The trouble with being right…

If the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that predicting the future really doesn't work. So at our eighth birthday party last week, we focused instead on how to prepare for whatever comes next.

Our theme was Reading the Room, which means knowing when to listen, challenge assumptions and admit that you might be wrong, which is notoriously difficult for large companies with many management layers.

One of the biggest impressions of the evening came from Parul Bhavishi, co-founder of the London Writers' Salon, who led our guests through a reflective talking exercise.

Her philosophy is that "Creativity is a biological necessity. And most of us never give ourselves permission to do it regularly, to make it a practice."

It's an interesting thought in a world where we're happy to schedule six consecutive meetings but somehow struggle to find fifteen minutes to think. Even reflection has become another productivity exercise, ideally ending with three key takeaways and an action plan.

Parul's session sparked some wonderful conversations about the importance of creating space to reflect, read, write and connect. It turns out that when people stop concentrating on what they're supposed to achieve next, they have some pretty interesting things to say about what they've already experienced.

That might just be the first lesson in reading the room: you have to create the conditions for people to speak before you can expect to understand them.

It links nicely to a story shared by Michelle Gansle, an insights and innovation leader who once found herself armed with all the evidence she needed to prove a point, only to discover that nobody particularly wanted to hear it.

Working in the confectionery industry, Michelle challenged a leadership team's assumption that declining gum sales meant the category had lost relevance. Her research suggested otherwise: the business had reduced advertising, stopped investing in relevance-building campaigns and raised prices beyond what consumers were willing to pay.

She presented the evidence, but when the leadership team remained unconvinced, she did what any respectable insights professional would do. She brought more data.

Unfortunately, more data wasn't the answer.

Michelle eventually realised she'd overlooked the importance of understanding the people she was trying to convince. Their concerns, assumptions and motivations were just as important as the numbers.

As she put it, "I learned that more data doesn't win an argument. How you tell the story does."

Her mentor offered another useful piece of advice: it's better to bring people along and be 80% right than be 100% right and stand alone.

A painful thought for anyone who's ever spent an entire meeting proving somebody wrong in Excel.

But it's a valuable lesson. Having the right information doesn't automatically mean you understand the room, particularly when the people in it have entirely different reasons for believing what they believe. You can read the full Linkedin post here.

Parul and Michelle's experiences point to the same lesson: understanding people requires curiosity, creativity, empathy and a willingness to question what we think we know.

Our biggest takeaway from the night was: read more, learn more, create more and proactively do more.

As we head into the next eight years, we want to keep our eyes wide open, learn faster, practise empathy and build the self-trust to act even when we don't have all the answers.