The Business Sensei

Flawed Execution — Don’t Lose Your Head Over It

I’m pleased to announce that my next book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” will be published by Springer in 2013.

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

There’s an old joke about a lawyer, a priest, and an engineer being sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The lawyer goes first. He kneels, and the blade comes swishing down. Suddenly, it stops just before it hits his neck. The crowd gasps. After a hurried discussion, the executioner announces that since the lawyer survived, it wouldn’t be legal to try again. He’s released.

The priest goes next. Once again, the blade stops just before it severs his head. The executioner declares that clearly it was the divine hand of providence at work, and so the priest is released.

Now it’s the engineer’s turn. Just as he’s about to kneel down, he looked up at the blade and says, “Hey, I see the problem.”

Leaving the engineer aside for the moment, what we have here is a classic case of flawed execution. It’s a fairly common, though less dramatic, event in many businesses. Unlike this particular example of flawed execution, however, when it happens in a business heads often end up rolling.

This, of course, is exactly the problem.

Now, it may seem like flawed execution is a bad thing. In fact, though, what is more important than the execution itself is how the company responds to its success or failure. This is particularly true in organizations that claim to promote innovation or organizational learning.

When a leader takes the view that mistakes mean that heads will role, that sends a very clear message to the rest of the organization: mistakes are something terrible. They are to be avoided at all costs. In other words, always play it safe because if you make a mistake, you’re in trouble. It also means never experiment because your experiment might not work out. In fact, most experiments don’t work; we conduct them to find out what will work.

To put this in perspective, at one software company the engineers on one project had to make some decisions about how users would interact with the program. They had several possible designs, but could not choose between them. Eventually, they made the logical decision to pick one and conduct some user tests. The first few rounds of tests did not go well, but eventually they hit on a design that the users liked. The response from the department head was, “That’s great, but why didn’t you get it right the first time? Your errors cost us a lot of time and money.”

On the next product cycle, the engineers simply picked one alternative and when it didn’t work blamed marketing for not providing them sufficient information. Naturally, marketing responded by blaming engineering, and so it went. Once heads start to roll, the most important thing is to make sure that someone else’s head is the one that goes. This rapidly undermines trust and teamwork.

Conversely, in highly innovative organizations, mistakes are accepted as a necessary part of the game. Indeed, these organizations try to avoid simply jumping to an answer. They recognize, as the engineer in our little joke did not, that jumping to a solution can have fatal consequences. Palm Computing, for example, conducted numerous user tests before releasing the first Palm Pilot. Many of those tests simply involved people walking around with pieces of wood in order to find the right form factor for the Palm devices.

The trick with both innovation and organizational learning is recognizing that you often don’t exactly know what you’re going to build or learn. Learning in particular is a product of making mistakes; when you don’t allow mistakes, you also don’t allow learning. As for innovation, well, it’s very hard to pick the right answer when you’re exploring unknown territory. Rather, getting to a right answer is a process of exploration and experimentation. That process of collaborating with your team, sharing successes and failures along the way, is what truly builds a strong and resilient team, as well as high quality products and services.

In the end, it’s the flawed execution that really gets you what you want, while jumping to the apparently correct answer too quickly can be fatal. No joke.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. He is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck, and the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Following Prince Charming

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a solution to that.”

I was sitting across a table from Joe. We had just finished dinner and he was trying to convince me to join his new company. I had some doubts about the feasibility of what he was proposing.

“I really know this area,” he continued. “And I’ve already worked out several possible solutions. It won’t bottleneck the project.”

You couldn’t fault his confidence. He was calm, focused, and intent. He spoke with a definite air of authority. He knew how to start companies and he knew he knew it. A lack of self-esteem was not one of his problems.

Over the next two years, some odd events took place.

Although we had regular code reviews, somehow Joe’s code was never looked at. It’s not that he refused or said, “I’m the CEO, no one looks at my code.” Rather, he confidently reminded us of his expertise, and was always very willing to help others, or at least have the code review time be focused on more junior engineers.

Joe finally decided that writing code was taking away from his ability to do other CEO-like things. When we eventually got a look at his code, it was rather like a software house of horrors. He did things to software that should never be done. We now knew why we were seeing those weird bugs and mysterious problems.

As we came closer and closer to our ship date, we realized that one of the earliest problems had never been solved. Joe was working on that. He was always so calm, so confident, he projected such authority, that we never doubted that he’d deliver.

He didn’t.

Why hadn’t we pushed sooner for a solution? In hindsight, it seems like the obvious thing to have done. Yet, it never happened. Joe didn’t share information, especially information that he thought was valuable to him. He simply didn’t share so smoothly and with such charm that no one ever noticed.

The company folded. Joe, however, did extremely well for himself.

Joe looked like a leader. He acted the way leaders are supposed to act: calm, confident, authoritative. He was not, however, a particularly good leader. But he was very good at keeping anyone from realizing that until it was much too late.

Lest you think that this is a phenomenon reserved to small tech startups, let us consider a certain giant pharmaceutical company. In 2001, Pfizer’s board appointed Hank McKinnell CEO. McKinnell was widely perceived to be strong, confident, and charming, if sometimes abrasive. Rather than the last being seen as a negative, it was seen as strength: He was someone who could get things done. McKinnell had no lack of self-esteem. Karen Katen, the other candidate for CEO, was seen as quiet, but effective. However, she lacked, at least in the board’s estimation, the necessary authority and toughness to get things done.

Five years later, McKinnell’s confident, strong, charming, occasionally abrasive, style of leadership led Pfizer into serious financial trouble. The board forced McKinnell into retirement. However, don’t be too quick to offer Hank a hanky. He did quite well for himself. He did so well for himself, in fact, that Pfizer was hit with several shareholder lawsuits over the size of McKinnell’s compensation package.

A New Jersey woman once learned that her next door neighbor had been arrested as a spy. She famously commented that, “She couldn’t be a spy. Just look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

The pretty colors of the hydrangeas are a superb way of distracting people if you’re a spy. The moral equivalent of those colors can be a great distraction when you’re not exactly the best leader around. If you can look enough like a leader, you can often win the rewards that go with leadership and dodge the consequences of failure. Sometimes, you can dodge the consequences all the way to the top. The company, however, doesn’t get to dodge the consequences of that poor leadership: just ask Pfizer. Following Prince Charming can be extremely expensive for the organization.

So how do you tell the difference between a real leader and Prince Charming? It’s not enough to just look at results. Joe and Hank had a history of results. It’s just that when it really counted, their companies suffered while they profited. So, you really have to ask yourself some important questions:

Are Prince Charming’s methods sustainable? What is the burnout or turnover rate in his team, division, or department? The higher they are, the more likely you’re dealing with Charming.

What happens to his team, department, or division after he’s promoted or moves somewhere else? Does productivity increase? If it does, you should be asking why it wasn’t higher when Charming was in charge.

How does information move through Charming’s department? Is there a great deal of open discussion, a sharing of information, perspectives, and knowledge? Does the leader seek out input and invite people to challenge his ideas? If so, you have a real leader. If not, Prince Charming is in charge and odds are he’s so full of himself that he’s not going to listen to anything he doesn’t want to hear. Quite simply, a good leader facilitates discussion by asking questions and periodically summarizing the discussion. Prince Charming is too full of himself to do that. He’s only interested in what he has to say.

When you follow a real leader, the entire company benefits. When you follow Prince Charming only one person lives happily ever after. What steps do you have in place to make sure you have the real leaders in your company?

Help Star Performers Ramp up the Whole Team

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Do basketball players have hot hands? A hot hand in basketball is when a player is shooting better than normal. A star player with a hot hand is, therefore, going to be shooting incredibly well. Many players claim that it happens, and many statisticians point out that it doesn’t. The argument against basically says that when you look at the frequency that a missed shot follows a successful shot, you find that the whole “hot hand” thing is just an illusion. It may feel like something is happening, but the results don’t match.

The statisticians, however, are missing a key point: a basketball player is not on the court by himself. In other words, he’s not playing in isolation. When a player is shooting extremely well, the other team is going to put more effort into guarding him. Of course, if that’s correct, the extra effort expended guarding that star player should leave less available to guard other players on the team. In other words, the increased performance of a star should have the effect of increasing the performance of the entire team.

Once someone actually thought to ask that question and look at star performance in that context, the answer turned out to be that hot hands exist and that true star performers don’t just perform well on their own –they increase the performance of everyone on the team.

Star performers in a business setting are the same, or at least they can be. The trick is to set up your team so that star performers increase everyone’s productivity rather than just their own.

To begin with, what are your incentives? If you’re only rewarding team members for their individual performance, you’ve got a problem. You’ve told your star performer to make herself look as good as possible, even at the cost of other team members: Imagine a basketball team where each player was only concerned about his own personal record and not about whether the team won or lost. The fact is, such a team wouldn’t be all that successful. I’ve seen any number of software development teams, for example, structured in just that way, with exactly the expected results.

Part of what enables a star to be a star is the strength of the team. While it can be comforting to argue that focusing on individual incentives will weed out the weaker performers and leave you with the star players, that’s a bit like arguing that your basketball team only needs Michael Jordan. He’s a fantastic player, but even he can’t be everywhere on the court. Jordan is so good in part because he has a strong team supporting him. Conversely, the team is so good in part because of Jordan.

This brings us to the next point: how do people communicate on the team? This can be tricky: everyone sends emails around, but that doesn’t mean they are communicating. It’s important to look at the patterns of conversation and communication in the group: quite often, one person is the center of the wheel; even when a team member is ostensibly addressing the group, he’s really talking to that one person, and no one responds until that one person weighs in.

Related to communication is the question of how well your teams argue and makes decisions. A team which never argues is also incapable of making good decisions. Sure, they may get lucky once in a while: a blind basketball player might also sink the occasional basket. Effective decision making requires being able to debate issues, ask pointed questions, disagree strongly, and eventually come to a consensus that everyone can work with. Teams that can’t do that tend to not benefit from star power.

What is the boss’s attitude toward giving and receiving help? At one company, the manager who took over a particularly high performing team had the attitude that, “you do your job, and let the other guys take care of themselves.” Although the star performers continued to do relatively better than everyone else, overall productivity dropped off rapidly after that manager took over the team. People stopped helping each other. Conversely, in a different department, the manager who came in with the “we’re all in this together” attitude saw his team performance skyrocket. Although the best performers on his team were not as individually strong as the best performers on the first team, on the second team the stars really brought everyone else up, and everyone else really supported the stars. In basketball, five people working together will beat five people working apart.

Hot hands exist, in basketball and in virtually all other areas of team performance. It’s only a question of whether or not your team is set up to take advantage of them when they occur.

Don’t Let Dracula Decisions Roam Your Business

As published in Corp! Magazine.

As a kid, I liked watching the old Bela Lugosi Dracula movies. The movies were more than a little formulaic, but still fun. Each one would begin roughly the same way: after a series of mysterious murders, disappearances, and other strange happenings, Our Hero would figure out that Count Dracula had somehow returned from the grave. Naturally, everyone else would laugh at him because as they, and the audience, knew perfectly well, Dracula had been thoroughly killed off at the end of the previous movie. Someone might also make the token objection that vampires don’t exist, but no one ever took that objection seriously. Our Hero would persevere, though, and after much debate and argument, eventually convince everyone that the Count was, indeed, once again walking the Earth. Finally, in the very nick of time, Our Hero would successfully drive a stake through Dracula’s heart, or expose him to sunlight, or the Wolfman would tackle him and they would fall together out a window into the raging surf hundreds of feet below, or some other equally melodramatic ending. Afterward, everyone would relax, confident in the knowledge that this time Count Dracula really was dead once and for all. This time, for sure… at least until the next movie.

I frequently hear a variant of this story from my clients. No, they’re not talking about Count Dracula per se; rather, they are talking about making decisions at their companies. No matter how thoroughly a topic is debated to death, and no matter how often teams make decisions on which way to go, the topic reappears in the next meeting. There’s always some purported reason: “We didn’t follow proper procedure,” or “I forgot to include this really important piece of information,” or “It’s not fair that Bob wasn’t here,” or “I didn’t understand what I was voting for,” or, “How about another Dracula flick?”

OK, maybe the last one doesn’t come up all that often. The actual reasons don’t really matter anyway: they’re all about as hokey as the reason why Dracula didn’t really die in the previous movie. Dracula returns because the audiences and the producers want him back; similarly, the decision returns from the grave because people want to bring it back. In this way, even apparently simple decisions can return again and again, sucking up time and energy like Dracula sucking blood. It isn’t long before a mundane meeting turns into an event to be anticipated with mounting horror, or at least a strong sense of dread.

Make decisions that stop returning from the grave
While this problem is particularly prevalent with leaderless, or self-managed, teams, it is hardly unique to them. The real question, of course, is what to do about it. How do you make decisions stop returning to roam the hallways like Dracula returning from the grave?

First off, if the team doesn’t have a leader, it needs one. When you see a team unable to make decisions, that’s a team rushing towards being dysfunctional. Changing course requires putting someone in charge, or at least having someone who can facilitate meetings and hold both individuals and the team accountable.

Next is communications: if no one is asking questions or pushing back on a decision, that’s a bad sign. That’s telling you that the team isn’t engaged in the process, and if they aren’t engaged, they’re also not seriously thinking about the decision. Inviting speculation or asking open-ended questions can get conversation started. If no one is willing to question, then you are also missing out on a valuable opportunity to debug the decision before you make it.

Conversely, once you have debate going, you also need a way to bring it to a halt. Just as it’s important to not end debate too quickly, it’s also important to not let it continue on until people are ready to chew their own legs off. Periodically polling the room to see if everyone can accept any of the alternatives being considered, and, if not, finding out what else they want to say or what else they need to know, can be very effective at helping everyone recognize when debate is ready to end. Once everyone in the room feels that they can support any of the alternatives being considered, you can make your decision. This approach has the added benefit that if there’s someone in the room who is determined to keep arguing until they get their way, that too will become obvious. Should that situation occur, the person in charge can then deal with it appropriately.

Finally, you need to have something substantive to discuss. It’s not enough to just make a decision: you also have to map out how the decision will be implemented, what steps need to be taken, who is responsible for reporting back, and when. In any non-trivial decision, the early steps are always error-prone: those charged with implementing the decisions must feel certain that the feedback they gain on those early steps will not be held against them. If people are afraid of being punished for inevitable learning mistakes, you can count on that decision returning like Dracula until responsibility is sufficiently diffused that no one can be blamed for failure. At that point, you can also be certain that no one will care about the outcome.

As much as the process of effective decision-making may seem to take a long time, it’s far quicker to make a decision once and put it to rest than to have it returning, time and again, like Dracula from the grave.

For Want of a Rubber Band

The other day, my DVD player stopped working. Naturally, this happened the night I was sitting down to watch a movie I’d been looking forward to. Quite simply, the tray wouldn’t open (presumably, it wouldn’t close either, but there was no way to test that). As we all know, a feature of modern electronics is that there are “No user serviceable parts inside.”

Nonetheless, I decided to open it up anyway. If nothing else, I figured I could at least recover the trapped DVD one of my kids had left in the machine.

Opening it up was an interesting experience. Inside was mostly empty space with a tray and a circuit board. Apparently the major difference between a portable player and a non-portable one is the amount of wasted space.

There was also one user serviceable part: the rubber band.

Yes, in the midst of the electronics there was a broken rubber band. That rubber band acted as the “drive train” to open and close the DVD tray. Just think about that: all this high tech electronics rendered completely useless by the failure of a sixty cent rubber band. How much is that rubber band really worth? Sometimes the value is not the cost of the item but what it makes possible. Sometimes the critical problem that is blocking us from moving forward turns out to be something small and simple, but only if we know where to look and what to look for. While I could have replaced the DVD player, that would have been a much more expensive solution than replacing the rubber band. Knowing the real problem enabled me to pick the best possible solution.

I was asked recently about my opinion on attendance point systems.

“Why?” I replied.

The person explained her company was having problems with absenteeism and people changing shifts without notifying anyone in authority. Based on this, she wanted my opinion of attendance point systems, presumably on the logic that implementing one would solve her problem. Unfortunately, without knowing exactly why people are not showing up for work on time and without knowing why they’re constantly switching shifts, implementing an attendance point system is as likely as not a solution in search of a problem. Sure it might work; on the other hand, it might not work. It’s basically a roll of the dice.

So why jump to that solution? Simple. It’s easy. Faced with a problem without an obvious solution, the natural response is to impose a solution that fits the symptoms. Symptoms, unfortunately, are not the problem; they’re just the symptoms. Like taking an antibiotic for the flu, it doesn’t help and may make you feel worse.

Instead, we need to work backward from the symptoms to understand the underlying problem. With my DVD player, the symptom was that the tray wouldn’t slide out. Had I assumed the problem was that the electronics were fried, I would have tossed it and bought a new one. By investigating the problem, I had a working DVD player in less than fifteen minutes.

Investigating the problem, however, requires a certain amount of effort and frequently appears overwhelming and expensive. The lure of an obvious, easy, and, above all, cheap solution is very strong. The fact is, there are a lot of obvious, inexpensive solutions to many problems. In a business, it’s particularly easy to find an easy solution particularly if you don’t care if it actually works. If you want a working solution, though, the choices become somewhat more limited.

Investigating a problem is rarely as overwhelming as it first appears. With the DVD player, it was easy to open it up and see what was going on inside. With human systems, on the other hand, taking them apart in that way can be a bit problematic. Putting them back together again is even more tricky. The real key is to see how often the symptoms appear and under what conditions. What other symptoms are there? What do people say when you ask them about their experiences and their observations? As you put together a picture of the symptoms and when they appear, you can start brainstorming about possible causes. Does your organization have a cold? The flu? Is it suffering from growing pains?

At one company, everything was going great until they went public, had a huge influx of cash, and began a rapid expansion. Suddenly, all sorts of symptoms appeared: increased conflict, passive-aggressive behavior, confusion, inability to follow through on decisions, and so forth. Fixing the problem required first identifying what was really going on, and then crafting a solution appropriate to that organization. None of the problems were that big, but, like that rubber band, they were in critical places.

In a sense, it’s not how big the problem is that matters most. What matters most is what that problem is preventing you from doing.

How much was that rubber band worth again?

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Is the product done?” a certain manager asked during a product review meeting.

“It is done,” replied the engineer building the product.

“Are there any problems?”

“There are problems.”

“What is the problem?”

“It does not work.”

“Why doesn’t it work?”

“It is not done.”

I will spare you the transcription of the subsequent half hour of this not particularly funny comedy routine. The manager and the engineer managed to perform this little dance of talking past one another without ever seeming to realize just how ludicrous it sounded to everyone else in the room. It was rather like Monty Python’s classic Hungarian-English phrasebook sketch, in which translations in either direction are random. In other words, the Hungarian phrase, “I would like to buy a ticket,” might be translated to the English phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

It was extremely funny when Monty Python performed it. As for the manager and the engineer, well, perhaps they just didn’t have the comedic timing of Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

[SYSTEM-AD-LEFT]As it happens, “my hovercraft is full of eels” moments come about far too often. What was unusual in this situation is that it involved only two people. Usually, considerably more people take part. Thus, instead of a not particularly amusing exchange between two people, there is an extremely frustrating exchange involving several people. The most common failure to communicate is the game of telephone: as the message passes along the line, it becomes increasingly distorted.

What I hear from teams over and over is, “We are communicating! We send email to everyone.” This is where the hovercraft starts to fill with eels. Broadcasting is not really communicating: effective business communications require a certain amount of back and forth, questioning and explaining, before everyone is on the same page.

Who talks to whom? When you send out an email, do questions come back to you? Or do people on the team quietly ask one another to explain what you meant? While it’s comforting to believe that every missive we send out is so carefully crafted as to be completely unambiguous, very few of us write that well. Of that select few, even fewer can do it all the time. Particularly in the early stages of a project, if there are no questions, then there are certainly problems.

When someone else asks a question, either via email or in a meeting, does everyone wait for you to respond? Even worse, does Bob only jump into a thread if Fred jumps in first? Who is Bob responding to at that point, you or Fred? Are you still addressing the main topic or is the hovercraft starting to become eel infested?

It can be extremely frustrating to ask, “Are there any questions?” and receive either dead silence or questions about something trivial. It can easily become tempting to assume that there are no questions and just race full speed ahead. However, until employees figure out how much each person understands about the project and how you will respond to apparently dumb questions, they will be cautious about what they ask. Their curiosity is as much about one another and about you as it is about the project. How that curiosity gets satisfied determines whether you have productive conversations or a hovercraft that is full of eels. In the former case, you get strong employee engagement; in the latter case, you don’t.

If you’ve been working with a team for some months, or longer, and people are still not asking questions then there are really only two possibilities: either your team is composed of professional mind-readers or you are about to find a room full of those pesky eels. No project is ever perfectly defined from the beginning. Questions and debate should be ongoing throughout the development or production cycle. A lack of questions tells you that there is a lack of trust between the team members and between the team members and you. When trust is lacking, so is engagement.

Now some good news: remedying that lack of trust isn’t all that complicated. It does, however, require a certain amount of persistence and patience.

Start by highlighting each person’s role and contribution to the project. Why are they there? What makes them uniquely qualified to fill the role they are in? Be specific and detailed. If you can’t clearly define their roles, you can rest assured that they can’t either.  Questions come when people are clear about their roles. Disengagement comes when people are not clear about their roles.

Prime the pump with questions. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and that you need the help of the team to find them. Give each person a chance to play the expert while you ask the dumb questions. When you set the tone, the others will follow. Communications start with the person in charge.

Separate producing answers from evaluating answers. Collect up the possibilities and take a break before you start examining them and making decisions about them. Brainstorming without evaluating allows ideas to build upon one another and apparently unworkable ideas to spark other ideas. Pausing to examine each potential answer as it comes up kills that process.

Encourage different forms of brainstorming: some people are very analytical, some are intuitive, some generate ideas by cracking jokes, others pace, and so on. Choose a venue where people are comfortable and only step in if the creative juices start to run dry or tempers start to get short. In either case, that means you need to take a break.  Intense discussions are fine, heated discussions not so much.

Initially, you will have to make all the decisions. That’s fine, but don’t get too comfortable with it. As trust and engagement build, the team will want to become more involved in the decision making process. Invite them in: that demonstration of trust will further build engagement and foster effective communications. Effective communications, in turn, builds trust and engagement.

Having a hovercraft full of eels isn’t the real problem. The real problem is what a hovercraft full of eels tells you about the trust, engagement, and communications in your company.

Make Believe Can Really Help Business

I was very pleased to see that Lizzie Stark’s new book, “Leaving Mundania: Inside the World of Grownup Make-Believe” is now available. Lizzie’s book is an excellent explanation of live-action roleplaying (larping) and how it works.

But  wait? Isn’t larping just a game? How can it help my business? I’m glad you asked.

All businesses need to provide leadership to their members, motivate employees, and negotiate with individuals and organizations. The problem is practicing those skills in an environment that doesn’t feel artificial. A well-designed, serious larp provides an engrossing, entertaining training experience. Players are able to get into the game and as a result deal with the problems that come up much as they would in real life. Whether a player gives up in frustration after encountering an obstacle or comes up with a creative out of the box solution, that tells you they’ll likely do the same thing on the job. Conversely, when someone shines in the game, but is a mediocre performer on the job, that alerts employers to untapped potential.

In sports, teams practice their skills over and over to deal with every conceivable scenario. Businesses rarely have that luxury. When I design a serious larp for a business, the experience of playing in the scenario enables employees to practice and hone skills before the critical situation in which they are needed. Employees also have the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes in an environment in which there are no financial consequences to the business. Finally employees who need additional skill training can be identified before they fail on the job.

If you want an academic treatment of larping, click here. Otherwise, I encourage you take a look at “Leaving Mundania,” and think about how you can use the games she describes to help your business (and have a good time!).

Happy Groundhog Day!

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Great movie, and solid proof of the old adage that adventure is something really dangerous and exciting happening to someone else. As much as watching Groundhog Day can be lots of fun, actually experiencing it is something else again. Thus, it never fails to amaze me when organizations willingly enter the Groundhog Zone.

No, I don’t mean that they are afraid of their own shadows, although that sometimes happens too! Rather, they are trapped in a cycle that is at best non-productive, at worst, downright destructive to the organization. Worst of all: everyone knows its happening and yet no one does anything about it. Unlike Bill Murray, though, they aren’t actually trapped. They just think they are.

For example, I worked with one two thousand person organization on some serious leadership issues. The first time the organization ran into this particular problem was decades ago, and it nearly destroyed the business. Many of the top people stormed out to found a competing company. The same thing happened again some twenty years later. The third time around, we made some progress: there was no fissioning of the business. Everyone stayed put and the first steps were taken to resolving some of the long-standing structural problems that were causing this cycle to repeat. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but it happened.

Okay, that’s an old business. Should we really be concerned with problems that only come up every twenty years? That’s up to you; I suppose it depends on when the next time the cycle rolls around. But Groundhog moments are not limited to older companies. Younger companies can have the same problems.

At one company, the engineering teams are unable to make decisions. The same issues come up week after week: every Monday is Groundhog Day! While there is a lot of talking and a great deal of motion, there is no progress. Running around in circles may feel good, but doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. Management regularly gets involved in various ways, and always with the same results: there’s some yelling, some threats, maybe a few people get fired, and there’s a brief flurry of forward motion. After a few weeks or a couple months, though, they are right back to where they started. Even though many members of the management team know there’s a problem, even though they keep talking about the problem, they take no action despite the cost to the organization: on the order of six figures per month. Groundhog Day indeed!

So what do you do when you realize that you are trapped in Groundhog heaven? Since every company’s Groundhog Day is uniquely theirs, the key is to know how to generate possible solutions, rather than find a one-size fits none approach.

First of all, don’t be afraid of your own shadow. Recognize that something isn’t working the way it should. The longer you pretend the problem doesn’t really exist or the longer you just hope it’ll go away, the worse it will get. As Einstein famously said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Whatever you’re doing to change things isn’t working. It’s time to try something else.

In Bill Murray’s case, Groundhog Day just happened overnight. In the real world, you didn’t get into Groundhog mode overnight and you won’t break out of it overnight. Stop looking for quick fixes: if they haven’t worked yet, they aren’t likely to in the future. You’ll spend more time and money trying quick solutions that don’t break the cycle than you will in committing to one solution that may take some time to implement. Organizational change, even beneficial change that everyone claims they want, is still difficult. If it wasn’t, Groundhog Day would be over by now.

Look outside the company for ideas. Let’s face it, you’ve got some really smart people working at your company (if that’s not true, you have bigger problems!). If they haven’t managed to change things, it might just be because they either don’t know how or they are too busy doing their jobs to devote the time and energy necessary to driving the changes necessary, or both. Whatever the reason, recognize that if they could, they would. Look at other companies and adapt their solutions to your specific culture and situation and bring in the resources you need to actually break the cycle.

Bill Murray has no choice but to repeat Groundhog Day over and over. Fortunately, you aren’t Bill Murray. What choice will you make?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Take a Future Retrospective

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Once upon a time there was a staircase. Although it wound its way up from floor to floor in the manner traditionally associated with staircases, this was no ordinary staircase. Although it stood in a courthouse in Franklin, Ohio, in a fashion much like other staircases, yet it was not like the other staircases. With most staircases, those who look down see stairs beneath their feet. With this staircase, however, those who looked down saw the floor below and those people walking up the stairs. They saw those who stood at the bottom of the staircase, for this staircase, you see, was made of clear glass. While we have no information as to whether those climbing the staircase felt a sense of vertigo when they looked down, we do have definitive information about what they said when they looked down: “Hey, those people at the bottom of the stairs are staring up my dress.”

Although the news report was slightly vague on this point, we may safely assume that this comment was made only by those who were, in fact, wearing a dress.

But yes, it seems that people on the staircase made an observation that had eluded the architects who designed the staircase: that if you can look down through the glass, you can look up through it as well.

When questioned on this point, the architects responded by saying that they had naturally assumed that no one would be so inappropriate as to stand at the bottom of a glass staircase in a courthouse and look up women’s dresses.

When this insightful observation was relayed to the judge, he replied that, “If people always exercised good judgment and decorum, we wouldn’t need this building.”

The architects had carefully considered their building material. They had thought about how to make the glass durable and resilient. They had considered the problems involved in building a glass staircase in such a way that it would continue to look good even after having hundreds of people walking up and down it each day. They had, in fact, solved each one of these problems.

What they had not considered was how the customer, to wit, the people in the courthouse, would actually use the product. They were so fixated on the concept that a staircase is for walking on, not staring through, that they failed to consider the ramifications of their architectural decisions. To be fair, architects are hardly unique in making this type of mistake. It can be very easy to let your assumptions about how something should work or how it will be used to blind you to how it will actually work or be used. Consider the example of the business school competition to design a helicopter. The contest was judged on a number of factors, including the weight of the finished product. The winner was the helicopter without an engine. Apparently, no one had included “able to fly” in the criteria for success. The assumption that, of course, a helicopter should fly was so taken for granted that no one thought to see if it was included in the rules.

On the bright side, it had considerably less severe consequences than the situation involving the helicopter that flipped upside down while in flight. Or the data analysis software package that looked like it had crashed the computer, causing users to reboot shortly before the calculations were complete. Or the organizational improvements that led to a massive talent exodus.

In each situation, the people designing the end result honestly believed they were giving the customers, including the employees in the final case, what the customers had requested — and that belief prevented them from considering any other possibilities.

“We asked!” the designers protested. “That’s what they said they wanted.”

Were the customers really asking for a helicopter that flipped upside down or an expensive glass staircase that had to be subsequently covered? Of course not. But somehow, that’s what the designers heard.

The problem was that they asked the wrong questions, further leading them into their one, narrow, view of the result. Thus, no one ever stopped to imagine how the end product, be it staircase, contest rules, helicopter, software, or organizational procedures would actually be used.

In each situation, rather than seeking information, the people asking the questions sought validation. They already had an idea in their heads, and any inquiries they made were aimed at confirming that idea, not testing it.

When you say, “This is what you wanted, right?” or “What do you think of this approach?” odds are you aren’t requesting information; you are requesting validation. Indeed, even if you are seriously trying to get information, such questions usually get you validation instead. This is because the client assumes that you, as the expert, know what you’re talking about.

So how do you ask for information? One answer is to change the time frame. Instead of asking them to imagine the future, pretend it’s the future and imagine the past: “If we went with this approach, and six months from now you weren’t happy, what would have gone wrong? If you were happy, what would have gone right?”

This small change causes people to actually imagine using the product or living with the new procedures. Now, instead of validation, you’ll get information. That information may shake up your carefully constructed vision of the future, but that’s fine. Better now than after the sightseers congregate at the bottom of that glass staircase. A future retrospective also forces you to be more honest with yourself and to address the issues in front of you.

What challenges is your business facing? If, six months from now, you had successfully addressed your most persistent problems, what would you have done to make that happen?

Don’t over commit to start the new year!

Why do so many people end up overcommitted at work, in volunteer activities, or socially?

The tendency to say “yes” to any request stems from several sources.

First, most of us like to think of ourselves as the type of person who helps others. Thus, when a friend or colleague (or boss) asks for help, that request immediately triggers us to think, “But if I don’t help, what does that say about me? I’m not <selfish/mean/self-centered/uncaring/etc.” So, we agree to help in order to protect our self-image.

Second, and related, is what’s known as social theater: in certain environments, there are certain role expectations that are taken for granted. Helping others is often one of those expectations. Therefore, when someone asks, we agree almost automatically, without really thinking through the consequences, or even the wisdom, of the decision. Essentially, behaviors that we learned at some point in our lives without really thinking about them become automatic behaviors later when the right trigger presents itself.

Third, many businesses foster a culture of obedience and pressure to always get more done in less time. Although this cultural baggage is ultimately destructive to the business, as it leads to burnout and corner-cutting, in the short-term it appears to be very rewarding. Thus, it gets repeated and hailed as an emblem of the dedication and productivity of the employees. It is, in reality, a sign of a company with relatively low functioning teams: high performance teams know their limits and are willing to stand up for them. Low functioning teams, and the members thereof, routinely bite off more than they can chew.

Fourth, when we over promise and fail to deliver, we frequently assume that the problem lies within us: if we’d just worked harder, if we were just a little more skilled, if we just a little smarter, and so forth. Thus, we become even more determined to “get it right” the next time around. In truth, the problem was not that we weren’t working hard enough, or weren’t smart enough, etc. The problem was that we simply tried to do too much, not some personal failing that can be corrected by working harder.

So how do you prevent this from happening?

There are several techniques, which can be used singly or in combination.

One trick is to identify the thought or image that pops into your head the moment someone asks you for help. It can be hard to catch this, but with a little effort, most people will discover that some image flashed across their brain and that they are reacting to that image instead of the request for help. That image might be a thought about how important it is to help others, or a belief that other person can’t succeed without your help, or an image of being fired for not helping, etc. This is one of those situations where if you ask 99 people to describe their image, you’ll get 99 responses :). Once you catch the image, you can look at it and ask yourself if it’s actually realistic. Do they really need your help that badly? If you’re a productive employee, do you honestly think you’ll get fired for saying “no?”

Another thing to recognize is that boundary testing is a normal part of all relationships: we instinctively attempt to understand our environment, and that includes understanding what we can and cannot expect from the people around us. Not knowing the boundaries is anxiety producing. Children do this sort of boundary testing all the time, and when they don’t find a boundary their behavior only gets worse until they get a reaction. Adults are different only the sophistication (and even that is arguable!) of their boundary testing. Thus, saying “no” is a form of setting boundaries. Setting boundaries actually helps make other people feel more secure because they now know what to expect from you, and also establishes you as a peer of the person making the request. Consider, the only people who are, in our society, nominally prohibited from setting boundaries are children. Children are typically expected to comply with most adult requests (how often did you hear, “When your mother asks, it’s not a request!” when you were growing up?). Thus, it’s important to recognize boundary testing and also recognize that setting limits is beneficial for everyone.

Another approach is to reverse the question: “I’d love to help you, and I’m not sure how I can fit this into my schedule. Let me go through with you what I have to get done over the <time> and you can help me figure it out.” Frequently, people ask for help without realizing the degree of imposition. Going through your constraints and asking them to help you figure out how to fit in their request is often a good technique to get them to realize just how much they are asking of you. If, in the end, you still decide to accept the request, you’ve at least enabled them to recognize just how big a favor they’re asking.

Note that if your boss is making the request, you can still apply this approach, with a slight modification: “I would love to do this, and I’m concerned that if I agree, these other projects will suffer. Please let me know your thoughts on how I should prioritize these different tasks.”

By the way, it can help to block out chunks of time on the calendar representing the total amount of time you expect a task to take (when you estimate how long a task should take, add 25%… most of us underestimate!). Tasks never seem that big when you’re thinking about them abstractly, but when you create a visual representation, you’ll be amazed how much time you’ve allocated.

All right, so  you’re already over-committed, what do you do? The best thing is to take an honest look at your tasks, prioritize, and then start contacting people. You can start with either your lowest priorities or your most recent “Of course I’ll do that!” Either way, you need to say, “I’m sorry. I know I told you I would help you, and I’ve discovered that these prior commitments are going to take much longer than expected.”

No, the other person won’t be happy. However, they will be a lot happier that you told them early on, not at the last minute. The longer you wait, the more painful the conversation becomes, the angrier they’ll be, and the worse you’ll feel. Moreover, you’ll be that much more likely to give in when they start complaining, leaving you feeling overworked and bullied.