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This ongoing, explosive content creation challenges us to assimilate greater and greater amounts of often conflicting information, increasing the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty in our lives. This rising noise puts a premium on what I call
confusion management,
which is without a doubt the most important asset for a leader today. Confusion management means dealing with ambiguity, contradiction and uncertainty while still retaining the ability to function. More on how to do this in the course of this book, but for now back to the challenge it represents. Separating the wheat from the chaff in the information pouring in on us, recognising when two or more apparently conflicting ideas must be utilised in tandem and accepting that new ambiguities will constantly arise are exactly what will distinguish winners from losers. No doubt this has always been true, and there were plenty of ambiguities in daily life even in the most primitive societies. But it has never been more true than it is today.

The most confusing issue for me right now is climate change. Scientists seem to agree now that the planet is hotting up, but will the current warming trend continue? And how rapidly? Can we avert disaster? If the experts can't agree, how are we supposed to know? But we can't let this confusion stop us from taking action to look after the environment. In Australia, for example, more efficient use of water makes sense both in the short term and as a long-term preparation for future climate change, whatever that change turns out to be, and whether it is slow and gradual or sudden and rapid.

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY

Add to this immense creation of knowledge (a generous label for much of what is online) the fact that the world has always been and always will be unpredictable because of unanticipated consequences. New technologies in particular have a history of creating unintended consequences, and in our day new technologies enter the market faster and more frequently than ever before.

Take, for example, the diminishing impact of a thirtysecond television commercial. Once a guaranteed way to drive sales, this form of media and advertising has become much less effective, especially with younger people, since the growth of the internet, or more specifically of massive multiplayer online games, social networking sites and greater access to broadband connections. Imagine what it is like for the 40-year-old ad account director advising the 55-year-old consumer goods brand manager that the market requires entirely new messages delivered in entirely new formats through entirely new media, and you have confusion and ambiguity in the mind of a once unstoppable executive. Perhaps you are that ad executive, or the equivalent for your industry. Oh, and just when you've worked out what that new message and media should be, they are no longer the 'flavour of the month' and the fickle consumer has moved onto still newer things.

Whenever technology changes rapidly, actions you took yesterday may have a different effect today. These unintended consequences make planning difficult, and they constitute yet more new information that eventually joins the crowded flow of data you must digest and evaluate. This book will help you do just that. I will speak in later chapters about the need to unlearn and relearn at a much faster rate in order to stay in step with not just this but the other three forces of change as well.

EXPLOSION OF CHOICE

More information, more knowledge and more options ultimately mean more choices. Yet too much choice can actually paralyse. This is both a challenge and an opportunity.

The opportunity is for a business that can make itself 'easier' for customers to choose and interact with. The challenge is that it is not just the customer faced with more choices, but the business as well. In an increasingly global market with more and more sophisticated technology, there are not only more markets you can serve but more ways you can serve them with a greater array of offerings.

The paradox of choice is alive and well in business as companies select which products and services to focus on, which markets to serve and how best to design, create and deliver a growing selection of offerings to increasingly broad and diverse markets.

INCREASINGLY INTANGIBLE DESIRES OF THE MARKET

Not only are the markets we serve more diverse and also more demanding in terms of choice, they are increasingly looking to intangible things to differentiate between one offering and another. The truth is most businesses are operating in oversupplied markets, where customers can choose between multiple products with the same functional value. In such markets, customers inevitably base the decision to buy one product over another on previously superficial features, a subject I'll explore in detail in chapter 3, 'Superficial is Anything But.'

INCREASED SOPHISTICATION OF TECHNOLOGY, SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES

The technology, systems and processes that you and your competitors use to access and service the market keep becoming more sophisticated. It is commonplace to buy things such as a server, laptop or software only to find that the tool requires an update – or even worse is completely obsolete – before you have even integrated it into your existing business processes and trained your team how to use it.

To share a personal example, I have spent serious money and time configuring my own business systems so I could get the information I need from the database whenever and wherever I want. I can't tell you how challenging it has been to get members of my team to understand how the technology works and also to get me the exact information I need. Just when I thought I had my finger on it, online customer relationship management (CRM) programs such as Salesforce.com may have gathered enough momentum and critical mass to make my locally stored data a business process of the past.

This both excites me and hugely frustrates me. I'm sure you have had similar experiences.

LEGISLATION

It is not just new technology, new choices and empowered staff and consumers that are leading to increased complexity. It is legislation as well. Consider the following two examples.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), named for its key sponsors in the US Congress, is American legislation on corporate financial reporting enacted in the aftermath of the Enron, Worldcom and other business scandals. Because of the global reach of the US economy, SOX has serious global impacts. For example, its strict guidelines on independent auditing of financial results have greatly complicated things for both non-US and US companies, especially in terms of their relationships with the four major global accounting firms.

And this is to say nothing of the complexity of tax legislation around the world, especially for multinational companies with operations that span the globe. I read recently that the US tax system (the Internal Revenue Code) is 7500 pages and contains three and a half million words.

The second is a more grassroots example: a takeaway restaurant I visited the day after attending a friend's wedding.As you might expect, I was suffering from a rather serious hangover, and I went to buy a kebab to try to settle my stomach.When I asked them to cut my kebab in half, they said they were not allowed to do so because of hygiene regulations. They even pointed out a sign they had posted to that effect. I told them they were off their rocker and wondered if it wasn't just an excuse to avoid extra work. But a week later I was doing some consulting for the Institute of Environmental Health and I related my experience to a former chief food inspector, who suspected, but could not say for sure, that cutting the kebab in half wasn't forbidden. Now if a former chief food inspector doesn't know for sure, I obviously can't blame the takeaway restaurant proprietor for trying to stay on the safe side of things.

All of this bureaucracy and complexity tends to lead to paralysis. In the face of the confusion you do less. But taking less action is often counterproductive. Managing confusion is usually a case of doing more, not less, at least initially.

3. INCREASING TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

As my reference to Sarbanes-Oxley may suggest, the flip side (I couldn't resist) of the increasing amount and complexity of information flows is increasing transparency and accountability. The digital information technology revolution has put global access to information in the hands of literally billions of individuals, who can share that information with each other at will. I have talked about how much knowledge and exchange of ideas takes place, and how much additional complexity it creates for companies as they try to manage their databases. Even more important is that information technology puts the power to obtain and share data in the hands of the individual.

The constant upswell in information, misinformation, complexity, ambiguity and confusion thus does not increase opportunities to hide your mistakes and misdeeds. It actually has the opposite effect, subjecting you to increasing transparency and accountability.

It is a little weird really. You would think that people have enough to do, given how 'busy' everyone is and how overloaded they are with information, without worrying themselves about your actions. Again the opposite seems to be true. There are always people ready to catch other people's mistakes with today's information technology.When they find mistakes, or what they think are mistakes, the very same technology allows them to spread their knowledge and opinions to literally the whole world. There is a good chance they are in the cubicle outside your office, bored out of their tree and looking for something more interesting to do.

Accountability is being forced onto businesses in three interconnected ways:

• Top-down accountability.
  This is where legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley and government oversight are being introduced to make businesses more accountable for their behaviour. In the near future legislation on new behaviours such as carbon offset trading will shed an increasingly bright light on companies' environmental impacts.
  
• Lateral accountability.
  The existence of competitors in your marketplace gives customers the ability to 'talk with their feet' when they don't feel as though you are meeting their increasingly intangible and constantly changing desires.
  
• Bottom-up accountability.
  A grassroots movement (be it word of mouth or mouse) can have a big impact on your reputation because of a positive or negative experience people have had with your brand.
  

Let me give you an example of these three elements playing together. A bottom-up movement has led to a growing awareness of issues related to climate change and the impact business has on the environment. This growing awareness creates an opportunity for a company to differentiate itself (or on the flip side for a consumer to discriminate against a company) based on its level of 'green-ness'. Take Westpac's 'every generation should live better than the last' campaign. In 2003 it was the first Australian bank to join other leading banks around the world in signing the 'Equator Principles', promising not to finance projects that endanger local communities or the environment. A consumer may now keep competitors of Westpac accountable by not doing business with them, because they have not been as transparent and 'green' in their behaviour.

Or consider that these days even the world's largest companies might find themselves at the mercy of two teenage girls armed with a high-school chemistry set. Ribena, for a long time a staple drink of pre-teens and young kids the world over, was advertised by manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline as containing four times the vitamin C of oranges.When two 14-year-old science students from New Zealand, Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo from Pakuranga College, Auckland, conducted an experiment to measure Ribena's vitamin C content, it came up terribly short.

The girls' concerns were originally disregarded by the company, but a local TV program picked up the story, and it eventually ended up online. Not long after, the New Zealand Commerce Commission brought fifteen charges of false and misleading advertising against the company in the New Zealand District Court.

So bad was the PR from the fallout that across the Tasman Ocean, in Australia, the company made a massive 'voluntar?' change to their packaging, and the managing director of GSK went on national television in a series of ads, making an apology.

GlaxoSmithKline are the world's second largest pharmaceutical company, with global profits over £7.8 billion, and they have basically been held to account by two 14-year-olds with a bunsen burner and conical flask!

This is just one example of how new technologies are empowering ordinary individuals and increasing bottomup accountability.

4. INCREASING EXPECTATIONS

The fourth force of change results from the other three and in turn feeds back into them: increasing expectations for faster, better, cheaper products, for more varied options and for greater transparency and flexibility in response to customer needs and wants. Let's consider the following product timeline.

Twenty years ago it was standard to have two or three keys for your car – one to open the door and start the ignition, one to open the boot and perhaps another for your fuel cap. This evolved into just one key for both door and ignition and a button inside the car for access to the fuel cap.

In an attempt to further improve the user experience, luxury car manufacturers decided to save drivers the immense effort required to stick a key in a lock and offered remote keyless entry, allowing the driver to press a button to unlock the door. Then they would need to put that remote key into either a traditional ignition and turn the car on or more recently hit the start button.

Now even this is too much and you don't even have to take the key out of your pocket. The car automatically senses the key in proximity and when you place your hands on the door handle the car unlocks instantly. Then, leaving the key in your purse or pocket you hit the start button and the engine fires up.Not only that, but some leading cars will automatically reconfigure the seat and mirror settings based on the programmed owner of the key. To top things off, keyless ignition moved in the space of a few months from a luxury car feature to one available on mass-market cars such as the Nissan Maxima.