Copenhagen, creativity and ambiguity
This last few weeks in Copenhagen have been amazing for many reasons. The summer was hot and sunny, which is not common in Denmark, and I had a chance to really embrace hygge, the Danish coziness philosophy. But most of all, I was immersed at the culture of one of Europe's most relevant business schools, Copenhagen Business School. Students from all around the world go there for their summer program and I was very fortunate to be one of them.
Denmark is a well stablished trade society. The Danes don't have much land of their own, so they had to excel at doing business with other countries. If you want to have an idea of how important studying business is for them, bare in mind that Denmark has only 8 Universities and CBS is the only one dedicated exclusively to this line of study. And more than 20,000 students go there. For a 5,7 million inhabitants country, that's a lot of students. Despite being a very competitive field, business in seen by the Danes as a promising career path for youngsters.
The course I was taking there is called The Psychology of Decision Making — We Are Not Irrational, Are We? Yes, the names of the courses at CBS can be very long and creative. As the title says, one of the things that we learned is that yeah, we are not really rational. But we are not irrational either. We are actually quasi-rational, which means that we lack total rationality in making decisions, but there are still a logic behind the psychological processes behind it.
In life and in business, we are often faced with situations full of contradiction, inconsistency and ambiguity. Those problems can't be dealt with by traditional decision making strategies, that involve a previews search for information and a posterior action. That happens because ambiguous situations are too dynamic, and by the time the decision maker feels ready to act, the scenario is already completely different from when they started thinking about the solution. Instead, chaotic situations call for creative, innovative solutions. In fact, it is in high ambiguity contexts that the creative individual and firm will flourish.
The way to tackle this types of problems is by acting first, and searching for feedback from the system later. To do that, one has to embrace uncertainty, and learn how to deal with risk. There's a chance things might go wrong, but if you and your firm are ready to act quickly, it might be better to take the risk than to let your problems escalate.
I'’l be posting more about CBS, Decision Making, and Denmark. I am also preparing some live content to be presented to you, and a Portuguese version of this text will soon be up. I hope you enjoy it and that we can start a conversation on these topics. So please feel free to comment :)
