Alexander Knapp
SUMMARY
What are wicked problems, exactly?
Wicked problems are significant, interconnected issues that share four traits: stakeholders differ on the problem and the remedies, the rules change as the problem is solved, and there is no perfect solution.
What characteristics must a person possess in order to successfully support the solution of wicked problems?
An individual must possess humility, curiosity, and grit in order to successfully facilitate the solution of wicked problems.
How can the methods for resolving wicked challenges be used to build a successful company where the client is at the center of everything you do?
The key idea is to prioritize doing enough of the right things at once rather than giving priority to accomplishing the right things in the proper order. This is due to the fact that customers rarely make their decisions on a single activity or experience, and it's crucial to realize that problem solving is rarely linear in nature.
What blind spots has Alexander Knapp created for himself in the past, and what lessons did he learn from them?
Alexander Knapp, a rationalist, has discovered that people base their decisions on subjective reality and that he must go to where people are and begin with their reality in order to achieve successful negotiation. He has also discovered that although he is a control freak, he must find and hire people who are smarter and more capable than him and shift his focus to getting them the resources they need and giving them protection from the bureaucratic immune response system.
TRANSCRIPT
Marcus Cauchi: Hello and welcome back once again to The Inquisitor Podcast with me, Marcus Cauchi. Today, I'm absolutely stoked to have Alexander Knapp as my guest. Alexander is a global nomad who's working on the world's wickedness problems and you are in for a treat. So we're gonna start by exploring global problems and then we're gonna narrow it down to issues in and around running a business, running sales and looking at how important it is, um, that if you tweak one part of the system, you need to be aware of the impact on others.
Marcus Cauchi: And, uh, just fixing one bit is like putting lipstick on a pig. So on that happy note, Alexander welcome.
Alexander Knapp: Thank you, Marcus. It's a pleasure to be here.
60 seconds on your history
Marcus Cauchi: Would you mind giving us 60 seconds on your history, please?
Alexander Knapp: Sure. I grew up in a small town, uh, in Pennsylvania, in the Northeast part of the US and left the states as an exchange student to Germany, just as the Berlin wall came down and the world changed.
Alexander Knapp: University at times it was, yeah, it was, it was the beginning of being in the right place at the right time, which is defined a lot of my, uh, career. University was dotted across Europe. I was studying international relations and the law school was in Vienna, Austria. My first job was with the UN at the end of the war in Bosnia, and then, uh, 11 other peacekeeping and humanitarian missions over the next 15 years.
Alexander Knapp: And this was field work. So I would be on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq or Liberia or South Sudan for between four and 12 months at a time. And then all over to the next crisis.
Marcus Cauchi: Giving your mother palpitations. No doubt.
Alexander Knapp: Oh, oh yes. Yeah. My family's all still back in the, in the, in the States wondering what the hell went wrong with me?
Alexander Knapp: Uh, eventually I got tired of getting malaria and shot and retired from field work to London. Started my own consulting company and we specialize in what we call Wicked Problems in international development and international business. Eventually the combination of Brexit, Trump and COVID forced us virtual.
Alexander Knapp: And now I'm considering what I want to be when I grow up.
What are Wicked Problems?
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Okay. Well, let's start with the big hairy ass question, which is what are wicked problems?
Alexander Knapp: Well, that's actually one of the most common questions that I get. A wicked problem, it was defined originally by a sociologist at the university of California named Horst Rittle.
Alexander Knapp: It can be boiled down to four characteristics. A wicked problem is a massively interdependent problem that has these four characteristics at a minimum. The first is that whatever solution you try first is bound to fail, but that failure is going to give you data that you didn't have before, and you couldn't have gotten otherwise. Second, stakeholders to the problem differ about what the solutions.
Alexander Knapp: And in fact, they probably differ about what the problem is. Third, the rules of the game change as you are playing it. You started with four years and 2.5 million pounds budget. Well, now it's gotta be done in two and a half and we're gonna have to cut the budget by 40%, but we still have the same deadline and we want the same outputs.
Alexander Knapp: And finally, the fourth characteristic of wicked problem is that ultimately there's no perfect answer. You are only ever going to get to choose between imperfect options. And the problem solving will stop when you run out of time, money or willpower.
What are the qualities of the human beings involved in facilitating the solving of wicked problems that are required in order to be successful and effective in such a role?
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. So what are the qualities at a, um, in terms of the human beings involved in facilitating the solving of wicked problems that are required in order to be successful and effective in such a role?
Alexander Knapp: Well, I don't know about successful and effective, but I do know about surviving , um, which is I let's go, let's go with the baseline in. Particularly NATO, military policy and training. There's a concept called VUCA, V U C A .
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah.
Alexander Knapp: And it's a situation that's volatile. It's adapting, it's complex or sorry, it's volatile, it's uncertain. It's complex, and it's adapting. And that's an, a, a, a shorthand for a wicked problem in particularly in a military context, but it describes business as well. It describes what we've all experienced over the last 15, 18 months with COVID. And we're now as one planet, we now have one common experience through COVID of living inside a wicked problem or a complex system that is constantly evolving, volatile, surprising.
Alexander Knapp: And we're finding that many of our tried and true methods or what we assume works or what has worked in the past smaller scales, we're getting less return from that investment. Diminishing returns, using the linear tools that we've been familiar with. So what characterizes someone who can survive and, and actually engage and influence? Uh, it's probably three things.
Alexander Knapp: The first is humility. Recognizing that you cannot control it and you will never understand all of it. That is very hard for people who have been taught or come from cultures that emphasize how much power they have and reward that assumption. The second characteristic is probably curiosity. It's about. Constantly learning and being hungry for more information that may seem tangential until you find the connection between what you're working on and that new field of knowledge. Because we're living in these systems. So curiosity is the second. The third, I think is grit. Perseverance. This is anything worth doing is hard.
Alexander Knapp: It's gonna hurt. You are gonna piss people off. They're gonna come after you directly or indirectly, any vested interest. And this is just a, uh, an ecological and an evolutionary fact will resist threats to its perceived continuance. And that works in ideas as well.
Marcus Cauchi: Uh, absolutely. And in sales, what we find is the biggest competitor is the status quo.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: On average, 60% of buying cycles end up in the status quo.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And if you're not ready to destabilize current preferences, demonstrate at an individual personal level, why it is in their best interest to change the ability to create points of difference that cause you to stand apart from all the other options, including the status quo and your competition. And mitigate against anticipated buyers' remorse, the regret and blame from making the wrong decision.
Marcus Cauchi: Then there's no chance of you making the sale. And it's interesting a lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment seems to fit all these qualities. This is really exciting.
So talk to me about the kind of projects that you have worked on
Marcus Cauchi: So talk to me about the kind of projects that you have worked on. I'd love to, um, get a little bit of a flavor and the scar tissue that you've picked up along the way.
Alexander Knapp: Well, I'll divide into two parts, the pre London and the post London. The pre London with the UN, I tended to do three things for the UN and it's related agencies. In no particular order, I advanced UN missions. So it's a podcast so you can't see the UN beret over my left shoulder, but-
Marcus Cauchi: My dad had one of them.
Alexander Knapp: Yep. I was, I was the, one of the, the first people in with a small team to actually get the lay of the land, to find office space, to hire staff, to establish the security protocols, set up communication, find housing and begin the implementation of the UN mandate or the peace treaty as best I, I and my team could. And then eventually handed over to the medium and long term diplomat.
Alexander Knapp: So mission advance was the first thing. The second thing was large scale humanitarian logistics. So working in food aid in Darfur, in the, in the Western part of Sudan, during that famine, working on the Boxing Day Tsunami about 11 years ago. And actually having to supply about 400 islands in Indonesia with emergency supplies, uh, that were coming in as I was figuring out how, where these islands were, the planes were already in the air.
Alexander Knapp: The third thing that I did, and this was my academic background, was, uh, election administration. And so if you heard about Bosnia's first post-war election, it was helping to run those. But also because I did studied international law to design the constitutions or the electoral systems or the governance parliamentary systems that the new country after the war would have, that hopefully would contribute toward a constructive direction rather than a destructive one.
Alexander Knapp: So that was the quote a pre London life. Post London same kind of issues, same, same sectors, but with the addition of international business, and I work primarily on strategy for global markets and strategy for global problems, like climate change, like poverty, like access to clean water. And these types of, of wicked problems, and on the commercial side, looking at emerging markets, because that's what a lot of these places that have been in conflict actually are for the global commercial sector.
Alexander Knapp: Um, and without that kind of commercial engagement on an international scale, they, these countries will not stabilize in the long term. Um, they have to become part of the global market. And goods and services have to flow both from them and to them in a way that is sustainable for companies and those countries themselves.
Alexander Knapp: So we tend to work in strategy and its application. And we also, uh, the second major thing is developing tools to understand, to visualize, to explain, and to engage complex systems in politics or in business. Because our toolbox for both of those sectors, whether it's political or commercial, is primarily linear.
Alexander Knapp: We've got our Gantt Charts, we've got our, you know, Six Sigma. We've got all of these tools that actually create massive amounts of efficiency, but they do so by removing slack. And that slack is critical and understanding that you're part of a whole is critical. So we're building quite a few new tools to be able to show and improve that.
Slack: Space for the unexpected in supply chains
Marcus Cauchi: Define what you mean by slack because, um, that, that seems to be the critical missing piece that will leave complex problems, uh, unsolved.
Alexander Knapp: Sure. I mean, I think it's something that, that certainly we experienced here in the UK personally, and I think many people did around the world as well in the early months of COVID.
Alexander Knapp: It's about space for the unexpected in supply chains. That's the slack, the space.
Marcus Cauchi: Right.
Alexander Knapp: And we've gotten very good with just in time manufacturing. Zara as a clothing company and designer can move a, a product address or a, a shirt from the designer's table to actually delivering in two to three weeks.
Alexander Knapp: Which is insane, but they have done that by optimizing the supply chain down to the second and being able to pivot when new designs and new trends hit the market. The problem with that is that if any one of the links in that supply chain suddenly breaks, pauses, or gets diverted, you've taken all of the buffer out of it in the name of efficiency.
Alexander Knapp: You no longer have the flex to be able to still hit the target at the end. And we've done that on a planetary scale, in a drive for profit essentially. Or impact in the nonprofit world without understanding that we don't control everything and we can't predict everything. And when the unexpected does happen, that slack is what would save us.
Marcus Cauchi: I'm gonna put you and a great friend of mine, Martin Lucas together. Martin has developed company called gap in the matrix.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: And he has turned he's created a new form of mathematics called irrational mathematics.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: That explains why people behave the way they do and unlocks decision making.
Marcus Cauchi: It's genuinely breathtaking. I mean, to the point where the matrix can predict what a consumer in the GU 47 post code will spend their money on in nine months time and how to get them there. I think the two of you will have a fascinating conversation if there's a way you can collaborate. That would be really interesting, too.
Alexander Knapp: Sure.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. So let's then take this to a practical level within the customer journey, most vendor organizations only pay attention to the bits they touch and they don't really understand all the things that are going on in the background that get the customer to each point in their journey. And the individuals within, uh, the organization have a tendency to see the buyer's journey only as the bit that they are involved in.
Marcus Cauchi: Which means that as a result, the experience for the customer is very often deeply deficient because as they get thrown over the wall from one department to the next, they have to start all over again. It's a bit like when you phone up customer service and you put all your details in.
Alexander Knapp: Yep.
Marcus Cauchi: And they say, I'll just pass you on to, and then you have to go through the whole miserable-
Alexander Knapp: Repeat it again. Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: Again and again, again. And people don't think as the customer, they think about them and what they can get from them.
How do you apply the principles of solving wicked problems to creating a great business where the customer is at the heart of everything you do?
Marcus Cauchi: And what I would love to explore is how do you apply the principles of solving wicked problems to creating a great business where the customer is at the heart of everything you do?
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm. So I'll give you the principle that I think governs all of it. And it doesn't matter whether it's the Balkans 20 years, 25 years after the, the Yugoslav War or whether it is a UK based property, investment development company that we worked for. Those two examples flow from the same principle, probably the most important thing about in understanding and engaging a wicked problem is you need to think differently about your actions. Instead of prioritizing doing things in the right order, instead, you need to focus on doing enough of the right things at the same time.
Marcus Cauchi: Right.
Alexander Knapp: If you are inside a complex system for a wicked problem, it's less about doing things in the right order. It's more about doing things at the, the, doing the right things at the same time. Because that customer is not only going to be on the phone to tech support, but they are going to be on the website. Trying to find in the, in the support forums, if an answer's there. They probably have a friend or family member who also owned the product, they may be considering purchase another purchase from the company of a related product or completely different product or service.
Alexander Knapp: And their decision making is not based upon one single action or one single experience.
Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely. In Martin's work, he's identified over 600 different potential influences.
Alexander Knapp: This is the, the, the challenge that we've got, whether it's in politics or in business at the international level, is that we were taught at least on the, in the, in the Western hemisphere, um, North America and, and Western Europe, we were taught that problem solving follows a very linear and logical path.
Alexander Knapp: You first gather information, you analyze the information to find the best option. You formulate a solution. And then you implement it. G A F I. And over time you move through those stages, gather, analyze, formulate and implement and you move from the problem space to the solution space, and that should resolve it and move forward.
Alexander Knapp: But that's not actually how people pro problem solve in reality when their issue is non-linear. And our first problem is that we don't actually take the time to pause and go, do I have a linear problem or a non-linear problem? We got two examples. Um, one in the, in the, the public or political space and one in the commercial space about how we apply this then in practice. The first example, we did work with a large UK charity that works on governance and democracy development, parliamentary process, and citizen engagement. And we were looking at the lessons learned and how effective all of the international aid was to former Yugoslavia after the War in Bosnia and, and ended in, uh, 1996, 1995-96.
Alexander Knapp: So it was kind of a lessons learned thing. And we, we started by actually mapping from a systems perspective. What governance in the Western Balkan, six countries in that region looked like. And what, in that network diagram of 250,000 nodes and probably about, I don't know, three and a half million links between them.
Alexander Knapp: Where were the power nodes? Where were the disproportionately influential clusters? And by doing it from a systems perspective, we actually have the visual of this beautiful colored, uh, network. We were able to find a couple of outlying clusters or pieces of information that were disproportionately important, but wouldn't come up.
Alexander Knapp: If you had been thinking about it in a linear way. The first was actually 5.2% of the entire network about how does, how well is democracy working 25 years later and billions of pounds later. 5.2% of the answer to that wicked problem was in regional air transport infrastructure.
Marcus Cauchi: Hmm.
Alexander Knapp: Not capital airports, but regional ones.
Marcus Cauchi: Right.
Alexander Knapp: Can you get from a, a large, a large city that is in the capital directly to another large city in one of the other neighboring countries that isn't the capital and back in a day? Because those kind of connections facilitate not only commerce, but build relationships between people who at some point in the past had been at war.
Alexander Knapp: The other thing that came out of that particular analysis was a disproportionate importance for, of tourism. And we looked at that and we said, what in the world? That was actually 6.6% of the entire. We were going, what in the world does tourism have to do with this? The, the questions we were asking were about parliaments and voting and citizens engagement and a free media.
Alexander Knapp: And, and so on and up comes tourism. And our, the, the, the science tells it that this is real. This is a thing. What we found was that actually one of the best indicators that has been tested, um, peer reviewed, um, but not applied to this type of, of international development was how much tourism income does a country get per year?
Alexander Knapp: And it correlates directly to the perceived stability and the perceived legitimacy and the, a lack of corruption in a country and its government. And so you can use tourism as an indicator for democratic health.
Marcus Cauchi: Very interesting. I was watching a program, uh, with, uh, the comedian Ramish Ranganathan, uh, great traveling to, um, Haiti.
Marcus Cauchi: And the, you know, obviously it's the same island as Dominican Republic, massively different environment. You know, these people are living on a dollar a day, the wealthier ones on two. The level of endemic poverty, the level of violence, um, compared with just over the, uh, the line over the border and the, you know, the difference in tourism levels.
Alexander Knapp: Yep.
Marcus Cauchi: And stability. And you'd no, no one in their right mind would probably be thinking of taking their, you know, their family to Haiti, but you'd happily go to Dominican Republic. And they're literally, you know, it, it's a step over a line. Yeah. Uh, to get to one to the other. Okay. This is really interesting.
Marcus Cauchi: So I, I wanna try and bring this into the wicked problem that I'm trying to address, and I'd love your take on this.
Alexander Knapp: Sure.
Marcus Cauchi: And I, I fundamentally believe that sales is a force for good but Milton, Satan's left tenant ar- um, uh, Friedman took business down a very, very dark and wrong path.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: About 40 years ago when he propagated the myth that every business should be, uh, serving shareholder value.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah, exactly.
Marcus Cauchi: And as a result, we now have investors driving utterly broken behaviors through leadership, into management, into sales and marketing. The sales operation has been broken up into a pin factory. So you've got marketing, you've got sales development reps, cold calling and interrupting marketing, putting out 4.3 quadrillion bad digital adverts, a year, millions of emails that interrupt. You then have sales people, customer success, you've got account growth then it feeds back into product development.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: And at the end of this long chain of abuse, is the forgotten customer. And I look at the investors, drivers and motivations. Then I look at how leadership is compensated and measured. The lack of runway for managers to learn their craft.
Marcus Cauchi: You generally get tapped on the shoulder and told Alexander we've just fired your boss. You're now the idiot boss. Congratulations. Then sales people who are churned and burned, they're hired for the wrong qualities. You've got customer success being put under immense pressure because sales, every company claims to be customer centric until the end of the quarter, when they've got to make up their target.
Marcus Cauchi: And so then they put immense pressure on the customer. So I, I see, uh, funding, leadership and management, compensation, measurement, career progression, the misnomer of training instead of learning,
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: And all of these things are working, uh, in parallel, but no, one's really having the conversation about all of them.
How do we map this in a way that will give us those insights about tourism or regional airports or our equivalents?
Marcus Cauchi: And I would love to understand how do we map this in a way that will give us those insights about tourism or regional airports or our equivalents? Because it's such a difficult, gnarly problem. And trying to bring this conversation to the fore, uh, and get people debating it, uh, when they're holding on through attachment and ego to their old habits, and we don't do it this way in this company, that sort of stuff.
Marcus Cauchi: So I love your help on that.
Alexander Knapp: So one of the things that we, in my in my company, that we realized and what brought us together initially, was a recognition that the non-linear toolbox was nearly empty. We had lots of linear tools. But business schools and the primary and secondary education, the best think tanks in the world, the alleged innovation hubs, make existing tools a little bit better.
Alexander Knapp: But they tend not to take the jump and make new tools entirely. Particularly informed by and believing that you're in a, a complex system and that you're not going to change that. So we asked ourselves what, what could we do to visualize wicked problems better? Whether it's in commerce, whether it's in, in politics.
Alexander Knapp: There are a few companies that are working on this. One that we partnered with is called Quid now Netbase Quid, Q U I D, just like the, the slang for the one pound piece here in the UK. And quid is a, it's a, it's a fascinating product that is based upon access to about last I last I, I heard, um, was about 80 different public and commercial databases.
Alexander Knapp: So this is everything from Lexus Nexus to Bloomberg, to pub med where all the medical research gets published, to J Store where all the academic journals are, to every digitized magazine and newspaper of the last 15 years, to blogs, to the public filings of the S-E-C and the European equivalents for pub for, for, uh, public companies, and social media.
Alexander Knapp: So all of Twitter, all of, of the Facebook that's, that's publicly available. And that forms the basis in a qualitative sense. They're words for a search engine. And it's a search engine they developed that you use to build a quantitative map of a qualitative question. And so our question for the, the example before in the Western Balkans was how's democracy doing in the Western Balkans, and then we broke it down with specific keywords.
Alexander Knapp: We worked for the third largest property investment and a property development company in the UK. Um, they came to us and said, hey, can you, can you stare into your crystal ball and tell us what the future of intelligent buildings and its market is gonna be? And we used this tool Quid, and we built up a, a, a query and a data set and a way of engaging with it.
Alexander Knapp: That allowed us to ask what is the future of the intelligent building market, and then pull from the knowledge in those data sets and databases, a picture, and it visualizes a picture when it finds some content that matches the question, then it grabs it, it reads it with, uh, AI and then it links it to other concepts in that content and outside that content to create a visual map of the answer to that question. It's a fascinating project, or it's very, very innovative, but most importantly, it allows you to visualize the whole of a problem or a, the whole of a market at once and see it in human, in human ways at that point. Because it's digital and it's based on nodes and links and it's a system, you can actually begin to analyze it, slice and dice it different ways. So there are tools out there. And in this case, when we applied it to the property market, what we found was the most important part of the future intelligent building market paradoxically was not anything physical at all. It was not anything technological at all. The cluster of content that had had disproportionate influence over the entirety of the whole market was 2.8% of the entire network. But that 2.8% was people, employees, and culture.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay.
Alexander Knapp: The conclusion was that the most important part of the intelligent building market is actually the people who you put into it, who use and, and inhabit the building who walk past it on a daily basis and their connections to the larger community, and as you rightly say, the customers.
Marcus Cauchi: Very interesting. Okay. So that what you just said clearly depends on two crucial factors that jump out at me. One is the ability and willingness of the leadership to take the plunge.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: And risk destabilizing the status quo and let go of what made them successful or they think make them successful.
Marcus Cauchi: And the second is in the quality of the questions that you put into your tools in order to ensure that you're getting the true picture. So let's start with leadership. Cause I know this is a topic near and dear to both of our hearts. I, I see in public service, I see a dearth of quality leadership.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: And uh, I know in our preamble to this conversation, we talked about why you should never give power to people who want it.
Marcus Cauchi: And you mentioned that the real, uh, cream of the crop avoiding going into public service leadership because of the gristmill that they'll have to go through and their families will be, uh, subjected to.
If we were to solve that wicked problem, what's the starting point of, uh, growing great leaders?
Marcus Cauchi: So if we were to solve that wicked problem, what's the starting point of, uh, growing great leaders?
Alexander Knapp: No softballs here, huh?
Marcus Cauchi: No.
Alexander Knapp: Okay. I'm on an advisory panel, essentially, a, a type of board for a, a Northern Irish Institute called, um, a, The Institute for One World Leadership. And we're building it to answer that very question. And my belief and the belief of my colleagues who are, are part of this movement, part of this effort is that the answer to your question is actually found in the earliest stages of our educational system.
Marcus Cauchi: Hmm.
Alexander Knapp: And it isn't so much about building leadership skills. Though that will be a byproduct of it. But it's about teaching our children, not what to think, but how to think so that they can engage with these wicked problems that, that the world has, that they are going to have no matter what the scale of their, their horizon, um, might be.
Alexander Knapp: But it's about, leadership is, is, is about being humble enough to know that you are, you don't have all the answers. Being secure, self secure enough, to be able to say, you know, I have no idea.
Marcus Cauchi: Mm-hmm.
Alexander Knapp: Or I need help. And then finally, to realize the interconnection that we have with ev- everyone else on the planet. Because it has gotten so small that even if it doesn't, uh, seem to affect you directly in whatever your day to day life is, what's happening on the other side of the world,
Alexander Knapp: we now know, we now know that a very small thing, literally, a virus from one part of the world can bring the entire planet to a stop. Because of this wonderful and terrible interdependence that we have. And that makes us all responsible, to some degree, for how we go about making our choices and voting in our elections and choosing where we spend our money and prioritizing what we, what we choose to learn on a daily basis.
Alexander Knapp: Hopefully we are learning on a daily basis.
Marcus Cauchi: I love your optimism. I'm not entirely convinced that we are, but, um,
Alexander Knapp: Yeah, I know.
Introducing to Patrick Lindquist and the innovation for the city of Helsingborg
Marcus Cauchi: I think, um, someone you would love, uh, to, um, meet is a guy called Patrick Lindquist. Patrick is the co-chief of innovation for the city of Helsingborg and it will not come as any surprise that, um, he comes from Sweden because of the way their education system works.
Marcus Cauchi: And the objective that they have is to make Helsingborg the center of innovation for Europe by 2023.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And what's been really interesting cuz I've heard him on the podcast a couple of times. Is how he goes about solving wicked problems. He has managers of the gaps. It's a, it's, it's a title where these people, their job is to bridge between the different silos organizations or groups or communities and recognizing the interdependencies.
Marcus Cauchi: When he was tackling the transport problems, he hired a team of 10 people. Who'd never worked in transport.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm .
Marcus Cauchi: They were all users of transport. And ev- everyone was saying you're out of your mind, but actually it's worked beautifully similarly for elder care and primary education. Using technology, but also, uh, thinking as the end user and working from there.
Marcus Cauchi: So, uh, again, I think I'll, I'll make an introduction to him cause I think you'll really enjoy.
Alexander Knapp: Sounds fascinating though. And it sounds, it sounds like something that we, that we did as well. Because whether or not we consciously recognize the way we're taught to solve problems. This G A F I, GAFI method, this linear method, it comes out of the industrial revolution where we learned that we can optimize and increase profit exponentially by creating our, our production lines, our manufacturing lines. And it definitely works in linear markets and linear products. It's fantastic. But that engineering metaphor, that machine metaphor then seek into our social systems as well into our language.
Alexander Knapp: We've got human resources. You have direct reports, you have line managers, you have all of the, you know, organizational charts, not organizational ecosystems. And to try and break that in deeply ingrained habit, one of the things that we did in my company was, much like you were saying about, uh, this approach from Linquist, was that we had a plan.
Alexander Knapp: We hired a cognitive neuroscientist into the company. We hired an organic chemist into the company. We had a genetic engineer. And I did the quantum mechanics because all of these four sciences are about interdependent systems. They're about organic change, literally at the most fundamental levels. They're about, um, genetic adaptation, which is just a scientific word for innovation.
Alexander Knapp: And quantum mechanics is about probability. What is the probability of this happening? How can I increase the probability of it happening? Even though I accept that I can't guarantee it's gonna happen? How can I increase the probability that it will go viral? I can't force it to go viral, but I can increase the probability.
Alexander Knapp: And actually those sciences, in contrast to engineering, allowed us to pull new insights. The insights allowed us to create new tools. And hopefully the new tools when applied to business or to politics create better interventions and more impact. Because we're, we're meeting the complexity on its own terms.
Marcus Cauchi: Very, very interesting someone else. I think that you'd really enjoy, um, speaking to is Suzanne Jacobs. She had her wake up moment when she realized that she knew more about her laptop than her people. And, uh, I had a fascinating conversation with her, um, last year about the realization that, uh, you know, building on exactly what you said, that we've dehumanized the whole, um, process of going to work and production.
Marcus Cauchi: In fact, Adam Smith and Wealth of Nations makes the point that, uh, uh, creating that production line is not a good idea in the long run. For precisely the reasons that you've touched on. Okay. Th this is really fascinating.
If we look at the effect of only tweaking one part of the system, what are the negative unintended consequences that we can realistically expect by putting a sticking plaster on the cancer in that way?
Marcus Cauchi: If we look at the effect of only tweaking one part of the system, what are the negative unintended consequences that we can realistically expect by putting a sticking plaster on the cancer in that way?
Alexander Knapp: So I think the first thing to remember is that no part of a company, no part of a market, no part of a country exists in isolation. We know that to a degree, we accept that to a degree, but we assume that we, we can see all the connections. So for example, the standard organizational chart for a company is gonna have some type of a public interface unit, department.
Alexander Knapp: It's the marketing department, it's the press relations department. It's whatever that might be. Communications department for your Senator or your MP. There is then a firewall, both digitally and figuratively, between the internal structure of the organization or company and the external. And there are certain ports in that firewall to allow information back and forth.
Alexander Knapp: Um, we understand this, but for every employee that has a mobile phone and a Twitter account, congratulations, they are double hated as your director of marketing. And while we can create as many standard operating procedures and the thick handbooks of employee policy and guidelines and restrictions about who can say what and when, we just had four years in of the American presidency that demonstrated what one person with a disproportionately loud voice and, and international digital platform, how much damage that can do. And we've seen again and again, how a rogue tweet from an employee, nevermind the CEO, can completely derail an ongoing strategy or knock 20, 30% off the value of a company in a day.
Alexander Knapp: So the first insight is don't pretend that you see all of the connections and the links and map the second and the third level down as well as just the first. And don't use an organogram, you know, hierarchical engineering model to do it. And so we talked to, to clients about ecosystems. We actually talk about ECORGS, E C O R G S, ecosystemic organizations. When you've grown large enough, that the hierarchical model no longer works as the best model to understand the, the workings of your, your company. An ecosystem model is much more effective and it's much more realistic, but it requires you to recognize that you do not have control over the whole of it.
The concept of command and control
Marcus Cauchi: And actually preempted where I was headed, um, which is the whole concept of command and control. It, uh, largely an onanistic, uh, myth. You're just convincing yourself and giving yourself a stroke to think that you do.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And unless you learn to give trust, and unless you learn to empower people who are lower down the, uh, the food chain, then chances are, you are going to not only be missing critical feedback and insight, but you're going to be working with only a very, very limited view of the problem. And so one of the other issues that I see is organizations have a tendency to hire in their own image, only weaker.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And I see this in the conversations I've had around diversity, equity and inclusion.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: That many organizations hire because they want to tick the box about being diverse and equal opportunities employer. But then they make it impossible to fit in. And then they fire people for being different.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: Uh, as opposed to welcoming the, the challenge and the difficulty. Um, so I, I think where I'm headed with this is that when you operate in a complex interdependent world tackling wicked problems, the first thing you need is the vulnerability to admit you don't know it all.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: The courage to give trust first and to empower people in a safe environment to have a voice and to take on difficult work and not just drop it because it's tough. In negotiation, what I've found is the best kind of negotiation results in a win-win outcome when neither side makes any compromises.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: It's about finding the common ground, the co-. So you work from that point on. So if you do have to make any compromises on either side they're small.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: But both sides get their needs met eventually.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And that's bloody hard work.
Alexander Knapp: I mean, that's that, that, that moves from science into art. It really, really does. I, and, and I I've seen people who can do it and on the international scale, in peace negotiations between, you know, in participants, in endemic conflict over time, that has just been brutalized. And I should, I should point out that by nature, I'm a control freak. I am a command and control guy.
Marcus Cauchi: Right?
Alexander Knapp: I want everything to be rational. I want to be able to come up with the perfect system that humans cannot screw up. But I was so fortunate in a way, looking back and reflecting, that when I got to Bosnia in 1995, and then I got to Albania when that country collapsed due to a pyramid scheme, run by its own government. And then when I got to Kosovo in '99, I had three wars and in three countries over five years, that beat that silly command and control illusion out of my fixed skull. Literally it literally, I got medevaced outta Kosovo with three bleeding ulcers due to stress of trying to fix Kosovo, to impose order on its capital Pristina. And it was the best thing that could happened to me because it took something at that scale to overcome and break my ego.
Alexander Knapp: And I'm so glad it happened at the beginning of my career.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah.
Alexander Knapp: Um, rather than at the end, and as a result, our, you know, our, the culture deck for our company, when you talk about diversity, inclusion, the, the, the differentiation of ideas, and, and so on, the one of the pages in our culture deck, it's about people and it says, who are we looking for?
Alexander Knapp: We've learned that, and this is the quote, "You can't think different if you're too busy pretending to be the same as everyone else. Come as you are." And we, we, we actually changed our hiring process in order to find what we affectionately and respectfully call freaks, who don't fit in and create a space for them to actually use their superpowers and have, and to do so in good company. Because most of the time, those individuals, of whom I am one, don't fit in well within organizations. But those organizations lose out on what magic we can bring.
Marcus Cauchi: Really interesting. Someone else I reckon you should meet is a lady called Suzanne Shula. She works with Cedr and she's been heavily involved in a number of conflict areas, uh, particularly creating
Alexander Knapp: Swedish Cedr or Canadian Cedr?
Marcus Cauchi: British Cedr.
Alexander Knapp: Oh, uh, so, okay. Yep.
Marcus Cauchi: So, um, it's sort of all about dispute resolution.
Alexander Knapp: Yep.
Marcus Cauchi: So, um, resolving and creating the decant after the, uh, trustees in Rwanda and various others.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah. Um, very familiar.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah. Okay. Um, Alexander, this has been an absolute joy, unfortunately, we've come to the top of the hour. I would love to have you back.
Marcus Cauchi: And ideally get you onto a round table with some of the people that I've mentioned today. Cuz I think we can kick the ass out of a number of really interesting problems and at least, um, o- open the dialogue.
What are the blind spots that you've self inflicted in the past, and what did you learn from that?
Marcus Cauchi: Tell me this, what, what are the blind spots that you've self inflicted in the past, and what did you learn from that?
Alexander Knapp: Oh yeah. that could take it entire another hour or an entire another day.
Marcus Cauchi: But, well, we can do another episode.
Alexander Knapp: There we go. What, what I'll say in short, like I said, I'm a rationalist. I, I like to think that I make rational decisions. But what I've had to learn, and again, it was our neuro in house neuroscientist that taught me this, as humans, we don't make decisions with our neocortex, which is the new brain that does the logical processing. So we make it in the back of our head in the amygdala, which is the fight or flight part of our, our brain. And then we rationalize with the neocortex, what we've already decided back in the, the amygdala.
Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely.
Alexander Knapp: And what I had to learn my blind spot was I assumed everyone was going to, to act rationally the rational actor model. What I learned was that reality is subjective in many, many ways. And if you want to get to that compromise, but successful negotiation, you've got to one, go to where people are and you've gotta start with their reality.
Alexander Knapp: And expecting them to come to you is, is, is, is a, a huge mistake. I think the second blind spot I mentioned, I'm a control freak. It did take, you know, three ulcers in Kosovo for me to, to, to get to, to, to find a different way of understanding the world. And I'm really glad that that happened. Wasn't fun, but I survived.
Alexander Knapp: And I think the final thing is that because of the work that I've done in my personality and whatever else, I've got an independent streak of mile wide, but the older I get, the more things I realize that I am completely lousy at doing. So, what I've deliberately tried to do is fi find and hire people who are smarter and much more capable than I am and change my focus to getting them the resources they need, and then providing them cover from the bureaucratic immune response system while they do some really miraculous stuff.
Marcus Cauchi: It, that's really interesting that you say that I have every manager I believed has five functions on their job description. Hire the best people.
Alexander Knapp: Yep.
Marcus Cauchi: And you never compromise on recruitment. Get the best out of them.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: Make sure they have the tools and resources they need to do their best work every day. Help them clear roadblocks. And in particular, protect them from acts of idiocy from above.
Alexander Knapp: Yes, exactly.
Marcus Cauchi: And give them a voice, empower them to speak their mind freely and safely.
Alexander Knapp: Yep.
Marcus Cauchi: If you do not manage like that, then what you're you end up doing is getting less than, and, um, a fabulous book that, uh, I've been reading recently, Liz Wiseman's Multipliers. She talks about the difference between a diminisher and a multiplier manager.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: And the diminisher will get about 50% outta somebody. A multiplier will get 200% outta what, uh, more than what they expect they're capable of.
Alexander Knapp: And we
Marcus Cauchi: That's a fourfold improvement.
Alexander Knapp: It is. And we, you know, again from our culture deck and we, we, this was the thing we did on the first day of the company, from the section on our mission. Why do we do this? We, we say, and I quote, "There are good people out there trying to save the world in spite of itself, they're selfish-, selflessly fighting a ground war against overwhelming odds and the forces of fear, mediocrity, prejudice, greed, evil, laziness, and stupidity. We are their air support and we are here to make sure they're not in the fight alone." And we believe that.
Marcus Cauchi: That is bloody awesome.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah. That's
Marcus Cauchi: Awesome.
Alexander Knapp: Page six of the day.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. Tell me this.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah.
You've got a golden ticket and you can go back and advise the idiot Alexander aged 23, what advice would you give him?
Marcus Cauchi: And you've got a golden ticket and you can go back and advise the idiot Alexander aged 23.
Alexander Knapp: Oh boy.
Marcus Cauchi: One bit of advice would you give him?
Alexander Knapp: No, very simply put, first and foremost, you are not as smart or capable as you think you are. Second. No, really? You're not. Third,
Marcus Cauchi: Third to one and two.
Alexander Knapp: Yeah, that's one and two. It really needs to be two separate ones. Third say, I don't know. And ask for help far sooner than you want to. And then finally, when you're in a wicked problem, just focus on the next three things in the right direction. Cuz you're never gonna be able to predict the fourth from where you're standing now.
Marcus Cauchi: That's great advice. Excellent.
How can people get hold of you?
Marcus Cauchi: Alexander, how can people get hold of you?
Alexander Knapp: Very easy. The website is akc.global. That's akc.global. If you wanna see our culture deck that's at akc.global/opportunities. It's right on the top of the opportunities page. It's also on slide share and we publicize it, uh, so that people can see our operating manual, how we think, and what we prioritize.
Alexander Knapp: It has the one page employee manual with three, the three, uh, employee guidelines. And I think it's a total of like 15 words or less because we do hire the right people. And if you want to email me, it is A K N A P P, Alexander Knapp, A K N A P P @akc.global.
Recommendation on great content, books, audios, videos on dealing with wicked problems
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. One final question then if you were to point people towards some great content, books, audios, videos on, uh, dealing with wicked problems, what would you recommend?
Alexander Knapp: Well, I'd recommend where I, where I started and for the, the listeners I'm I spun around and grabbed a book out of my, my bookshelf directly behind my chair. It is called Birth of the Chaortic Age. That's spelled C H A O R D I C. And it is by Dee Hock. You're holding one up too.
Alexander Knapp: Clearly clearly great minds think alike, and we've just blown a, a, a fantastic adage out of the water.
Marcus Cauchi: And fools seldom differ though.
Alexander Knapp: Yes, exactly. It's the autobiography of Dee Hock, who's the author, and he was the first CEO and the Chairman and of the Chairman Emeritus of Visa International, the credit card company.
Marcus Cauchi: Right.
Alexander Knapp: And it describes how he built the company to a trillion dollar company that didn't have a headquarters. That actually worked as a complex system by defining how the different parts globally interacted with each other. These are countries so that you could buy a souvenir in Thailand using your debit card and it automatically got back to your bank account in Los Angeles. And that is a minor miracle, but it it's all based upon, and a great example of the application of complex system theory, into one of the biggest companies in the world.
Marcus Cauchi: That's fabulous. I I'm gonna add to the book list. Which is How To Run Your Own Life by Jut Meininger, a a J U T M E I N I N G E R.
Marcus Cauchi: It's only available at a secondhand book.
Alexander Knapp: Mm-hmm.
Marcus Cauchi: You'll be lucky to get it for less than a hundred pounds.
Alexander Knapp: Wow.
Marcus Cauchi: It's the best a hundred pounds you will ever, ever spend. Alexander. Thank you so much. I can't wait to continue this conversation on future podcasts and round tables if you're up for it.
Alexander Knapp: It would be a pleasure, Marcus. Thanks for the opportunity. I've really enjoyed it.
Marcus Cauchi: So this is Marcus Cauchi signing off once again from The Inquisitor Podcast. If you found this insightful, and if you haven't, frankly, you're dead. But if you found this insightful, helpful, inspirational, challenging, uncomfortable then please, like, comment, share, and subscribe and tag three or four people who need to hear this message.
Marcus Cauchi: If you are operating in a complex environment where you're dealing with wicked problems and you can recognize them from what Alexander has discussed, then make sure you listen to it with a notepad and a pen and no interruptions and listen to it several times. Cause there are some absolute items of gold in here, uh, that are not to be missed.
Marcus Cauchi: Now, if you wanna get a hold of me, marcus@laughs-last.com. And if you feel the urge and you think that the, uh, podcast deserves a review, good, bad, or indifferent, then please hop across to either Apple or Google or whatever your favorite podcast is. Then give it an honest review. And if you want to give me negative feedback, I'm cool with that, that's how I learn.
Marcus Cauchi: In the meantime, stay safe and happy selling. Bye-bye.
