have a firm grip on the next. That’s safe, that’s very practical. But it may not get them to where they want to be in life before it is too late. Then there’s the second type, the ones who swing as fast as they can go, letting go of one vine and stretching as hard as they can for the next. These people aren’t as safe but they just might get to where they want to be in life. Something tells me that you are very much the second type of person in the jungle.’” This second group are throwing themselves out there leaving security and grasping for an uncertain future. They reflect the explorative nature noted by Andre Gide who wrote, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.”
The two jungle types capture our exploiters and explorers. Maybe our tendency to explore or exploit is part of our personality? The novelist Jean Rhys believed this noting, “One is born either to go with or to go against.” Researcher of high performance across domains, Anders Ericsson, too, shares the view of a leaning to exploiting or exploring being inborn on some level. In Peak, Ericsson writes, “That’s how it always is. The creative, the restless, and the driven are not content with the status quo, and they look for ways to move forward, to do things that others have not.” Novelty is a necessity for some. John D. Rockefeller agreed. He suggested, “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.” To find excellence we must leave the path paved by others. We can look at and learn from others, but at some point, we must leap into new territory if we have hope to lead.
With respect to individuals, we’re often encouraged to specialize to advance. From elementary school forward, we’re told that to be good at something we need to focus our full attention and efforts in that direction. We see progress towards excellence in an area as a steady, plodding, linear pathway with the occasional plateau. We’re urged to put in our 10,000 hours in a single field. Each day or year we delay, we put ourselves further behind, making catching up difficult or even impossible. Author, David Epstein, writes in Range how this approach is wrong headed. His observations suggest the road map to success for many is a much muddier one. Success is stumbled upon through exploring different, unrelated fields. Epstein suggests individuals sample from a broad range of disciplines taking detours into unrelated areas of interest while being open to experimenting leads to developing skills and forging a path into new areas. Epstein’s research supports that fields that are complex or unpredictable (which tend to be more and more of those that are succeeding in the current economic climate) reward those individuals that are more generalist than specialist. Following the established path can only take one so far. It also puts them amongst the masses making standing out difficult. To differentiate when everyone knows the same script and is wearing the same costume is tough.
To become better at exploring on an individual basis we must learn that we’re continuously a work in progress. Nothing about us is set in stone. We should work to see our skills and character as continuously capable of change. Adopt the perspective offered by Jay Samit writing in Disrupt You! “To stay relevant, you must keep your career in permanent beta. That means committing to a lifetime of learning and professional growth.” A hundred years earlier, Ralph Waldo Emerson encouraged us to consider that “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” Exploring is where improvements are found.
Generalists may be able to generate new insights more so than specialists. Specialization leads to an exploiting mentality and an investment in the status quo. Generalists may be messier but more likely to stumble across opportunities for innovation. Explorers happily collaborate with others that are curious to brainstorm solutions. Explorers, too, tend to lean to being self-taught. They’re happy figuring things out on their own. In a podcast with David Perell, researcher Joe Henrich noted, “What innovators shared was a tenacity, an ‘improving mentality,’ social connections with other innovators (often via a knowledge society), and usually a bit of luck.”
To the end of embracing our inner explorer, some tactics to try include seeking inputs from a variety of sources. Consider looking outside of your own industry for ideas as opposed to spending time looking over your shoulder at competitors. Encourage exploring by enticing others to do the opposite of NIH. Proactively seek ideas from outsiders to consider. Ideally, look and learn from other industries to come up with things to explore in your own industry. Jim Collins in BE 2.0 suggests “an employee swap.” Find a company that seems to be doing well in an unrelated industry, seek to send one of your employees to work there while they send one of theirs to work with your organization. Insights may flow from what the transplanted employee sees or knows. Someone from outside your sandbox may see things that those playing in the sandbox daily don’t. Fresh eyes may find solutions to old problems.
Consider subscribing to a wide range of publications across industries and ideas so that staff see the value of a plethora of perspectives in terms of seeking strategic direction. Go further and encourage staff-driven education initiatives that have nothing to do with your current business. Finally, invite input from customers. Users may have needs or insights using your product and services that you’ve never considered.
Exploiting is worthwhile. It just can’t be done in perpetuity. As management guru Philip Kotler noted, “Long term is NOT about performance improvement. It is about forgetting the past and reshaping the business to compete more effectively in the future.” Exploiting helps extract the fruits of a current system. Set aside some of the fruits harvested from exploiting to explore. Exploring is about uncovering what’s next. Exploring, too, offers the potential for improvement. However, it can’t be relied upon as an exclusive strategy. A strategy built around one or the other of exploit or explore isn’t likely to be successful. Both are essential elements to a long-term strategy.
