What We're Doing

Our Mission. The focus of our work is helping people understand, solve, and explain complex problems... problems that involve system behavior... problems that cause normally rational people to behave irrationally.

Challenges to Managing Complexity Issue #1: Very few people (less than 1%) have any skills or training whatsoever at handling complex problems. Traditional logical thinking and decision making doesn't help people solve complex issues and usually make the problems worse. (One of the traditional responses to complexity is to try and break it into parts. The results may be satisfying in the short term and usually futile and often disastrous in the long term.)

Issue #2: As problems increase in complexity, people's ability to think about, talk about, and take action on them goes down. Typical untrained responses to complexity are: (a) to freeze and not act; (b) to react impulsively; and (c) to revert to familiar patterns of behavior... none of which help solve the problem!

Issue #3: Technological advances have made the world smaller and more interconnected. People have access to information than every before and are drowning in the overload. They are faced with more choices and potential consequences. The world is becoming increasingly complex. Increasing complexity without appropriate skills and tools to manage it, is having significant repercussions on business and in society that are becoming increasingly challenging.

There is a great deal of research going on at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and other academic institutions on this subject. There is also a multidisciplinary research think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, with some of the world's leading minds participating, working to facilitate discussions about it.

Some of the most interesting and meaningful results of these efforts have been advancements in studies of Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning, and Simulation. All three provide valuable contributions to helping people learn to navigate through complexity - solving complex problems and making complex decisions more effectively.

So What? So how does all this academic jargon apply to financial services and what we're doing? Most financial companies' (and advisors') approach to complex problems is KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), which typically modularizes or breaks the problem into parts; for example, retirement planning decisions, investment decisions, insurance decisions, and estate decisions. This is a logical, but flawed approach.

Why? The reason that most customers get hung up and fail to decide/act is because they have difficulty visualizing the tradeoffs between these issues. For example, "If I solve my estate problem by gifting assets to children, will I need the money some day (cause a retirement problem)?" There are many other examples of issues like this where people's decisions and actions are paused or abandoned because of the inability of the client (and the advisor) to visualize and model the tradeoffs involved in the client's big picture.

If this can be solved, clients will be better served - they will make better more confident decisions - and sales people will sell faster and more effectively!

The Bottom Line. Real life and real problems, particularly the types of issues clients in the 21st century go to advisors for, aren't simple. They're complex! If advisors want to add real value for customers, they must be able to help them understand, solve, and act on complex problems. But most advisors don't have the training or tools to do it!

We've done a lot of research/work to create tools and training to help fix this. We create products that represent the state of the art in helping advisors model and explain complex financial problems.

We design visuals tools, including slideshows and software, based on principles of systems thinking, scenario planning, and simulation to help people look as financial wholes rather than parts. Using our tools advisors help clients talk about big picture issues and visualize financial tradeoffs. This helps them plan more appropriately and effectively and make decisions/take action much faster.