Be More Dramatic

When I am building a relationship with a leader I love to ask, "where are you from…and where are you going?" The first one gets a good answer almost every time. People know where they're from, and they like telling it. The second one gets a number. A revenue figure or an exit year. If I ask it again, a few of them can describe the place: what the company looks like when it gets there, who's in the Tuesday meeting and who isn't, what the leader himself is doing all day. Most can't. They have a target and no scene, and the scene is the cheapest risk management they'll ever skip. Imagination is risk management at low cost.

A target is a number you hit or miss. A scene is a place you can walk around in before you get there, and walking around in it is where you find the things that aren't in your model yet. With only the number, you find out what was happening inside the company months late, in the bad years in a quarter that ends with a layoff, and every one of the causes was knowable in March.

Why the number feels safer

The number fits on a slide, everyone can agree to it, and nobody has to say out loud what the Tuesday meeting looks like when the number is missed by 30 percent. The scene is uncomfortable because it has people in it. It has the executive who'll be gone by then, the customer who'll have moved on, the board member who'll ask why nobody said anything. A number has none of that. It sits there, green or red.

A number can surprise you, and the surprise in the number is the last step of a scene that had been running for months: the phone call, the resignation, the customer who stopped returning email. By the time it's in the number, it has already happened. Real-time data closes some of that gap; you can watch the figure move by the hour now, and in a good company somebody does. What the dashboard can't show is why it's moving or what's about to move it.

Rory Sutherland, who spent a career in advertising watching people decide things for reasons that never made the model, put the limit of the spreadsheet in seven words in Alchemy: "a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles." It leaves no room for disasters either.

What gets cut from the deck

You flatten the world; it's the job. A board's agenda, a half-true report from the field, a market that keeps changing, a person on the team whose marriage is coming apart: all of it gets compressed into three columns and five priorities so that a decision can be made by Thursday. The deck gets approved. Everyone exhales. You've made the company small enough to manage.

The parts you cut don't stop happening. They stop being looked at. Picture a founder whose board deck is green on every slide, and six months later the company lays off a third of its staff. Nothing on the slides was false. What the deck didn't carry was the scene: the two biggest customers were each waiting on the other's renewal, the head of sales had been interviewing since spring, and the founder's own plan for the next raise assumed a market that had already turned. Every one of those was knowable in March. None of them was a number, so none of them was on a slide, and the people in the meeting who could have caught them spent the hour on the numbers.

The cost of flattening is that the things that ended up mattering most were the ones that didn't fit the format, and nobody in the company had a place to put them.

Two ways to write the scene early

The founder could have had those three facts in March for the cost of an afternoon. Imagination isn't just dreaming. It is scenario planning. It's not just for "creative" people. It's the ability to put yourself in a Tuesday three years from now and look around, and it costs an afternoon.

The best-known case is an oil company. In the early 1970s, a planning group at Royal Dutch Shell, led by a Frenchman named Pierre Wack, stopped writing forecasts and started writing scenarios: short stories about how the next decade could go, given what the producing countries wanted and could do. One of the stories had the oil price, stable for a generation, jumping. Shell's managers read it in 1972 and argued about it. When the embargo came in 1973 and the price went up four times over, Shell's people had already walked around in that scene, and by the end of the decade a company that had been one of the weaker of the seven largest oil companies was among the strongest. Nobody at Shell predicted the embargo, but they had already argued about one.

A pre-mortem is the same practice at the size of one project. The psychologist Gary Klein described it in the Harvard Business Review in 2007, and nearly 20 years on it's still the simplest version. Before a project launches, you tell the team it's a year later and the project has failed, badly, and you give everyone two minutes to write down why. People who'd never have raised a doubt in a planning meeting will write three reasons in two minutes once the failure is a fact instead of a prediction. What it buys is the scene, a year early.

The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.

The danger is in front of both men, and one of them looked. The simple go on because nothing in their day had a place for looking, and the same word, simple, describes a lot of well-run companies.

Imagination as an excuse

Imagination cuts the other way too, and the same chapter shows it 10 verses later:

The sluggard says, "There is a lion outside! I shall be killed in the streets!"

That's a scene as well, and a vivid one, and it's a lie he tells himself so he can stay in bed. Both men imagine; one writes the scene down, tests it against what he knows, and acts, and the other uses it as a reason not to. Every company has both. The leader who kills a deal because he's imagined the year-two maintenance bill is the first man. The one who's been "watching the market" for three years and hasn't made a hire is the second, and he'll tell you the lion is very real.

The test of an imagined scene is whether it changes what you do on Monday.

What the stakes are

Drama is a word ruined by the people who manufacture it, the ones who need the strife and go looking for it. The stage meaning is the plain one: a scene with stakes in it. On a stage, drama is four things at once: somebody wants something, something stands in the way, the outcome isn't settled, and it matters. Every company you've run has all four, every day. Your head of sales wants the promotion and your CFO is in the way. Your biggest customer is deciding between you and a competitor and hasn't said so. On the deck the wanting has been settled into targets, the obstacles into a risk column, the unsettled into a forecast. Nothing on it is at stake, because everything on it has been decided.

A company run that way for long enough has no scenes, only numbers, and the people in it can feel the absence even when the numbers are fine. In 2021 Adam Grant borrowed a word for that feeling from the sociologist Corey Keyes: languishing. Languishing is not dramatic. It is "meh." Nassim Taleb put the alternative in one sentence: "Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock."

The rigor is the part people skip when they quote that. Being more dramatic means describing the company as it is, stakes included, and then letting the scenes in: writing them down, arguing about them, testing them, and then running a clean meeting anyway.

It isn't only danger, either. In the same afternoon you find the customer nobody has called yet, the product the sales team keeps getting asked for, the hire who'd change the company. Imagination allows you to bring a potential future into the present, and once present, enables you to follow it into the future.

You don't have to write the scene alone. The board member who asks what the Tuesday meeting looks like, the partner who plays the pre-mortem straight, the friend with no stake in the number. You have a model and a target, and probably nobody who's been asked to imagine the year ahead with you.

Where you're going

Where you're from is a story you already have, and you tell it well. Where you're going is one you have to write before it happens to you, and most of it isn't numbers.

The next time somebody asks where you're going, tell them what it looks like when you get there.