The Business Sensei

That Was Obvious!

The solution always seems so obvious once Holmes explains it.

I’ve been reading the Sherlock Holmes stories to my son. Even though I read the stories years ago, I find that I can rarely remember the endings. As a result, I’m puzzling them through along with my son. While it’s certainly true that sometimes Holmes is taking advantage of information not available to the reader, such as his encyclopedic knowledge of mud or cigar ash, quite often the clues are present. Even when Holmes doesn’t clue us in until the end exactly what about the cigar ash was important, we do get to see that he was interested in it. Quite often, that should be all a reader needs, except, of course for the fact that it isn’t.

At the end, Holmes finally reveals how he solved the mystery. Watson expresses his astonishment, Holmes shrugs and, despite belief to the contrary, usually does not say, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Whether or not Holmes says it, what he is doing is not elementary. Putting together the apparently unrelated clues to assemble a picture of how the crime was committed is a very difficult skill: consider how many readers are unsuccessful! Yet once we know the answer, it is equally difficult to imagine the pieces fitting together any other way. Harder to imagine is putting the pieces together to anticipate the murder before it has even happened! I suspect that Holmes himself would have trouble with that: indeed, in the stories where he had to do just that, he was rarely able to do it fast enough to prevent the crime from occurring. The reader, of course, is even more in the dark than Holmes: even knowing that he’s solved the case from the information presented, we still can’t figure it out.

When reading Sherlock Holmes, the resultant feelings of frustration, amazement, admiration, and feeling like an idiot for missing the obvious clues, are all part of the enjoyment of the story. In a business setting, however, it’s not enjoyable at all.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard statements like:

“I can’t believe he made a mistake like that. He should have seen it coming!”

“If Fred was as good as he claims he is, he would have anticipated that.”

“I can’t believe she was taking the project seriously!”

I could go on, but you get the idea. When someone makes a mistake, we often confuse hindsight with foresight: while hindsight might be 20-20, foresight is not. In fact, in a great many cases it’s more like 20-2000. But, because things are so obvious in hindsight, the tendency is to assume the person who made the mistake must have been careless, or foolish, or goofing off, rather than making the best decision they could with the information they had at the time. Perhaps there was some way of looking at the information that would have suggested the problem was in the offing, but, like in a Sherlock Holmes story, putting together the disparate pieces of data in just the right way in the time available is no trivial task.

Conversely, there are times when people do correctly recognize the clues that suggest a serious problem is in the offing. At one technology company, several engineers saw the clues and put in the time necessary to analyze them and avert the impending disaster. Their thanks was being yelled at for wasting time: the problem was clearly obvious, even though no one else had seen it, and they had clearly not been working very hard if it took them “that long” to figure it out.

Lest this be viewed as a problem unique to the tech industry, I had a similar experience running a management training predictive scenario game. At the end of the exercise, one of the participants told me in no uncertain terms how the outcome of the game was clearly predetermined. He explained in great detail how the different factors in the exercise could play out only the one way, and that this was basically unfair. I gently broke the news to him that I’d run that particular exercise over a dozen times, with wildly different outcomes.

“Impossible!” he said, and stormed off.

Mixing hindsight and foresight isn’t such a good thing, but is it really anything more than what amounts to an annoyance? In fact, yes. When we fall victim to the 20-20 foresight in hindsight trap, and disparage people for not spotting the “obvious” problem, what we really are doing is telling them they are incompetent. Done often enough, they might start to believe it, reducing performance, motivation, and innovation in the company. When someone does successfully anticipate a problem and we dismiss that accomplishment, we are implicitly telling them not to bother doing that again! The results of that should be obvious.

Neither of those points, though, are the most serious problem: when we convince ourselves that problems are always obvious, we don’t spend as much effort trying to anticipate them. If it’s not obvious, it must not be there. It’s sort of like saying that if you close your eyes when crossing the street, there won’t be any cars.

That is a good way to get blindsided by some very big problems indeed.

What do you see?

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

Sherlock Holmes on more than one occasion told Watson that it was foolish to speculate until all the facts were available. One of the most difficult aspects of organizational diagnosis is separating what you see from what you think about what you see. I’ve conducted exercises in which people are asked to do something, for example ask to cut into a line, and then describe what the reaction is. Many people tell me that, “She didn’t allow me to cut in because she was in a bad mood,” or something similar.

The observation is only whether or not the person let you cut in the line. Everything else is interpretation. We don’t know why she didn’t let him cut in the line; perhaps he didn’t say please. The point, though, is that it’s hard to separate what we see from what we think about what we see. This can pose a challenge in organizational diagnosis: instead of acting on what is in front of us, we act on what we think about what is in front of us. For example, earlier we discussed the case of the passive aggressive manager. By interpreting the behavior instead of simply observing it, the person making the complaint created chrome out of thin air. No amount of fixing of this mythical passive aggressiveness would have solved their very real problems, whereas merely observing the situation quickly led to the solution. As we discussed in chapter 9, managers observing employees working late rated those employees as more productive, even though what they were really doing was surfing the web. The observed behavior was “in the office late.” The interpretation was, “productive.” The employees who didn’t stay late were rated as less productive and no one could figure out why productivity was always so low.

Observing without interpreting is difficult, but if we don’t learn to do it, all we really do is create chrome.

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

Baker Street Irregular

Fans of Sherlock Holmes might remember the occasional scene in which a scruffy urchin appears out of nowhere, speaks briefly to Holmes, and then disappears again. Holmes then solves the case, and explains to the stunned Watson that he cultivated the urchins as sources of information. They are his “Baker Street Irregulars.”

For those who prefer a more recent image, fans of James Bond movies will remember the endless parade of agents who show up long enough to give Bond some critical piece of information or equipment. Unlike Holmes’s informants, the mortality rate amongst Bond’s “irregulars” tends to be awkwardly high. Star Trek, of course, was famous for its “Red Shirts,” the red uniformed security officers who would always die within minutes after appearing on camera. In all these cases, the character shows up on camera just long enough to move the plot forward and then disappears. In a very real sense, they have no existence before they are needed and no existence after their function is fulfilled.

When they are present, they exist only to meet the needs of the story, or at least of the hero.

Of course, these examples are all fiction. What bearing could they possibly have on reality? When I run predictive scenario management training exercises, a type of serious game, I find the same behavior manifests: many participants tend to assume that the other players in the scenario are only there to support their goals. They don’t quite recognize that each participant has their own goals and their own needs that they are trying to meet. As a result, conflict often erupts between different individuals and groups who each assumed that the other individuals and groups were present only as “red shirts.”

Read the rest at the American Management Association