The Business Sensei

To Succeed, Plan to Fail

I’m getting tired of hearing people say, “Oh I get it. We didn’t plan to fail, we failed to plan.”

When I’m working with a business to help them understand why their process is failing or their projects are off course, sooner or later someone comes out with this little gem. At that point, everyone nods sagely as though they’ve actually solved something. They are missing the point. If that was all that was wrong, they wouldn’t need help.

Sure, it’s certainly true that if you fail to plan, you’re far more likely to fail, but knowing that doesn’t actually address the real problem: they are taking the “failure is not an option” mindset. This is a fantastic line in a movie, but has some problems in reality.

When we take the mindset that failure is something that cannot be accepted, we are implicitly stating that failure is a terrible thing, something so terrible that we cannot even consider it. It’s an attitude similar to that taken by many martial artists, who teach their students that they must never allow themselves to be taken off balance. All their training is then based on the idea of never being off balance. As a result, when they are off balance, they freeze.

A youthful student once watched Morehei Uyeshiba, the founder of Aikido, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. After Uyeshiba defeated the guy, the young student said to him, “Master, that was amazing. You never lose your balance!”

Uyeshiba’s reply: “You are mistaken. I frequently lose my balance. My secret is that I know how to regain it quickly.”

Uyeshiba recognized that loss of balance is a normal part of any fight. By training to rapidly regain his balance, he stripped the experience of its emotional content. It was merely something that happened, and something which he well knew how to recover from. As a result, not only were his opponents unable to capitalize on taking him off balance, when he took their balance, they didn’t know what to do.

Failure is the same. When failure becomes something we fear, it can cause us to freeze. At one company, the first hiccup in a string of successes led to panic by the CEO. He wasn’t used to failing, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

The problem is that fear of failure causes us to avoid risk and not experiment with new ideas. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, we figuratively lose our balance and become momentarily stuck. If we think that failure means something terrible will happen, we opt for the safe course. Unfortunately, the safe course is often not the best course or the wisest course. It’s merely the one that minimizes the short-term risk to us, potentially at the cost of long-term risk to the team. That, of course, is just fine: if the entire team fails, no one is to blame.

Conversely, when we accept that along the route to success there will be many failures along the way, and when we practice viewing failures as a form of feedback, the negative emotional component of failure is eliminated. Instead, we simply have information: something we attempted did not work the way we expected. What does that mean? What is that telling us about our plan? About our process? About the competitive landscape?

Failure is a way of calibrating our efforts and focusing our energy. Particularly early in a project, small failures are, or should be, common. The less defined the project, the more exploration needs to occur in order to adequately and accurately define the milestones. Indeed, early milestones are best thought of as little more than wishful thinking: opportunities to put stakes in the ground and see what happens when we get there. It’s the chance to see how well the team members are working together, how effective the leader is being, how effectively the team can make decisions and implement a course of action.

When we fear failure, the fear itself is often more damaging than the failure! The key to succeeding at large, important projects is to recognize that failures will happen along the way. By accepting the information that failure gives us and cultivating the mindset that failures are recoverable and useful, failure truly does make us more, not less, likely to succeed.

Now can I solve the problem?

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

Unfortunately, you still can’t solve the problem. There’s still just a bit more to do before you dive in and implement your solution. Examine the goals you just developed: how will you carry them out? Which steps can you plan and which steps can you not plan in advance? How will you know if you’re successful? This last point may seem silly: after all, if you’re successful, the problem will go away! While that’s true, it helps to identify precisely what you expect to happen and when. Back to goals and feedback: we want to know if we’re succeeding before we get to the end. Conversely, if we are solving the wrong problem or if our solution is flawed, we want to know this as early as possible. As with all goals, we have to define our intermediate steps and identify the factors that will tell us if we’re going off course. At the end, we don’t want to get bogged down arguing about whether or not we’ve succeeded: by defining our criteria ahead of time, before we’re invested in the results, we avoid the danger of getting somewhere random and simply declaring that to be the finish line.

If the implementation of the solution is going to be carried out by other people, it pays to bring them into the process at this point if we haven’t brought them in already. People who have to implement a solution will feel more engaged and committed if they are involved early on in the process of coming up with that solution: respect their competence and build relatedness. On a purely practical level, they are also likely to have expert insights that others may not: I worked once with an architecture firm whose head architect made a point of involving builders in the earliest stages of design. He told me it was because that way he wouldn’t end up giving the client drawings for something that didn’t exist.

At this point, you can go ahead and implement your solution. At the end, do a final check: did it work? Since you’ve already defined the criteria for success, at least in theory this shouldn’t be too hard to determine. In practice, it’s often a bit messier than it sounds on paper, so be prepared for that. If it didn’t work, you have a choice in how to respond:

Option 1: Clearly the failure is someone’s fault. Heads must roll!

Option 2: What have learned that we didn’t know before? Remember our discussion of hindsight in chapter 11. Just because something is obvious now doesn’t mean it was obvious before. Based on what we’ve learned, how can we now solve the problem? What else have we improved along the way?

Cultures that focus on blame typically go with option 1. However, the more optimistic and successful organizations choose option 2. That doesn’t mean not doing a post-mortem and trying to identify mistakes or failing to refine your processes; it simply means that you’re proceeding from the perspective that you have competent, committed people who have no more interest in wasting their time on a wild goose chase than you do. The secret to solving large, difficult problems is accepting that there will be mistakes along the way. The secret to optimistic organizations is that they actually treat those mistakes as feedback and learning opportunities instead of merely giving the concept lip-service.

We’ll return to these concepts when we discuss organizational diagnosis later in this chapter.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Could you make that noise again?

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

Ever listen to NPR’s “Car Talk?” For those who might have been under a rock for the past 25 or so years, Car Talk features “Click and Clack, the Tappit Brothers,” also known as Tom and Ray Magliozzi, taking questions about and giving advice on car repair. In the course of the hour show, they will take several calls, laugh at their own bad jokes, and ask a series of questions such as, “Does it make that noise when you turn to the right or to the left?” “And it goes away above 30 miles per hour?” and, “Could you make that noise again?” I suspect the last question is mostly because they find it hilarious to listen to callers attempting to imitate the odd sounds their cars are making.

What Click and Clack are doing through their apparently random questions is identifying the symptoms of the problem. The symptoms are not the problem; they are merely the symptoms. However, when we understand the symptoms, we are able to gradually identify the problem. Going back to our discussion of goal setting, we are defining and executing learning goals. We are setting goals that will help us answer several important questions:

1. What are the observed symptoms? Exactly what is happening?
2. When do the symptoms occur? All the time? At certain times?
3. When did it start? What changed?
4. Where do they occur? In one location or many? In one product or many? At one customer site or many?
5. How long do they last?
6. What is affected?
7. Who is affected?

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

Undermining control

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

The powerful thing about providing people control is that it builds their sense of competence and autonomy. They become more likely to tackle difficult projects and are less willing to give up. However, if we approach control in the wrong way, we can easily reverse those effects. It’s easy to order people to do something and then tell them exactly how to do it: that’s not giving them control. That’s micromanaging.

The more serious problem, though, is when you routinely second-guess people’s decisions: a form of the hindsight trap we discussed in the previous chapter. Remember that your goal is not to have people make the decisions you would make, but to make the decisions you can work with. As we discussed in the section on feedback, focus on what people did right. When you do have to correct something, make sure you clearly explain why the decision the incorrect and how they can fix it in the future. Avoid doing this unless it really is necessary: frequent correction only undermines confidence and destroys the sense of control. I’m not in control if I’m always wrong! If you are finding that you have to frequently correct people, either you haven’t adequately conveyed the goals to them, you have the wrong people, you haven’t provided them proper training, or you are too sensitive.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Stop and Admire

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

As we’ve discussed in previous chapters, celebrating success is a critical part of building motivation and accomplishing long-term goals. Celebrating success is part of how we know we’re on track. One component of celebrating those successes along the way is to periodically pause to admire your handiwork. The basic rule here is this:

You will never admire it more than you do right now.

This requires some explanation. Any complex project has intermediate steps. Those steps are opportunities to stop and take a long, hard, look at your work. Do you like what you see? If you don’t, sleep on it. If you still don’t like it, you won’t like it more when you’re done; in fact, the odds are very high that you’ll like it much much less. If you ignore that feeling, then each subsequent step is going to remind you of the thing you didn’t like, which is only going to to undermine your enthusiasm for the project. When we’ve worked hard at something and we just don’t feel good about the result, that’s a clue that something is wrong. It may not be immediately obvious what that wrong thing is, but the odds are pretty darn good that it’s there and whatever it is isn’t going to just get up and walk away on its own.

When we were remodeling one of the bathrooms in our house, my wife designed and built several ceramic tile shelves, complete with colored glass trim that matched the shower enclosure. She completed the shelves, and stopped to admire them. She wasn’t happy with the result. She couldn’t really put her finger on why, but something wasn’t right. She ended up redoing them. The second time around was not only much better, but once we had the redone shelves to look at, even I could clearly see why the originals didn’t work. One very important lesson here is that you can’t always tell what’s wrong until you redo it; if you redo it and you and find you can admire it, it’ll also often be obvious what was wrong before.

An important caveat here is that this method works in the context of having defined goals for what you are trying to accomplish. Without goals, you have nothing to measure against. Without that sense of comparison, your ability to admire is likely to be influenced by any number of extraneous factors. As with all skills, this technique gets better with practice.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

Failure

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

While there are certainly lessons to be learned from failure, and failure is necessary for successful innovation, we also have to take the time to enjoy the progress we are making and take pride in what goes right. Optimistic people are those who take pride in their successes, who recognize how their efforts made those successes possible, and who keep failure in perspective. Pessimists, on the other hand, focus on how they contributed to failure and tend to view success as being as much about luck as anything else.

Now, people have assured me over and over again that they are optimists! They are not focused on failure, no way, no how. Actions, however, trump words in this case, as they so often do. If you engage in behaviors that orient you toward success, you are an optimist; if you engage in behaviors that keep you thinking about failure, you are behaving pessimistically. When planning is all about avoiding failure, that’s inherently pessimistic!

Although pessimists so often seem rigorous and logical, optimists are happier and more successful. An organizational culture can be biased toward either optimism or pessimism; the most successful organizations are fundamentally optimistic. Optimism works.

Of course, it’s not enough to just say, “Be more optimistic!” If that were all it took, you wouldn’t need this book. Being optimistic is more than just some sort of mythical power of positive thinking. Rather, real optimism, the kind of optimism that gets things done, is based in identifying the positive, building resilience, engaging in behaviors that reinforce our sense of control over the world, and learning to reframe failure into useful feedback. Building an optimistic organization, enjoying success, and knowing how to learn the right lessons from failure, are all skills that take time to develop.

In this chapter, we are going to look at how to do just that. Along the way, we’ll see how the different aspects of organizational behavior that we’ve already discussed fit together to reinforce that message of optimism.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

Thinking Success

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

“It was a terrible throw!”

This statement was made to me by a student in my jujitsu class. She then proceeded to elaborate on all the ways in which she had executed the throw incorrectly. Her partner, meanwhile, was patiently lying on the ground at her feet where she had thrown him. Observing this fact, I eventually commented that the throw couldn’t have been all that bad. After all, it had accomplished its primary objective: putting the other person flat on his back.

In jujitsu, it’s easy to perform a technique and then focus on everything wrong with it; after all, a technique can always be improved. The problem, however, is that when you focus on all the problems you lose sight of the big picture which, in this case, was that the technique was successful. Was there room for improvement? Of course there was. That room for improvement doesn’t change the basic success, unless we allow it to.

The same phenomenon happens in business all the time. After a grueling marathon of long days and late nights, the team finally ships the product. Rather than celebrate the release, they focus entirely on the bugs that didn’t get fixed, or the features that they didn’t have time to put in. In one rather egregious case, the director of engineering was busily berating his team for their “lousy” work even as the customers were singing their praises!

As we have discussed in a number of different contexts throughout this book, a focus on success is far more rewarding and, well, successful, than a focus on failure. When we only look at failure, we start to think of ourselves as failures. When we look at success, we think of ourselves as successful. Failure is depressing; success is exhilarating. When we feel like we’re failing, our willpower is wasted just forcing ourselves to keep going. We try to make things easier in order to feel a success, any success. When we are successful, we start setting our sights ever higher. Think about the motivation trap and the high performance cycle!

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom

President

Manager Mechanics, LLC

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Killing the Princess: The Dangers of Goal Lockdown

Remember the Ford Pinto? If you don’t, you are not alone. The Pinto’s history was a troubled one, complete with explosions, fires, and lawsuits. In a nutshell, in the 1970s, Ford committed to building a small, light, inexpensive car. It turned out that while they were so committed to that goal, that they also made a car that was prone to exploding in an accident. Why did that happen? According to management professors Lisa Ordonez, Maurice Schweitzer, Adam Galinsky, and Max Bazerman, it was because the management at Ford set goals.

Wait a minute! Aren’t goals are supposed to be a good thing? Normally, yes. However, Ford’s management was supposedly so committed to their goals that they developed metaphorical tunnel vision. In other words, although they knew there were design problems with the Pinto, they ignored those problems in favor of the more powerful outcome goal they were committed to accomplishing. Interesting concept, but are there other examples?

In fact, yes. According to the same four professors, setting specific, high outcome goals led to dishonest behavior at Sears Auto Repair: by requiring mechanics to generate $147/hour of revenue, the mechanics were effectively incentivized to cheat customers. They also implicate goals in the Enron fiasco of the late 1990s. So, if goals are supposedly such wonderful things to have, how can we explain what happened? While it would be easy and comforting to simply say these four professors are ivory tower academics, that would be unjust and incorrect. In fact, they have a point: the best thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them; and the worst thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them.

To put it another way, goals are powerful tools. Like all power tools, it’s important to know how to use them correctly lest you cut yourself off at the knees. In a very real sense, the rules for goal setting and rules for chess have a great deal in common: both sets of rules are relatively simple, but the strategies for success within those rules are complex. Failing to understand the proper strategies leads to defeat. In the case of goals, it can lead to a phenomenon that I refer to as, “Goal Lockdown.” In Goal Lockdown, people become so fixated on their goals that they ignore all feedback or other information that they might be heading into trouble. Indeed, in extreme cases, they will take any feedback as confirmation that they are on track, even when the feedback is someone yelling, “Hey, didn’t that sign we just passed read ‘Bridge Out?’”

The dangers of improper goals are not limited to giant firms like Ford or Enron. I ran an organizational development serious game for a certain high tech company. This particular serious game takes participants outside of the normal business world, instead presenting them with a fantasy scenario with very real business problems. Instead of playing their normal roles of managers, engineers, salesmen, and so forth, the participants are kings, dukes, knights, wizards, and the like. Participants still must recruit allies, motivate others, negotiate over resources, and solve difficult problems. Changing the scenery, however, makes it fun and increases both learning and retention of the material.

In keeping with the fantasy nature of the scenario, a number of plots involve the princess. Unfortunately, for all those people who had plots, and goals, that included the princess, she was eliminated from the exercise; in other words, figuratively killed. What was particularly interesting, however, was that the people whose goals involved the princess found it extremely difficult to change those goals, even though they had just become impossible! This was Goal Lockdown in action. Fortunately, by experiencing it during the exercise, we were able to discuss it during the debriefing and the people at that company are now on guard against it.

Ultimately, if you don’t want to bother with serious games and if you do want to avoid Goal Lockdown, there are some steps you can take. The simplest is to identify your outcome but then focus on your strategy. How will you accomplish the goals? What are the steps you will take? How will you know you are succeeding and how will you know if you’re failing? A system that doesn’t tell us what failure looks like is a system that we won’t trust under pressure. In the long run, the more we focus on process and how that process will move us towards our objectives, the more likely we are to be successful: we are focusing on the things we can most easily change. It’s when we focus on the result and let the strategy take care of itself that we become most likely to fail, sometimes in very dramatic ways!

In the Zone

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

There are a number of advantages to operating in the zone of optimal arousal. The major advantage is that our focus feels almost effortless. We automatically pay attention to relevant information and ignore things that are not relevant to the task at hand. This is assuming, of course, that we know what is relevant and important to the task at hand! How do we know what is relevant and what is not? That’s where goal setting comes into play. One of the advantages of structured goals is that they tell us what is relevant and what is not. Thus, well designed goals combined with implementation intentions and the proper level of arousal generates that optimal level of focus shown in Figure 2. Productivity in this state is at its peak; it won’t get any better. In sports, this is known as performing in the Zone; an athlete in the Zone will perform many times better than a similarly skilled athlete who is not in the Zone: it’s the difference between winning and not even making it to the podium. The results in a business environment are similar.

The stress of 20-20 hindsight

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

The hindsight trap can be best described by Dr. Watson saying to Sherlock Holmes at the end of the mystery, “It’s so obvious once you explain it!” Holmes famously does not reply by saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” though one might imagine that he is at least thinking it. The fact is, though, that what Holmes is doing is not elementary or obvious, as evidenced by how few readers can actually figure it out. In fact, being able to look at an apparently random collection of clues and figure out how they fit together is incredibly difficult. However, because after the fact it seems so clear, we are vulnerable to the hindsight trap: we assume that because hindsight is 20-20, foresight must have been 20-20 as well.

In rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories recently, I realized that Arthur Conan Doyle does play fair most of the time: he reveals the clues to the reader, or at least he reveals the fact that there was a clue in such a fashion as to provide the reader the information he needs to figure out what is going on. For example, there are times when Holmes is taking advantage of knowledge not readily accessible to the reader, such as Holmes’ enyclopedic knowledge of mud or cigar ash, but that’s not the point: it is a sufficient clue that Holmes is interested in the mud or the cigar ash. Despite this, it’s extremely hard to figure out the solution to the mystery before Holmes reveals it. Once revealed, though, it’s equally difficult to imagine the pieces fitting together any other way.

Now, if this phenomenon was limited to Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it would be rather thoroughly insignificant. Unfortunately, it happens all the time:

“I can’t believe she didn’t see that coming!”

“How could he have not noticed the problem ahead of time?”

“Were they even paying attention?!”

When something goes wrong, be that in a marketing campaign, a client engagement, developing an app, or launching a new online service, the reasons are almost always obvious… in hindsight. Like a Sherlock Holmes story, once the ending is clear, we can’t imagine any other arrangement of the pieces. Thus, we assume that not only is someone responsible, that person or that team must have been incompetent, indifferent, or careless, because they didn’t recognize what we now know to be completely obvious. Ironically, what I’ve observed over and over is that when someone does point out the potential problem, they are first laughed at for being too nervous and then when the problem is clear to everyone, castigated for not pushing their point more aggressively!

On the flip side, when someone does successfully anticipate and forestall a problem, their efforts are not taken seriously. After all, the problem was obvious, so why did it take them so long to figure it out and prevent it? Clearly, they weren’t working all that hard!

The net result of both of these manifestations of the hindsight trap is that self-confidence and the feeling of being in control are both eroded. This is a very bad combination, because eroding self-confidence makes us less likely to take actions that might demonstrate control, and reducing control also reduces our self-confidence. As we can see, getting caught in the hindsight trap is a very destructive form of stress.  In particularly severe situations, the hindsight trap can produce such a strong focus on the past that it leads to organizational stasis or passivity. No one is willing to make a decision because they are too afraid of being second-guessed for it later. The decision to do nothing is viewed as the safest course.

Taking this a little further, we can now understand why fear based motivation sooner or later causes trouble. Fear activates our fight/flight response: just ask Thag! Fear focuses our attention on the source of the fear; if we can’t easily find the source, then our attention is very likely going to be grabbed by anything which we think might be the cause. In the first case, when people are afraid of the boss, they are not focusing on the goals of the organization. Rather, they are focusing on pleasing the boss, or at least avoiding his wrath. While this can be a tremendous boost to the boss’s ego and self-esteem, it doesn’t do much for the employees. Their sense of control is now based not on their actual ability to address problems and accomplish goals, but on the far more nebulous ability to manipulate the boss. Cooperation, creativity, problem-solving, and the high-performance cycle all suffer in this scenario. In the second case, where attention is grabbed by whatever seems to be causing the fear, we again see a loss of control. In this case, the organization or the team spends its time and energy focused on the wrong things, and hence fails to adequately address the actual challenges in front of them. Constantly seeking to change something that doesn’t matter will sometimes briefly create an illusion of control, similar to constantly pressing a “Walk” signal that doesn’t actually work. More likely, though, is that the wrong focus leads to repeated failures to change the situation, and a steady erosion of both individual and team confidence.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence