Thinking Like a Mountain

Note: I wrote this blog post a couple of years back, but never posted it. In re-reading it, I think that it provides a foundation for a lot of things that I want to talk about with regard to the changes that the pandemic is going to enable. So, if some of this seems written for a different time, that’s because it is.

A long time ago, I read “Thinking Like a Mountain” - the story of a village at the foot of a mountain, but really a story about thinking systemically. The villagers worried about mountain lions, so they killed off the mountain lions. With their natural predators  gone, the deer propagate, eating all of the grass on the mountain side. Because the grass is gone, when the rains come there is a mudslide which destroys the village.  

The thesis of the book was that human beings tend to view each decision in isolation, ignoring downstream impacts and therefore are consistently making ruinous decisions. I come back to this lesson often when working on products. 

As Product Managers, we have to be thinking not just about the feature that we are working on, or even just the product we are working on, but the context that our customer is working in. We have a tendency to think that our customers work in a context that is similar to ours, where they are aware of the newest UX trends, where they spend the majority of their days online, where they are fully in a world that is significantly different than it was 10 years ago.  Heck, we tend to think that our customers work in an office like ours (if we are working on a b2b product) or have lives like ours (if we are working on a consumer product.) We don’t think about what other products they are using, or what mindset they are in when they are coming to our product.

But, the reality is that we are all living in different worlds. We think, when we work in technology that the disruption that has happened to media, to communications is widespread. But the "disruption" that AI, that  BioTech, that Quantum computing, are bringing about - is very much at an early stage. Education, agriculture, pharma, health, automotive, transportation, finance etc. haven't yet been really disrupted. 

Disruption requires adoption. Large-scale disruption, requires large-scale adoption. It requires systems - the cultural forms of habits - to be weakened enough that people look at them not as human nature, but as social norms or inherited systems. Culturally, the US went from hitchhiking being an acceptable means of getting around - because strangers weren’t dangerous - to never accepting rides from strangers to regularly getting into a stranger’s car because an app tells them it’s ok.  But even that took some time and only happened because taxis were so poorly performing their mission. And, quite honestly, taxis were never much of a habit in most places. 

But much in the way we need a shock to break us out of our habits- we need a realization that they are habits and a recognition that there is a better way - we need a collective shock to the system that forces us to re-examine our deeply entrenched institutions. 

So, what does it mean to be shocked into rethinking the system? Many industries have been entrenched for so long, we don’t really think about whether they make sense to operate the way they do - or we don’t think there is a possibility of changing them - unless we are forced to realize that another way is possible. 

In other words, when the system is shocked, opportunities arise. 

Next, I’ll post an example of what this means and bring this up to date with what the current shock to the system means for the context that your customers are operating in.