Anyone remember the power failure during the 2012 Superbowl? Probably not, for all that it lasted for a whopping 35 minutes, or, as comedian Stephen Colbert put it, “only two months short of New Orleans’ personal best.”
The funny thing about the power failure, however, was not Stephen Colbert making jokes about it, but how a number of people blamed the failure on Beyonce. Did Beyonce have anything to do with it? Well, Beyonce was playing at the time, but that’s about the only connection. I know that a lot people think she’s pretty impressive, but knocking out the power to the Superbowl? Even for Beyonce, that’s a bit much. Nonetheless, the fact that the two events were coincident in time meant that, for many people, there must have been a connection.
This is called getting caught by the chrome: rather than focusing on the actual problem in front of us, such as a power failure, our attention is caught by something peripheral. Sometimes, if we get lucky, that bit of chrome might also turn out to be a symptom of the problem, but not always.
Basically, a problem is composed of three elements: the problem itself, the symptoms, and the chrome. Most of the time, we can’t actually see the problem. What we can see are the symptoms and the chrome. The symptoms are useful: they can lead us to the problem. When you go to the doctor and the doctor asks questions about how you are feeling, she is exploring your symptoms. Knowing your symptoms helps her identify what is wrong with you, or at least sound authoritative when she tells you to take two aspirin and call the advice nurse in the morning.
The chrome is the shiny stuff that’s nice to look at: the things that are easy to see and, because it’s easy to see, also easy to mistake for a symptom or the actual problem. Sometimes we also mistake the symptoms for the actual problem, essentially treating the symptoms as chrome instead of as clues to what is actually wrong.
Now, at least for those watching on TV, whether Beyonce was problem, symptom, or chrome, was probably pretty much irrelevant. But for those actually tasked with dealing with the problem, figuring out the difference is considerably more important.
Let’s consider the case of Tim, newly appointed CEO of big data company Hornblower Software. Hornblower is considered a rising star in the big data space, yet when Tim came in, the company hadn’t produced a product in over a year. The reasons for this varied, freely mixing chrome and symptoms. Was it the engineer who was incompetent and insubordinate, doing whatever he wanted and doing it all badly? Was it the engineer who was competent, but completely unwilling to take direction, making changes as he thought fit? Was it the several engineers who did enough to get by but who weren’t willing to make major efforts on the part of the team? The first guy quit shortly after Tim came in, producing a belief that the problems would all go with him.
There is a cliched scene in countless murder mysteries in which our hero is suspected of the murder and arrested. Another murder then occurs while he’s sitting in jail, forcing the police to grudgingly conclude that maybe he really isn’t guilty. The problems at Hornblower didn’t go away when the first guy quit, suggesting pretty strongly that he was at best a symptom of the larger problem, at worst nothing more than chrome. Well, in that case the problem must the other guy, the one would wouldn’t take direction! After all, as the VP of Engineering put it, “I can’t tell him what to do.”
We can certainly agree that if you have an employee who refuses to take any direction that is A problem, whether or not it is THE problem. In this case, it was also a distraction from the real problem.
The trick to solving the real problem is first to identify the real problem. To do that, you have to get away from the chrome and focus on the symptoms. There were many: the lack of products, rogue engineers, infighting, dispirited team members, to list just the major ones. When did they start? Where did they occur? Were there any common elements? When we take the time to examine the symptoms and identify the boundaries of their occurrence, then we can start to understand the real problem. In this case, the common element was the VP of Engineering, who, it turned out, was either intimidating or ineffectual: those who found him intimidating exhibited low motivation, while those who realized that he was a paper tiger simply ignored him. And while he might have been quite competent technically, he wasn’t capable of communicating with other team members, organizing them, or focusing their efforts. The net result was an ineffective engineering organization.
The only real question left at this point is whether Tim will be able to see past the chrome fast enough to make a difference.
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers
Sherlock Holmes on more than one occasion told Watson that it was foolish to speculate until all the facts were available. One of the most difficult aspects of organizational diagnosis is separating what you see from what you think about what you see. I’ve conducted exercises in which people are asked to do something, for example ask to cut into a line, and then describe what the reaction is. Many people tell me that, “She didn’t allow me to cut in because she was in a bad mood,” or something similar.
The observation is only whether or not the person let you cut in the line. Everything else is interpretation. We don’t know why she didn’t let him cut in the line; perhaps he didn’t say please. The point, though, is that it’s hard to separate what we see from what we think about what we see. This can pose a challenge in organizational diagnosis: instead of acting on what is in front of us, we act on what we think about what is in front of us. For example, earlier we discussed the case of the passive aggressive manager. By interpreting the behavior instead of simply observing it, the person making the complaint created chrome out of thin air. No amount of fixing of this mythical passive aggressiveness would have solved their very real problems, whereas merely observing the situation quickly led to the solution. As we discussed in chapter 9, managers observing employees working late rated those employees as more productive, even though what they were really doing was surfing the web. The observed behavior was “in the office late.” The interpretation was, “productive.” The employees who didn’t stay late were rated as less productive and no one could figure out why productivity was always so low.
Observing without interpreting is difficult, but if we don’t learn to do it, all we really do is create chrome.
Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.
Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media
June 3rd,2014
Book Excerpt | tags:
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This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
One of the things that world class successful organizations, the organizations that keep innovating and growing and reinventing themselves, have in common is a remarkably effective ability to solve problems. What is interesting, however, is that they don’t necessarily get it right the first the time; often, perhaps, but not always. What they are extremely good at is knowing how to solve problems in ways that constantly reinforce their cultural beliefs of optimism and success.
To begin with, problem solving is really a question of goal setting. In this case, it is a goal where the outcome is to make the problem go away. Unfortunately, that’s not really enough information to create a specific goal, although plenty of businesses try. There are, however, many ways to make a problem go away at least temporarily. Hence, if that’s all you focus on, you end up with a problem that feels like a boomerang in a Saturday morning cartoon: it keeps coming back and whacking you upside the head. Thus, we need to do a bit more work in order to formulate effective goals around solving our problem.
Before we can solve a problem there is one thing we absolutely have to know. What might that be? Whether I ask this of college students or managers, I always get the same response: puzzled looks and then people start yelling out answers such as, “the solution,” or “the cost of the problem,” or “what resources we need,” or a host of other answers. Eventually somebody says, “Don’t we have to know what the problem is?”
Exactly. Before you can find a solution, you have to identify the problem. As obvious as this may sound, if you don’t know the actual problem, then your solution isn’t likely to fix it. There are a great many solutions out there looking for problems.
A problem can be broken down into three major pieces: there is the actual problem, whatever that may be. We don’t know what the problem is because we can’t actually see it; what we can see are the effects of the problem. That may mean deadlines being missed or angry customers calling to complain or a lack of motivation or difficulty hiring or retaining talent, or countless other things. Those are the symptoms of the problem. Finally, there are the things that occur around the problem, things which attract our attention but which are basically irrelevant to the situation. They look important but they’re not. That’s known as chrome: the shiny stuff that draws our eye and distracts us from what really matters.
Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”
Sid Probstein
Chief Technology Officer
Attivio – Active Intelligence
