The Business Sensei

Organizational Learning

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

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. 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 have something to fall back on to help them recover quickly, as opposed to something to fall into and get eaten.

Businesses are in a fundamentally similar position: while there are some obvious differences in the details between learning the skills of a sport and learning sales or management or computer programming, the fundamental process is the same. Since organizational performance is ongoing instead of being organized into discrete chunks such as tournaments, organizational learning needs to be ongoing as well. Optimally, organizational learning should also be an enjoyable experience, not just because that makes people happy but because people learn best when they are enjoying themselves. The methods and approaches to organizational learning should also serve to simplify other issues, such as orientation, accreditation, and organizational change. The lessons of sports and games will serve us well in understanding how to make organizational learning effective.

To begin with, though, we need to understand what learning is and how it works.

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

Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Problem Solving and Mistakes

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

The Paradox of Perfection

This article was originally published in American Business Magazine.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”– Michael Jordan

Ask practically any hiring manager if they’d hire someone who never considers alternatives, who refuses to take decisive action, who has never challenged themselves, and the answer will be, “No.”

The odd thing is, however, that those same managers are hiring exactly those people they said they’d never hire. Of course, they say they’re hiring people with strong track records, who don’t have a history of failure, who have never been responsible for something going wrong; the people, in short, with the perfect job histories.

But what they don’t do is take the time to understand just why that person looks so perfect. After all, isn’t it always better to hire someone who has never failed than to hire someone whose background includes unsuccessful projects?

Imagine if Michael Jordan’s coach had said, back when he first missed a game winning shot, “Hey Mikey, you missed that shot! You’re done.”

Far too often, the people who look so perfect are only perfect because they’ve never allowed themselves to attempt anything that would damage their image of perfection. They carefully choose their projects to make sure they’ll be successful, and they never challenge themselves or expose themselves to risk. Unfortunately, when something does go wrong, they also have no ability to cope.

Twelve years ago, I worked with someone who was telling me how he failed his black belt test in the martial art he studied. “It was the first test I’d ever failed,” he told me. “It was devastating.”

“How long ago did that happen?” I asked him.

“Two years.”

“So I assume you passed the second time.”

“What second time?” he asked.

After two years, his failure was still so overwhelming that he hadn’t gotten back on that metaphorical horse. As an engineer, he was not easy to work with because he had to be right all the time.

I was once called in to work with a manager who had a stellar track record, until something went wrong. He couldn’t cope. He kept telling me, “I’m not the sort of manager who allows something like that to happen.”

The resulting disconnect between his (mis)perception of himself and reality was overwhelming. The fellow was so stressed out that he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and couldn’t think straight. The fact that he had never failed meant that he had no resilience. The mere possibility of failure was enough to send him into panic and make the odds of failure more likely. Yes, we did turn things around, and he’s a much more capable manager now than he ever was before.

When you want someone to embark on a risky project or take bold, decisive action, don’t look to the person with the perfect record who has never failed. If they haven’t taken risks or been bold before, why would they change just for you? Clearly what they’ve been doing worked for them—it got them praise, promotions and financial rewards.

Paradoxically, perhaps that person with the checkered past is exactly who you’re looking for. The person who misses that game-winning shot one day, improves their skills, and nails it the next time is the real winner. Success is about trying over and over and accepting the bobbles along the way. Unfortunately, the tendency on the part of many people is to view a mistake as total failure. This deprives them, and their managers, of the chance to improve and seek greater challenges.

Who would you rather trust when the stakes are high? The person with the perfect record, or the one who is the equivalent of Michael Jordan?

When The Solution Is The Problem

I am pleased to announce that my next book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, will be published by Springer in 2013.

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“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 that 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, the 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.

The Blofeld School of Management

As published by the American Management Association

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 games, 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.