The Business Sensei

China Design Torture

China can be a problem.

No, not the country. The dishes. Choosing a China pattern can be a particularly stressful and exhausting proposition, a form of torture not dreamt of by the Inquisition. And somehow, I suspect that making people have to choose China patterns as an interrogation method wouldn’t make particularly convincing television. Nonetheless, the process of making multiple decisions leaves many people so drained they can’t make even a simple decision afterward.

Decision making is an interesting phenomenon. As simple as making a decision may seem, it turns out that we can only make so many decisions each day. Actually, let me be more precise: we can only make so many good decisions each day. The more decisions we make, the harder each one becomes. And while taking a break or having a meal can help recharge our decision points, that trick only goes so far.  Ultimately, decision points run out and the only option for recharging is rest.

How much of a problem decision fatigue causes really depends on what you’re deciding. If it’s China patterns, maybe that’s not such a big deal so long as you don’t mind becoming skilled at covering the plate with food. However, if you’re making major financial decisions or running a company, well, that’s a bit more serious. Making the wrong decisions can have long-term consequences, and, in this case, there are two types of wrong decisions: first, there are what most people think of as wrong decisions. When we run out of decision points we become increasingly prone to decisions that appear to not change anything, but which lead to poor outcomes: decisions which make the problem worse, decisions that miss critical opportunities, and decisions that lead us down blind alleys.

Then there’s making the wrong decisions: making decisions that are below your paygrade. If you spend your points making decisions that could be handled by someone else, then you risk not having anything left for the more important financial and strategic decisions that can only be made at your level. The second type of wrong decisions leads inexorably to the first. If you use up your decision points on decisions that should be made by other people, you will inevitably miss strategic opportunities, persist when you should change direction, and become up close and personal with a lot of blind alleys.

Knowing how decision-making works is the easy part. Changing how you make decisions is hard. It requires a lot of decisions! It requires putting in the time and energy to find and train people who can make those lower-level decisions for you. It requires creating the infrastructure so that they have the necessary information. And, it requires accepting that they may not make exactly the same decisions you would make; rather, the question is whether or not they are making decisions that you can work with.

Fortunately, there are ways to make it easier to make good decisions.

• The best decisions are made early in the day, after lunch, and after an afternoon break. There is a theme here: being rested and having eaten recently do help with making better decisions. In general, it’s better to sleep on a decision than make it late in the day.

• Conduct meetings and discussions in light, well-ventilated rooms. Recent studies find that the carbon dioxide content of meeting rooms goes up rapidly with only a few people in the room. Sitting in a stuffy meeting room quickly makes us feel sleepy and interferes with our abilities to make good decisions.

• Take frequent breaks. Decision making is an endurance activity. Don’t try to sprint the marathon.
• Don’t make important decisions after choosing China patterns 😊.

• And, circling back around to the beginning, avoid making decisions below your paygrade. Use your good decision-making time to create the infrastructure you need to delegate. Save for yourself the decisions that only you can really make.

The ability to make good decisions is a powerful, yet limited asset. Treat it accordingly.

Balanced For Success

The story is told of a young student watching Aikido founder, O’Sensei Morehei Ueshiba, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. No matter what the opponent did, he could never strike Ueshiba or throw him to the ground. Afterward, the youngster said to Ueshiba, “Master, you never lose your balance. What is your secret?”

The master replied, “You are wrong. I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it.”

Ueshiba could not be thrown because he knew the instant he was off balance by even the slightest degree, and he would shift to regain his balance before his opponent could take advantage of the opening. From the outside, though, this constant adjustment was invisible. It appeared to observers and to those he fought that he never lost his balance.

Ueshiba recognized that training with the idea that he would never be off balance was an impossibility: either through the skill of an opponent or through mischance, sooner or later he would be drawn off balance. If he always planned to be on balance, then that moment of off-balancing would prove to be his undoing. Thus, he trained not to be perfectly on balance, but to rapidly and smoothly recognize being off balance and correct it before it could be used against him.

In the business world, being physically off balance may not happen all that often, at least not the way that Ueshiba Sensei might experience it. However, being mentally off balance can happen quite easily, with potentially devastating results. Consider Darren, the CEO of a mid-sized, publically traded company. One quarter, his company missed its numbers. This had never happened to him before, and he was stunned. Rather than stopping to regain his mental equilibrium, he panicked. Within two weeks, he’d sold the company for a song to his largest competitor. Darren did learn from the experience, though, as his performance in his most recent, highly successful, venture demonstrates: he’s managed to regain his balance despite several significant setbacks, and come back stronger each time.

Fortunately, learning to regain your balance isn’t that difficult: the hardest part is remembering to do it! Unlike Ueshiba Sensei, if it takes you a few minutes, or even a day, to collect yourself, odds are no one will be throwing you to the ground in that time. There are a number of techniques that are used by martial artists and Olympic athletes when they need to rapidly recover their mental or physical balance in competition.

The first is a technique used by martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Whenever he felt disoriented or overwhelmed, he would ask himself what he had just thought or imagined to make himself feel that way. He would then imagine writing that thought down on a piece of paper, crumpling it up, and throwing it away. That let him focus on what could go right instead of what might go wrong.

Another technique is to simply pay attention to your breathing: a few deep breaths can work wonders. When we’re feeling off balance, though, the tendency is to take short, rapid breaths. Deep breathing breaks the cycle and convinces our bodies that the danger is past, allowing us to think clearly and act calmly.

Ueshiba achieved his amazing ability to regain his balance by paying attention to his balance all the time. Any time he noticed he was standing off balance or in poor posture, he would adjust his position. He would also stand when riding the subway and not hold on to anything: the fine art of subway surfing. Paying attention to balance all the time seems like a lot of effort, but the exercise becomes second nature very quickly. Oddly enough, when someone is physically on balance, it is very difficult to take them mentally off balance.

One mistake many managers and even CEOs make is to talk to someone close to them in the company. Unfortunately, when the problem is at the company, the other person is also off balance. Two people who have both lost their balance are going to be figuratively hanging onto one another to avoid falling over: very amusing when done in a slapstick comedy, but not so funny at the office. This is what happened to Darren: by talking to the people around him, he only magnified his sense of being off balance. Instead, find someone unconnected to the company with whom you can talk. This can be a close friend, coach, or trusted advisor. Their lack of deep emotional involvement means that they are not going to be knocked off balance and hence will be able to act as a stable anchor.

In the end, Murphy’s Law is inevitable. It’s not a question of whether it will knock you off balance, but how rapidly you’ll recover when it does.

The Solution is the Problem

“I sit down in a meeting and my phone goes nuts. I can’t even take a vacation!”

This very frustrated comment was made to me by a manager about his team. Whenever he’s in a meeting or away from the office at a client site, no work gets done. His team is constantly calling him to make decisions or help them solve problems.

“I don’t get it. The solution is obvious!”

This was a completely different manager at a completely different company. Same basic problem though: when he wasn’t there, nothing got done. He was frustrated; his team was frustrated. They were all loyal, all eager to please, but they also wouldn’t do anything if he wasn’t there.

Indeed, teams which don’t work when the manager isn’t around are legion. It’s a common problem, and common wisdom suggests that the team members lack motivation or are trying to goof off: when the cat’s away, and all that.

Common wisdom may sound good, but is often wrong. This is no exception.

When apparently enthusiastic teams are unable to get any work done when the boss is away, there are really three common causes:

1. The goals are unclear.
2. The group can’t make decisions without the boss.
3. The group is either unable or unwilling solve the problems that come up.

While the first two are important, the third is critical: if the team doesn’t think it can do the job, or isn’t willing to try, then it doesn’t matter how skillful they are at decision making and it doesn’t matter how clear the goals are. It’ll merely be that much clearer to them that they cannot do it.

In each of the cases mentioned above, and countless others, the situation was the same: a highly skilled, knowledgeable manager, a competent team, working under a tight deadline and the perception that there was no time for mistakes.

Perception can be dangerous: in this case, that perception that mistakes had to be avoided caused more delay than the mistakes would have!

In each situation, when the team ran into a difficult problem, they’d call their manager. He’d run into the room, quickly size up the situation, and tell them what to do. It usually worked; if it didn’t, they’d call him in again and the process would repeat.

Given the tight deadlines and how busy the manager was, this always seemed to be the best thing to do: solve the problem, move on. Unfortunately, it meant that the team never had to learn to solve the problems for themselves. Even worse, they were being given the very unmistakable message that they couldn’t be trusted to make the attempt lest they make a mistake.

In each case, the solution was easy, although the implementation was not: the manager had to slow down and work through the problem solving process with their team. Rather than solving the problems, they had to let the team see their process for problem solving, and understand their criteria for success.

Then, came the really hard part. Each manager had to step back and let the team move forward on their own.  Yes, the manager could help, but they also had to resist the urge to solve the problems. They had to accept that the teams would make mistakes.

This did not always go smoothly. It is not easy to tolerate mistakes, especially when the right answer is obvious to you. However, if the teams were not allowed to make mistakes, and then recover from those mistakes, the team couldn’t develop either the confidence or the ability to solve problems on their own.

Some managers couldn’t accept this. They couldn’t tolerate the inevitable mistakes or they couldn’t stop themselves from solving the problems. Others went the other direction: they were too quick to pull away, refusing to help at all. A couple firmly believed that they were making themselves irrelevant, and refused to move forward.

Most, however, were able to make the transition. Many needed some coaching: an outside perspective is very helpful. For those who were successful, they found that their teams became far more skilled and motivated than they had ever dreamed could happen. Instead of spending their time running around solving problems for the team, those successful managers were able to take a more strategic focus, further increasing team productivity. Several were subsequently promoted into more senior roles in their organizations.

In the end, teams don’t learn to operate when the boss is away by watching the boss solve every problem. It’s learning what to do, practicing, and recovering from the inevitable mistakes along the way that transform a dependent, low-performance team into an independent, high-performance team that gets things done when the boss is away.

It Was Supposed to Fly?

“Alright, let’s see it fly.”

“We can’t do that.”

“What do you mean, you can’t do that? It’s a helicopter. Of course it flies!”

“Look at the specs. You didn’t say it had to fly!”

Imagine that you’re in a design contest to build a helicopter. You are being evaluated on various criteria such as efficiency, beauty, cost to build, and so forth. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable contest. In fact, it actually exists, although the details are omitted to protect the guilty.

The second place finishers designed a really quite excellent helicopter. There was only reason they didn’t come in first was that their helicopter wasn’t as cheap to build as the winning model. The second place model included an engine.

I wish I could make this stuff up!

The team designing the first place helicopter noticed a minor omission in the criteria: there was no rule that said that the copter actually had to fly! They saved an enormous amount on cost and weight by not including an engine. As a side benefit, their helicopter was also the most fuel efficient and the safest model in the contest.

It didn’t actually work, but that wasn’t an official requirement at the time.

While we might celebrate the team’s ability to think outside the box, there are times when being inside the box isn’t such a bad place to be. Imagine shipping non-working helicopters to the customer… possibly not a problem if the customer ordered scale models for a display or for kids to sit in, but maybe not such a good idea if the customer wants to fly rescue missions. Indeed, when dealing with customers, it’s often a good idea not to get fixated on exactly what the customer says they want: what the customer asks for is often their best guess as to what they want, not something that will actually solve their problem.

Soak Systems, a software vendor, landed a huge contract with a certain major telecommunications company. The telecom provided Soak with a very detailed set of specifications for what they wanted. The company set a team of engineers to work on the contract. Although several people wondered aloud about some of the elements in the spec, no one bothered to go and ask anyone at the telecom. After all, the reasoning went, if they didn’t explicitly say they wanted something, clearly they must not want it. No doubt it would all make sense to the customer.

After all, helicopters don’t really need to fly.

When Soak delivered the product, it was, shall we say, missing the engine.

Confronted with this, everyone at Soak, from the lowest engineer to the VP of engineering to the CEO all responded by saying, “But we gave you what you asked for. And just look at how elegant and efficient our solution is!”

Replied the telecom, “You didn’t solve the problem.”

“But you didn’t say it had to have an engine! And it is what you asked for, so stop complaining.”

Fundamentally, when a customer has a problem, they can really only imagine the solutions they wish you could provide. If you don’t know how to ask them what their problems are and then help them see how your solutions can benefit them you are likely to deliver a helicopter without an engine.

Even worse, most of the time what the customer is actually complaining about is not the problem at all: they are complaining about the symptoms of the problem. They might think that they are solving the problem, but really all they’re doing is treating symptoms. The software the Soak designed did, in fact, address some of the more irritating manifestations of the problem, carefully replacing those manifestations with a different set of irritating manifestations. They no more solved the actual problem than painting a helicopter green, making it soundproof, and providing a really good stereo system will enable it to fly. Only providing an engine will do that.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how elegant and efficient your solution is if it doesn’t work!

Thus, it’s critical to take the time to find out what’s behind what your customer is looking for. What do they really want and why do they want it?

Realizing that the rules don’t specify that the helicopter needs to fly may work fine in a contest, but it doesn’t win you friends in the real world.

The contest rules were subsequently corrected. The cool thing about design competitions is that each year you get a do-over. Soak, on the other hand, did not.

What are you doing to make sure you know how to speak to your customers?

Tortoise and Hare Schedules

Remember the old story of the tortoise and the hare? Aesop’s old fable about a race between the extremely fast hare and the slow tortoise is a famous one, appearing in countless children’s books. It also made its appearance on Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Bugs Bunny Show. In the latter case, the role of the hare was played by no less a personage than Bugs Bunny himself, which is almost, but not completely, totally unlike getting Sir Lawrence Olivier to appear in a high school production of Hamlet.

The fact is, though, the story has tremendous longevity. This little race fable has, as it were, “legs.” If there is one thing that story tortoise, it’s that speed simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, one of the fastest people I’ve ever met was a 75 year old Judo master. He never seemed to move all that much, but no matter how fast we tried to hit him, somehow we always hit the ground instead. His secret, he told us, was that we simply had to be in the right place at the right time. As long as we could do that, we didn’t have to move very fast.

This same question of speed plays into how we experience time and, by extension, how productive we are. When we feel that we don’t have much time, we try to move faster. This is tiring: the hare, as you’ll recall, fell asleep before the end of the race. Not only that, and odd as it may sound, the faster we move, the less time we feel like we have. In a shocking counterpoint to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says that the faster we go the more time slows down, when we go fast, time seems to speed up as well. My physicist friends assure me, however, that this would change if I could simply move at a rate approaching the speed of light. Failing that, we need to learn to experience time differently, and use time in ways that maximize our productivity without leaving us exhausted.

Fortunately, there are ways to do this. Instead of viewing time as ticks on a clock or blocks on a calendar, we need to step back from that rigid construction of time and instead view time for what it actually is: Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once. Time imposes a sequence on our activities, and it does that no matter how much we may wish otherwise. That sequence, however, can be used to our advantage. Instead of being locked into a rigid, clock-based image of time, we can instead view time as a series of events. Each event triggers the next event. What does this mean?

When we are locked into a clock-based view of time, we attempt to start and stop activities according to the number on the clock: 3pm have pre-meeting meeting, 3:30pm meeting, 7pm post meeting discussion, and so on. When we are working with others and need to coordinate a variety of different people, use of space, and allocation of other resources, then we need to impose some of that clock based ordering. Too much of it though just slows us down: if something takes longer, or shorter, than expected, suddenly the whole schedule is thrown off. We get distracted and suddenly find ourselves running behind or forget to take breaks and wear ourselves out too soon.

Instead, within our blocks of time, and whenever we are working in a relatively unstructured environment, we need to think in terms of events. What events are happening around us? What events are we causing? Our events can be used to trigger us to change activities or take breaks. In one office, the coffee cart coming around was the trigger for people to take a break and move to a different task. An engineer working at home used the school bus driving by in the morning and mail deliveries in the afternoon as events to trigger him to switch tasks. We can even take this a step further, and create explicit linkages of events for our own uses: when I finish testing this piece of code, I will make a cup of coffee. When I finish my coffee I will review the documentation. When I finish… and so on.  When we plan and connect events this way, it’s amazing how much time we don’t waste just trying to decide what to do next.

The other piece of managing our perception of time is to create a schedule that we can beat. It’s quite amazing: when we’re ahead of schedule, we are simultaneously more relaxed and more energized. We focus better and come up with more creative solutions to problems. Unexpected obstacles are fun challenges. When we are behind schedule, we feel rushed. Every delay feels like a crisis. We take shortcuts and make more mistakes.

Ultimately, teams that are ahead end up further ahead. Teams that are behind, end up further behind. People who are rushed don’t see what is in front of them, lose track of where they are, and exhaust themselves too soon. If you want to win, design a schedule that you can beat not one that beats you.

Future Retrospective

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 more honest with yourself and address the issues in front of you.

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

Death of Thousand Knives

Very few companies are ever driven out of business by their competitors.

I’ve found that this statement upsets a great many people, all of whom are quick to jump up and start providing examples of companies that were, in fact, driven out of business by their competitors. This is missing the point. Indeed, it’s rather like a detective in a murder mystery concluding that the cause of death was that the victim’s heart stopped. It matters whether the heart stopped due to lead poisoning, for example in the form of a bullet, or due to some other cause. Indeed, understanding exactly what led to that heart stopping moment is a key part of solving the mystery.

Similarly, while it’s not so unusual for a failing company to have the coup de grace administered by a competitor, how they got to that point makes all the difference. Focusing only on the end point provides a very simple, comfortable solution, but not necessarily a particularly useful one.

Robotic Chromosomes, for example, was a company that dominated a particular niche in the bioinformatics market. They were an early entrant into the field and their products were initially the best on the market.

Over the course of several years, though, they developed a view of their clients as idiots. The fact that their clients were all highly educated research scientists did not enter into the equation. If they had trouble using the software, they were idiots. As a result, the company became increasingly less open to feedback from either their clients or from the market. While their market share was increasing faster than the market itself, they could get away with that attitude. Eventually, though, their growth started lagging the growth in the market. Phrases like “law of large numbers” and “temporary aberration” were batted about. When their market share started shrinking, phrases like, “temporary aberration” became even more popular. The view of the clients as insanely stupid for buying competing products also became more common.

Today, they no longer exist. Were they driven out of business by their competitors? Only in the sense that they put themselves in a position to allow their competitors to drive them out of their dominant position in the market. Sure, their competitors may have pushed them over the cliff, but they were the ones who chose to walk to the edge and lean over.

Now, it may reasonably appear from the preceding description that Robotic Chromosomes was taken down by a clearly defined event, that is, viewing clients as idiots. That is not, however, quite correct. While it may appear that way in retrospect, the reality is that Robotic Chromosomes suffered from a series of cascading errors. Each mistake was small, easily overlooked or ignored. Each mistake led to more mistakes until eventually the company was suffering from so many small cuts that it eventually had no strength left to resist when its competitors moved in. So how does a company avoid this death of a thousand knives?

The obvious answer is that they needed better communications. While true, it again misses the point. Communications is where problems show up, but the communications are rarely the problem. Rather, the dysfunctional communications are the symptom of the problem. It’s critical to look beyond the symptoms to identify the real problem. Otherwise, you spend all your time looking at the wrong things, as Robotic Chromosomes so eloquently demonstrated.

Avoiding that fate requires a willingness to accept negative feedback; it means being willing to hear what people are saying about your product, your service, or your management style. If you aren’t willing to listen, or if you structure the way in which you listen to negate the feedback, you’re setting yourself up for failure, one step at a time. For example, creating a culture that mocks and demeans your clients is not a recipe for success, and closes you off from valuable feedback from those clients.

Being willing to accept feedback is only a first step though. You have to create a context in which employees are not afraid to give you that feedback, and in which they believe that providing feedback is worthwhile. If people that they’ll be punished for being critical or regarded as “not a team player,” it’ll be hard to get them to provide feedback.

Next, you need to clearly define your goals and also define how you’ll know whether you’re succeeding or failing. Robotic Chromosomes had very fluid definitions of success, definitions that shifted regularly to avoid facing unpleasant results. It’s important to separate the evaluation of the feedback you’re getting from the testing to see if the criteria for that evaluation are valid. In fact, verifying the validity of your criteria should be done before you then evaluate your feedback: otherwise, it’s too easy to redefine success and give yourself a few more cuts. None of them seem all that bad at the time.

Step by step, over the course of several years, Robotic Chromosomes successfully created an environment where any negative feedback could be ignored because that feedback was always coming from idiots.  Their competitors didn’t drive them out of business. They drove themselves out of business; their competitors simply put them out of their misery. How will you avoid the death of a thousand knives?

It Takes a Process

Large projects can be very intimidating. It’s easy to feel like you are standing at the foot of a very tall and imposing mountain. Working on the project can easily overwhelm even very talented people. It can be hard to feel like you’re making progress when there’s always a lot to do and when it feels like problems are constantly cropping up. When you climb that mountain, it can often feel like there’s always fog ahead of you and behind you so that you can’t see how far you still have to go and you can’t tell how far you’ve come.

When I decided to write my first book, I didn’t jump in and start writing. Even though I’ve executed some very large projects, my first step was to learn a process for writing books. In this case, the process I used came from someone who had written over two dozen books, so I figured he had some clue what he was talking about. I subsequently modified the process by bringing in some of the lessons I’d learned from other complex projects and adjusting it to suit my personal style and to correct a few short-comings.

The trick with processes is that they serve to organize and simplify complex operations. They create structure. Writing a book is complex: there are a lot of moving parts. If nothing else, keeping track of the chapters, what’s ending up in each one, making sure there are no contradictions, that something mentioned in an earlier chapter is followed up on later, and so forth, can easily become nightmarish. However, using an organized system turns that nightmare into routine. Other projects have their own headaches that can by managed by having the right processes in place.

Processes, however, often feel awkward and alien when you’re first learning them. This is like the student in my jujitsu class who once said to me, “I’d never do that technique. It doesn’t feel natural.”

Of course it didn’t feel natural, he hadn’t practiced it! Processes are the same. They rarely feel natural at first. You have to get used to them. Processes also serve both logistical and psychological functions.

From a logistical perspective, a process serves as an organizational structure for projects that have a lot of moving parts. When designed well, the process captures the moving parts, or at least provides a way of making sure that they don’t get lost. Lost pieces of a project are a little like Roger Rabbit: just as he can escape from handcuffs only when it’s funny, lost pieces tend to show up only when it’s most inconvenient.

Psychologically, a good process protects us from having to spend our time and energy constantly wondering what we’re forgetting. This can be amazingly distracting. With a good process in place, even if some things still slip through the cracks, the frequency and severity of problems are minimized and are far less likely to derail the project. A process is, in essence, a way of breaking down a large project into goals and subgoals, while also providing a framework for keeping track of them all. This allows you to measure progress, making the whole project seem less intimidating. Put another way, you’ve at least cleared the fog from below, so you can see how far up the mountain you’ve climbed, and you have the tools to navigate the fog ahead of you.

Processes are not just about accomplishing large projects though. A good process can make it easier for new hires to become productive: for example, having a sales process helps new salesmen know what to say and how to demo the product. In this case, the process is serving to reduce confusion and provide structure to someone who is entering a new environment. By learning the process, they also learn what matters and what does not. Without a process, becoming productive is slower and involves a lot more wandering around in the fog.

Of course, no process is ever perfect. Once you’ve learned the process, you must modify it to fit you and to fix shortcomings. For team projects, part of how the team reaches its most productive stages is by figuring out how to modify the process so that it works for everyone on the team.

You wouldn’t climb a mountain without preparation. Tackling large projects without some sort of process is similarly unwise.

Winning Was Easy: The Tragedy of Star Wars

Winning was easy young man. Governing’s harder.

                                                 — President George Washington (Hamilton)

 

When I’ve done jujitsu demos, we would often conduct “what if” scenarios: given a situation, how would one of the demonstrators use jujitsu to get out of it? Some of the situations members of the audience would imagine were, to say the least, creative: “You’re on your face, with your arms and legs twisted into knots and …”

The response to such scenarios was always, “How did you get there in the first place?”

Watching The Last Jedi, I had a similar reaction: “How did they manage to get into that mess in the first place?”

For those who haven’t figured it out from some of my other articles, I am something of a Star Wars fan. As I watched The Last Jedi, I couldn’t help but think of it in an organizational psych context. How did the galaxy get from the fall of the Empire and potential rebirth of the Republic at the end of Return of the Jedi, to the First Order and the collapse of the rebellion that we saw in Force Awakens and Last Jedi?

More simply, how did the First Order and Supreme Leader Snoke (or is it Snookie?) take power and establish the sort of industrial base necessary to build massive dreadnaughts and the Starkiller Base? One thing we can say with some certainty is that “Supreme Leaders” don’t just waltz in and take power when things are going well. However, when government is (at least perceived to be) not functioning and political and economic conditions are chaotic, Supreme Leaders tend to find much more fertile ground for their promises of order: humans (and aliens, but since Star Wars aliens are functionally human, we’ll treat them all as human) hate organizational ambiguity. Just think about how unpleasant it can be when you don’t know what’s expected of you on the job or how you’re going to get your job done, then multiple that by a few powers of 10.

This suggests that after Emperor Palpatine got shafted at the end of Return of the Jedi (remember, he was dropped down a shaft), the nascent Republic was unable to re-establish a functional government. Without a functional galactic government, when the remnants of the Empire returned as the First Order with Snoke at the helm, they would have found ineffective military resistance and a galaxy open to their message of order.

This is a little surprising: Palpatine had only been in power for roughly 25 years. The Galactic Senate had only recently been disbanded (during Episode IV). The mechanisms of government, as well as the actual people, should still have been in place. Sure, 25 years seems like a long time, but a galaxy is a very big place and cultures containing trillions or quadrillions of people do not change quickly. So again, how did we get there?

At this point we need to go to a very scary place: the prequel trilogies. I realize this may be painful for some, so I’ll try to keep it brief.

What we see in the prequel movies is that in addition to his dark powers, Palpatine is also a consummate politician. Most, if not all, of his manipulations were done using words and political acumen. The Force almost never came into it. In fact, Palpatine’s manipulation of the Galactic Senate, the Trade Federation, and the political system are no different from what plenty of less than scrupulous organizational leaders have done without any magical powers at all. Even Palpatine’s seduction of Anakin Skywalker was done purely through words and a deep understanding of practical psychology. Once Palpatine took control, he did not use the Force to govern; rather, he used the existing mechanisms of governance.

That’s the thing about organizations: no matter the size, they need social mechanisms to keep them functioning. Small groups can work informally with a loose decision-making process. Very large organizations, up to and including Galactic Empires, need a formal structure complete with functionaries and deliberative bodies that can carry out the instructions from the top. Even Palpatine, for all his power, could not rule a galaxy without that structure. The galaxy is just too big and there’s just not enough time for one person to pay attention to all the details. Organizations much smaller than the Empire run into that problem: Tom Watson Sr. maintained a very flat organizational structure at IBM; his son, Tom Watson Jr., instituted a management structure because otherwise the company would have become ungovernable as it grew. Once Palpatine dissolved the Senate, he replaced it with Moffs and Grand Moffs; essentially, middle managers. Even Sith Lords need lieutenants to carry out their orders, at least if they want to have time to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. More to the point, Palpatine recognized that running a galaxy requires a large bureaucracy and that transitioning from the existing mechanisms of the Republic to those of Empire took time. That sort of transition is necessary when implementing a dramatic cultural change.

Palpatine’s organizational changes provoked outcry and rebellion across the galaxy. To be fair, his changes involved altering the existing culture at a profound level, so resistance was to be expected. This is hardly surprising to anyone who has ever attempted even a more benign organizational change, although most fights over that changes do not include duels, battle cruisers, and Death Stars. However, those fights can still be extremely bitter and exhausting for all concerned, for all their lack of special effects.

The original trilogy, episodes IV-VI, told the story of that rebellion against Palpatine’s organizational change. However, the story did not focus on matters of governance or organizational behavior, but on using the Force to defeat Palpatine and Darth Vader. That the Force was the focus is hardly surprising: aside from the fact that lightsaber duels and telekinesis are more exciting that “Organizational Psychology: The Movie,” Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda are Jedi. They view the world through the lens of the Force. For Yoda and Obi-Wan, the goal was to train another Jedi capable of defeating the two Sith. Actual governance of the galaxy wasn’t really their primary focus. Like anyone who has a specific background or expertise, there is a tendency to view problems through the lens of that expertise (this article being no exception 😊). This tendency can cause problems when it blinds us to other, equally important, components of the situation, like who would run the galaxy once Palpatine was let go.

The answer, apparently, was no one. We might suspect, as one economist pointed out, that the construction, and subsequent destruction, of two Death Stars was enough to bankrupt the government and trigger a galactic depression. It may be that the recently disbanded Senate was unable to come together and pass legislation, and Palpatine’s governors were not inclined to cooperate. It may be something else. What we do know is that after another approximately 25 years, Luke Skywalker has given in to despair, the Republic is down to so few planets that they can be functionally destroyed by the Starkiller Base, the First Order has control of enough of the galaxy’s industrial base that they can build the Starkiller Base, and the remnants of the Resistance have no resources and no allies. Whatever the message of the Resistance was, it clearly hasn’t been convincing anyone other than the true believers. Similarly, in any organization, it’s important to seek out information from outside the group and find out how your message is being received.

Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, the man who defeated Darth Vader and the Emperor, could not recreate the Republic. Leia Organa, princess and general, was apparently also unable to do so. The new government that did eventually emerge was headed by Snoke and his disciple, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren. With Snoke’s death, the galactic government is now in the hands of a man with no impulse control and a tendency to throw temper tantrums and engage in the gratuitous use of Force. On the other side, Rey is at least Ren’s equal in the Force. Given Ren’s inability to control himself and Rey’s incredible self-discipline, she’s potentially far more capable than he is. And yet, neither one of them has the training to run a galaxy. Some things require expertise that comes from years of education and practice on top of raw talent. Just trusting your feelings isn’t going to cut it.

Organizations need to think about their needs both in the immediate term and in the future. Thinking about expected changes can help the organization predict what skills it will need. When Palpatine took charge, he knew exactly what to do and had the people in place to do it. Even so, it took him 25 years to mostly complete his personnel changes. The Rebellion was not so well organized, and paid the price. If you wait until the moment you need the skills to start developing them, it’ll be too late. This last point is true not just at an organizational level, but at an individual one as well.

The tragedy of Star Wars is that Our Heroes have spent their time focusing on the Force, as though the Force is what governs the galaxy. Like duct tape, the Force might hold the universe together, but it’s about as good at the actual mechanisms of governance as a roll of duct tape. As with any organization, to be successful the Rebellion needs to identify and develop its core competencies, which includes learning how to govern should they win. Otherwise, the cycle will just repeat. They can only get so far relying on Force.

Mirror, Mirror

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”

 

Magic mirrors have a habit of showing up in fairy tales and legends. The most famous, of course, was the mirror owned by the wicked queen in Snow White. But don’t think that magic mirrors were solely the province of the wicked queen. There were plenty of evil sorcerers, kings, and especially evil grand viziers who had magic mirrors of one sort or another. Given how ubiquitous those mirrors were, one can only imagine that entire fantasy economies must have depended on their manufacture. But that, as they say, is another story.

The interesting thing about magic mirrors is that what they show us is, well, us, with an emphasis on making us feel good about it. That’s the problem with magic mirrors: when we look into them long enough, we might actually start to believe that we really do look that good. If that happens, anything that spoils the illusion becomes a problem to remove rather than feedback that things might not be as they seem.

“Sorry Queen, but it is Snow White who’s better looking by day or night.”

We all know how that worked out.

In a business setting, the magic mirror is the people we work with. When we work as part of a team, we can see everyone on the team: we can see what they do, we react to their work, we hear their words. The one person we cannot see is ourselves. Is our work good or is it poor? Are we behaving intelligently, foolishly, wisely, or carelessly? We can only really tell by how we are reflected in the eyes of our team mates. Without that feedback, we have no point of reference. Sometimes, the mirror doesn’t show us what we want to see.

This mirroring phenomenon is a big part of how a group of people who happen to be wandering in the same direction learn how to come together as a team. We look at others and we see how people act, look, and dress. Because team members always seek some degree of similarity, we try to mimic what we see so that we’ll feel like part of the team. This is especially true when we are new to the team (when everyone on the team is new, each person is doing this. That can make things a bit tricky). Similarity brings the team together, but differences make it effective. The trick is making use of the first without losing the second.

Assuming that each member of the team sees and reflects the appropriate actions, appearances, and behaviors, the team has a much better chance of coalescing and achieving very high levels of performance. On the other hand, if people don’t reflect to one another or, in other words, see too much difference, the team doesn’t come together, members are less loyal, and the team is more likely to dissolve.

Points of similarity can be many things: behavior, clothing, common goals, an outside threat, annoyance at a particular member of the team, skin color, gender, etc. Some of these work better than others. Superficial characteristics such as physical appearance and gender can certainly help bring a team together, although at the risk of creating a more homogenous team. Simply looking at people who look like you might feel good, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to stimulate creative thought; for that, difference helps. As Terry Pratchett observed, we go on vacation so that we can come back to view home through new eyes. Seeing those who don’t look like us helps us consider multiple options and perspectives, an important component of successful products and services.

Bringing a team together against an outside threat has good short-term results, but often only succeeds in suppressing disagreements and preventing the group from learning how to argue effectively and develop consensus. Unifying around annoyance at a particular member of the team creates its own special set of problems. Both of these approaches tend to suppress difference in favor conformity. Common goals, interests, imitating behaviors, and having a common vision work best at building similarity while preserving differences.

How a group unifies then determines who else it lets in. Humans naturally form in- and out-groups, and we are all subject to viewing members of our in-groups more favorably than members of our out-groups. That means that we will tend to favor those who resemble the people around us. Over time, the group will reflect the dominant identifying characteristics: be that skin color, a penchant for puns, gender, style of dress, incisive problem solving capabilities, and so on. The magic mirror is telling us what the group looks like and, by extension, what new members should look like. And, because, we’re human, we are also very good at explaining why our group looks the way it does. In fact, we might decide that there are very good and very serious scientific reasons why it must look that way, and why any other group composition would be wrong. In reality, there may be nothing special about many of the dimensions of group composition other than happenstance.

Indeed, when we recognize the important dimensions of similarity, we can also take advantage of our differences. A key strength of a high performance team is its ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives, to generate diverse ideas, and to explore different and unexpected approaches. Team members must become comfortable along the axes of their similarities and their differences for that strength to manifest.

Just to make things more complicated, not all group members will always recognize which dimensions of similarity are the relevant ones for the group. For example, some people might assume gender or physical appearance is the driver, when, in fact, they are simply coincidental. Part of how a group matures is for members to connect along more significant dimensions than the merely superficial. People who cannot make this adjustment ultimately cannot remain as part of the group. Some will leave after discovering that the group is not what they thought; others will demonstrate their inability to connect along the important dimensions or will demonstrate that they are intolerant of valuable differences and will need to be forced out before they poison the team.

The team is a mirror for each of its members. It’s important to stop and reflect, and then learn to use the feedback correctly. Getting fixated on superficial similarities can break the team and lead to a great deal of bad luck.