The Complexity of Human Behaviour with Margaret Heffernan

In this episode I sit down with author, entrepreneur and thought-leader Margaret Heffernan to explore two of her seminal ideas: the hidden dangers of conforming to systems that blind us to obvious truths (from her book Willful Blindness) and the vital importance of embracing uncertainty, especially through the lens of writers, artists and creatives (from her latest work Embracing Uncertainty).

 We talk about how organisations and individuals get stuck in the comfort of predictability, why innovation is not merely incremental improvement, what creative people can teach business leaders about sensing the future and navigating chaos, and the critical role of agency, curiosity and courage even when outcomes are uncertain. 

It’s a conversation designed for senior leaders, coaches, team-effectiveness practitioners and anyone who wants to see beyond the status quo. 

 00:00 Introduction & technical note
 02:15 Who is Margaret Heffernan: career, context and influences
 08:45 Exploring Willful Blindness: what it means, in business and culture
17:20 Why systems and institutions encourage willful blindness
23:30 The trigger for the next book: from Uncharted to Embracing Uncertainty
29:08 Join to second recording – framing the shift to artists, music, creativity
31:00 What does “embracing uncertainty” really mean in today’s world
38:40 COVID, anticipation and why the future unsettled so many organisations
45:50 Creatives, artists and the ability to sense the future ahead of others
52:12 Divergent thinking vs incremental improvement: defining “innovation”
56:22 Leadership and agency when certainty is not possible
01:03:15 How context, character and culture interact in enabling creative agency
01:10:00 Practical take-aways for senior leaders and coaches
01:15:30 Closing thoughts: system change, individual mindsets, human skills 

To find out more about Guy Bloom and his award winning work in Team Coaching, Leadership Development and Executive Coaching click below.

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Transcript

Guy Bloom (00:21)
Hi, so I had the rather marvellous Margaret Heffernham on the podcast. Now we had a little bit of a technical issue so we did two recordings and it happened again where unfortunately we lost the back end of the interview. So I've decided to put the two recordings together and I think they work actually very well so rather than two separate episodes which would have been absolutely fabulous we ended up with one pretty good one.

On the first half of the podcast we talk about willful blindness, which is a great concept and set of thinking from Margaret and then her most recent book, Embracing Uncertainty. So you may or may not have even spotted the join, but ⁓ I know it's there, so I've got to just kind of mention it. Enjoy the podcast and...

let me know what you think about it but Margaret really is a huge personality, a fantastic intellect and incredibly well thought through. So enjoy!

Guy Bloom (29:08)
So Margaret, we are reconnecting to continue our conversation. We spent a good portion of our last conversation speaking about your book, Wilful Blindness. And just having spent quite a bit of time talking about Wilful Blindness, I just want to segue us into talking about embracing uncertainty, which I've actually got some notes on as well. So.

Margaret Heffernan (29:36)
Excellent.

Guy Bloom (29:38)
which is always a good start. So embracing uncertainty, how writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world. So very excited to talk to you about that. I've got quite a few questions. One of them is slightly embarrassing because I think you're, when I ask you, you're gonna go, old guy, what's wrong with you?

But ⁓ so one's a point of clarity because I've read it three or four times and I'm not sure I understand the difference and I looked something up using the old Google and I thought that's what I thought it meant. But very often there's a vernacular term and then there's a kind of a more kind of used term by people that actually know what they're talking about. So let's just let me let me get into that very first question. I don't need to introduce you because we've already done that. Is

Margaret Heffernan (30:03)
Ha ha ha!

Okay.

Guy Bloom (30:32)
I guess when you look at Willful Blindness, that's a book that kind of, ⁓ again, well covered, what was the catalyst that led you into embracing uncertainty? And in particular, I guess, through that lens of writers, musicians and artists, and not just the inherent topic of embracing uncertainty.

Margaret Heffernan (31:00)
Right. So a couple of things. The first is in 2020, I brought out a book called Uncharted, How to Map the Future. And that looked at the unpredictability of life. It looked at uncertainty, the differences between uncertainty and risk, and how in the face of increasing unpredictability in the world, for all the reasons that I explore in that book,

I then asked the question, ⁓ well, how can we deal with it? What's changed? What do we need to change in order to deal with a world that's more uncertain than it used to be? And ⁓ I think a lot of people frankly thought I was crazy that actually with enough data you could predict everything. ⁓ As it happened, the book came out the same month this lockdown started and people suddenly got the idea that some things are unpredictable.

So if you like the COVID sort of ⁓ won my argument for me and the book went on to do very well. And ⁓ so after that, as I went around to lots and lots of organizations talking about the need for greater creativity, higher levels of experimentation, a better understanding of how innovation and creativity actually function. One of the things I kept hearing was,

But we understand that intellectually, but our people aren't very good at it. They all want instruction. They want handholding. They want banisters. They want ⁓ incentives. They want key performance indicators. They want all the mumbo jumbo of performance management. And ⁓ we don't know how to do that. We don't really want to feed that. We want them to have more initiative and more agency.

So that was one point that really, really stuck in my head, because I heard this in big companies and small companies and British companies and American companies. So I thought this is a real problem. The other thing that made me think about was the first 15 years of my career, I spent ⁓ working with writers, ⁓ artists, musicians, poets, painters, actors, directors.

And one of the things that struck me then and continued to strike me was that this group of people have an uncanny ability to sort of sense the future before it arrives. And I guess the sort of most classic example of that in the UK was when House of Cards very famously had its first episode broadcast on the day that Thatcher fell from power.

And I mean, was an astonishing broadcasting coup, but having worked in television, what I knew was that that series had started development and then production three years before that. And Mark Stivers, who was the producer, he had a kind of track record of doing this, as did a number of other very talented producers at the BBC. And then I started thinking about

other artists who just seemed to have a better sense of what's going on in the world. And I thought a lot about my theatre going in the 70s and 80s where really a lot of theatre was holding up a mirror to the future. It was quite political. It was some of the greatest writing in 20th century theatre. And I thought, there's something going on here. And you can also point to something like Margaret Atwood.

her great success with Handmaid's Tale in the last few years where in fact, the book was over 20 years old. So she had sensed this from a very long way back. And so I got very curious about how do they do that? What is it about the way that they live, the way that they approach life that gives them a better instinct for where we're going?

And is that something we might be able to at least get better at? Maybe not with the incredible instinct of an Atwood or a Shivas, but could we start to be more in touch with the world and therefore less phased by some of the things that seem to catch us by surprise? And I guess the last part of my answer is...

Willful blindness came out kind of just before people started thinking that while there seems to be a lot of something around and they didn't have a name for it, the name turned out to be willful blindness. I wrote a book in 2015 called A Bigger Prize which was about the downsides of deeply competitive cultures, a book that I think has roared into relevance in the last couple of years.

Uncharted, you know, I started writing in 2017, in 2020, the COVID pandemic really proved my case. And so I just became interested in why some people seem to have a better instinct for what's going on. And you can see this in these art forms that often take quite a long time to produce.

And my contention when I started and my contention with it now is that there's a lot in this that we could all learn from. We're all born creative. We're all born curious. Creativity and curiosity are really fundamental building blocks of agency. They're always part of innovation. But we've both developed an education system and a way of managing people.

that I think pretty much kills that stone dead. And we think it makes it easier and it makes the world more predictable. And I think I've now come to the conclusion, actually it makes us less able to deal with the world that we've designed for ourselves. We are so wedded to knowing the time of our destination before we even leave home. So astonished when it turns out that the GPS estimate wasn't correct.

so astonished when our plans don't go according to plan. And because we become so wedded to this predictability, when all of that goes wrong, we're totally thrown and don't know what to do. And so in many ways, Embracing Uncertainty is a very positive book saying, actually, you do have the capacity to deal with this. And not only is it going to make you better able to deal with uncertainty, it's also probably going to improve your mental health.

It's certainly going to improve your creative and critical thinking. And without those things, we really are in trouble.

Guy Bloom (38:28)
Yeah, there's quite a lot there. First of all, with Encharted, have you gone back and wrote at the end as a version? Have you sort of gone and COVID proved my point? I rest my case, Your Honor. Did you? You can go back and put that at the end.

Margaret Heffernan (38:40)
Well, the publishers did

ask me to write a second edition, and so I added an extra chapter at the end talking about exactly that. I mean, for one thing, know, Theresa May's government had shut down the National Office for Epidemic Preparedness.

because they wanted the resources to deal with Brexit. That turned out to be a really bad decision. On the other hand, the Wellcome Trust, which is one of the biggest funders of medical research in the world, in 2017 started developing vaccine platforms for diseases that they thought had epidemic potential. So that's a really great decision.

⁓ So it's not that we couldn't have seen COVID coming and it's not in fact that some people didn't. It's that ⁓ various governments chose not to prepare for it on the grounds that, well, if it's going to happen, we'll see it and good enough time we can scramble. And obviously that proved to be a fatal error.

Guy Bloom (39:57)
So on this topic of uncertainty, I was just making some notes. So these aren't the most robust and sequential thoughts, but bear with me as we shoot at them. I just wrote down, do they have a better sense or more of an expectation? So when I was thinking about artists and musicians, if I think about context and maybe character,

Margaret Heffernan (40:05)
Okay.

Guy Bloom (40:25)
the context that you're in, i.e. you're in a business context, versus let's say you're a comedian, right? So I love watching comedians and I see comedians as the last vanguard of reflecting societal reality like the court jester, you know, being before being able to say things because that's kind of the role. Now, is it that actually the people that go into that space

Margaret Heffernan (40:34)
huh.

huh.

Guy Bloom (40:53)
are characteristically and inherently like that and therefore, you know, they wouldn't go into probably more of a business space and if they did, the chances are they might find it very difficult. So people that care and maybe have a greater capacity with empathy probably go maybe into more caring professions. So I'm wondering a little bit about inherent characteristics and

Margaret Heffernan (40:56)
Hmm.

Guy Bloom (41:18)
context that either sets the expectation for a certain set of behaviors or by its own internal systems prevents that kind of innovation or that fear of failure because rules, because we want predictability, with predictability comes a lack of capability for innovation because by definition how can you innovate?

Margaret Heffernan (41:29)
I'm not sure.

Guy Bloom (41:41)
Predictably, you know, I mean to a point you probably etc etc So I'm just interested in just that I don't think that's even a question really other than that context versus characteristic and maybe just your thoughts on that from When you hear me say it

Margaret Heffernan (41:42)
Right. Exactly.

Yeah.

I think that, ⁓ well, it's probably true that some people grow up with a capacity and enjoyment of divergent thinking. ⁓ I'm not sure they're born that way any more than other people. ⁓ And I don't think context answers everything, which is to say, you know, when I worked in the tech industry, I had a chief creative officer.

⁓ You know, we were funded by ⁓ Venture Capital. I would say many of the other companies that had the same funding had a very different culture than ours. But my Chief Creative Officer, I think, had the greatest sense of zeitgeist of anybody I've ever worked with in my life. ⁓ And that's in an industry which is very focused on fast returns. So I think...

I think you can find, and I often do find, unbelievably creative people inside organizations that do not look intrinsically creative or supportive of creativity. So in your framework, that would mean that that's just their character and somehow the institution hasn't beaten it out of them. ⁓ I think one of my main arguments in Willful Blindness

is that if you work people long enough hours, if you make the culture too homogenous, if you have a very rigid sense of how the world works, so what Alan Greenspan would call an ideology, if you're inherently a very obedient and conformist person, then you are very, very, very likely to be willfully blind. In other words, you are going to go with the crowd.

and the institutional structures like performance management and KPIs and cash related incentives will ensure that you do. That's what they're there for. They want you to see what everybody else sees and they're profoundly disincentivizing of divergent thinking, which is why it's willful, right? Because it is willfully imposed on institutions in the mistaken belief that they're efficient.

⁓ I think there's another piece to this though, which is that though I spent many years working in one very large institution, ⁓ which I think was mostly free of those concerns, but I also think I've worked with people who, they may work in universities, very big institutions with mountains of bureaucracy.

And yet some of them stay very, very, very creative, very capable of thinking for themselves. And it isn't that they're kind of wild, woolly creatures, but they spend their time differently. They're more likely to think it would be fun to walk to the office a different way than to think, well, I always walk this way. If I always walk this way, I should always walk this way. Or I've already mapped it out that it's the most efficient way.

They have incredible curiosity. know, gee, I've walked to work for the last three years and I've never gone down that street. I wonder what's down there. Why? Why not? Right? They're more likely to strike up conversations with strangers on the train or on the tube. They're more likely, like my daughter, to overhear conversations and tune into them.

Guy Bloom (45:36)
Mm-mm.

Margaret Heffernan (45:51)
because they're curious about who's here, what's happening outside, what's going on in the wall. ⁓ They're much broader readers. They won't just read the bestsellers. So they are very independent in their choice of how to live, where to go, what to look at, what to eat. And what they don't do is what, you know, and I write this in the book.

the super, they don't do what the super efficient traveler does, which is research everything from the hotel to the flight to the restaurants to the galleries to the guided tours to within an inch of their lives so that actually by the time they've researched the trip they scarcely need to go at all. What those highly efficient people are doing is actively

planning uncertainty out of their trip because they don't want anything to go wrong which means that the best thing that's going to happen is they see nothing that surprises them. So what's the point of travel? There's no discovery, there's no exploration, it's all planned out and mapped out in advance. Whereas you you talk to almost anybody about their holiday and what do they talk about?

the couple they just happen to meet sitting at the table next to them or at a little restaurant they discovered by accident that nobody ever heard of. So they're so driven to be efficient that they cannot be creative.

Guy Bloom (47:32)
interested in efficiency and safe safety because they're not necessary I mean the my efficiency allows me to be safe but also they they may be slightly different things but there's a safety mechanism in there which goes back to that observation of if you are inherently more submissive you're probably inherently looking for safety but you could in essence

Margaret Heffernan (47:35)
Yeah.

Guy Bloom (48:00)
do something that may not be safe, as in I'm travelling to quite a complex environment or whatever, but through a high level of preparation I'm mitigating risk.

Margaret Heffernan (48:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Guy Bloom (48:11)
So

again, I have that sense of that, which is maybe the difference between innovation and divergency. And again, I love having these conversations with you because I have an understanding of a word until you tell me, maybe think about it differently, which is innovation for me is relatively safe.

But it's, and I could be at work and I go, actually, you know, this Excel spreadsheet, we've always had column three there. Why don't we move it to column five? Or, you know, that would make it easier. And everybody goes, blimmin' heck, yes. Now, it's innovation. I mean, it's not inventing, ⁓ you know, the new Dyson vacuum cleaner, but it's still innovation contextually and probably no better or worse because nobody else has done it before. You have an inspirational flash and also you either have the...

ecological safety to offer it into the environment because the environment welcomes it and Or you have the inherent confidence to offer it regardless, and it's taken on board. That's innovation Divergency and maybe diversion innovation would be

Right, well this is going to rock the boat. This is going to burn the bonfire to the ground. But it's innovation, but it's divergent thinking. And maybe I'm explaining myself because maybe the language isn't quite right, but in my mind that's how I talk about it. And I wonder if there's two elements of that, the safe version of innovation through preparation and the willingness for the house to burn down, metaphorically. Because actually it's something, you

Margaret Heffernan (49:26)
huh.

Roll out.

Guy Bloom (49:47)
revolutionary.

Margaret Heffernan (49:48)
Yeah, well I would say the first thing is just sort of incremental improvement, which happens a lot. It's lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of marginal gains. And we know that if you have a process for that, Toyota's favorite, famous for it of course, ⁓ then things do get better slowly but surely over time. I wouldn't call it innovation particularly, I would just call it improvement. ⁓

I think the really divergent thinking is capable of bringing a whole new way of seeing something that others didn't necessarily see before. And that's what I would call genuine innovation. And if you look at companies that are very famous, justifiably famous for their innovation, they do this all the time.

So they're accepting of the risk. They recognize that many of the things that they try will fail. Or they recognize that they may fail but be useful later. So this is true of a lot of innovation at 3M, for example. People always used to be puzzled by how could 3M invent such new products so fast? And when I dug into it, I discovered that actually they don't do it very fast.

They try stuff, and when it doesn't work, they ask why. So what would have to change in the market for this to be a fabulous product? So they're very alert to context, and they do very deep debriefs. And quite often, they're just two, three, five years ahead of the market. But because they've done the debrief, they remember that they have this half-baked product.

that's sort of in the freezer, as it were, and they can pull it out, warm it up, and get it to market faster than anybody else. And they have such a reputation for doing that, that they recognize that even though it's not gonna be true of all of them, it's true of enough of them that it's worth doing them on a pretty routine basis. So it's making pretty good bets, but very much not obvious bets.

Guy Bloom (52:12)
And then there would be something about if we have an environment where.

the trying, mean obviously competence and skill has to be present as well, an element of in the attempt there will be failure. But if you've ever run an exercise with a team, there are many exercises where the only way they really solve it is by everybody having an opinion and everybody bouncing off each other and they quickly get to a solution. Even though some really said something a bit daft, it was a trigger for somebody else going, not that, but this.

Margaret Heffernan (52:25)
huh.

Guy Bloom (52:46)
and then it bounces

Margaret Heffernan (52:46)
Exactly.

Guy Bloom (52:48)
you to the end goal. So in some respects if we make a thing and hmm you know we want the best glue available. Right well what's that one? that's the glue that's bloody useless because it never actually sets. ⁓ and then somebody else goes well why don't we stick it on some notes and we're trying to make the best glue in the world we end up making technically the worst glue in the world but...

Margaret Heffernan (53:12)
Right, but

finding a use for it.

Guy Bloom (53:14)
somebody

else goes well why don't you put it on these then so it's this ability to have failure and then the ability to suggest something that nobody's ever thought of in an environment that goes and that would help us have this ongoing narrative about our ability to invent and go how do you do it well actually it's it's cultural it's etc etc

Margaret Heffernan (53:38)
Yeah,

and I don't think this is very different from ⁓ the director Thomas Ostermeyer thinking, you know what, I think right now is the perfect moment to do checkoffs, play the seat off.

And I remember going to see that and thinking, well, I saw the seagull years ago. Why are they doing it now? I don't know. And by the time I left, I knew exactly why they were doing it. I mean, he had just seen in that play, a play I'd never seen. Maybe Chekhov never saw it either, but my God, it was a revelation. And it felt like it had been written 30 minutes before it started. I mean, it just rippled with relevance. So it's the capacity to take something like that

and brush it off and suddenly see, is this exactly what we want to see right now? But I think there's another really important point implicit in what you were saying, which is there are very, very, very many things in life that you cannot think your way to the answer for. So am I going to like swimming if I've never been swimming before?

Well, I can think about, do I have a fear of water? No. I can think about, I like being in the bathtub. I can think about, the ocean looks pretty. But there's no way I will know if I'll like it without doing it. There's no way to know if I can write a book without trying. There's no way I can figure out how to walk from

here to the next village, and I do that without going on the main road. I can think about it, I can even look at maps, but actually whether or not I'm going to be able to ⁓ get over that hedge or not, I don't know. And what concerns me, and one of the drivers behind the book was what I see everywhere, and I saw this particularly in a group of CEOs I was working with last week.

Nobody wants to take a decision unless there's a guarantee that it's right. And I got a little ⁓ energetic, shall we say, in saying, you guys are supposed to be leaders. What you're really wanting to be is super followers. If you need a guarantee of everything before you dare do it, that isn't leadership at all.

Guy Bloom (56:22)
Yes, what's the point of it?

Margaret Heffernan (56:24)
Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, I think I'm interested because I understand their complaint about their workforce lacking agency. But here at the very top of organizations, we are complaining people who are lacking in agency. And I've asked myself quite often the question, why is that? Why do we have people in these very senior roles who

Guy Bloom (56:26)
Mm.

Margaret Heffernan (56:53)
only want to do what is guaranteed to be successful. I mean you could argue they're the wrong people. You could argue that they are now so incentivized to hit the share price perfectly that they cannot think about anything else. But I also think there's a role that technology plays here which is if my GPS can tell me what time I'll reach

school where I was speaking today, for example, if my phone can tell me where my kids are, I get very accustomed to certainty. And I think we have become quite addicted to certainty. I don't want to leave the house until I've seen the weather forecast. I don't want to decide whether to take the bus or drive until I've seen the bus timetable and the GPS estimate.

Guy Bloom (57:35)
you

Margaret Heffernan (57:48)
I mean, all this sort of stuff, you know, I don't want to go to a restaurant unless I've made a reservation. I can't go to the movies unless I book my ticket. I mean, some of this is a hangover from COVID, but we have become absurdly wedded to not just managing our businesses, but managing ourselves like businesses. And I think the consequence of that is a real absence of creativity.

critical thinking and courage. And those are the qualities that right now in the total mess that we find ourselves in, we need more than we have ever needed.

Guy Bloom (58:32)
This is very interesting then, isn't it, as to it becomes more obvious or there's greater clarity as to why you would say writers, musicians and artists. And I think about it through that lens because actually, if I think about, I don't really know a lot about musicians and artists per se. I mean, I like a bit of art and I like a bit of music, but it's not quite the same thing. But I think about my life and...

Margaret Heffernan (58:58)
Bye.

Guy Bloom (59:01)
I'm a martial artist, I like watching comedians, so I go through that lens and I think about martial arts done it all my life. There are two types of martial artists. There are the ones that will only do what they've been told to do by the person that taught them and they will never deviate from that behavior. You could say inverted commas traditional, but they may not even be doing a traditional martial art. They may, well, that's how I was shown it.

And then you have others who are, for the want of a better word, we often, we used to say eclectic, you know, we changed, the words change. But the people that go, well, I was shown this, however I've found, you know, in my experience, and or they will go, and when you're with them, they'll go, would this work?

Margaret Heffernan (59:44)
Yeah.

Guy Bloom (59:51)
And what they'll do, so there's three things. There's the repeating things that clearly work, so why would you mess with them? And innovating something that's incredibly efficient probably isn't gonna help. Then there's this kind of place of the willingness to work with it in the moment and go, well actually you're a bit taller so you may have to do it differently than somebody that's bit shorter. So there's almost like an adaptive innovation.

Margaret Heffernan (59:59)
huh.

⁓

Definitely.

Guy Bloom (1:00:21)
in the moment and then there's the willingness just to say on the mat, we just have half an hour just having a go at some different stuff and see where it takes us? And you can really then tell when you come across those students...

In one organisation, it's obedience to a set pattern. In the other, there's just free movement and chat and conversation. It's a very different... That's a permission-led environment, but it's also a role-modeled environment, because if you went in new in the innovation space and try... Sorry, in the traditional space and try to... Could we just... And why don't we... Well, good luck. because it's...

Margaret Heffernan (1:00:52)
Yeah.

Guy Bloom (1:01:06)
So again, there's lots of truths your inherent character is it being role modeled? Is there a permission to do it? Is there an expectation of it? Are you rewarded for it? Or what are you rewarded for? There's so many little jigsaw pieces that probably allow it to work in totality versus it to work maybe in part. That I kind of I observe I think.

Margaret Heffernan (1:01:21)
Mmm.