Widthwise 2022
Is your brain holding you back? The lessons you’ve learned in the past could be why your business fails the test of time - unless you question your mindset.
D
igital printing did not even exist when Queen Elizabeth II’s reign began in February 1952, and it would be another 41 years before Benny Landa launched the revolutionary Indigo, effectively making an entire industry possible. There was no internet (the first email was sent in 1969) or smartphone (developed by IBM in 1994), and global warming didn’t exist as a recognised concept - in 1960, crop failures in India and the Soviet Union were attributed by the media as “unlucky weather” although scientists began to wonder whether something irrevocable was happening to the Earth’s climate. Seventy years later, we live, work and do business in much more uncertain times. The greatest known unknown facing us all is climate change but there are others, more specific to the UK and to wide-format print service providers, notably supply chain disruption, the soaring cost of supplies (including energy) and the British economy’s fragility. We are entering an era where wide-format print executives discover that curiosity is more useful than decisiveness. As the industry looks ahead, it needs to avoid such cognitive traps as ‘projection bias’ - our tendency to ground our vision of the future in our experience of the present. This mindset led mail order companies astray. They had the systems to sell, market and to deliver shopping to the masses - and were rich enough to invest in their transformation - but their focus on the mail order catalogue left a gap that Jeff Bezos was only too happy to fill with Amazon. Most industries - and companies - are much more insular than they care to admit. The ‘egocentric empathy gap’ bias leads us to overestimate the similarity between what we think and what others think. In the early 1980s, high-minded prophets of the digital age assumed the internet would be a boon for people like them, not gamblers, corrupt politicians and trolls.
Digital print companies have already been affected by what theorists call the ‘say/ do gap’. For example, a client will almost certainly say that sustainability is important to them when it comes to buying print but what they actually purchase is as likely to be driven by cost, convenience or quality. The lesson is: ‘say’ data can be useful, but ‘do’ data is better.
As the industry looks ahead, it needs to avoid cognitive traps ‘Agile’ has become an irritatingly ubiquitous concept for one very good reason -change is greater, faster and more unpredictable than at any time since Elizabeth II’s
36 | Widthwise 2022 | www.imagereports.co.uk
reign began. In this time of flux, print service providers (PSPs) need to be especially wary of ‘hypothesis confirmation’ - our unconscious preference for information that supports our view. This bias is so strong that we often dismiss facts that contradict our opinions as irrelevant. Even more alarmingly research shows that many decision-makers don’t change their thinking even when this error is pointed out to them. The hypotheses that wide-format printers could consider include - but are not limited to - the likelihood of a game-changing technological breakthrough, how their services fit into the metaverse, and given the relentless advance of AI, what part of their current business could be automated either by themselves or by their (probably larger) clients. As PSPs navigate through such uncertain times, they should heed American physicist Richard Feynman’s maxim “I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.”
