Imagine for a moment that you are going skiing. You put on your equipment. You make sure you’re prepared for the weather conditions. You get up there at the top of that black diamond slope and before you race down the slope you carefully put on your blindfold.
Well, maybe not. Even James Bond, whose movies routinely feature some pretty outrageous ski stunts, never tried skiing blindfolded. When you’re trying to dodge obstacles and avoid being shot by enemy agents, the last thing you want to do is not be able to see where you are going.
Despite that, many businesses choose the blindfold.
Imagine a typical software solutions problem. The company needs to improve its bottom line revenue, the customers are complaining and want their problem solved yesterday. At best, the engineer sees a technical challenge involving algorithms and code. At worst, he sees an annoying interruption to solving interesting technical challenges. The engineer’s goal is to build a robust, elegant solution to a problem. The manager, on the other hand, sees something very different. His focus is not on the technology but the process of assembling and coordinating a team. Who has the right skills? What skills are needed? What will this cost? How quickly can it be done? The manager’s goal is to give the customer what they really want, even if that is not the most elegant solution.
Dilbert highlights, to great effect, the gap between management and engineering. Frequently, the two groups seem to live in different worlds. More significantly, they often appear to work for completely separate companies with totally contradictory agendas. Sadly, there is some truth to this. Ed Schein, professor emeritus of business psychology at MIT Sloan, points out, managers and engineers form two distinct, separate organizational subcultures. Each group has very specific goals, which may not always be in alignment. Unfortunately, since both groups are working for the same company, and apparently speaking the same language, they tend to assume that they have the same image in mind. As many managers and engineers have discovered, this can lead to more than a little friction.
Where you start is what you get. I regularly hear managers say:
“An unexpected problem arose and the team didn’t step up.”
“I can’t figure out how to motivate them.”
“No one goes above and beyond.”
“They are just so passive!”
Alternately:
“They won’t stop arguing!”
“People complain about being interrupted all the time.”
Businesses like to describe their culture in positive terms, as “can do” or “fun-loving, but hard working,” or “highly motivated, team-driven atmosphere,” and so forth. Unfortunately, as the comments above illustrate, this is often wishful thinking. Culture is a complex construct and actions taken early in the company’s history can have far reaching effects. And while everyone knows that who a company hires can make a big difference, what is less obvious is that how a company hires can be even more critical.
In any business, information can be thought of as the organizational equivalent of nerve impulses. Information about the state of the company, the state of the economy, the marketplace, how different parts of the company are functioning, and so forth, is critical to effective decision making. If any aspect of information flow is interrupted, it is like losing sensation in a part of your body: unable to feel, you may suffer serious injury without realizing it; if the nerves are unable to innervate muscles, those muscles will atrophy and not perform when called upon. By the same token, a business failing to receive crucial information about the state of the market can suffer financial disaster when products don’t sell or when innovation and productivity are crippled.
The problem with information flow is that people may not agree on the information, on the meaning of the information, or what should be done with or about the information. Disagreement leads, in turn, to argument or intra-organizational conflict.
I had this conversation recently with my 3.5 year old son. We were in the car, and he had just dropped his favorite stuffed animal, a black cat named Midnight. He couldn’t reach it, and I was feeling around trying to find it for him, while he kept telling me I was near Midnight. When I finally tried asking him if I should move my hand left or right, his response was that I should move my hand, “right to Midnight.”
Now the fact is, a 3.5 year old doesn’t really understand that I don’t know what he knows: after all, he can see my hand and the cat, therefore I should know which way to move. This sort of thing is not at all unusual with young children. For the most part, it’s generally pretty funny.
It’s much less funny when senior management is in the role of the 3.5 year old, and the employees or customers are trying to figure out what is going on. Young children haven’t yet learned to consider other perspectives; management, on the other hand, doesn’t have that excuse.
Many people are familiar with companies that put out products with incomprehensible interfaces or unreadable documentation, and then become highly irate when the customers complain that they can’t figure out how to use the product. I worked with one high tech company where the CEO and engineering team routinely described their customers, primarily research scientists, as a bunch of incompetent idiots. They simply could not understand why their customers could not understand how to use the product. After all, the CEO and the engineers understood it.
Fortunately, very few people are going to argue that a company needs to get input from its customers and involve them in the design process. After all, that’s the best way to make sure you’re giving them something that they’ll be happy to spend money on. The real problem arises when the company’s internal communications are lacking. It is, sadly, not at all unusual for management and engineering, or engineering and sales, or any other combination of departments to be talking past each other. The groups are nominally all working for the same company, but none are capable of recognizing that the others don’t know what they know or cannot imagine that different groups within the company have different, equally valid, priorities.
Engineers, for example, are most concerned with building elegant, effective solutions to problems. Salesmen want to sell product. Documentation wants to describe what the product does. Customer support wants to help the customer actually use the product. Managers are trying to meet deadlines and generate revenue for the company. It would seem that everyone is on the same page. The reality, though, is far different. The engineer’s elegant solution may be brilliant, but impractical: for example the engineer who suggested driving bolts into the side of my house to hold up a sunshade for an afternoon. While that would have solved the immediate problem, it was just a bit of overkill and could easily have caused other problems down the road. Salesmen may promise features that engineering can’t implement or management, in an effort to close a deal, might set overly aggressive deadlines. A case in point occurred in one company I dealt with, when the CEO turned to the VP of Engineering and asked when the product would be ready to ship.
“September 1st,” said the VP.
The CEO turned back to the phone and said, “We’ll have it for you on July 15th.”
The CEO simply could not understand why engineering couldn’t have the product done by July 15th, and the VP of Engineering simply could not understand why the CEO couldn’t accept September 1st. The net result was that the product ended up shipping on October 1st, delayed by a constant series of unmeetable deadlines.
When I’m telling this story, someone always says to me that the two people simply needed to communicate better. True, but not very useful. If it were simple, they would have done it. Under the pressure to get a product out the door, each one forgot to stop and get the full picture. Their frames of reference narrowed to the point where they could not imagine any other answer than the one they had locked onto. Whether two people or ten people are involved, it’s important to stop and ask four critical questions:
1.What do I know that they do not know?
2.What do they know that I do not know?
3.Do I actually have enough information to make a decision?
4.Are we really all on the same page?
Taking the other person’s perspective can pay off in a big way. What’s stopping you?
Swine flu is in the air. After a brief flurry of panicky news reports, what we’re hearing now is that it’s not so bad, not such a big deal, and so forth.
A common event that I’ve seen at company after company is that when someone spends all night fixing a bug that they caused, they are a hero; however, the person who went home at 5pm after carefully checking their work and making sure they didn’t have any major bugs is told they aren’t working hard enough.
We don’t know yet why the swine flu outbreak is turning out to be mild. To some extent, this may be due to the virus being wimpy. It may also be due to the precautions that are being taken. It’s not clear that we’ll ever be able to tell.
What we do know is that flu pandemics come around on a fairly regular basis. We also know that the 1918 pandemic started with a mild, “wimpy,” wave in the spring and summer before turning into the deadly outbreak of the fall.
When I ran a Pandemic Flu simulation exercise in Washington DC during the summer of 2006, the response to the flu was disastrous. Fortunately, the previous and current adminstrations learned from that and other exercises; the current administration is taking all the right steps.
I’m wondering what the public reaction will be if the flu continues to be “wimpy?” Will the administration be seen as having panicked, or as having taken reasonable precautions?
If the swine flu turns out to be nothing this summer, what will happen if it comes back in the fall?
Put another way, is it a waste of time to play it safe? It is in many companies, or at least it’s not nearly as popular as going for heroics.
There is nothing quite like that warm feeling you get at the end of the day when you look back and wonder where the time went. There is nothing quite like realizing that an entire day has gone by and nothing got done. Unfortunately, this happens far too often, especially when the day holds meetings.
Meetings have a bad reputation for consuming a great deal of time while producing little of substance. That reputation is well deserved. Despite this, meetings remain extremely popular in many companies. Unfortunately, in addition to potentially wasting a great deal of time, meetings often tend to leave people drained and unable to focus. As a result, they use up even more time getting back on track after the meeting.
Once upon a time, the late and unlamented Soviet Union decided to grow wheat in Siberia. Their logic was simple: by growing wheat in the inhospitable conditions of Siberia, the wheat would become stronger. The wheat, however, was indifferent to Soviet philosophy. Despite speeches, threats, and promises from the government, the wheat stubbornly refused to grow.
A belief about how the world should work was trumped by the way the world does work.
To bring this a little closer to home, I worked with one high technology company that decided to create a set of coding standards for its software development team. While not an unusual occurrence in software companies, in this case, the manager in charge wrote up a fifty (that’s right, 50) page standards document. Naturally, everyone was overjoyed and memorized everything; at least, that’s what the manager thought. In fact, no one read more than a page or two and most of the engineers ignored even that.
Another company was trying to manage information: design decisions, notes from discussions, and so forth. They had the very good idea that they could manage all their accumulated wisdom as a Wiki. Unfortunately, the Wiki swiftly ballooned into an unmanageable morass of data in which no one could actually find anything useful. The problem wasn’t so much getting people to remember to update the Wiki; it was organizing the information in a manner useful to everyone who needed to use it, and in convincing people to take the time to keep it organized.
In both of these cases, beliefs about how people should do their work were trumped by the way people actually do work. Like Soviet wheat, it can be remarkably difficult to motivate or threaten people into doing something that they really do not want to do. Unlike wheat, people can be forced. It’s merely a question of how much time and energy you want to spend: pushing people takes a great deal of effort and tends to result in significant amounts of anger and frustration for all parties involved. Not, in other words, a conducive atmosphere for creating a strong, collaborative team.
Of course, sometimes it is necessary to have people do things they don’t want to do. Code does need to be commented, information needs to be documented, and so forth. Fortunately, unlike wheat, people can be convinced. Instead of pushing them, the key is to get them to pull. How do you do that? Here are some tips:
Involve those who will be affected by the outcome in the process of solving the problem. Nothing gets buy-in like giving people the opportunity to develop the solution.
Identify the actual problem. The company with the 50 page style guide needed code that could be maintained over time and easily read by someone other than the writer, and they needed the process to not interfere with actually getting work done. That can be accomplished with a one page style guide. Instead, they were trying to win the World’s Most Beautiful Code Contest. That may be prestigious in certain obscure circles, but it doesn’t sell product.
Ask yourself how you’ll know when you have a workable solution. This may seem counter-intuitive since you don’t have a solution yet, but it helps to figure out what success looks like. That way, you’ll know it when you get there.
Brainstorm possible solutions.
Do not evaluate any solution until the end of the brainstorming process. Off-the-wall ideas frequently trigger creative solutions.
For each solution, ask yourself if it will actually get you to the outcome you want. Focus on the idea, not the person who came up with it.
Take the time to honestly assess what might go wrong.
Recognize that “oh, we’ll figure that out later,” is often a warning of trouble ahead. Make sure there is a way past potential roadblocks.
Test your solution before you commit to it, or at least look for examples of similar solutions being successfully implemented.
If more than one solution has survived to this point, pick one and implement it. Be willing to abandon it and pick another if it becomes obvious that it won’t work. You can’t foresee everything that can go wrong.
Be willing to reformulate the problem if the solution doesn’t work.
Give people as much autonomy as possible in implementing the solution. When possible, allow them to develop their own implementations. The company with the Wiki could have used email and encouraged each person to maintain their own records in whatever form was most individually useful. Instead of trying to figure out how to maintain a central repository, perhaps what they should have done was to present different ways of organizing the information and allow each person to pick the one most useful to them.
This may seem like a lot of steps, and there certainly is effort involved. The Soviet Union decided it was easier to yell at the wheat. Given the amount of wheat they imported, it’s clear which method is cheaper in the long run.
It’s the end of the world! There’s clearly no chance that the US will escape from the current economic downturn. Doom is at hand.
More and more people are telling me that they no longer listen to the news. They are finding the steady drumbeat of negativity too depressing. Their response is to shut out the noise.
Now, there’s something to be said for that approach. After all, if you don’t listen, you don’t have to pay attention to how bad things are. On the flip side, you might also miss something useful. Back in 1910 or so, legendary stock trader Jesse Livermore always read the newspapers, no matter how bad things were. When the economy finally turned, he was ready. Inside a year, he went from a million dollars in debt to a million dollars in the black. During the Great Depression, IBM’s Tom Watson always stayed current on the news: when conditions changed, his swift actions made IBM a huge success.
Perhaps ignoring what’s going on is not the best course of action, especially for CEOs and other business leaders.
The fact is, though, it is hard to listen to the news without feeling discouraged. It’s even worse in a world where the news is always on, as close as our computer or cell phone. Being tough and bucking up only works for so long. Eventually, even the toughest will get tired: a steady diet of discouraging words can undermine anyone’s confidence in a variety of subtle or not-so-subtle ways. So if the answer is not playing ostrich, and it’s not toughing it out, what does work?
The most important thing is to reframe excessively negative news into something more neutral or even positive. This is actually less difficult than it sounds, mainly because the news frequently appears worse than it actually is. In Edwin Lefevre’s classic, “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,” he observes that the news media is always most excited and positive at the top of the economic cycle, and most dire and pessimistic at the bottom. Lefevre’s book was written in 1923, and his observation remains true today. Just because it’s easier to get the news doesn’t mean that the psychology has changed.
In a recent news report, one economist was claiming that hyper-inflation and total social collapse is just around the corner. Is that likely? I’m no economist, but I have to wonder how many people today remember “Dow 36,000?” James Glassman’s book was published at the height of the Internet boom: in October 1999, just a few short months before the market crashed in March 2000. Today, we’re hearing the equivalent of Dow 3600. The predictions of a rosy future stretching into forever were loudest, and most believable, at the top; what does that say about the news today?
What then is the best way to listen to the news and keep your outlook positive? There are several strategies used by master stock traders and other business leaders:
·Be contrarian: it’s always most euphoric at the top and grimmest at the bottom.
·Look for the hidden opportunities. When it looks like we’re doomed, that’s when things are turning.
·Don’t listen to every news broadcast or read every paper or website. Hearing the same stories over and over reinforces the feeling that you’re getting new information. In fact, you’re getting the same information, and it’s all usually from the same original source.Hearing something through multiple channels “tricks” us into giving it too much credence.
·For some reason, negative news frequently sounds logical and good news foolish. Stop and take a larger perspective. Don’t let your point of view become narrow.
·Each day, set aside some time to get away from the computer. Shut off the TV, put down the newspaper. Do something fun. Give yourself perspective.
·Don’t be afraid to act. It’s easy to get stuck looking for the perfect move. Sometimes, the important thing is just to move. Once you’re moving, it’s amazing how much more positive the news becomes.
While it’s certainly true that we can’t control the economy, we can control how we react to it. You can be sucked into the doom and gloom, or reframe and seize the opportunities that are out there. Tom Watson chose the latter. What’s your choice?
Stephen R. Balzac, "The Business Sensei," is a consultant and professional speaker. He is the president of 7 Steps Ahead, LLC, a consulting firm helping businesses get unstuck and transform problems into opportunities.
