Near the end of the award winning movie, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Aragon leads his pitifully small army to the Black Gate of Mordor, realm of Sauron the Dark Lord. Sauron’s forces outnumber Aragorn’s by easily a hundred to one. On the surface, there appears to be little chance of success. Indeed, during the planning of the assault, Gimli utters the famous line: “Certainty of death, small chance of success… What are we waiting for?”
As those familiar with the story know, the attack is diversion. Its goal is to draw the attention of Sauron so that Frodo can destroy the Ring of Power. Aragorn, however, cannot let on that the attack is anything but an all-out assault on Sauron’s fortress. To fool Sauron, indeed, even to convince his soldiers to follow him, he must act and speak as though he has complete confidence that his badly outnumbered army can win. Aragon must not just be confident, he must be so confident that people will be inspired to follow him to almost certain death. That act of confidence is what makes it possible for Frodo to succeed and for Sauron to be defeated.
Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership
December 10th,2010
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As published in the CEO Refresher
For a great many years, the majority of discussions I’ve heard about the Superbowl focused on the ads. This year, of course, was different. Sure, there was plenty of speculation about the ads, but most of the discussion had to do with the New Orleans Saints finally qualifying. It’s not easy to have an even more losing reputation than the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox. At least Red Sox fans knew that their team had won the World Series once upon a time, albeit so long ago that the event was very nearly mythical. Indeed, the Sox qualified many times, only to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.
The Saints never got that far. They just lost. Until this year, when suddenly the big news was that they were playing in the Superbowl.
Naturally, the pundits were out in force in the days leading up to the game: detailed explanations for why New Orleans couldn’t possibly win, how the Colts were simply too strong, too well prepared, too skilled a team to be beaten, and so forth. The opinions were logical, well thought-out, and seemed to make perfect sense.
The reality, however, was something just a tiny bit different. On the Sunday before Mardi Gras, the Saints won the Superbowl.
How could so many experts have been so wrong? Frankly, outside of people who are extremely serious about football or people who bet large sums of money on the Colts, probably no one actually cares. In a business environment, however, having the experts be dramatically wrong can be expensive for more than just a few people. It can harm not just the people who made the mistake, but the rest of the organization as well. So perhaps the real question is what can be done to improve decision making accuracy and expert predictions within an organization?
The fact is, all those experts who were predicting victory for the Colts were relying on, well, expert opinion and “previous experience.” In this case, their “previous experience” with the Saints was that the Saints were not particularly good players. The Colts, on the other hand, were well-known to be a strong team. The pundits thus made the mistake of comparing the Colts of today to the Saints of yesterday. What they missed was that something had changed. The very fact of the Saints making it to the Superbowl was a signal that something was different this time around: either everyone else was playing a lot worse, or the Saints were playing a lot better.
In a business, the tendency is to apply expert opinion and previous experience to many situations. When the business is facing a difficult or intractable problem, potential solutions are often evaluated based on opinions of how that solution should work out based on its perceived similarity to some other situation. If the previous situation and the current situation are sufficiently similar, then you can make some reasonable predictions based on the past; indeed, the past is generally one of the most powerful methods available for predicting the future. The ability of an expert to correctly recognize points of similarity and draw valid conclusions from them is a very valuable one.
A break in similarity, however, is a clue that something major may have changed. It is a clue that the previous situation and, therefore, opinions and judgments based on that previous situation, may not apply. When that happens, it’s critical to recognize the change and be willing to disregard all of our expert judgments in favor of a slower, more careful evaluation.
Of course, if the pundits had recognized that the situation was too different to make a meaningful prediction, there wasn’t much they could have done: at some point, only actually doing the experiment, that is, playing the game, will give you an answer. In football, or most other sports, that’s part of the fun: if we always knew in advance who would win, it would be awfully boring.
In a business, though, boring can be good. So what do you do when you’re evaluating a potential solution to a problem?
It helps to look at the points of similarity between your solution to a problem and the situations you view as similar. What is the same? What is different? Do those differences represent a fundamental incongruity between the two situations? Or perhaps you can only see a small piece of the other situation. This is not all that unusual when one business looks at how another business is solving a problem: I worked with one small software company that decided to adopt the Microsoft Way, whatever that was. It didn’t matter though: they were going to price like Microsoft, develop like Microsoft, act like Microsoft. Unfortunately, they weren’t Microsoft. It didn’t work for them. It may have worked for Microsoft, but Microsoft had resources that this company did not. Pointing out that Microsoft didn’t do things that way when they were small didn’t gain any traction.
In this case, it can help to study other companies that look like your company to see how they are addressing similar problems. The greater the similarity, the more likely you are to get valuable information. Sometimes, the present, rather than the past, is the best predictor of the future!
Sometimes, of course, the best way to evaluate your solution is to rely on none of the above: personal experience, expert opinion, even a study of similar situations and companies, don’t provide you with enough valid data to evaluate your solution in the present. In that case, you might have to actually play the game: you need to figure out how you’ll know if your solution is successful in the long-term and the short-term. You need to know not just where you want to go, but also how you’ll know if you’re on track to getting there.
In the short-run, this is the most difficult approach. It involves taking some risks. It may also involve the biggest return.
Or you can settle for predicting the results of the game.
As published in Corp! Magazine
Horror movies follow some fairly predictable tropes: the monster slowly awakens; someone sees it happening, but no one really believes him. As the story unfolds, people go to investigate and are captured, killed, driven mad and so forth. There’s always something terrible going on, and there’s always some helpless innocent caught up in it, acting the way helpless innocents generally act.
Of course, when the helpless innocent doesn’t act as expected, well, that can cause the whole story to change. The classic comedy, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” is a traditional period horror film, complete with the legendary Bela Lugosi, in which the helpless innocents are Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, acting like, well, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. This, of course, causes the plot to go flying off the rails, at least as far as Count Dracula’s dastardly plot to reawaken Frankenstein’s monster is concerned.
The key element of a horror film is that our helpless innocents are put into a situation in which they have no idea what to do. As in most situations, when we don’t know what to do, we do what we know how to do. Indeed, successful horror relies on that phenomenon: the terror comes from seeing how our ordinary actions lead deeper and deeper into trouble. Alternately, if those ordinary actions are slightly askew, the horror becomes comedy. In that case, the humor comes from seeing Abbott and Costello responding to a deepening horror by doing what they normally do.
The movie works because the tendency to do what we know how to do is both powerful and universal. Most people, confronted by novel situations, react that way. When there is truly nothing they can do, they attempt to exert control anyway by doing something that they can do. The results are often comedy or horror, depending on perspective and circumstance.
At one nonprofit, the founder of the organization was a man who had started out working in a stockroom. When the organization hit a financial crisis, he fixated on doing inventory. There was simply nothing useful he could do. Rather than feel helpless, he did the thing he could do. This made his board very happy as it kept him busy while they raised money for the organization.
At a high-tech company, a product deadline was threatened by a vendor not delivering a critical software component on schedule. There was nothing that could be done: the entire product was designed around that deliverable. The department head responded to the situation by demanding his employees work long hours, before the vendor delivered. After it was delivered might have made some sense, as the company would need to make up the lost time, but before? The department head had no control over the vendor, so he dealt with the situation by controlling the people around him.
Comedy and horror might be quite enjoyable when viewed from a safe distance, like a movie screen, but are much less fun to be in the middle of. How, though, does a leader avoid having her actions turn the situation into a comedy of errors or frustrating, painful experience for her employees?
The key is to practice dealing with chaos. Consider successful athletes: they learn all the moves and drills of their particular sport. Then they practice by competing against other athletes in order to become comfortable with the unexpected actions of their opponents. Indeed, Judo competition is referred to as “randori,” or “seizing chaos.” Because it’s not possible to predict what strategies people will employ or control what an opponent does, the successful athlete learns to adapt to the situation. Rather than becoming stuck on one response, they become adept at switching strategies to counter their opponents.
Successful leaders need to develop the same skill. It’s not enough to just know the theory of leadership; you also must practice in a chaotic or ambiguous scenario. Sadly, for many leaders, that means practicing on the job. As most athletes learn the hard way if they move straight from drilling to competition, getting used to chaos takes its own practice.
Fortunately, just as athletes have multiple training tools at their disposal to learn to deal with chaos before they enter competition; tools are available for business leaders as well. Predictive scenarios, a type of live action serious game, provide the sort of detailed, ambiguous situations that enable a leader to become comfortable with chaos. Unlike traditional leadership training exercises, there is no one, right answer. Participants need to motivate others, win deals, provide feedback, and execute strategies in a constantly shifting environment. Rather than just talking about leadership, participants need to display leadership and do it well enough to convince others to follow them.
Like the athlete, the leader becomes adept at switching strategies and at managing unpredictable situations. Rather than being trapped by doing what they can, they become able to apply what they know. Instead of comedy or horror, they achieve success. Now, that is something you do want to be in the middle of!
Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses to increase revenue and build their client base. 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.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.
October 31st,2010
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Recently, I was running a leadership and negotiation exercise, which involved participants attempting to determine who they could and could not trust. The exercise required that participants work with one another and included various techniques for verifying the truth or falsehood of someone’s claims.
The dynamic between two of the participants, we’ll call them Fred and Barney, became extremely interesting: Fred needed Barney’s help, but Fred was convinced that Barney was lying to him and looking for a way to double-cross him on a business deal. Barney, meanwhile, was going to great lengths to prove that he was telling the truth and dealing in good faith. The more evidence Fred found that demonstrated Barney was telling the truth, the more Fred was sure he was lying. Not only was Fred not convinced, he even came up to me and complained that he thought that Barney was violating the rules of the exercise because he was clearly lying. When the exercise was over and I debriefed the participants, Fred was stunned when he found out that Barney was telling the truth all along.
Part of the value of this particular exercise is that behavior in the exercise tends to correlate well with behavior in the office. Unlike the exercise, however, in real life we don’t have any magical means of verifying the truth. Of course, as we can see, even that doesn’t necessarily matter. Once an opinion is formed, sometimes nothing will change it. That may be fine in some obscure situations, but in business it can get you in trouble.
Read the rest at Corp! Magazine
October 26th,2010
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How often have you heard someone from a company say, “We hire slow and fire fast?”
I’ve heard this line so often that it sounds sort of a like a mantra or one of those wise sayings that are taken for granted but are generally wrong: “I invest for the long term,” or “There is no room for emotions in the work place,” or “The Red Sox will never win.”
This is not to say that it’s always wrong to “hire slow.” However, it’s important to understand the different ways that a company can hire slow. Some of them make more sense than others. What, fundamentally, does it mean to hire slow? For that matter, what does it mean to “fire fast?”
Read the rest at the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership
October 25th,2010
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In an upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership I talk about the perils of “hiring slow” and “firing fast.” As I’ve been doing, I wanted to give you just a taste of the “hiring slow” part here.
A company can hire slow for two major reasons: because they know exactly who they’re looking for and are willing to wait for the right people to apply, or because they don’t know who they’re looking for and believe they’ll know when the right person applies.
The first is more useful. If you’ve done your homework and figured out the characteristics of the employees you’re looking for, and if you’ve trained your interviewers to recognize those people, then by all means hire slow. Take your time and wait for the right people or, better yet, go out and attract them to the company.
Read the rest at ERE.Net
September 29th,2010
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Last Friday, I was on Business Insanity Talk Radio speaking on the five components of effective leadership. If I’ve done this right, here’s the segment I was in:
SteveOnBusinessInsanityRadio20August
August 25th,2010
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Recently, I was attending a board meeting for a certain organization. They were contemplating some significant changes to several long-standing policies, which naturally generated quite a bit of discussion. The various options were carefully laid out and analyzed. There was a great deal of discussion over how well the different changes would address the identified problems. The president very carefully checked to make sure each member had had their say, that each member felt heard, and that each member was comfortable making a decision and accepting whichever decision was reached.
The vote happened, and a decision was made. No problem!
The problem came up at the next board meeting, when the president said, “I’m not comfortable with our decision. I think we should revisit it.”
Read the rest at Corp! Magazine
