Have you ever spoken with a well-respected senior executive, and questioned what you were hearing? Have you felt uncomfortable when that executive gets to the inevitable sequence of false certainties, where they proclaim something like: “We’re different! We know our business! We know our customers! We know what we are doing!” and thought that most of this is probably completely wrong? You know it, everybody around the table knows it, but no one is saying anything to challenge these assertions. Frightening, isn’t it? What is happening is that you are living in a Zombie idea moment! An old idea, or belief, has come back from the dead, and has captured the decision-making process of this organization, possibly even threatening its continued relevance as an important player in its industry.
Zombie Ideas
Few people, today, boast about not being in a fast-moving industry. It seems as if everyone speaks about how rapidly their business environment is changing, but what about the ideas, beliefs and assumptions that guide their decision-making? Are they being refreshed in time to keep-up with the changes, or are these same people relying on ideas well-past their expiration dates; familiar, but fading in potency; maybe even dangerous? The term for such ideas, coined by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in a 2007 New York Times blog, is zombie ideas. This term later became the title of a book Krugman authored in 2020, entitled Arguing with Zombies, which suggests that there are ideas that never die, but continue to undermine leaders who rely upon them, without realizing that such outdated thinking can bedevil any new choices an organization is considering.
Zombie ideas are everywhere. Take, for example, such long-held notions such as “keep doing, what you’re doing, we can work our way out of this;” or “the people at the top know what’s going on;” we see it even in the reliance on more meetings as the universal solvent for any problem: “let’s convene another meeting to address this.” Each of these beliefs undoubtedly worked in the past, but their continued utility in a fast-moving world is questionable. Yet, they never disappear, just like the living dead; and, we all know that nothing good is going to come from hanging around with the living dead!
Zombie ideas are not a new phenomenon. John Maynard Keynes wrote about such ideas in 1936, in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, when he observed: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Such ideas are hiding everywhere; typically embedded in “the way we do things around here.” They are familiar, comfortable, and all too often relied upon without any thought given to their continued appropriateness in a fast-changing world. As a result, they haunt our organizations, playing havoc with decision-making outcomes.
Drucker Forum panel on Zombie Ideas
Earlier this month, at the Sixteenth Global Peter Drucker Forum, in Vienna, a panel was convened to discuss such Zombie ideas. The panelists included: Michèle Zanini, co-author of Humanocracy, and co-founder of Management Lab; Tammy Erickson, a prolific leadership scholar, who directs the London Business School’s Leading Business into the Future program; Lenka Pincot, the Project Management Institute’s Chief of Staff to the CEO, and organization transformation veteran; and Robin Speculand, CEO of Singapore-based Bridges Consultancy, and co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute, who has chronicled the transformation of Singapore’s DBS bank. The author of the piece you are reading now, was the panel’s moderator.
The major take-aways from that panel include:
- Zombie ideas really are everywhere, and they are abundant! Our Drucker Forum audience had no problem identifying many, and describing their stultifying affect on their own organizations. They exist wherever, within an organization, it is difficult for employees to challenge the logic underlying leadership decisions. This was, in fact, a point repeatedly made by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson throughout the Forum.
- These zombie ideas appear in the guise of old friends; insights, beliefs, practices and behaviors that are familiar, comfortable, and require little effort to slip into. Thoughts that once had mantra-like status, such as “time is money,” or “simplicity always beats complexity,” are simply no longer fit for today’s knowledge-intensive organizations, or their highly nuanced customer experiences; yet, somehow, they live on. Vivid evidence of diminishing respect for the well-known adage that “faster is better” has been highlighted, this month, in the current issue of Think:Act magazine (issue 43), which is subtitled Take your time.
- Today’s leader accepts at their peril the waning distinction between long-run and short-run range categorizations in a fast-moving world; or a reliance upon planning and strategy over culture in markets were the future can only be sensed as you move through it.
- The seemingly never-ending arguments between the virtues of top-down versus bottom-up change, which continues to be a bone of managerial discussion, is often a false dichotomy when bottom-up influence is not easily possible without enlightened top-down encouragement.
The loss of relevance accompanying the persistence of such zombie ideas, many of which serve as articles of faith in leadership discussions, is a warning signal that we need to be much more vigilant in outing these zombies before they result in choices that no longer reflect contemporary realities. A vivid example of this was heard elsewhere at the Forum, when IMD professor Howard Yu argued that “bigness is no longer reliable as a guarantor of business success;” yet how often do we still see “scale” as the centerpiece of new strategy?
How to Combat Zombie Ideas
Combating Zombie ideas was identified by our panel as an essential task for organizations seeking to move into the future. In the past, great leaders built organizations that were optimized for what was important; and while the most important work was done well, everything else was consigned to the periphery of the organization’s life. Today, with the unknown characterizing much more of an organization’s future, this no longer works. Change now originates on “the edges” of both an industry, and the organizations within it, and knowing what is important, and what is not, is no longer an easy assessment. In addition, the diminished clarity of “end goals” are increasingly succumbing to the ad hoc finessing of an “infinite” journey where hopes for sustained relevance makes speaking of any specific “end” seem inappropriate. As a result, most of the examples of confronting zombie ideas that the panel discussed were more about the “hows” more than “whats.” These included:
- Challenges to zombie ideas require sufficient literacy with emerging leadership trends, so that a recognition of aging management approaches can be relied upon;
- Organizations should create new “informal” roles to call-out the presence of zombie ideas;
- It is important for an organization to encourage an “obligation to dissent” whenever anyone senses that Zombie ideas are in play and distracting the organization from a better outcome; “why are we doing this?” should be a common refrain heard throughout any organization;
- Organizations must provide assurances that any dissenter will be protected; even when it turns out that they were mistaken in challenging an idea as being zombie-like;
- Let’s abandon the notion of any one person, or group, “owning” important projects. Ownership gives you control, but not agility. More diversity in a work-group is a first defense against unchallenged group-think for routing-out zombie ideas.
After-Forum Thoughts
In a recent Bloomberg opinion piece, Adrian Wooldridge refers to the zombie ideas panel at the Drucker Forum, and argues that identifying zombie ideas is not necessarily easy. Pointing to Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management as being a quintessential source of ideas past their prime, he also acknowledges that more humanistic management approaches, that have been turned to in response, have also not been perfect, either. His conclusion is that “…soft management of knowledge workers can only work if it is coupled with a bit of “hard” management.” In effect, one zombie approach versus another might balance out the dangers of either? Wooldridge also ventured that JFK’s nineteen-sixties space program excelled in “harnessing enthusiasm on a big scale;” combining ambition with goal-specificity. Once again, mixing two, presumably contrary, approaches to reach a more balanced, yet inspiring, outcome.
Ironically, zombie ideas can also be associated with another dubious idea, that of “thought leadership,” whenever the credibility of that title is not refreshed. Paul Bowers has argued on Medium that “great thoughts do not create great action across all contexts,” and cautions of being misled by such static labels applied in dynamic contexts: once a “thought-leader,” does not necessarily make one always a “thought-leader.”