The Business Sensei

Plays Well With Others

Once upon a time, for that is how these stories always begin, there was a brilliant engineer. This brilliant engineer could come up with all sorts of creative ideas in a flash. Because of this, he decided to start a company. His company did reasonably well, although it did have some problems. One of the big problems was that this brilliant engineer, now a brilliant CEO, was not always all that skilled at playing well with others. He always had the best answers to all the technical challenges the company was facing.

Now, to be fair, his answers really were the best, at least according to some standards. On a technical level, he understood the technology of his business extremely well. His solutions were always technically brilliant. And that is where the problem arose.

One day, an engineer in the company was charged with developing a solution to a particularly vexing problem. This engineer went off and studied the problem. He worked hard at the problem. On the appointed day and hour, he presented his solution. Everyone loved the solution except, sadly, for the brilliant CEO. He knew the technology like no one else, and he immediately saw A Better Way. Over the course of the next few minutes, the CEO proceeded to demolish the engineer’s solution. Indeed, he reduced it to metaphorical rubble. If the engineer’s idea had been a village in Eastern Europe, it would have looked like the Great Mongol Horde had just swept through, leaving no stone standing upon another stone nor any blade of grass unplucked.

And then, the brilliant CEO explained how it could have been done better. Truly, it is said by some, that he waxed poetic in his analysis of what to do and how to do it.

There was but one small, one tiny problem: no one understood what he was talking about. Everyone did agree that his solution was clearly better, but, alas, they were simply not sufficiently worthy to understand it. When the CEO had finished speaking, the incomprehension in the room was of such depth that even Nik Wallenda, that master daredevil  who crossed the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, might well have hesitated before attempting to traverse it.

In the end, there was nothing. Rather than a functional idea and a staff of loyal engineers motivated and enthusiastic about carrying it out, the company was left with no plan at all. An imperfect plan, well, that can always be improved. But no plan at all? That can be a bit of a problem.

Sadly, for the brilliant CEO, this was not the first time this sort of thing had happened. Having the Great Mongol Horde sweep across the landscape of ideas, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake, is not something that any company can long survive. In such an environment, it is not long before people stop suggesting ideas lest they draw the attention of that aforementioned Great Mongol Horde. The Board of Directors came to the same conclusion, and decided that it was time for the CEO’s tenure to also come to a conclusion. He was forced out, and the company went on its way without him. Perhaps their ideas were no longer quite so brilliant, but they had ideas. Perhaps their plans were no longer quite so ambitious and clever, but they had plans. Perhaps their products were no longer quite so perfect, but they had products.

From this, we can draw several important lessons:

1. When you crush every plan or idea people propose, eventually they stop proposing ideas or suggesting plans. It is unwise for one person to be left as the sole source of ideas.
2. Tearing people down does not motivate them. Indeed, it does precisely the opposite. If you want to motivate people, find ways to build them up.
3. If it can’t or won’t be built, it doesn’t matter how perfect it is. Insert whatever you’d like for “it.”
4. Having the best mousetrap today is less valuable than having a consistent, repeatable process for developing good solid buildable mousetraps.
5. Point 4 will only happen when you know how to connect with your team and build them up.

In the end, playing well with others might not guarantee that you will live happily ever after, but it helps.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a… Frog?

A frog?

Well, okay, it wasn’t a frog. But that incongruous answer definitely got people’s attention in the old Underdog cartoon. The whole phrase, minus the frog anyway, was made famous by the old Superman cartoons of the 1940s, before it was parodied by Underdog and Rocky the Flying Squirrel in the 1960s. The fact is, when we see something flying through the air, we can be reasonably certain that it really is a bird or a plane, not Superman or a flying dog, squirrel, or even frog. However, if it were one of those things, we’d probably have much the same reaction as the people in the cartoons: at first glance, we’d see what we expect to see, not what it is actually there.

Professional magicians rely on this phenomenon all the time. It’s not so much that the hand is quicker than the eye, it’s that in an ambiguous setting, the eye can be fooled quite easily. This can be quite enjoyable when watching a magic show. In competitive sports, such as fencing or judo, that sense of ambiguity or uncertainty is what makes it fun. On the other hand, being tricked into seeing and responding to the wrong thing is particularly frustrating as you can quickly have points scored against you. At least the feedback is immediate and you can quickly adjust your strategy now that you know what to look for.

If you’re leading a team or a business, however, that rapid feedback is frequently not present. While most people know to doubt the evidence of their senses if they do happen to see a flying dog, squirrel, or frog in or out of the office, most ambiguous situations are not so clear cut. The problem with ambiguous scenarios is that when we don’t know exactly what to do, we tend to do what we can do. As many an athlete has learned, that’s not usually the way to win.

The problem with ambiguous situations is that, without appropriate training, we tend to see what we expect, a bird or a plane, not what is actually there: that rare flying frog. Or, to be a little less facetious, we tend to ignore the warning signs of trouble exactly because we are so focused on the success we expect to find. After all, those warning signs probably won’t amount to anything.

The fencer, of course, solves this problem through training. When something they ignored hits them, in a very literal sense, they practice to avoid making the same mistake. They can do that because they are in an environment in which they get rapid feedback and in which they have a coach who can help them analyze what happened.

For a manager or a business leader, it’s more difficult. While I’ve certainly helped various managers, directors, and so forth, analyze a situation and develop a plan to move forward, coaching is only half the solution. The other half is learning to become comfortable in ambiguous situations. Like the athlete, we have to become aware of the types of mistakes we tend to make before we can act to correct those mistakes.

The secret, in turn, to becoming comfortable in ambiguous situations is to spend time in ambiguous situations. However, not all scenarios are created equal. Fencers learn to deal with ambiguous situations in fencing by practicing sword play. Judo players learn to deal with ambiguity by practicing throwing one another competitively. We want to be in scenarios that require us to use our professional skills: that force us to lead others, motivate people who may not be interested in our goals, and negotiate with those who are opposed to our success.

In one such predictive scenario, a manager wasn’t sure whether he could count on a particular team member. He responded to that uncertainty by minimizing the person’s involvement. Eventually, that person become so frustrated that he went to another team in the exercise and offered to work with them. They enthusiastically accepted his contribution. His original team failed to complete their goals without his involvement. Afterward, that same manager was able to recognize that his handling of similar situations in the office had cost the company several top employees. Similar situations provoke similar behaviors… and results. Finding out what those results are is much cheaper in an exercise than in the real world.

Whether you see what is there or whether you overlook key clues is up to you. What are you doing to increase your ability to handle ambiguity?

Leaders, Followers, and Jokers

As an organizational psych professor, I would ask my students to list leaders. They could name anyone from real life or fiction. The list invariably included famous historical figures like George Washington and Abe Lincoln, well-known business figures like Steve Jobs or (later) Tim Cook, fictional characters like James Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard, Luke Skywalker, and even Aragorn from Lord of the Rings.

Eventually, I’d pause and ask the students if they could identify anything that all of their leaders had in common and anything that was missing.

With enough prompting the class eventually noticed the obvious: the lists were almost entirely made up of men, usually white men, and the choices of leaders listed were mostly unaffected by the racial and gender makeup of the class. This is one of those results that is both unsurprising and surprisingly unimportant. While race and gender are certainly factors, they are also hard to change. Going down the rabbit hole of the obvious obscures the more interesting questions: what else did these leaders have in common, and what causes some people to be seen as leaders and others not to be seen as leaders?

The key point that students consistently missed is that leaders have followers. A leader without followers is just some joker taking a walk. While this may sound like the first rule of tautology club (which is the first rule of tautology club), the relationship between leaders and followers changes the question to “how do I get followers?” This isn’t always easy.

How leaders get followers varies considerably with the leader and the situation. For example, being tall and having a deep voice — characteristics more common in men than women — can provide a significant leg up. However, if that doesn’t describe you, there are plenty of other methods. Indeed, one of the key points in understanding leadership and how to become a leader is realizing that there are many paths and part of being a successful leader is figuring out the techniques that work for you. While I’ll talk about a few of them here, I can’t possibly cover all of them in a short article.

Leaders are perceived as being confident. Therefore, appearing confident is a way of looking like good leadership material. Unfortunately, appearing confident doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is actually competent. Appearances can be deceiving, and often are. However, just as our fictional leaders always seem to know what to do and always appear very confident when they take risks, we expect the same of our real leaders. Similarly, appearing to be energetic makes you seem more like a leader; conversely, if you can make other people seem low-energy, they will also be seen as less charismatic, and hence less like a good leader.

One of the currently popular concepts around leadership that we hear in politics is the “beer” metric: is this someone I’d like to have a beer with? The beer metric is really a narrow slice of the more general concept of likability. It’s well established that people like to do business with someone they like, so good salesmen try to get you to like them. Some leaders will do the same, particularly if likeability is important to them being a leader. Naturally, it is to a potential leader’s advantage to define likeability in terms that favor them and exclude as many other people as possible. If it’s the case that the beer metric were to favor, as a wild example, men over women, then it is clearly advantageous for a man to emphasize that metric. Understanding that’s what is being done makes it easier to reframe the debate and focus on other areas of likeability.

A powerful likeability technique is demonstrating that you are similar to your potential followers. This can be done via speech patterns, cultural references, modes of dress, shared activities, and pretty much anything else you can think of. A particularly pernicious form of similarity is created by attacking outside groups, such as the other teams in sports, other companies in business, or other racial or ethnic groups in politics. Attacking the Other creates a point of reference that is not your target group of followers. Because the Other is now a psychological anchor, the differences between the would-be leader and their potential followers are minimized (or erased) by comparison. This may not be such a terrible thing if we’re talking about Red Sox vs. Yankees, but can easily spin out of control as the stakes get higher.

A strong situational component of leadership is that leaders are seen as providing safety, structure, and inclusion. How much these factors matter depends on the specific circumstances. In small groups where no one really knows anyone else, the person best at providing structure and sense of safety often becomes the leader. Even when a formal leader is assigned to the group, de facto leadership may well devolve on the person who best provides for a sense of safety and inclusion. Creating structure, for example by helping people know how to behave or how to deal with a confusing situation, is seen as a mark of leadership. Potential leaders who can do that, even if by creating chaos that they then solve, can build followers, particularly since chaotic situations are harder to keep track of and the relief when the chaos is resolved is often a powerful form of “safety.” Indeed, one of the very effective strategies I’ve observed in years of live role-playing games is that if you can get people excited, scared, confused, or into a variety of other strong emotional states, and then provide them a path of action, they will usually take it. That’s in a game; it works even better in real life.

One of the funny things about attracting followers is that eventually it becomes a self-perpetuating process. Here’s a simple experiment you can do with the help of a few friends: on a city street, stare up at a spot on a building. Every five minutes or so one of your friends joins you. While one person staring at a wall is just a joker staring at a wall, once several people are doing it random people start to join in. They might even convince themselves that they’re seeing something. So yes, one way to get followers is to pay people to be followers until the real ones show up.

Ultimately, leadership is really about attracting followers. Without followers, you don’t have a leader, you have a joker. The mere presence of followers is often enough to attract more followers, and so on, leading to the impression that you are following the leader. Therefore, when someone impresses you as a good leader, see if you can spot the techniques they’re using to get you to feel that way.

There’s a lot more to this topic and I’ll talk about some other techniques in future posts.

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.

What Are You Really Asking For?

The names have been changed to protect the silly…

History teacher Norman Conquest had a very difficult student, Sasha Pandiaz. Sasha was constantly disruptive in class, driving Norman up the wall. Finally, Norman decided on a simple solution: when Sasha misbehaved, he would be sent out into the hall for five minutes. If he misbehaved three times, he spent the entire class sitting in the hall.

Inside of a week, Sasha was spending the entirety of each class in the hall. Sasha, it turns out, didn’t like the class. Although Norman thought he was punishing Sasha, apparently no one bothered to inform Sasha of that. As a result, Sasha was quite happy to miss each class; the long-term negative of a bad grade in the class was simply too far off and abstract to change Sasha’s behavior.

Fred was the VP of Engineering at Root-2 Systems. Fred had the habit of indicating his displeasure with engineers in his department by assigning them projects that were not particularly fun or interesting. At least, Fred didn’t find them particularly fun or interesting. Unfortunately, the engineers did. Rather than feeling punished, they thought they were being rewarded! As one engineer put it, “I thought Fred was ready to kill me, but then he gave me this really cool project.”

Thus, for example, instead of realizing that Fred was punishing them for blowing off a meeting, engineers believed he was rewarding them for skipping a meeting that they thought would be a waste of time. As a result, they kept repeating the behaviors that were infuriating Fred. By the time he figured out what was going on, Fred was bald.

At Mandragora Systems, Joe took over a key product team. He regularly exhorted his employees to work together: “We’re a team!” Joe cried loudly and often. But when it came time to evaluate performance, the song was a bit different:

“What were you doing with your time?”

“I was helping Bob.”

“If you’d finished your work, why didn’t you come to me for more?”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“Then why were you helping Bob?”

“It was something I could do quickly and would have taken him all night.”

“If Bob can’t do his job, that’s his problem. Worry about your own work.”

Astute employees soon realized that the key to a good review was to focus on their own work and devil take the hindmost. While Joe won points with his boss for his aggressive, no-nonsense style, and for his success in identifying weak players and eliminating them, something rather unexpected occurred: team performance declined on his watch. Instead of a team working together and combining their strengths, he ended up with a group of individuals out for themselves and exploiting one another’s weaknesses. The fact that this was damaging to the company in the long-run didn’t really matter as it was very definitely beneficial to the employees in the short-run.

There are several lessons to be drawn from these experiences.

First, it doesn’t matter whether you think you’re rewarding or punishing someone. What matters is what they think. If they think they’re being rewarded, they will naturally attempt to continue to get those rewards. If that means you lose your hair, so be it. If, on the other hand, they think they’re being punished, or at least not rewarded for their efforts, they will change their behavior no matter what you might say. Your actions really do speak louder than your words.

Second, no matter how much we might tell employees to think about the long-term rewards and delayed gratification, short-term rewards offer an almost irresistible lure. If you create a contradiction between the short-term and the long-term, most people will go for the short-term.

Third, if you want a strong team, you must reward team-oriented behaviors. If you only reward individualism, you’ll get a collection of individuals. For some jobs, that really is all you need. For many other jobs, though, it’s virtually impossible to succeed without a team.

In the end, people will do whatever they hear you telling them to do. It pays to make sure that what they are hearing is what you think you are saying.

The Blofeld School of Management

Fans of James Bond movies might recall a scene that goes something like this:

We are looking at an unidentified room. Two people we’ve never seen before are standing in front of a desk. We might be able to see the back of the head of the man who sits behind that desk. A voice rings out:

“You have failed SPECTRE. Number 3, why did you not kill 007 as ordered?”

Number 3 stammers out some response and the voice turns its attention on the other person.

“Number 5, you have also failed SPECTRE…”

Eventually, Number 3 is told everything is forgiven and he can leave. Of course, this is SPECTRE. As soon as he walks out of the room he’s dropped into a tank of piranhas, or the bottom of the elevator turns out to be a trap door and Number 3 learns that Maxwell Elevators really are good to the last drop, or he dies in some other Rube Goldbergesque manner.

SPECTRE, as all Bond fans know, is the villainous organization headed by Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the evil genius who spends most of his time trying unsuccessfully to kill 007. Of course, given his track record, as evil geniuses go, he frequently seems more like Wile E. Coyote.

Blofeld’s problem, of course, is that every time one of his agents makes a mistake that agent dies. Those whom James Bond doesn’t kill are terminated by Blofeld himself. This makes it extremely difficult to conduct any form of on-the-job learning. When every mistake is fatal, the lessons tend to come a little too late to do much good. As learning organizations go, SPECTRE has issues.

Although the consequences are generally not so flashy, businesses do face some similar problems. Granted, most business mistakes don’t make for a good action movie, and dropping people in piranha tanks is generally frowned upon. However, there is still the very real problem of figuring out how to enable people to learn from their mistakes without those mistakes harming the business. James Bond, after all, at least gets a script.

Part of the challenge is that even when leaders are well-trained and highly skilled, there is a big difference between what one learns in most management training classes and the actual experience of leading a team, department, division, or company. That doesn’t mean that the training is useless, but it does mean that the training needs to be appropriate.

In sports, for example, athletes drill constantly: they practice the fundamental skills of their sport until they can execute those skills without thought. Doing that, however, is not enough to make an athlete a successful competitor. Such training is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

As a soccer-playing friend once commented to me, there’s a big difference between the drill and the game. The drill is controlled and predictable; the game is not. The game is confusing and chaotic, and in the moment of truth all those carefully drilled skills simply vanish away. The problem is that chaos is overwhelming: it takes getting used to in order to navigate it. The Japanese term, “randori,” used to describe Judo competition, means “seizing chaos.”

Athletes practice getting used to chaos by moving past drills and practicing in various free play scenarios: mock games, spring training, practice randori, etc. These experiences enable the athlete to experience the chaos in small doses and hence become increasingly comfortable with it. They learn which skills to execute when. The day of the actual tournament, they are ready. When they do make mistakes, they also have something fall back on to improve their skills, as opposed to something to fall into and get eaten.

Business leaders can produce much the same results through the use of predictive scenarios. A predictive scenario is a live-action serious game focused around leadership and negotiation. Like all serious games, it both educates and entertains. Because it is live-action, rather than a computer game, leaders are forced to interact with other people as they would in daily life. Because the game is complex and competitive, participants engage with the game: there is no one right answer. Rather, the situation is chaotic and ambiguous; it’s not possible to predict an optimal solution or a perfect move. Participants are forced to constantly revise and adjust their strategies in order to counter what other players are doing.

Thus, a predictive scenario becomes a powerful practice environment for leaders who want to improve their skills and the skills of their subordinates without risking the financial health of the business. As with athletic training, a mistake is an opportunity to develop new skills or improve existing ones. Surprise outcomes will often indicate someone whose potential is not being developed or recognized: an employee may turn out to be a unexpectedly skilled speaker, be remarkably talented at inspiring and motivating others, display unexpected gifts as a salesman, or reveal themselves to be a masterful problem solver. If that’s not the job they already do, you’ve just been alerted to talent being wasted!

After the game, participants can analyze the action much as an athlete would analyze her performance with her coach. This analysis helps the participant recognize whether problems that arose were the result of a lack of skill or a failure to correctly apply a skill. In either case, you know what to do. There’s no need to guess, no expensive consequences, and no need for piranha tanks.

One of the other advantages of a predictive scenario is that the setting need not be restricted to a pale imitation of the office. Rather, it can be anything imaginable, provided that it forces participants to act as leaders, negotiate with one another, work together, come into conflict, and so forth. You could even be James Bond… or see just how well Mr. Bond would actually do against a Blofeld who knew what he was doing.

Take Two Aspirin

As we all know, when we have a cough, the best thing to do is to visit a Cough Doctor. When we have a fever, we visit a Fever Doctor. Also, when our car is making a funny knocking noise in the key of C, we take the car to a mechanic who specializes in funny knocking noises in the key of C. Or maybe we just hope the problem will go away because the only mechanics we know deal with knocking noises in the key of B.

Okay, so maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration. We don’t actually look for Cough Doctors or Fever Doctors and I very much doubt that anyone outside Car Talk would ask if the knocking noise is in the key of C. When we go to the doctor because of a cough or a fever, we go because the doctor understands, or can figure out, why we have that cough or fever. When we take the car to the mechanic because of that weird knocking noise, it’s because we’re hoping that the mechanic can figure out why that noise is happening and what it means. We go to the doctor or the mechanic because of our symptoms, but we don’t go to Symptom Doctors. To be fair, Symptom Doctors are great when all we have is a cold: take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

The fact is, treating symptoms can make us feel a lot better. Having a fever isn’t much fun, and a couple of aspirin can work wonders. Of course, if that fever is because we have the flu, then maybe suppressing it isn’t the best thing to do. That knocking noise from the left rear wheel can be easily tuned out by simply playing the radio loudly enough. Then we don’t have to worry about it until the wheel comes off. Hopefully, this happens while we’re at the gas station and not when we’re traveling at 65 mph on the freeway. Treating symptoms doesn’t make the underlying cause go away, it just lets us feel good. Therein lies the problem.

The symptoms we see are only that: the symptoms. That cough and fever might be a mild cold or it might be the flu. That knocking noise might be nothing or it might be a wheel getting ready to declare its independence from the collective body that is your car. When it comes to fevers and coughs, we can usually tell what’s going on and most of the time the consequences of being wrong are only inconvenient or a bit uncomfortable. With cars, most of us are not quite so good at figuring out what the noise means, while a trained mechanic can do it in minutes or seconds. Not only do they know what it means, they also know the cause, and which parts of the car are affected. The symptoms enable them to identify the problem, and by treating the problem, they also make the symptoms go away. The converse, as we’ve discussed, is not true.

So why would anyone call a Symptom Doctor? Well, just treating the symptoms makes us feel like we’re accomplishing something. We feel better for a brief time. Most important of all, we feel successful. When the symptoms return, we just want them to go away again and we want to feel successful again. So we call the Symptom Doctor back and once again the symptoms go away for a brief period.

In one situation, a certain engineering manager had a team that was always argumentative to the point of being unable to reach agreement on anything. After carefully observing the situation, he decided the problem was that Joe disagreed with everyone too much. Joe had a “difficult personality” and hence was the cause of team’s problems. He fired Joe. Lo and behold, everyone stopped arguing. The manager was very proud of himself for solving the problem. Four months later, a different member of the team had revealed herself to have a “difficult personality.” That’s right, the arguments and lack of agreement had returned in force. Firing Joe hadn’t solved anything; it had simply made the symptoms disappear for a short time. When they reappeared, they were worse than before.

Now, in this particular example, the manager was his own Symptom Doctor. Symptom Doctors can also be brought in from outside: companies hire “Decision Consultants,” or “Consultants For Leaders Who Don’t Listen,” or “Consultants For Leaders Who Listen Too Much,” or “Consultants For Leaders Who Listen With Their Head Cocked At A Funny Angle.” Okay, maybe the last one is a joke. The results of going to a Symptom Doctor, however, are rarely a joke. They are wasted time, wasted energy, and lost resources.

So what do you do instead? Like going to the doctor or the mechanic, you need someone who can understand what is going on. Not a Symptom Doctor, but someone who either knows, or can figure out, what the symptoms mean. It may not be as cheap or as easy as going to a Symptom Doctor, but, unlike the Symptom Doctor, it just might solve your problem.

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.

It Doesn’t Look Like Progress

“I can’t believe I need to explain that to this group.”

I might be tempted to mention where I most recently heard that phrase, except that I’m sure I’ll hear it again before long. That’s because it’s a very familiar complaint, one that comes up in a lot of groups. I can recall saying it myself a few times and I imagine that most of you have heard it at least once. If not, well, either that’s a problem or you’ve been incredibly lucky. Odds are, it’s the former. All too often, when that sentiment comes up, it’s seen as a problem for the group.

As Terry Pratchett once wrote, “the strength of the individual is the group and the strength of the group is the individual.” Put another way, groups can be very effective at getting things done. The right group with the right people can achieve great things and be a joy to be part of.  The flip side, of course, is that the wrong group or the wrong people can make for a horrendous experience. How does a group become one of those really effective, “feels great to be part of” teams?

I imagine that some of you are thinking, “Well, isn’t that Forming, Storming, and all that stuff?” Well, yes. But does that tell you anything? Tuckman’s model of group development (Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing) describes a process of relationship development over time. It sounds very clean and neat when described on paper or in a talk, but the reality is fairly messy. The “I can’t believe I need…” questions are an example of that messiness.

For groups to be effective, or, put another way, for two or more heads to be better than one, everyone needs to get at least near to the same wavelength. Group members must go through the process of figuring out what everyone actually thinks about a topic. Again, this sounds very neat and simple, but the reality is anything but.

The tendency is for each member of the group to assume that what everyone wants is what they want. Together with that tendency is the tendency of each individual to assume that if no one is asking questions then everyone else must know the answer and that they are the only ignorant person. For those who like technical terms, we’re talking about False Consensus and Pluralistic Ignorance.

If the group is around long enough, and the members are invested enough in the group, at some point someone realizes that some attitude, belief, or value that they took for granted and assumed that everyone else agreed with turns out not to be so universal after all. At that point, if that person is invested in the group, they might very well express some variant of, “I can’t believe I need to explain that to this group.”

The presence of that statement represents a developing awareness in the group that they are operating with, if not a false consensus, at least an untested consensus. In fact, even when everyone more or less agrees with the broad concept, each individual will tend to view the details in very different ways.

How the group responds to the statement determines what happens next. The best-case scenario is that the statement triggers subsequent discussion that enables the group to develop a real and robust consensus. That new consensus may or not be precisely what members thought going into the discussion. On the other hand, if the group responds by shutting down the speaker, that’s a bad sign: the group is not ready to accept that there is a great deal of variation in how members view a topic or that members may not even agree at all; group members don’t have a strong enough relationship to accept differences along that axis. Should the group respond to “I can’t believe…” by just flipping over to the new point of view, the situation is not much better. The group is substituting one illusion of consensus for another, but not doing the work of learning to address substantial differences (some groups can’t even handle trivial differences without dissolving into pointless argument, which is even worse).

So, if you’ve never heard anyone express the sentiment that they can’t believe they have to explain something to the group, that probably means your group is stuck. On the other hand, if you find that you can’t believe that you must “explain that” to your group, be happy. You’re making progress.