Day 34: Preparing for the unpredictable

In 1994 Iaan and I spent many hours developing a game called "Malbal" (Literally mad ball). Similar to bowls the objective is to place eleven balls next to the "sun" before your opponent does. There are many rituals around how one achieves this but the real stars are the balls. Iaan has turned beautiful balls made from various wood varieties. The madness in the balls comes from their lack of symmetry and lead weights sunk below the surface. It is entirely impossible to accurately predict how a ball will roll. Over the year we ascribed personalities to the various degrees of madness, or unpredictability and ultimately risk inherent in each ball. Tonight we had our first international championship. Iaan was the winner with a final score of 11:9:6:3 after 5 hours and 28 rounds.

The fascinating thing about malbal though is how it confronts you with randomness. How you make every effort to prepare for it by holding the ball in a certain way, using zen like focus to control your arm, wrist, hand, posture and all manner of mental machinations. How in the end the balls decide where they want to go and who to reward. Make no mistake, the game demands a huge degree of skill because everyone is dealing with the same degree of unexpected trajectory. Tapping into their 'flow.'

When Brian Eno played the game with Iaan in 1998 they discussed using it for developing strategies in music. The outcomes can be codified and tabulated to reveal all kinds of patterns that say far more about our patterns creating ability than the randomness my imply. This is the closest thing I have seen to a tool for revealing Black Swans.

What mechanisms do strategy modeling tools apply to develop the personality traits needed in leaders to deal with random and unexpected events? As with the individual balls, can we ascribe personality types to different levels of risk? What does the debt swap derivative ball look like and how do we invite others to play with it, so that we may discover new ways of dealing with a particular risk?

In malbal some players throw the balls through the air, reducing the impact of crazy patterns to a smaller impact surface. Others give the same ball a specific spin, using the flywheel effect to contain its camber. Ultimately all these things reveal elements of a player's identity (or as Iaan calls them 'Id'-entities) more than they say about the balls themselves. How long will it be before the value of play is recognized in the boardroom (or is this the real purpose of golf)? Not only to release creativity and develop new outcomes, but also to reveal the deeper nature of the leadership personalities who are responding to and shaping the risk of a corporate strategy.