‘If you work hard and succeed, you’re a loser’: can you really wing it to the top?

Forget the spreadsheets and make it up as you go along – that’s the message of leaders from Elon Musk to Boris Johnson. But is acting on instinct really a good idea? Emma Beddington in The Guardian
There are, it seems, two types of “winging it” stories. First, there are the triumphant ones – the victories pulled, cheekily, improbably, from the jaws of defeat. Like the time a historian (who prefers to remain nameless) turned up to give a talk on one subject, only to discover her hosts were expecting, and had advertised, another. “I wrote the full thing – an hour-long show – in 10 panicked minutes,” she says. “At the end, a lady came up to congratulate me on how spontaneous my delivery was.”

Then there is the other kind of winging it story – the kind that ends in ignominy. Remember the safeguarding minister, Rachel Maclean, tying herself in factually inaccurate knots when asked about stop-and-search powers? The Australian journalist Matt Doran, who interviewed Adele without listening to her album? Or the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, claiming Channel 4 was publicly funded, then that Channel 5 had been privatised?

There are even worse examples. As a young journalist, Sarah Dempster was unwell when she was supposed to review a Meat Loaf concert, so she wrote the piece without attending. “An hour after publication, the paper called to inform me that the gig had, in fact, been cancelled. I was sacked,” she tweeted. “The Sun wrote a piece about it. The headline: ‘MEAT OAF’.”

Why does anyone wing it, and how do they dare? As a lifelong dreary prepper, I have been wondering this since reading a profile in the New York Times of winger extraordinaire Elon Musk. “To a degree unseen in any other mogul, the entrepreneur acts on whim, fancy and the certainty that he is 100% right,” it related, detailing how Musk wings even the biggest decisions, operating on gut feeling and without a business plan, rejecting expert advice.
Genius or graft? Apple founder Steve Jobs and Zhou Qunfei, China’s richest woman. Composite: Getty/Shutterstock/Guardian Design

What, I wonder, is the appeal of this strategy? And is it a legitimate – indeed, more successful – way of doing business? Can Musk, the CEO of Tesla (a company with a market capitalisation of £570bn) and the founder of SpaceX (the first private company to send humans into space) really be winging it?

Some are sceptical. “Is this self-presentation or an accurate statement?” asks Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organisational psychologist and the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? “Musk is probably way too smart to actually operate under that principle; he uses this arrogant self-presentation to his advantage. Brand Musk accounts for a big chunk of his success.” In contrast, he says, the recent Netflix SpaceX documentary shows Musk as “quite self-critical, quite humble”.

It is an idea echoed by Stefan Stern, a visiting professor at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London and the author of Myths of Management. “I can’t believe that he doesn’t draw on data; it’s a leading-edge thing he’s engaged in. When you promote yourself as a sort of visionary or hero, you absolutely want to try to claim that there’s something special about your insights – they’re not a petty, banal matter of data.” 

The implication is that Musk is like those schoolkids who claim not to have done a minute’s revision, then ace the exam. There is, the argument goes, something innately appealing about someone operating effortlessly on flair, instinct and inspiration: a Steve Jobs, not a Zhou Qunfei – the discreet founder of Lens Technology and the richest woman in China, who, Chamorro-Premuzic says, credits her success to “hard work and a relentless desire to learn”.

“There’s something romantic to the idea that there are mavericks who don’t need to work very hard,” adds Chamorro-Premuzic. “We say we value hard work and dedication, but, by definition, talent is more of an extraordinary gift and we celebrate that more.”

The leadership expert Eve Poole agrees. “No one wants to make it feel like hard work,” she says. “No one wants to say: ‘I slaved in front of a spreadsheet for 20 hours before I made that decision.’”

For Stern, Boris Johnson’s apparent penchant for winging it carries a similar message. “When he says: ‘We got the big calls right,’ he’s saying: ‘These small-minded people obsess about data and numbers and statistics, but with my instinct, my judgment, I – the uniquely gifted, insightful leader – got the big calls right.’ It’s not even true!”

His self-presentation as “a charismatic figure with panache who is apparently spontaneous” is particularly interesting, Stern says, given that “the other thing we know about Johnson is he’s not spontaneous, he doesn’t have good lines off the cuff”. (See that disastrous CBI Peppa Pig speech in November, recent prime minister’s questions performances or his testy, defensive responses in more probing interviews.)

Is there any foundation for the notion that gut feeling is superior to pedestrian, data-driven decision-making? The cognitive psychologist Gary Klein has spent his career researching intuition in decision-making; 35 years on, his research on how firefighters act swiftly under pressure in tough situations is still cited. “We weren’t looking for intuition,” he says. Rather, his team’s original theory was that firefighters might be rapidly evaluating two options when they decided how to tackle a fire. “They told us: ‘We don’t compare any options.’ More than that, they said: ‘We never make any decisions.’” Klein didn’t understand how firefighters could believe only one course of action was possible and land on it without making comparisons. 

Further digging revealed a different picture. With 15 to 20 years of experience, Klein explains, the firefighters were classifying the situation based on fires they had seen – a process known as “pattern matching”. The second step Klein called “mental simulation”: the firefighters would visualise how a course of action would run and adjust their model accordingly. “It’s a blend of intuition and analysis,” says Klein. The process was near-instantaneous. “Most decisions were made in less than a minute.”

So, what looks like winging it can, in fact, be instinctive decision-making backed up by experience – what Poole calls “really quick heuristics in your brain … synaptic connections established through years of conditioning”. Leaders who trust that, she says, “are just fucking excellent”.

This decision-making model is common in one of the areas where people are least comfortable with the idea of winging it: healthcare. No one wants to end up in the hands of a seat-of-the-pants neurosurgeon, but Klein’s research suggests medical professionals use intuitive decision-making and gut feeling as a matter of course.

His book The Power of Intuition tells the story of an experienced neonatal intensive care unit nurse accurately diagnosing a baby with sepsis just by walking past the incubator and getting a gut feeling, when a less experienced nurse who had been conscientiously tracking all the infant’s vitals had failed to spot it. “An experienced physician sees a cluster of cues and says sepsis. We’ve heard stories of someone who was just a resident; there was a tough case and they called the attending physician. The attending physician does not even enter the room and from the door just looks at the patient and sees there’s an issue and says: ‘Ah, congestive heart failure.’”
Firefighters in New York. Gary Klein’s research suggests they use ‘a blend of intuition and analysis’ to make quick decisions. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The experiences that feed intuition can be less concrete. Poole has been researching what humans still have to offer in a world in which AI is ever-more powerful, such as what she calls “witch-style intuition” – that sense of foreboding when you enter a room or meet someone. “We all know we have had those feelings and we tend to discount them and think they’re a bit silly and weird,” she says. “But I think it’s probably coming from the collective historical unconscious, trying to keep us safe as a species.” There are, she says, two strands: “your own, desperately hard-earned gut feeling, laid down in templates of data and knowledge, then the spooky ephemera that you can pick up through ‘spidey sense’, which I think can still be really reliable.”

It can, but it isn’t always. Intuition of any kind is not infallible. Klein describes it as a “data point”: something to take into consideration, not to accept uncritically. One area in which intuition gives demonstrably poor outcomes is recruitment. As Chamorro-Premuzic explains, unstructured interview processes increase and reinforce conscious and unconscious biases about candidates. We all believe our own intuition to be superior, he says: “In an interview situation, this is a big problem, because hiring managers think they have an ability to see through candidates and to understand whether they are competent.” Companies will spend large budgets on diversity and inclusion, “then tell you they hire for ‘culture fit’ – and the main way to evaluate culture fit is whether somebody ‘feels right’ in a job interview. Even if managers are well-meaning and open-minded, they will gravitate towards candidates who are like them and they are comfortable with.” 

Moreover, studies show that people tend to make up their mind in the first 60 or 90 seconds, he says. This is pattern recognition gone wrong, according to Stern. When decision-makers see someone who reminds them of themselves, they think: “Oh yeah, he’s got the right stuff. I used to be like him.”

Donald Trump springs to mind here. I read Klein a typical Trump pronouncement: “I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” It reminds Klein of two dangerous fallacies about intuition: “One, some people think intuition is innate ability, which I don’t think it is; it’s based on experience. Two, intuition is a general skill and will apply in lots of different situations. I don’t think that’s true.” Having decent intuition in an area where you have professional experience – “like real estate”, he says, pointedly – does not mean you have a transferable skill.

Talking to people who admit to winging it reveals that, mainly, they mean the “good” kind of intuition: calling on a wealth of relevant experience and deploying it in defined circumstances. That often involves an element of performance, where spontaneity can be the secret ingredient.

Susannah, who works in publishing, says: “I love to wing it in sales presentations. When I wing it, I suddenly find a new angle; it works every time. But only, I think, because I’m winging stuff I already know deeply.” Kathy, a senior financial services strategist, says: “If it’s something I don’t know at all, I won’t wing it, but in my area of expertise I’m the queen of prep five minutes before the meeting.”

These are the good wingers, but of course the bad ones are out there – the lazy, the grandiose blaggers and the bullshitters, too often in positions of power. “There are a lot of men, particularly, who do that,” says Poole. “I think it does appeal to people who don’t feel anything any more – it’s all so boring and that’s the way they get some feelings. It gives them a massive adrenaline rush; it makes them feel very powerful and victorious.” It is not usually a successful long-term strategy, she adds, comfortingly; what Chamorro-Premuzic calls “the sense of Teflon-style immunity” betrays them eventually. “I just think you get caught out. It’s the spin of the wheel and that’s why I hate it: it’s so risky for your organisation.”

But we still admire them, buy their products, even vote for them. Why do we fall for it? It is a lack of “followership maturity”, according to Chamorro-Premuzic, and varies from culture to culture. “I grew up in South America, where if you work hard and you succeed you’re automatically a loser,” he says. “Whereas if you bullshit and deceive people, we should worship you. There are cultures that truly value self-improvement, hard work and knowledge and there are cultures that value confidence.”

A country that wants to be entertained, he says, is likely to apply low standards for leadership, preferring self-belief to caution and hard work. “Whether it’s Trump, Boris, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk – they celebrate them because they challenge the establishment. When they behave in anarchic ways, disrespecting the rules, I think they can channel the anger that people have.” The kicker is that we assume there’s some competence behind the blagging and bluster, that the emperor is fully clothed. But how do we work out if it is true: spreadsheet or gut? 

How to spot the chancers who are ‘winging it’ at work

We are bad at assessing others’ skills and performance but true slackers will always slip up writes Emma Jacobs in The FT

“This one is going to be pretty special,” teased the Australian reporter’s Instagram post. How right he was. Accompanying a television crew to interview Adele, the British pop star, he discovered too late that he had missed an email containing the preview of her new album, 30. Talking about the album was the entire reason for their encounter. “This is the most important email I have ever missed,” he said. The interview was binned. 

The story emerged on the same day that Boris Johnson delivered a speech ostensibly about the UK creative industries to the CBI, the UK’s largest employers’ group. Instead, he lost his place in his notes — pleading “forgive me” — and swerved into talking about Peppa Pig. I’m no expert on public speaking but asking the audience for forgiveness might be an error. 

As examples of winging it go, these were both spectacular fails, criticised for being unprofessional and disrespectful. We’ve all been at meetings, watched panels or seen speeches where participants are bluffing, having failed to do their homework. Some (many?) of us may even have been the bluffers. 

Winging it has appeal. It’s a lot less work, for starters. And it can appear charming: making its practitioners human rather than robotic, fitting the business vogue for authenticity. A few people can genuinely pull it off. 

However, beware the faux-wingers (FWs). Anyone who has been to school will be all too familiar with the person who rocks up to an exam claiming not to have done any revision, concealing the fact they studied hard. Falling for an FW’s spin is a mistake that might cause you to fall flat on your face. 

One classic FW tool is spontaneity. It looks effortless but can be hard work. I called an FW friend I’ve known since university, where he would procrastinate by evaluating different types of biscuits. Today he is a senior barrister. Unsurprisingly, he’s left the biscuits behind, and prepares for cases with rehearsed arguments, strategy and detailed answers, reams of notes, including gags and analogies that appear to have been made on the spot, to keep the audience engaged. “You have to work harder if you want to riff,” he says. 

Another friend prepares sports stars to go on television. He works with two sportspeople (frustratingly, he won’t name and shame) who have very different attitudes. One puts the work in and appears fluent and natural at press conferences, the other puts no effort in and clumsily and inaccurately tries to parrot the words he has been fed. 

Chaos is Johnson’s schtick. The broadcaster Jeremy Vine once wrote an entertaining post about watching the prime minister prepare for an after-dinner speech by jotting a couple of random notes down just as he was about to go on stage and then forgetting half the joke. Only to see him do exactly the same thing — and the same speech — at another function. On many occasions, the prime minister would appear to be a classic FW. 

Those at the top of their professional game may be permitted some genuine winging, not needing as much prep because they are experienced. But as demonstrated by Johnson’s recent performance (which appears to be a case of genuine winging) and the Adele interviewer, there is no excuse for an experienced professional who fails to cover the basics.  

It can be hard to tell the fake from the genuine winger. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organisational psychologist who has researched confidence, says we are not very good at assessing performance, either in ourselves or others. And, as he says, the more “inept you are, the less good you are at evaluating your performance”. (In other words, the Dunning Kruger effect.) 

One of the paradoxes of the modern world of work, Chamorro-Premuzic says, is that “the more complex, skilled, and well-paid your job is, the harder it is for others to tell if you are performing well or not”. In other words, greater complexity makes performance harder to judge. 

Those who are overconfident often end up doing too little work: they might pull it off, but there is a strong chance they won’t successfully wing it. “Having less confidence can enhance performance as it means you prepare and study”, Chamorro-Premuzic points out. Which for all the worriers out there (like me) is a great comfort.

Is PPE a passport to power – or the ultimate blagger's degree?

Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and David Cameron all studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. What does the degree really teach you and why is it the perfect springboard to a career in Westminster and the media?

• 
• • John Crace
  • The Guardian, Monday 23 September 2013 16.59 BST

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. Photograph: Stephen Simpson/Rex Features

On their own, they aren't particularly remarkable. Taken together at York or Warwick, they still aren't anything very remarkable. But study philosophy, politics and economics(PPE) at Oxford University and you get power and influence thrown in with your degree certificate on graduation day.

At least that's the way it looks. Of the current cabinet, David Cameron, William Hague, Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond all read PPE: as did Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Danny Alexander along with about another 30 MPs. Among many others at the BBC, Nick Robinson, Stephanie Flanders, Evan Davis and Newsnight editor Ian Katz read PPE. At least eight journalists at the Guardian read PPE, with similar numbers at the other broadsheets. And tabloids, for that matter. Toby Young read PPE. Even Chris Huhne read PPE.

Some might take one look at both politics and journalism and conclude that the one thing they have in common is a talent for having a firm opinion about absolutely everything regardless and that PPE is a life lesson lesson in winging it. Others who went to Oxford certainly think that. When asked by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight if it rankled that Cameron had got a first when he had only got a 2:1, Boris Johnson, whose degree was in classics, said: "It would if it wasn't that his first was in PPE." His message was clear: PPE was an inferior degree. Though one might also wonder at the cheek of Boris Johnson for calling Cameron out as a slacker.

Slack is certainly not the word Oxford University chooses to describe PPE; only 15% of those who apply are admitted. Rather it prefers to market the course as "Modern Greats" that "brings together some of the most important approaches to understanding the social and human world around us, developing skills useful for a whole range of future careers and activities". In the first year, students study all three subjects equally, after which they can choose to drop one.

So what sort of student chooses PPE? For some it's a chance to try something new. "I had taken science A-levels but didn't want to continue any of those subjects at university," says one graduate. "PPE seemed like a safe transition. The three branches covered a lot of ground and if I found one boring or wasn't up to it, then I could drop it." Not knowing exactly what they wanted to study was also key for many other students but there are a significant number for whom the course's reputation was critical.

"There were those who had chosen PPE precisely because it was a springboard to a career in the politics or the media," says a former student. "They had their whole lives mapped out from the moment they arrived at Oxford. They knew they were going to edit the student newspaper, be president of the union and what job they were going to end up in. They probably even knew whom they were going to marry. They seemed to have got just about everything else right."

 David Cameron. Photograph: Rex

"It's definitely something that is commented on and joked about," says a graduate from Wadham. "There's a moment in The West Wing, a flashback I think, when one character is handed a napkin with 'Bartlett for President' written on as they plan to make him run for office. Well, I'd be lying if I said there weren't more than a few drunken nights that ended with someone being handed a napkin with 'X for Prime Minister' written on. People are fully aware, and much of the student union is made up of PPE students. That creates a pressure in its own way too – I certainly still think about it. I think most people who did it are interested in politics, and so it's natural to wonder if you could do it better – especially as you see more and more of your peers getting heavily involved."

PPE's reputation for being a bit of a doss compared with other courses stems not so much from the amount of work that is required – most students remember feeling they could never hope to cover all the reading they were given – but from the freedom they have to do it. While science students usually had to be in the lab every day from 9am till 5pm, PPE students could spend the entire morning in bed. Lectures are not compulsory: one of the graduates who spoke to me said he never went to a single one during his entire three years – "There was no real point so long as you did the reading" – and the three or four tutorials a week are usually arranged at a mutually convenient civilised hour later in the day. So, as one graduate put it: "If you wanted to lie in during the mornings and plan your conquest of Oxford in the afternoons, you could. As long as you got your essays done on time – you could write them at night, if necessary – there was nothing stopping you."

Most graduates say there were many more men in their year than women, but no one found it particularly macho. "Yes, it was competitive and students were ambitious," says a female graduate. "But you'd expect that at Oxford; the university is full of alpha types who are used to succeeding. About a third of the students may have made a point of wanting to show how clever they were by not dropping a subject, even though it gave them a great deal more work and didn't get them any extra benefit, but the bragging rights weren't worth a great deal as most students didn't know each other. There were so many different options and tutorial groups were so small, you could go through your entire Oxford career never talking to some people on the course."

Oxford's sales pitch for PPE describes the course as "a multidisciplinary degree designed for those who like to draw connections among political, economic and social phenomena". This is slightly misleading, as it implies that the course tutors go out of their way to help students make these connections and that the three disciplines have been tailored to complement one another. "Nothing could be further from the truth," says one graduate. "Each subject exists entirely in its own bubble and it's almost as if a don would rather die than talk to someone teaching one of the other subjects. Every don is convinced that theirs is the only subject worth doing and that the others are a bit of a waste of time. So you're left to make your own connections between the subjects."

Sometimes this works better than others. One graduate regrets having given up economics at the end of the first year. "It was taught in such a dull, theoretical way that I just couldn't see the point of it," she says. "It just didn't seem to relate to anything in real life. Only since I've left Oxford have I come to understand how central it is to understanding how the world operates."

But mostly it works like this. Students make the political, philosophical and economic connections they were always going to make. Those on the right have their rightwing views reinforced; those on the left have their leftwing views reinforced. All that's happened in the three years in between is that everyone has become a bit better informed and a lot more confident that they are right. And maybe it's just as much the social connections that are made that turn so many PPE graduates into masters of the universe: after all, many continue to orbit one another throughout their careers. "The thing is this," one graduate laughs, "PPE is such a big subject that no one can ever know everything, so we all have to bullshit like mad at times to cover up our ignorance. And we by and large get away with it. So we carry on bullshitting once we leave Oxford and most of us are still getting away with it."

The syllabus

Year 1

All courses studied equally.

Philosophy – general philosophy, moral philosophy and elementary logic.

Politics – theorising the democratic state and analysis of democratic institutions in the US, UK, France and Germany.

Economics – microeconomics, macroeconomics and mathematical techniques.

Years 2 and 3

Only two branches must be taken.

Philosophy – ethics and either early modern philosophy; or knowledge and reality; or Plato's Republic; or Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

Politics – any two of: comparative government; British politics and government since 1900; theory of politics; international politics; political sociology.

Economics – microeconomics, macroeconomics and quantitative economics

In addition to these compulsory courses, second- and third-year students may take optional papers from a choice of more than 50 courses. Compulsory courses can also be taken as options.