The Business Sensei

Solving Yesterday’s Problems

Once upon a time there was an employee working on a knotty biotech problem. Weeks, then months, passed with no results. The employee’s manager decided that the employee clearly wasn’t working hard enough, fired him, and hired someone else.

Weeks, then months, passed with no results. The second person was also clearly not working hard enough and was swiftly replaced.

The next two people didn’t work hard enough either.

The fifth person got lucky: someone in a different lab was working on a similar problem and figured out that the process was fatally flawed. No one had noticed. Everyone, especially the manager, assumed that it must be correct. The manager, in particular, was unwilling to even consider the possibility that the problem could be the process, not the people, until it was shoved in his face.

In a slightly different example, I was conducting a leadership and negotiation exercise with a group of would-be managers. As part of the exercise, they were each given various items and told to obtain various other items. Naturally, everyone started trading back and forth. Some items, though, simply could not be found. As a result, the people who needed those missing items started hording the items they did have: they wanted to make sure they had leverage to get other people to give them the items they needed.

At the end, there were a number of very frustrated people complaining that the exercise was unfair because items were missing.

“I needed an apple, and there were no apples,” complained one irritated individual.

When I asked him why he hadn’t just gone down to the cafeteria and bought an apple, he just stared at me.

One woman complained that no one in the room had willow leaves. I asked why she didn’t just walk outside and pick some off the tree.

Again the stare.

Because each person was visibly presented with a bag of items, everyone immediately jumped to the assumption that all the items were present and that they could be obtained through trade. Even when that failed to work for everyone, no one questioned the basic assumption. Instead, those who couldn’t find what they needed assumed that people were withholding items and responded by withholding their items. Instead of engaging in brainstorming or problem solving, they just glared at each other. Unlike the biotech manager, the option of firing one person and hiring another was not available. This was probably fortunate under the circumstances.

In both the lab and the exercise, the people involved had become so focused on the results that they weren’t thinking about how they were trying to accomplish those results. Indeed, the process had somehow achieved the status of holy writ, to the point that no one even thought of questioning it.

Results are important, make no mistake about that. However, it’s equally important to think strategically about how to accomplish those results. By mindlessly assuming that only one path exists or one way of working exists, the different groups trapped themselves in failure.

The more difficult the problem being solved, the more important it becomes to pay attention to the process. Assuming that there is only one process or blindly believing that everyone has to fit a certain image or work a certain way reduces the likelihood of success and can even lead to the results not being accepted. The lab manager could have made something of a name for himself if he’d been the one to publish the identification of the flawed process! The groups looking for the items could have all succeeded if they’d stopped to revisit their assumptions and seek out alternate means of accomplishing their goals.

If you’re trying to solve yesterday’s problems, then ignoring the process is frequently a great way to go about it. By the same token, it would be very easy to win the lottery if you could only buy based on yesterday’s paper. Unfortunately, the first option is actually available in business.

The more complex the problem, therefore, the more important it becomes to stop and look at what you’re trying to accomplish, how you’re trying to do it, and why you’ve chosen to do it that way. If you want to think strategically, it helps considerably if you don’t limit yourself to preconceived notions about how the problems must be solved. The more hidden assumptions you can overturn, the more likely you are to accomplish your goals.

What a Hissing Cat Teaches Us About Teamwork

One of our cats recently needed a course of antibiotics. Now, this particular cat is quite large, but also very sweet and has a purr that would put a motorboat to shame. Giving her pills is really a very simple task: pop the pill in her mouth, give her a treat, and we’re done. She never runs away, never puts up a fight, just gives me a dirty look and then gobbles up the treat. Thus it was that when we realized that we’d be out of town for a few days during the cat’s course of antibiotics, we didn’t think it would be all that big of a deal to have a friend come in and give the cat her pill.

As it turned out, the cat had a different opinion about this. The first night we were gone, we were treated to a series of text messages detailing the ongoing adventures of the friend who had come by to pill the cat. Apparently our sweet lump of a cat had transformed into Demon Kitty. She was loudly expressing her opinion, while ducking under pieces of furniture and also demonstrating her willingness to remove any human limb that happened to come in after her. At the first opportunity, she dodged past our friend and disappeared.

She did not get her pill that night. On the other hand, our friend was intact.

The next morning went somewhat better. Eventually, the cat did agree to eat the pill. The basic problem was that the cat didn’t really know the friend who came over, but once she came by the house a couple of times, the cat began to accept her. At that point, there was a relationship and the cat was willing to submit to being pilled. Cats don’t like people they don’t know sticking things down their throats or doing other unpleasant things to them. They don’t necessarily like it when someone they do know is doing it, but at least they are more likely to tolerate it.

Cats are suspicious of people they don’t know. They approach carefully, if at all. They want to take their time getting to know the person before they will tolerate much, if any, contact. Although we are less likely to hide under chairs hissing and spitting, people are surprisingly similar to cats. We are also suspicious of people we don’t know, although we do a better job of hiding it than a cat might. I’m not sure whether this says something profound about people or cats!

Like cats, we have a variety of social rituals and behaviors that we use when we meet someone new. These behaviors are the moral equivalent of cats sniffing at each other and checking each other out. These behaviors become increasingly important when a team is coming together, when a new leader is assigned to a team, or when a new person joins an existing team. In each of these cases, different members of the group need to build relationships with each other.

At first, those relationships are professional: distant, polite, and, above all, superficial. No one is quite sure of where they stand or what behavior is appropriate. What will offend someone else? What will embarrass us or another person? Which behaviors will help us gain status and acceptance, and which behaviors might get us thrown out of the group? Push people too hard at that point and the reaction can be quite strong. Think about groups you’ve been in: how often did you find yourself agreeing with an idea or a suggestion because you assumed that other people knew better or because you didn’t want to upset anyone? How often did what seemed like a simple suggestion or off-hand comment provoke an unexpectedly angry or intense response? Conversely, think about who has the right to criticize you: people whom you know well, or people whom you don’t? Superficial relationships produce lower quality work.

It takes time for those relationships to move from keeping people at a safe distance to actually engaging with the other person at a deeper, more productive level. It’s easy to say that in the office we need to focus on the issues, not the person, but it’s hard to do. The less we feel we have good relationships with our colleagues, the more we’re likely to feel that they are trying to shove something down our throat. It’s only after we’ve been working with them for a few months that we might really start to develop a sense of trust and comfort. That’s assuming, of course, that the process is handled correctly. Try to rush it, and it only takes longer. That sense of trust and comfort is vital, though, for actually doing high quality work.

As with cats, we have to take it slowly. Everyone involved has to recognize that mistakes will happen. So long as you don’t take anyone’s head off, it is the process of making mistakes and recovering from them that actually builds the relationship. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the cat runs and hides. Sometimes the relationship gets destroyed and people flee the team or the company. But the only way to achieve high quality relationships, and do high quality work as a team, is to take the risk of being scratched.

Is Congress Running Your Business?

It’s been pretty impressive listening to the news lately. Will Congress deign to return from vacation to debate whether to grant military authorization to attack ISIL? It seems sort of odd to even be debating whether or not they should be doing their jobs! Now, I could at this point draw some trivial parallel to around how many people get to just blow off their jobs and not really worry about it, but that would be pointless. I doubt anyone is having any trouble seeing that issue!

What I find much more interesting is why they are so eager to avoid debate, and what that can teach us about similar problems in a business.

Politics is an interesting game: in a very real sense, it’s not so much about doing a good job as it is about looking good. Debate military authorization before elections? No matter what you decide, events might prove you wrong. In this case, prove really means that a completely arbitrary and unforeseeable event makes whatever decision you just made appear to be wrong in hindsight. Of course, once this happens, then it becomes an opportunity for your political opponents to swoop in and declare that they would have magically foreseen the future and made a different decision.

In the immortal words of Monty Python, there are three lessons we can take from this and the number of the lessons shall be three.

First, hindsight is very comforting, but is fundamentally an illusion. Hindsight only appears to be 20-20. In reality, what appears obvious in hindsight is frequently only obvious because we know the answer. Go read a good mystery, be it a Sherlock Holmes story or something by Agatha Christie, and try to figure out the clues. It can be done; Conan Doyle, for instance, played fair. You don’t need to know that Holmes picked up a particular brand of cigar ash from the floor; it’s sufficient to just know that he found something interesting. The problem is that it doesn’t help: even with the clues in front of us, it’s still extremely difficult to solve the mystery. Once Holmes explains it, however, then it’s obvious; in fact, it’s hard to imagine that it could have gone any other way. That’s the problem with hindsight: once we know how events turned out, clearly it was obvious all along. That’s why everyone bought Google stock the day it went public and held on to it ever since. While hindsight, used properly, can certainly teach us some useful lessons about our decisions, the hindsight trap teaches us to avoid taking action.

Second, how do we react when someone makes a mistake? In any business operation, mistakes will happen. Are those mistakes feedback or are they the kiss of death? Does a wrong decision become an opportunity to bring out the knives and get rid of a rival or find an excuse to not give someone a promotion or a raise? Or does a wrong decision become an opportunity to revisit the process of making the decision and learn how to make better decisions? In other words, are you fixing the problems or are you simply fixing blame? Fixing blame may feel good, but doesn’t actually solve anything: the same problems just keep reappearing in different guises.

Third, are you evaluating your employees based on results, strategy, or both? Even the best strategy sometimes fails, but when you focus on strategy your odds of successful results are much higher. If you only focus on results, you are telling people to not take risks, not accept challenges, but rather to play it safe. If you only focus on strategy, you lose the opportunity to reality check your plans: if a strategy fails, it’s important to understand what happened. Did the market change? Did something unexpected and unpredictable occur? What are the things that can derail your strategy and what can you do to make your strategies more resilient? What can you control and what is outside your control? Athletes who focus on strategy, process, and winning, win far more often than those who only focus on winning.

When you get caught in the hindsight trap, fix blame, and ignore strategy what you are really doing is telling people that inaction is better than action, pointing fingers is better than improving the business, and playing it safe is better than pushing the envelope and seeking excellence. Is that really the business you want? If it’s not, what are you going to do?

Bring Me The Head Of Shinseki The General

When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of old WWII movies and B-grade science fiction on TV. There wasn’t a whole lot of difference between them. The WWII movies involved airplanes or submarines, while the science fiction involved space ships. Beyond that, the plot lines were remarkably similar. The bad guys always appeared absolutely overwhelming and were led by a seriously tough, supremely competent general who terrified everyone. He, and it was almost always he, would usually be introduced in scene that involved him killing off one of his subordinates for failing at something or another. The good guys always were slightly disorganized and Our Hero started the show in deep trouble: he was either being dressed down for some major screwup or the major screwup occurred early in the show. But, because these were the Good Guys, he would be given another chance. Naturally, because this was the nature of that type of movie, Our Hero would then turn out to be the one person who could save the day. It was very clear, even then, that if the good guys killed people off for failing, they would have been defeated. Indeed, this was the major difference between the good guys and the bad guys in a lot of those movies, a point emphasized in some movies where it would also be revealed that Our Hero’s earlier screwup was due to attempts by the bad guys to discredit him. Meanwhile, assuming he survived to this point, the bad guy general would kill himself or be killed for his failure.

The fact is, when a team fails it’s not uncommon to kill off the leader, albeit these days the death is more likely to be symbolic. As news of the problems at the Veteran’s Administration surfaced, General Eric Shinseki ended up resigning his post as head of the VA. Now that he’s gone, naturally all the problems at the VA will immediately disappear.

Well, maybe not.

Killing off the leader can be a very satisfying move, and certainly has a sense of poetic justice to it. Certainly, when the screwup is large enough, it’s more satisfying than killing off some junior flunky. However, as a means of producing effective organizational change it is not necessarily going to be all that effective; indeed, you just may be getting rid of someone you’ve spent a long time training. Instead, it helps to stop and look at the organizational system and understand the forces at play and what is actually taking place. Organizational systems can be very complex and unexpected interactions or badly constructed goals can have serious unintended consequences independent of any particular leader.

For example, at one time Sears Automotive famously gave all of its car mechanics a goal of generating some $200 dollars an hour of billable revenue. The problem, of course, is that they had no control over how many people came to them for auto service nor did they have any control over the particular problems those drivers were having. But the goal focused only on the result: a specific number. Failing to make that number meant failing to remain employed. As a result, the goal became all-consuming: mechanics focused on it to the exclusion of all else. Not surprisingly, they found a way to make their numbers: they invented problems out of thin air. This worked very well until Sears was caught. The wrong short-term goal can blind people to longer term consequences. Changing leaders only helps if the goals are changed as well.

In another situation, IBM in the early 1990s decided that it needed to do a better job of getting technology out of its scientific centers and to the market. They decided that the engineers in the scientific centers needed a stronger incentive. The incentive some senior VP came up with was to tie the performance evaluations of the engineers to how well their products did in the market. This produced a couple of significant problems:

First, the engineers had no control over the sales force. Salesmen had their own numbers to make, and tended to push only those products that they were most comfortable with. They had no particular desire to risk their bonuses! The net result was that it was pretty random which products were being actively marketed and which were not. This, as one might imagine, did not exactly thrill the engineers. The problem was further aggravated by the fact that the sales people were often in a different geographic location from the engineers.

Second, instead of collaborating and cooperating, engineers on different projects now had an incentive to compete with one another. Since they really had no idea how to make one product or another more attractive to the sales team, competition was, at least, mild. Mostly it served to waste energy and distract people. Each new leader who came in was caught up in “the way things were done,” and a lot of good people quit. Replacing the VPs didn’t change anything; it wasn’t until Lou Gerstner came in that anything actually changed. Changing leaders can help, but only if the new leader can also change the culture. Otherwise, you’re just replacing an experienced leader with a less experienced one, and telling the new one that he’d better not make any mistakes. That is not a recipe for success!

In a third situation, a manager was fired because customers were complaining that products were being released too slowly. The manager had been told several times to speed up the process. After the manager was fired, shipment speed dramatically increased. Unfortunately, so did two other things: customer complaints about defective products and, to the surprise of no one except senior management, product returns. I suppose one could argue that they fired the wrong manager in this case. The real culprit, though, was problems with team coordination across the company. Killing the various leaders was not the solution; training them properly was. When that happened, and the various managers were allowed to learn from their mistakes, things began to improve.

Particularly in high profile situations, killing the leader can feel very satisfying. It has a feeling of justice being served. However, quite often it does not actually solve the problem. It’s only when we stop to look at the system and understand what is really happening that we can take the actions that will actually make changes that we want.

The Four Innovation Musts

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

As for what you have to do to encourage innovation, that’s actually pretty easy. We’ve discussed all of these elements repeatedly throughout this book:

• Continuous learning – As we discussed in chapter 5, continuous learning is key to motivation. It is also key to innovation. Innovation comes from putting together familiar things in new ways. The more you know, the more likely that is to happen. Steve Jobs knew nothing about building computers, but that didn’t stop him from inventing the iPhone.
• Mistakes – At the risk of beating a dead horse, mistakes are feedback. How many light bulbs have you made?
• Take breaks – Another topic we’ve discussed at length. Creativity doesn’t happen when you’re exhausted. The “Eureka!” moment comes when you take a break and see things differently.
• Patience – Innovation is an ongoing process. If you wait until you desperately need a breakthrough before you start, your odds of success will be better in Vegas. Creativity takes time. Innovation is most important when it seems the least necessary.

I hear from many businesses that they’d like to be more innovative. What’s stopping you?

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

999 Light Bulbs on the Wall

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

Just as we have to reframe negative news, we have to reframe failure. As we’ve discussed throughout this book, failure is a form of feedback. In Thomas Edison’s case, the feedback was that he learned a great many ways to not make a light bulb. This is easy to say, but hard to live: that’s a big part of why innovation is so difficult. Without innovation, though, organizations become stuck: they lose the excitement and novelty that made them great. Just as individual growth is key to maintaining individual motivation, innovation is the organizational growth that is key to maintaining a vibrant, exciting organization. So why is it so hard?

Isaac Asimov wrote in his classic novel, Foundation, that the people who most fiercely defend the status quo today are the same people who yesterday most bitterly opposed it becoming the status quo. So it is with innovation.

Innovation involves disrupting the comfortable, familiar, safe ways of doing things. Although a culture may start out aggressive and entrepreneurial, if the organization is successful then, over the years, people learn to be careful. Partly, we’ve been taught since childhood not to make mistakes: mistakes are VERY VERY BAD. Mistakes mean a low grade and that Goes On Your Permanent Record. Remember all the talk about your permanent record from when you were in school? It’s time to shake those habits; they are about as useful as worrying about a monster under your bed.

Another piece of the puzzle is that we start to measure all the different ways we can cut costs and we start thinking about how much better the business would do if all that wasted effort and misdirected work were just eliminated. We reward managers for staying under budget, not for taking bold steps in the service of the organization. As we discussed in chapter 8, where there is no room for mistakes, there is no room for learning: the same is true about innovation. When we get too focused on counting beans, all we become good at is counting beans.

The challenge is distinguishing between exploration, which leads to new products and services, and actual waste. Exploration is a dirty business and a lot of it fails. That’s only waste if you don’t bother to learn how not to make those light bulbs.

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

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

Sometimes a Little Inefficiency Can Go a Long Way

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

An efficient system is frequently described as one in which there are no mistakes.

People, however, only learn by making mistakes.

This creates a bit of a problem. In a truly efficient system, there would be no opportunity for people to learn. When there is no learning, the system will eventually fail: either it becomes rigid or it stagnates, but in either case it fails to adapt to changing conditions in the environment.

Shoto Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan Katate, used to say that in the practice of Shotokan there was no room for error. American students never had the patience for the level of perfection demanded in more traditional Japanese dojos; instead, they made a great many mistakes. Today, Americans win most of the competitions.

Fencing is a very precise sport: a master swordsman can hit a moving quarter with the point of an epee. Yet, the winner of the competition is frequently not the person with the most perfect moves. Instead, the winner is often the person who appears to be making mistakes.

Now, there are certainly situations in which there is no room for mistakes: surgery and landing an airplane are two that come to mind. However, for someone to become a master surgeon or a successful pilot they had to make a lot of mistakes along the way. The goal, of course, is make sure those mistakes occur in settings that do not involve people getting killed. And, although both of them are required to perform potentially difficult operations without error, they are also expected to rapidly recognize and adjust to changing circumstances, for example having both engines of your airplane taken out of action by birds. That ability to adjust can only come from experience in dealing with unexpected or unusual situations: in other words, coping with mistakes without losing your mental balance.

I’ve worked with jujitsu students who completely crumbled when they made a mistake. Their concentration and confidence were shattered and their performance along with them. One minute they’re comfortably demonstrating techniques; the next, they’re frozen or in a panic because something didn’t go as expected. In the business world, I’ve seen CEOs comfortably running their companies, apparently supremely confident, right up until something unexpected happens: revenue misses expectations, there’s an unforeseen problem with the product, a deadline has to be extended, etc. The response is pure panic: in one case, the CEO refused to acknowledge the unexpected problem and insisted on shipping it on schedule anyway… and then couldn’t understand why the customers were so irate. In another situation, the first time revenue came in light, the CEO immediately laid off 20 percent of the company. This was not a particularly well-considered response to the situation. In both of these scenarios, the CEO didn’t stop to think; instead, he took the fact that Something Was Wrong, imagined the most dire of consequences, and took the first action that came to mind.

The problem is that mistakes are not something to fear. They are events that can provide valuable feedback. When something doesn’t work the way you expect, that is often a sign that conditions are not what you expect either. Something has changed or is not what you imagined it was, and it’s critical to understand what that means. Only when you understand exactly what is causing the “mistake” to occur can you design an appropriate solution.

In one company, a researcher was fired because he was clearly making too many mistakes and not committed to his job. How did they know? His experiment wasn’t working. It didn’t work for the next three people either, all of whom quit or were asked to leave. Eventually, it turned out that the experiment couldn’t be performed as designed. The first mistake was made by the person who designed the experiment; the second by management who refused to consider alternative explanations. As a result, they repeatedly executed an inappropriate solution.

When too much focus is placed on being efficient, more and more energy is spent on avoiding mistakes. Eventually, more energy may be spent on avoiding the mistake than on the mistake itself as the company works to solve the wrong problem.

It helps, therefore, to have plan for making use of mistakes and not being frozen by them.

• Start by doing nothing. Take a moment to consider the situation. Look at your own reactions: are you imagining disaster down the road? If you are, try “seeing” that image as a photograph and then imagine crumpling it up and throwing it away. Free yourself to consider alternatives.

• Ask what the mistake is telling you. Consider different ideas. Brainstorm a list of possibilities.

• Look for an opportunity to innovate. Don’t settle for the status quo. Instead of just eliminating the mistake, can you turn it to your advantage? How can you make the system a little, or a lot, better than it was before?

Sometimes, a little inefficiency can go a long way.

BlackBerry Jam

They sit there in the room, their eyes fixed on the head of the table. There stands a man, quite probably the team’s manager. He is speaking, presenting some gem of long-since-forgotten lore. Those watching him seem rapt, focused, intent upon his brilliance. But look again. Notice the strain around their eyes, the sweat upon their brows. See the twitching of the hands, as though each man and woman in that room could keep their hands upon the table only with great effort. Watch longer; see the hands slipping off the table, sliding towards pockets and purses. See realization cross the faces, observe the hands forced jerkily back towards the table, as if their owners were fighting against some horrid, hypnotic compulsion. Over and over again, the hand is pushed back.

But attention is finite, will power limited. Eventually, a hand reaches a pocket. It slips out seconds later, an object tightly clutched in its grip. A flicker of bliss passes across a man’s face as he glances furtively down at the object in his hand: a BlackBerry.

So it was in 2005, in the days when the Blackberries ruled the world. Coming out of the distant north, from a place, or so it is said, far out on the rim, Blackberries quickly came to dominate the corporate world. Everyone had to have one. At the very thought that the Blackbery network might go down, panic would spread across the land. A few months later, in 2006, Webster’s Dictionary proudly proclaimed the new word of the year : “Crackberry.” BlackBerry seemed unstoppable, its spread inexorable. And then, as rapidly as it had grown, BlackBerry shrank, faded, vaninshed away. Of that invincible empire, but a single outpost remains, fighting to not vanish away and be forgotten. What force, what power broke the might of BlackBerry?

Success.

That is correct: what destroyed BlackBerry was its own success. Confident in their power, they forgot that when you build the perfect mousetrap someone will come along with a cat. Unlike a mousetrap, the cat does not need to be reset, it doesn’t need the mouse to come to it, it is fun to play with, and it keeps your feet warm at night. Also, the purr is soothing. While BlackBerry’s co-CEOs were busily dismissing the iPhone as, “a toy,” Apple and Google were busily striking deep into the heart of their empire. iPhones and Android phones are not just business devices. They are entertainment devices and are fun to use. BlackBerry, or to be more accurate, Research In Motion, stood still while those around them kept moving.

One of the challenges in innovation is that what a company becomes good at, it naturally wants to keep doing. Innovation becomes an exercise in perfecting the existing product and building up impenetrable barriers to competitors. The catch, however, is that the wall that keeps others out also keeps you in. Research In Motion kept making better and better “business” phones. They let their product define them until they could no longer change as the world around them moved on. In 2007, the first iPhone arose to challenge the BlackBerry. Much to RIM’s surprise, this upstart “toy” proved surprisingly popular. RIM’s attempt to respond with a touchscreen phone of its own was a dismal failure, and their attempts at an Appstore and at adding an MP3 player to their phones were equally unsuccessful. From owning some 70% of the market in 2006, the BlackBerry is now less than 2%. That was the price of their success.

Real innovation is a messy business. It requires trying a great many different things and being wrong most of the time. Indeed, successful innovators fail far more often than they succeed. When a company does succeed, though, it naturally wants to protect and extend that success: they start thinking about how much more successful they would be if only all those messy, and costly, mistakes could be eliminated. They start looking for reasons why their product is invincible, instead of experimenting with things that might kill it. Your cash cow is sacred only to you; to everyone else, it’s just hamburger waiting to happen. Guided by their successes, Research In Motion focused ever more tightly in making better and better Blackberries. That single-minded obsession caused them to develop corporate tunnel vision: all they could see in the future was their own inevitable triumph. In that, they joined with other great companies such as Polaroid and Kodak, who missed the digital photography boat, IBM which was dethroned by the PCs it invented, Digital Equipment, whose CEO declared the PC, “a toy,” Barnes & Noble, which was successfully Amazoned, and a host of others.

So how does a company remain innovative?

Recognize that the more tightly you focus, the less you see. Sometimes it pays to take your eyes off the ball and look at the big picture. What else is going on? Pay particular attention to those competitors you see as jokes. What are they offering your current customers and, even more to the point, what are they offering your potential customers? Apple and Google didn’t take on BlackBerry in its corporate strongholds; rather, they vacuumed up all the rest of the oxygen and the corporate strongholds followed.

Remember that mistakes are part of the game. You can learn from them or hide from them: it’s your choice whether you are receiving feedback or experiencing failure.

Put your focus on process and strategy, not just on results. When you think strategically, you can start to anticipate the moves others might make. Unlike chess, the rules don’t have to stay the same. If you’re making the rules, someone else will break them. Why wait for them to do it and seize the initiative? And if someone else is defining the rules, you have nothing to lose by breaking as many of them as you can. Who says a business phone can’t play music, videos, and games? Research In Motion, that’s who.

Those meetings are still going on. Hands are still slipping into pockets. Men and women are still furtively glancing down at the objects in their hands. Today, those objects are Droids and iPhones. Tomorrow?

Steve’s new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, is now available. The initial run sold out in two days at Amazon.com; order your copy now.