The problem is who are you asking.
As the brilliant 1984 film, Ghostbusters told us, your first thought should be “who you gonna call”.
As a CEO there are lots of people you might want to cal. For example, do you need someone who can help me understand the nonsense you're being told by you team - a Myth-Buster? Do you need a Stressbuster to help you manage your physiology before you can even start thinking about a way forward. Do you need a much better Commercial Director to become a Price-Busters and renegotiate all your contracts. Do you need a better Marketing Director, to be a Crime-Buster, because it’s criminal how little people understand your value position. Or do you need our Strategy Director to be a Dam-Buster and breakthrough the organisational barriers to change. Maybe it's none of these because you already have the right answer on the shelf and you just need a Dust-Buster to bring it back to life?
If it's not someone inside your organisation then "who you gonna call" from outside?
When faced with challenging problems, most CEOs call one of the ‘Usual Suspects’.
This means someone from one of the consulting cathedrals, or someone from the 'hallowed halls of learning', i.e. your preferred business school.
After all no-one ever gets fired for hiring IBM, right?
It’s a safe bet.
These are the most credentialled institutions in the world. Their people are brilliant, polished, and expensive.
And, in business, expensive is often mistaken for valuable.
Playing safe, by calling on a famous name, insulates the decision-maker from personal risk. This isn’t stupidity. It’s rational self-interest.
The consequences of turning to the conventional wisdom, commissioning the establishment, or bringing in orthodox thinkers is rarely catastrophic. But it lacks courage. If you really want to change the future you need to be brave, and resist the temptation to call the usual suspects, who are likely to give you the usual answer and keep you exactly where you are already at.
The usual suspects are unlikely to solve the problem or produce the breakthrough you need.
More likely they will create another corporate echo chamber.
And turning to your preferred intelligent friend; Claude, Co-Pilot or ChatGPT won’t get you off the hook either. The subtlety of AI's sycophancy beguiles many a leader into believing they are achieving better answer when they're not.
Playing it safe is the fast route to failure.
Not catastrophic short-term failure. But a more insidious soporific demise. A gradual diminution of leadership intelligence. An erosion of quality and a lost of innovative capability.
Generally speaking Innovation Sucks. The numbers are brutal. In the UK alone, £65 billion is wasted every year on failed product launches.
The inconvenient truth is that most businesses are terrible at the very thing they claim to prioritise - innovation.
And this is not a British peculiarity. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen calculated that 95% of all product innovations fail globally. The Doblin Group found that 96% of all innovations fail to return their cost of capital. A McKinsey Global Innovation Survey found that only 6% of executives are satisfied with their company's innovation performance, and in the same breath, 72% of those same executives admitted their companies make bad decisions more often than good ones.
Read those numbers again. We are not talking about occasional misses. We are talking about a systemic, near-universal failure. An industry spending vast sums to produce the same wrong answers, over and over again, with remarkable consistency.
The question isn't "why so many innovations, or attempts to solve endemic problems, fail?"
The better question is: "why do we keep asking the same people for an answer?"
In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, one of the most important and least-heeded books of the 20th century.
His central argument was that the establishment doesn't just fail to produce paradigm shifts, it actively resists them.
Why? Because genuinely new thinking undermines the status and authority of the very people who built their careers on the old thinking. The institutions that guard conventional wisdom have a structural incentive to protect it.
This is not a scientific phenomenon. It is a human one.
And even if we were brave enough to not call the usual suspects, do we have the humility to listen to the maverick thinkers with their novel answers? Many boardrooms and research labs suffer from "Not Invented Here" syndrome. The well-documented corporate tendency to reject fresh thinking from outsiders
Research shows that the performance of R&D groups actually declines after about five years, as teams become increasingly insular and cut off from the external sources of insight that could freshen their thinking. The corporate immune system, is charged to attack the very ideas that could save the organisation.
The result is organisations keep turning to the same firms, who use the same frameworks, reach the same conclusions and nothing really improves. Organisations mistake the familiarity of the answer for its correctness.
Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the most original minds of the twentieth century, had a characteristically blunt diagnosis of this problem.
He suggested that most people don't actually think - they repeat.
They learn by rote rather than by understanding. They lack 'foundational thinking'. Their route cause analysis, is simply a repetition of a methodology or an answer they've heard elsewhere.
Feynman suggested that leaders need to train their minds to actually think. To develop the ability to work from first principles. They need to drill down to the most fundamental truths and build their understanding upward from there.
When leaders understand the fundamentals, they can explain apparently unrelated complex phenomena by using the same underlying 'foundational thinking' and logic.
You can only see the critical connections if you’ve gone deep enough to find the fundamentals.
Elon Musk, who cites Feynman as a formative influence, draws the same distinction in a business context. Most people, he argues, reason by analogy.
They do things because it is like something else that was done, or because it is what other people are doing.
Foundational thinking is different. You strip away assumption, convention, and received wisdom. You build your understanding from the ground up.
When Musk looked at the cost of building a rocket, he didn’t accept the going price as fixed. He broke it down to raw materials, calculated what it should cost, and founded SpaceX. The usual suspects in the aerospace industry had been reasoning by analogy for decades. Musk asked a different kind of question.
The lesson for business leaders is clear.
When you commission the established view, you are, by definition, purchasing reasoning by analogy. You're buying a sophisticated restatement of what has been done before, dressed in the language of rigour. What you're not buying is a genuine foundational thinking, the rich first-principles interrogation of your actual problem.
Now, here’s the Good News The answer to your most pressing problem is already out there in the world. It sits in the mind of someone working at the edge of a field. Someone who connects ideas across multiple disciplines. Someone who is unencumbered by the need to protect a methodology, a retainer or a reputation. The person you should be looking for is a 'polymathic integrator' who's almost certainly left the hallowed halls of academia and eschewed the insularity of big consulting firms for the rawness of the cutting edge.
In fact, if you look deep into the research of breakthroughs, that have transformed entire fields, they've almost always come from people who possessed exactly these qualities.
Alexander Fleming noticed what no one else had bothered to look at: a contaminated petri dish. Why? Because he no-one told him it was irrelevant. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, two maverick Australian doctors working far from the global gastroenterology establishment, proposed, in the early 1980s, that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium rather than stress or excess acid. The medical consensus was contemptuous. They were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize. Ignaz Semmelweis cut death rates from puerperal fever by 90% simply by insisting on handwashing. He died in an asylum, rejected by the very profession he had tried to save. Francis Crick did not crack the structure of DNA by being the world's greatest biochemist. He imported conceptual frameworks from physics and saw something that pure biochemists had looked at and missed.
The pattern is consistent across centuries and disciplines: the people who hold the answer are rarely the people everyone thinks to call.
If the usual suspects aren’t where the answers lie, then “who you gonna call?”
You can’t simply commission different consultants.
You must develop two organisational capabilities that almost no business currently has.
It’s not easy to FIND and DIFFERENTIATE.
To do this well, organisations require high quality search skills, genuine curiosity, an openness to difference. Organisations need the courage to choose a maverick and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. All qualities that corporations tend to train out of their people rather than into them.
In the absence of such capability, the default is dull and safe - hire the famous name. Reduce your personal risk, and join the 94% of senior executives who are privately dissatisfied with what they got.
Ghostbusters worked because they were the only people willing to ask a question no-one else was taking seriously: what if the ghost is real, and what would it actually take to deal with it? They did not consult the established view on paranormal activity. They built the proton pack themselves, from first principles.
The organisations that will solve their hardest problems in the years ahead are those that are brave and develop the discipline to ask, who’s genuinely ‘thought’ about this.
Who is working from first principles, and who is reasoning by analogy?
Who brings foundational thinking, independence and diversity of thought, rather than the echo of the consensus?
The answer to "who you gonna call" is rarely the name everyone else is calling.
The Dambusters did not use a conventional bomb. Fleming did not throw away the contaminated dish. And the best thinking available to your organisation almost certainly does not come with a famous logo on the pitch deck.
The real busters, of myths, problems, and paradigms, are found somewhere else entirely.
The question is whether you have developed the skill to find them.
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