The Business Sensei

A Disunity of Crisis

“We have an army.”

“We have a Hulk.”

— Loki and Tony Stark, “The Avengers”

I promise, no Captain America: Civil War spoilers here. I can make that promise because, as of the time of this writing, I have not yet seen the movie. The basic story line, though has been rather hard to avoid.

When it comes to power, the Marvel Superheroes have it in spades. They fly, they can withstand impacts that would turn a normal human body into jelly, shrink, climb walls, turn into an indestructible green creature with serious anger issues, and on and on. Given an alien invasion or an assault by a mad AI, the Avengers have everything it takes to defend the world. They do really well, except when they have a disagreement. Granted, it makes for a much more exciting movie when the Avengers are all pounding on one another, as they do in Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and, of course, in Civil War (I hope that wasn’t a spoiler for anyone).

The problem here is that the Avengers, as a group, really have no effective methods for making decisions. Sure, when the crisis actually hits, they fall into their specific roles and do their things really, really well. And, since they are all insanely powerful, they are successful. But that same lack of structure for decision making is also what leads them into trouble as well: they simply have no agreed upon mechanism, or social structure, for resolving differences and coming to a decision without getting into a fight.

Imagine for a moment what this might look like in a business or a, even worse, a government. At least in a business, when people refuse to cooperate it may be possible to fire them. Sometimes, that’s even the right thing to do. But when you can’t remove a recalcitrant person or group, and you have no agreed upon methodology for making and implementing decisions, eventually your options become pretty limited. The Avengers get to this point very quickly and, to be fair, that’s what we’re all paying to see.

So how do groups make decisions? There are really only a few ways of doing it.

Some organizations work on a purely hierarchical basis: someone is in charge, and that person makes the decision. The organization has rules that clarify who is in charge when and who the bigger boss is. Military rank is an example of this, as is many a corporate hierarchy. Sometimes the person in charge might request input from team members, sometimes they might make the decisions without involving others. This approach can work very well, but does suffer from some drawbacks. Most notably, team members may resent not being part of the decision making process, particularly if they bring their own particular expertise to the table. They might also have knowledge and expertise that is worth considering.

Decisions are also often made through voting. Voting feels good and nicely democratic. It has the potential to get people involved. Of course, for a voting system to be effective, people have to be able to argue productively and debate the issues honestly. The Avengers, as a rule, are still struggling with the productive argument concept, preferring to rely upon trial by combat. Being fictional, the consequences to them tend to be minor. More broadly, though, when a voting system lacks an effective means of agreeing upon facts and applying logical, reasoned analysis to a problem, then that system is effectively saying that ignorance is equivalent to knowledge and expertise. If you find yourself having trouble telling the difference between expertise and ignorance, just ask your doctor for help next time your car is making weird noises, and your auto mechanic next time you are. Sure, you might get lucky…

For voting systems to work effectively, participants need to go to the hard work of building consensus. This doesn’t mean that everyone agrees with the ultimate decision, but it does mean that everyone agrees to the process and agrees to support the outcome. Consensus is difficult exactly because it is hard for people to accept a decision they personally don’t like, particularly if they expected that the result would be different. And, of course, sometimes the result of a decision making process really is so awful as to be unacceptable. Having some sort of final method of checking or validating a decision before implementation can be very helpful for preventing such situations! Otherwise, the system can break down over fighting about whether the decision is worthy of being fought over (this is a separate topic all by itself). Granted, the process can also be revised for future decisions, provided the social structure is strong enough to handle that. Changing the process while it’s running, on the other hand, tends to be seen as invalidating the decision that results from that change; yes, there are counter-examples, which is part of why this process is difficult. Overall, though, one might imagine that if the loser of a voting based decision process kept trying to change the rules in order to find some way to claim victory, then that victory, assuming it even happened, might well be seen as illegitimate. It would be like deciding that the winner of the baseball game should be based on number of hits versus number of runs.

Decision making can also become non-functional, as when one or two people simply make the decision and present it as a fait accompli or try to rush everyone else into agreeing. Sometimes, people will agree to a decision and then go off and do their own thing anyway; Tony Stark has a habit of this behavior and it did cause a bit of trouble in Age of Ultron. In the real world, as in the fictional one of the Avengers, this sort of behavior is also symptomatic of a group that is really more of a group of people wandering in the same direction than it is a cohesive team.

Ultimately, part of what makes the Avengers fun to watch is that their efforts to work out their problems will quickly degenerate into a dramatic battle from which they will recover just in time to save the world. When you’re a fictional character, there’s no real reason to do the hard work to avoid a bad outcome. In the real world, doing the hard work to develop effective methods of decision making, and avoid the dysfunctional ones, is generally a better way to go.

I’m Not!

In Monty Python’s classic comedy, “The Life of Brian,” there is a scene fairly early in the movie when the people of Jerusalem have decided that Brian is the Messiah and are standing waiting on the street outside his window. Brian’s mother screams out at the crowd, “You are all individuals.”

The crowd replies: “We are all individuals.”

A pause, and then a lone voice yells out, “I’m not.”

This is typical Monty Python absurdist humor, but it makes a very serious point. What is standing outside Brian’s window is not a group of individuals, it’s a mob. A mob is a group in which individuality is lost is the urge to conform to the group. As the movie progresses, we see the mob do various ludicrous things as they follow their unwilling prophet. Brian’s followers are, of course, convinced that they are acting according to his instructions and executing his desires, no matter how much Brian screams to the contrary. This being a Python film, the sequence of events is absolutely hilarious.

In a business, not so much. Unfortunately, the tendency for a group to lose individuality in the service of a charismatic leader or a particularly enticing corporate vision is not restricted to comedy. At one large software company, the dynamic became quite extreme: employees were expected to arrive at a certain time, eat lunch at a certain time, visit a certain set of restaurants, leave at a certain time, and so forth. No deviation was tolerated. The mantra was, “We’re a team. We do everything alike!”

Sound fanciful? I wish it were.

The problem is that a team that loses its individuality is not a team, it’s a mob or a rabble. It can be a very disciplined mob or rabble, sort of like the Storm Troopers in Star Wars, but it’s still a mob. Like the Storm Troopers, it’s very good at dealing with routine situations, but isn’t very good at dealing with the unexpected: new tactics from the rebels or, if you prefer, new competitors or existing competitors adopting new strategies. The other problem is that when a group focuses on homogeneity, it loses its ability for the strengths of some to compensate for the weaknesses of others: the Storm Troopers, for example, cannot successfully shoot the broad side of a barn.

At a different high-tech company, the only engineers hired matched a very precise and very limited profile. Not only did you have to solve a certain set of puzzles, you had to solve them in just the right way. Alternate solutions were not tolerated. This created a team that was very good at creating intricate, convoluted algorithms, and a user interface that was equally intricate and convoluted.

None of these situations are as extreme as that portrayed in Life of Brian, but then again, they aren’t as funny either.

Later in the movie, we see the opposite end of the spectrum: the members of the People’s Front of Judea are so busy drawing insignificant distinctions between each of their positions that they are not functioning as a team. Rather, they are a horde. Each person is operating according to their own individual needs and goals, with no actual concern about the goals or strategy of the group. In a horde, everyone is a hero, entitled to their share of the plunder and devil take the hindmost. Cooperation is almost accidental, and the group is likely to break apart at the slightest disagreement: the People’s Front of Judea can’t even quite figure out why the Judean People’s Front broke off, but is quite happy to yell, “Splitters!”

At a certain manufacturing company, each department was totally focused on doing its own job. None of the departments considered how their actions or decisions affected the others. Within each department, much the same thing was happening at an individual level. Rather than figuring out how to work together, they spent their time blaming one another for the inevitable failures. Fixing this issue saved the company in question several hundred thousand dollars a year.

The challenge, of course, is to find the middle ground, where the individual and the team are in balance. While it’s extremely difficult to find the exact middle, anywhere in the general vicinity works pretty well. Peak performance occurs when people are committed to the goals of the company and the team, and are also free to pursue their personal goals and work the way they want to work. Is it easy? No: less than one team in five ever gets there. However, it sure beats a horde or a mob of people chanting, “We are all individuals.”

Difficult decisions or difficulty with decisions?

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

Some years ago, when I was getting married, my wife and I engaged in the traditional ritual of the Choosing of the China. After trying to choose between china patterns all afternoon, the thought of being eaten alive by creatures from another planet was looking more and more attractive. Fortunately, it wasn’t an available option! By the end of the day, I just wanted the choices to end. I was ready to agree to anything. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if the reason police shows never use choosing china patterns as a form of interrogation is that it is seen as just too cruel.

In their book, “Willpower,” psychologist Roy Baumeister and NY Times reporter John Tierney discuss the phenomenon of will and decision making in great detail. From an organizational perspective, though, there are some key points that we need to consider as they have far reaching effects on organizational effectiveness.

As anyone who has ever had to choose china patterns can attest, the process is exhausting. We can only make so many decisions in a day before we start to feel like our brains are turning to goo and are trickling out of our ears. Part of the problem is that decisions are not always obvious: you’ll recall in chapter 11 we discussed the point that part of focusing on a task is being able to distinguish what is important from what is not. That separation is a form of decision making. Tuning out that annoying coworker in the cubicle down the hall is a decision. Indeed, what Baumeister found is that our decision making and our overall willpower are inextricably linked. The more decisions we have to make, the less willpower we have left for other things, like focusing on a problem or being creative.

Part of why decision making in groups works the way it does is that the energy people have determines the types of decisions they can make. In stage one groups, people are spending most of their time and energy just figuring out how to work together; thus, we end up with directive leadership being the most effective style in that situation. The group members lack both the decision making skill and energy for more sophisticated decision making techniques. As the group members become more comfortable with one another, the combination of learning to work together and increasing skill at decision making enables the group to develop and move to higher levels of performance.

Unfortunately, unlike physical tiredness, the sort of mental tiredness that comes with decision fatigue isn’t always so obvious. It’s not like we stop making decisions; rather, we just make increasingly poor decisions. When we’re mentally tired, we have trouble making the types of decisions that involve risk. We’re much more likely to just choose the thing that’s easy, which is generally to do little or nothing; to not try that new initiative or explore that new product idea. The planned bold new leap forward at dawn becomes a hesitant shuffle by the end of the day. Whether at an individual or a group level, we are subject to decision making errors of this sort. With groups, though, the poor decision is then amplified by the echo chamber effect of group polarization.

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