The necessary illusion of control

Yesterday I was called by someone from a company we had lengthy discussions with about half a year ago. They have their own vision on innovation and a wonderful set of software tools to support their process of innovation and decision making. We stopped our discussions when it was clear that they were too far ahead of us to match what we both wanted; to support innovation in the Netherlands. Too far ahead doesn’t do it justice, since what we wanted to do didn’t completely match where they were going and they were too far ahead for them to wait for us to catch up to them or take a step back and choose a joined path to explore. No judgment here, I am not talking wrong or right, I am just telling it like I saw it.

I have long wondered why, since the overlap of what we both wanted is great enough to make a joined effort. In our discussion yesterday, something became clear to me. In six months time their vision, concept or processes haven’t changed, but their message has. They are not selling innovation anymore, they are selling solutions. Office optimization, ICT optimization and Business building. How to optimally organize your office (space, enjoyment, privacy, etc.), how to optimize your ICT (costs, function, etc.) and how to pick the right ideas and bring new products and services to market, in other words, build your business. Innovation processes are still the essence of what they do, they just don’t mention it anymore. What they offer is a means to lower and control costs in the three largest cost factors (aside from the pay roll) companies face. Our discussions weren’t beneficial to finding their approach to market, they diffused and confused the issue. They had been there and why go through it again with another party? Especially when some of the things they were doing were having effect! Their processes fed the need for consensus in our society and it worked, so why change? Completely understandable, through their discussions with us, some of their mechanisms for control where questioned (rightly or wrongly isn’t the issue here) and they weren’t prepared to give them up, they had put too much effort into them.

Back to the title. Their company has basically found, through trial and error (though I don’t think they would agree with this classification) a way of offering their customers the illusion of control. Even better, by naming and focusing their solutions and having processes and tools in place to roll them out they have provided themselves an illusion of control as well. This is working! So why do I call this an illusion? Reality drives all events! Their processes can not cover all events, so they can not control reality! People know this, so they had a hard sell talking about innovation from a process point of view. They do not talk about innovation anymore, they do not talk about their processes anymore, they act and by the results prove they are right. They have mystified the means by which they reach results, even to us, they have been secretive to the point of paranoia when it came to their processes and tools; NDA’s came up even before we had discussed anything. Since there are results, they must be right, but are they really offering control or just the means to set up the illusion of it?

I am not trying to demean anything here, because what they do strikes a chord with me that they have found something that works which they are proving with their customers. In positioning it they are just the victim of human nature. Believe is stronger then scientific prove; we are lost without a sense of control. Worse, when we feel out of control, we get physically sick because our immune system starts to work less efficiently. To stay healthy human beings, it is absolutely essential that we have at least the illusion of control over our lives. So here’s to them for having found a way to provide us with that illusion!