“David is engaging and engaged: he provides deep insights that stick, understanding his audience and providing what they need to hear. It’s been a privilege having him at our events!”
Individual level: Careers
I love coaching, and much of my work is summarized in the 2020 FT series, especially how to guide teams, the 'knight's move', and resets.
Larger level: Scenarios
Scenarios are ideal for larger scale guides. How they work is well summarized in a colleague's kind comments:
“Scenario thinking is not about predicting the future. It’s about giving us a tool in which we can discuss the future in a way that helps us understand the problems that we face today. David Bodanis offers his own distinctive take on this approach, to deal with a problem that we are wrestling with.
“Instead of offering a solution, he will play the genial host, telling us a story to put us at ease, while he takes us down a side-path which we likely would not have considered taking. Then as we amble along, he invites us to pause and look at the problem again, but from a different perspective.
“And often at that moment, from taking that step back, and from that unexpected vantage point, we get the Aha moment of sudden insight, where we see the essence of the problem and begin to understand what we need to do to deal with it.”
Largest level: Lessons from history
For the hardest problems, especially when there's no time for scenarios or other explicit processes, it's tempting to just be guided by what seems most relevant from the past. But that's easy to get wrong. Aristotle said that common people like maxims, as it's easy to find one for whatever course of action you want. Businesses - and political parties - do that all the time.
One good way I've found to get around that is to delve into relevant events from the past with enough detail that the true subtleties of what's needed can't get lost. This is what I’ve tried in my Art of Fairness: there's the account of how a remarkable manager organized the Empire State Building construction so it was finished in a bare 13 months; how the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used new communication technologies to bring out a nation's worst impulses...and what had to be done to stop that; other chapters have more.
Another way to have a better chance of using history well is to really understand the systematic biases in your sources. I've found that especially useful when helping banking and also telecom groups with their forecasts. These sorts of biases have long fascinated me, and one of my old Oxford lectures has a more general take on how some historians get this wrong, and others more often get it right.
“The rise of 21st-century authoritarianism has produced hundreds of studies. All their learned discussions about how a democracy becomes an authoritarian state can be distilled down to a one-word answer.
“Gradually.”