The Business Sensei

Do your best…

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

I often hear the argument made that the effort involved in effective goal setting is really unnecessary so long as people just “do their best.”

The problem with “do your best” is that “your best” is an arbitrary term. There is no real way to measure it or even know when you’ve arrived. Each person has their own view of what “best” means. Thus, I’ve often heard managers telling employees, “You call this your best work? This is terrible!” Of course, this “feedback” is of absolutely no value as it fails to provide the person with any information that she can use to change or improve her work. Conversely, I’ve also seen many an engineer respond to a deadline by saying to their increasingly frustrated managers, “But it’s not done yet. It could be better!”

For an organization, “do your best” lacks any coherent focus or vision. It produces muddied priorities instead of a common objective. Common goals help bring teams together and provide a means to adjust course when something doesn’t work as expected; “do your best” is more likely to produce argument and blame when the team runs into an unexpected problem. In a “do your best” environment, clearly failure is the result of someone not “doing their best!” Everyone should just “try harder!” This is a sure recipe for overwork, exhaustion, burnout, and low productivity. Of course, since everyone is busy running around in circles frantically trying to “try harder” and “do their best,” it looks like a lot is getting done: remember that motion does not equal progress. Accomplishing goals equals progress.

The whole point of goals is that they give us a way to decompose a task into logical pieces, organize those pieces, and attack them in a systematic fashion. Goals provide us feedback so that we know how far we’ve come, how much is left to do, and when we’ve arrived at our destination. “Do your best” does none of these things. Overall, people, and businesses, with clear goals out-perform those who are simply attempting to do their best roughly 99.9% of the time. But, since autonomy is an important motivating factor, you should feel free to bet against those odds if you really want to.

Plan to fail

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

I have to confess to being very tired of the old aphorism, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Planning to fail is actually a worthwhile exercise, while failing to plan is simply a good way to waste time and energy without any benefit at the end. Failure is a surprisingly useful tool, at least for those who are not afraid to use it.

Seeing how your plan is failing can give you vital information on how to shift focus, allocate resources, and generally adjust your strategy. On a more subtle level, we won’t fully trust a plan that fails to consider failure: we need to have confidence that our plans or our feedback systems will alert us to something going wrong in order for us to believe it when things are going right. I’ve frequently seen companies abandon working plans simply because they had never determined how they’d know if something was going wrong and therefore concluded that something must be going wrong no matter how much evidence they had that their plans were working!

More broadly, though, the difficulty is often a misunderstanding of what it means to plan. I’ve worked for companies that tried to plan projects out 2-3 or more years. While this is possible in a very broad sense, details matter, and you can’t plan details that far in advance. Instead, you have to plan the steps in front of you. Part of the plan is to pause periodically and review the plan. What worked? What didn’t work? What are the next steps? Developing an effective strategy is not something you do once and then execute blindly; you have to constantly adjust as circumstances change. The beginning chess player tries to play out a sequence of moves and is paralyzed when the opponent doesn’t respond as expected; the chess master has a plan and constantly adjusts his strategy in response to his opponent.  You need to plan far enough, but not too far: This may sound like it contradicts the concept of reverse goal chaining; not at all. It is simply the case that the more distal steps are going to be vague until you get close enough to see the details. Good strategy requires a certain comfort with ambiguity and the ability to periodically evaluate, adjust, and adapt any plan.

Interestingly enough, the beginning chess player usually can’t explain his plan, while the master can. The beginner’s plan sounds like, “I have a plan: I’ll do this, and this, and this, and that’s how I’ll win.” The chess master, on the other hand, is likely to treat you to a detailed discussion of his thinking processes and chess strategy. The first is easy to say and easy to listen to, but is fundamentally useless. The second is hard to articulate and takes a lot of effort to follow, but actually does have a chance of working. Part of the reason it works is that the chess master has contingencies built into his strategy: he’s already considering that his opponent might do something unexpected and is mentally prepared to handle that. The beginner, by assuming that each step simply needs to be executed in the proper sequence, is locking himself into a rigid mindset. Chess strategy or business strategy, the results are same.

Fundamentally, failure is a form of feedback. In fact, this is exactly what you want failure to be: a means of testing out different strategies and figuring out which ones work best. Used this way, failure can be very helpful. Indeed, without such productive failures learning and strategy development is impossible.

However, sometimes the cost of failure can be somewhat higher. If Billy’s goal is to cross the street safely 75% of the time, what about the other 25%? Even if we raise the expectation to 99%, that one failure can negate all the successes: getting hit by a car can ruin your whole day.

It’s all too easy to confuse the two types of failures and businesses do it all the time. They are afraid to fail when that failure would give them valuable information and they take risks that sound good but where one slip causes you to lose everything.

How do we tell the two types of failure apart?

“Author Stephen Balzac has written a terrific book that gets into the realpolitik of organizational psychology – the underlying patterns of behavior that create the all important company culture. He doesn’t stop at the surface level, explaining things we already know like ‘culture beats strategy’ – he gets into the deeper drivers and ties everything back to specific, actionable stories. 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

The paradox of perfection

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

The trap of looking for the perfect candidate manifests in a few different ways.

The first manifestation is something I refer to as the Godot Effect, based on Estragon’s line in Waiting for Godot: “Personally, I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.”

All too often, a prospective hire becomes the repository of every hope and every need of the hiring organization. The fact that the person does not yet exist in the organization only makes this worse. I’ve seen this particular phenomenon happen in front of me more than once. In particular, I was sitting in a product design meeting while the team discussed the next few hires it needed to make.

They started by observing that they needed someone who could handle some specific piece of technology. So far, so good. Then things went downhill.

“We don’t have anyone on the team who can handle […technology…] either.”
“That’ll be the next hire.”
“Wasn’t the next hire supposed to be […original problem…]?”
“We’ll need someone who can do both.”

From someone who could do “both,” it quickly morphed into someone who could do three things, then four. After a while, it did become clear that things were getting just a bit ridiculous, but that didn’t help. There still wasn’t a serious return to reality; by the time the people in the room were finished, the only person who could have met their needs was Doctor Who. In other words, they were looking for a fictional, centuries old, omni-competent Time Lord. Alternately, if he wasn’t available, they could have tried to hire the professor who teaches the most courses in a typical college catalog: a scholar known as Staff. Unfortunately, Professor Staff isn’t usually available either. The net result is that they were so busy looking for someone with a highly improbable set of skills that they couldn’t recognize a qualified person when they walked in the door.

Closely related to the Godot Effect is the idea that, to misquote the X-Files, the perfect person is Out There and is always the person who is Not Here.

In one training exercise I ran, participants were presented with a problem and were given the names of other people who might or might not be able to help them. The trick was that not everyone was present: some of the people listed weren’t available. While some of the participants made do with the contacts that were available, many of them fixated on the people who weren’t there. Just as Clint Eastwood, at the 2012 Republican Convention, imbued an empty chair with all the characteristics he disliked about President Barack Obama, participants in the exercise imbued the people who weren’t there with all the characteristics of the person they were looking for, including the belief that this person would be eager to help them. This idealized mythical individual prevented them from recognizing the imperfect, but physically present, individuals who could have actually helped them!

The next form of the perfection paradox is a little more subtle. Ask any hiring manager if they’d hire someone who never takes decisive action, refuses to consider alternatives, and has never challenged themselves, and the usual answer is, “Of course not!” Despite the vehemence of their response, however, that’s exactly what they are doing.

Naturally, it doesn’t look that way.

It looks like they are hiring people with strong track records and consistent employment: People who have a history of successes, not failures, and who have never been responsible for something going wrong. The problem, though, is that they rarely take the time to understand why those people have those perfect records. At best, I’ve seen managers attempt to break down someone’s record, in order to see if it was airbrushed.

While there is value to verifying that someone is being truthful on a resume, those managers are missing the point. The real problem is that the resume really is as perfect as it looks.

Basketball great Michael Jordan famously said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan is so good exactly because of his willingness to take chances, to push himself, and to act without a guarantee of success. All too often, that perfect resume is really showing you someone who carefully burnished his image or selectively chose projects which would not risk that beautiful façade. When you focus on perfect resumes, you are quite often weeding out the people who are willing to seek out challenges and push the envelope. In other words, you are screening out the people who are most likely to be out of the box thinkers! Far more important than someone who has never failed is the person who can fail and get back up again: as one of my jujitsu instructors once said, “The fight’s not over until you can’t get up.” The ability to fail and recover is a sign of optimism and resilience, critical attributes of developing a success driven mindset. Those attributes should be part of your definition of a qualified person.

The final aspect of the perfection paradox relates to the stages of team development that we discussed in chapter three.

Recall that teams in early developmental stages are very focused around conformity and appearances. There is a strong tendency toward a mentality of “what you see is what you get,” or, in this case, “what you see is what you look for.” A WYSIWYLF (pronounced wizzee wolf) may sound more dangerous than a WYSIWYG, and it is. Simply put, our image of the right person to hire is shaped by the people around us. We look for people who look like us or like our coworkers. A poor manager is unlikely to hire a good manager in large part because she doesn’t know what a good manager looks like! This part of the interplay between organizational culture and recruiting; we’ll go into that in more depth later in this chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that even advanced teams can be trapped by what our organizational culture tells us is the image of the “right” person.

The net result of all these factors is a lack of faith that the hiring process will get the results we want.

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.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. 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.

For the Deadline Was a Boojum, You See

“There was one who was famed for the number of things
He forgot when he entered the ship:
His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,
And the clothes he had bought for the trip.”

— Lewis Carroll, Hunting of the Snark

Lewis Carroll billed the Hunting of the Snark as an “agony in eight fits.” While it’s not entirely clear what Carroll meant by this, the sentiment well describes the process of scheduling and hitting deadlines in many organizations. Certainly it’s clear that the Bellman didn’t have a schedule, or he wouldn’t have left his crew’s belongings on the beach.

Some years ago, I worked for a software company where the CEO decided that missing a deadline was a personal failing on his part. No matter what, the software would ship on the day he had announced. Even if the product had bugs, even if it did not work, it shipped on the day the CEO had promised. “Not a single day of delay,” said he.

He preferred to ship a product that did not work and then release a bug-fix rather than delay the software even a day. He never understood why customers grew increasingly irate and would call the company to complain. He was keeping his promise to ship by a certain date, and certainly adherence to the schedule was important.

There are several problems with this belief. The most obvious, of course, is the stubborn belief that the software must go out on a specific date no matter what. Shipping any product that doesn’t work is going to upset your clients. Doing it repeatedly just makes the company look incompetent or indifferent to its customers. It is not meeting their needs to give them something that they cannot use.

Stepping back, though, from that minor problem, we have to ask what the point of the schedule was. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to why the CEO picked the dates that he did. When pushed, his reaction was that scheduling was important, otherwise things didn’t get done. True, but not necessarily relevant. Fundamentally, a schedule is a tool; like all tools, it must be used properly or there is risk of serious injury. In this case, financial injury.

A schedule is not an arbitrary set of dates put down on paper to make sure that everyone works hard and doesn’t goof off. The goal of a schedule is also not to precisely calculate how long each task will take and account for every minute. It is not a holy writ to be held to beyond the bounds of common sense or product quality, nor is it put in place in order to have something to ignore. Sadly, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen schedules designed with exactly those somewhat dubious objectives in mind. However, a well-designed schedule needs to satisfy some fairly significant constraints:

1. A schedule helps make sure you don’t forget anything. It is both a to-do list and calendar. It helps people know what to work on when so that they don’t have to waste time constantly figuring that out.
2. A schedule is a tool for marshalling resources. Building a product requires different resources, be those resources time, people, or equipment. The schedule helps make sure that the right resources are available at the right times so that the project can move steadily forward.
3. A schedule is a tool for managing dependencies. In any large project, different pieces will depend on other pieces or on obtaining external resources. Some dependencies are obvious from the beginning, others do not emerge until the project is under way. The schedule helps organize tasks and manage dependencies so that they don’t derail the project.
4. The schedule helps you determine what you can do in the time available with the resources you have; alternately, it helps you understand how long it will take to accomplish your goals with the resources you have available.
5. The schedule enables you to define reasonable checkpoints, or milestones, that will let you know if you are moving successfully toward your planned target date or if problems are emerging. Missing a milestone is feedback that something is not working as expected!
6. A schedule needs to have enough slush in it to handle unexpected problems. You can’t always determine all possible dependencies at the start; some parts of the project may turn out to be significantly more difficult than expected; you may discover that a piece that appeared to make perfect sense just won’t work and needs to be redone. When I speak about this to technology companies, someone always claims that they’ve done a few simple calculations and developed the perfect project schedule. Based on the reactions from the rest of that person’s department, I have my doubts.
7. The schedule also needs enough slush to handle external delays. If your schedule is so tight that a severe winter storm closing the roads or having someone come down with the flu or having a vendor be late on a delivery will cause real problems, then you need to rethink the schedule. As that great sage Murphy so wisely said, “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Plan for it.

You’ll also notice that if you design a schedule this way, you’ll tend to be running ahead of schedule, not behind. Falling behind schedule is demoralizing, particularly when the schedule feels arbitrary. Running ahead of schedule energizes the team to work harder. A team that falls behind tends to stay behind, while a team that runs ahead tends to get further ahead. In other words, nothing succeeds like success.

When you view a schedule in this way, it has the potential to be a powerful, flexible tool for getting things done as opposed to causing quality, effort, and enthusiasm to softly and silently vanish away. Isn’t that the whole point?

There Can Be Only One

The other morning, I noticed one of my cats running around with her catnip mouse. Now, this isn’t such an unusual occurrence. However, the difference this time was that the other two cats also wanted to play with the mouse. This is unusual: normally, when one cat gets the toy, the others ignore it.

It wasn’t until the cat dropped the mouse that I realized that either it wasn’t a catnip toy or the cat had been playing with a Pinocchio mouse that had picked a very unfortunate moment to become a Real Mouse.

As soon as the mouse was on the ground, it immediately tried to run from the cat. The only thing that saved the mouse was when another cat got in the way. It was a bit hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure that the cats were more interested in competing with one another over which one would get the mouse than in working together. It reminded me of an old Tweety and Sylvester cartoon.

What was particularly interesting, though, was how the mouse behaved whenever a cat did catch up to it: it would open its little tiny mouth, raise its front paws, and try to look fierce. It was pretty funny watching a mouse trying to intimidate a cat that outweighs it one hundredfold. Oddly enough, though, every time the mouse did this, the cat would hesitate, which usually gave enough time for another cat to get in the way. At that point, the mouse would run and the third cat would quickly chase and catch it, causing the whole process to repeat. Eventually, I managed to trap the mouse in a container and release it outside.

To be fair, one can hardly blame the cats for taking an “every cat for herself” attitude. After all, in this situation, we’re talking about a very fixed pie, or mouse. Only one cat will get the prize. Whether that prize is then eaten or proudly left as a gift on a bedroom pillow, there can be only one winner, and it’s not the owner of the pillow. For cats, this is quite normal. Unfortunately, it is also quite normal on far too many so-called teams. Indeed, it is quite disturbing how often teams work together almost as well as did the cats.

Like the cats, though, in a very real sense you can’t blame the team members either. When there is only one mouse, or pie, suddenly the priority becomes getting it. Put another way, whenever team members are in a position of “I win, you lose,” you don’t really have a team; you have a mob or a horde of cats out for themselves.

It doesn’t matter whether there’s a fixed amount of money being given out to the “best” members of the team, or bottom ten percent are being fired. Quite simply, when members of a “horde” are competing with one another for the rewards, performance is drastically and dramatically reduced compared to a strong team. How bad can this be, you ask? A team outperforms a horde by at least tenfold, and can sometimes outperform by a factor of a hundred or more. What is that level of performance worth to you?

Like the cats being “intimidated” by the mouse, members of a horde are also more likely to be flummoxed by relatively simple problems. By behaving in an unexpected fashion, the mouse could startle the cats, in large part because each cat was devoting the bulk of its efforts to competing with the other cats. Thus, they were less able to focus on the mouse. Similarly, when team members are devoting the bulk of their efforts to competing with their supposed colleagues, they spend less effort solving problems. After all, the reward is not for finding the best ideas, but to finding an idea that looks better than the ideas that other team members came up with. In some cases, just being good at making someone else’s ideas look bad is enough to win. Well, at least the individual wins; the team, and the company, end up with a dead mouse on their pillow.

Competition on the team also means that you, the manager, have to spend most of your time keeping your cats walking in the same direction and focused on your goals. This can be exhausting, as anyone who has ever taken their cats for a drag can attest. Team members will only care about the goals of the team when no other way of getting ahead is available. As for taking risks, forget it. Why take a risk when that means someone else gets the mouse? It’s smarter to play it safe and let another person make the mistake.

Far better to eliminate competition within the team and focus team members on competing against other teams, preferably teams at other companies. Use the competition to bring them together instead of driving them apart. If someone on the team isn’t carrying his weight, it’ll become obvious and can be dealt with simply and directly at that point. Building a strong team takes effort, but it sure beats herding cats.

What Are You Avoiding?

The amazing thing about train wrecks is that they are obvious in hindsight. However, while they are happening, everyone involved is gripped by some horrid fascination that, if not forcibly interrupted, leads to the inevitable conclusion.

By the end of this particular train wreck, a member of the senior management team had resigned and the CEO had lost the trust of many of his formerly extremely loyal employees.

The newly hired VP of Sales was given responsibility for supervising a particular product manager, someone who had been with the company for years. They did not hit it off and the relationship went downhill from there.

The PM was charged by the CEO with getting a particular release of the software out the door. The VP of Sales wanted the project manager to be working on something else. The CEO kept promising to straighten things out with the VP of Sales, but never quite got around to it.

The VP of Sales became ever more frustrated with the constant “insubordination” of the PM; the PM, meanwhile, was increasingly frustrated with getting one set of instructions from the VP and one from the CEO.

The VP of Sales eventually went to the CEO and told him that he was planning to fire an employee. The CEO shrugged and didn’t think much about it. “It’s your department,” was his only response.

The VP told the project manager to leave, that she was suspended without pay pending completion of the paperwork to fire her.

At this point, the CEO noticed that the PM wasn’t in the office, found out what was going on, and “unfired” her. While she was happy to be unfired, she was also furious that he’d let it get to that point. The VP of Sales, meanwhile, was just a tad miffed. He felt he’d received carte blanche and ended up feeling much like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football as Lucy jerks it away.

The CEO’s attitude was that, “these things just happen.” He was, of course, wrong.

Teams are not a group of people operating in their own silos, independent of one another. Rather, they are an interacting system and sometimes parts of that system don’t work quite the way they should. When something goes wrong, it’s important understand the system and how different players contributed to the problem.

The Project Manager was nobly perhaps, but foolishly, focused on the assignment she’d received from the CEO. Her attempts to explain to the VP of Sales just why she wasn’t focusing on his objectives were either insufficient or simply missing. She may have assumed that the CEO would explain things to him, but didn’t force the issue when it became obvious that he hadn’t.

The VP of Sales walked into the company and made a number of assumptions about how work was done and how authority was implemented. Rather than take the time to find out how people worked in the company, how rigid or flexible the lines of control were, and what other projects might be going on, he assumed that an employee put into his department could be assigned to his projects. He didn’t listen to the PM and he never made the effort to go to the CEO and found out what was going on. He assumed the CEO was paying attention to issues in his department that were, quite simply, not where the CEO’s mind was. Even when he went to the CEO to explain that he wanted to fire someone, he didn’t bother to explain the situation.

The CEO, for his part, also contributed in a major way to the final, unsatisfying outcome. He knew he was giving an employee instructions that might contradict what her manager was telling her. He also knew the project manager was extremely frustrated with her new manager. He didn’t act on that knowledge. He was busy, and explaining things to the VP of Sales was not a high priority for him. Even once the situation had reached its climax and the project manager had been fired, the CEO didn’t really address the problem. He simply pulled the rug out from under the VP of Sales and did not consider how that might make the VP look to his other subordinates.

At every stage of the game, the CEO, the PM, and the VP of Sales each had opportunities to address issues that each of them wanted to avoid: the CEO didn’t really want to deal with the disappointment of the PM at having her project cancelled, nor did he want to upset his new VP of Sales. The PM did not want her project cancelled and really wasn’t all that interested in the project the VP of Sales wanted her to take on. The VP of Sales had his own views about power and authority and didn’t really want to find out that the company did things differently than he believed they should be done. He was angry, blamed the PM, and wanted to punish her.

Right up to the end, stopping to address the unpleasant issues and recognizing how each person was contributing to the impending train wreck could have changed the results. Instead, each person operated in a vacuum, and managed to achieve one of the worst of all possible results.

What difficult situations or awkward conversations are people in your office avoiding?

Who Needs Strategy?

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers.”

“Our goal is to succeed!”

“Our goal is simple: we will build a winning product.”

“Joe’s goal is to get his work done on schedule 75% of the time.”

“Billy’s goal? He should cross the street safely 75% of the time.”

I’ve heard each of these so-called goals presented with a straight face. They sound good; well, at least the first three sound good. The fourth? Well, isn’t it just like the third?

Goals are an interesting beast. We talk about them all the time, put them down on paper, hang banners with goals written on them, and exhort people to stay focused on the goal. Despite all that effort, a great many of these goals never come to pass. Most of them are little more than wishful thinking or downright fantasy.

The goal problem is two-fold.

First, setting a goal does not make it happen. You can set a goal of finding a pony under your Christmas tree, but that doesn’t magically cause a pony to appear. For a goal to succeed, there needs to be a plan to accomplish it. That planning process, sometimes known as the strategy, is critical. It doesn’t matter how much you want to succeed if you aren’t willing to plan you aren’t going to get there.

Now, I frequently hear that planning is pointless since no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That may be true, but seeing the plan not survive is at least giving you feedback that you’ve encountered the enemy. Seeing how your plan is failing can give you vital information on how to shift focus, allocate resources, and generally adjust your strategy.

More broadly, though, the difficulty is often a misunderstanding of what it means to plan. I’ve worked for companies that tried to plan projects out 2-3 years. While this is possible in a very broad sense, details matter, and you can’t plan details that far in advance. Instead, you have to plan the steps in front of you. Part of the plan is to pause periodically and review the plan. What worked? What didn’t work? What are the next steps? Developing an effective strategy is not something you do once and then execute blindly; you have to constantly adjust as circumstances change. The beginning chess player tries to play out a sequence of moves and is paralyzed when the opponent doesn’t respond as expected; the chess master has a plan and constantly adjusts his strategy in response to his opponent.

Interestingly enough, the beginner usually can’t explain his plan, while the master can. The beginner’s plan sounds like, “I have a plan: I’ll do this, and this, and this, and that’s how I’ll win.” The chess master, on the other hand, is likely to treat you to a detailed discussion of his thinking processes and chess strategy. The first is easy to say and easy to listen to, but is fundamentally useless. The second is hard to articulate and takes a lot of effort to follow, but actually does have a chance of working.

I said earlier that there are two big problems with goals. The second is failing to fail correctly.

Sometimes failure is a form of feedback. In fact, this is exactly what you want failure to be: a means of testing out different strategies and figuring out which ones work best. It is Edison’s proverbial, “I learned a thousand ways to not make a light bulb.” Used this way, failure can be very helpful. Indeed, without such productive failures learning and strategy development is impossible.

However, sometimes the cost of failure can be somewhat higher. If Billy’s goal is to cross the street safely 75% of the time, what about the other 25%? Even if we raise the expectation to 99%, that one failure can negate all the successes: getting hit by a car can ruin your whole day.

It’s all too easy to confuse the two types of failures and businesses do it all the time. They are afraid to fail when that failure would give them valuable information and they take risks that sound good but where one slip causes you to lose everything.

How do you tell the two apart?

Check out the strategy around the goal. If there is a strategy and the possibilities of failure are being considered and managed, then odds are good that if you fail, you’re failing successfully. If there is no strategy or failure is not being considered as a possibility, turn and run away. All you’re doing is rolling the dice, and if that’s your game, Vegas is a better bet.

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.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. 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.

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.

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?

New Year’s Resolutions? Forget it!

It’s barely the start of the new year, and I’ve already received half a dozen identical articles touting the benefits of SMART goals as the solution to all my New Year’s resolutions.

Now, to be fair, they have a point as far as it goes: New Year’s resolutions have a shorter half-life than champagne at a New Year’s party. However, that’s about as useful as these articles get.

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, SMART goals are often touted as the secret to personal and business success. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of these goals will go the way of all New Year’s resolutions. Why? Because none of these articles actually tell you how to make SMART goals work. In fact, most people who try the SMART approach for any but small and relatively easy goals frequently find themselves frustrated and disillusioned.

Well-constructed goals are extremely powerful tools for getting things done, increasing concentration and motivation. Successfully completing a well-constructed goal builds self-confidence. Unfortunately, creating a well-constructed SMART goal is not quite so simple as the average article makes it out to be.

To begin with, a specific goal is only useful if it’s something you can control. Although this may seem obvious, the fact is that far too many people set goals that appear to be under their control, but really are not. For example, consider the athlete who sets the goal of winning an upcoming tournament: it’s specific, it’s measurable, it has a time of completion associated with it, and presumably it’s highly relevant to the athlete. Is it achievable? Depending on the athlete’s level of skill, very possibly. However, the athlete has no control over the difficulty of the competition. He may simply be outplayed by a more skilled opponent.

Furthermore, although the goal is measurable, in that the athlete will know whether or not he accomplishes it, the measurement is not particularly useful. At no time will he know how close he is to accomplishing the goal, where he needs to focus his energies, or what else needs to be accomplished. The athlete is far better served by setting the goal of exercising certain key skills in the competition, skills that have a high probability of leading to a victory. Not only will he gain the self-confidence boost of accomplishing his goal, he may just win the tournament. Whether your goal is winning a competition, selling a product to a particular customer, or getting a specific job, focusing mainly on outcomes only gets you in trouble.

Another problem is that a goal may simply be too big. If a goal takes years to accomplish, it can be extremely difficult to maintain motivation. Big, ambitious goals are wonderful, but they need to be carefully structured. It is vital to break them down into subgoals that can be accomplished in a much shorter period of time. The perception of progress is critical to maintaining motivation, whether for an individual or a team.

Having too many goals is another common problem. Well constructed goals are great, but if you have too many of them at once, they become a distraction. Many people can focus on three to five unrelated goals without a problem, but not ten or twenty. Keeping in mind that each goal might generate numerous subgoals along the way, it’s easy to see how having more than a few key goals can easily balloon out of control.

Is the goal something you really care about? Many people have goals that they don’t really care about. Perhaps they’ve been told it’s something they ought to do or they believe they should do, but they don’t really care about the outcome. If you don’t care whether or not you accomplish a goal, it’s hard to find the motivation to do it.

Used properly, SMART goals can be a very powerful and effective tool. Well-constructed goals can increase motivation, improve focus, and build self-confidence. Used improperly, they can decrease motivation, and destroy self-confidence. If you’re using SMART goals, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do I control the outcome?

Can I measure progress in a meaningful way?

Is my goal too big? How can I break it up?

Do I have too many goals? Is there enough time in the day/week/month to work on each one?

When will I work on each piece of my goal? How will they chain together?

Do I really care about my goal? Is this something I genuinely want to accomplish?

Good luck!