The Business Sensei

Don’t Lose Your Marbles!

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to observe participants in an estimation contest. Participants were given a problem along the lines of figuring out how many marbles are in a jar or balls in a pit. Participants then had to come up with an approximate answer based on the information that they could glean from the scenario: for example, they might be able to at least approximately measure the size of the marbles.

I was particularly impressed by one of the groups: they were very analytical. They discussed the problem in very reasoned terms. They only included very few people in their discussion. They came up with a very well-written, very logically developed answer. They were very wrong. While all the other answers clustered around the correct response, this one group had an answer that was so far out in left field that it was in some other stadium.

This, of course, is the challenge in estimation games: it’s easy to make very simple mistakes early on and then run merrily off along a completely wrong, but apparently logical, trail. In estimation games this is pretty much harmless. However, in more general areas of problem solving the same errors that can derail an estimate can also lead to much more significant problems. This isn’t necessarily all that surprising in that real-world problems are much more similar to estimation games than we might like to acknowledge: they often require us to make assumptions, act with incomplete information, make deductions about facts we cannot easily observe, and come up with a best guess at the end. Fortunately, there are some lessons we can draw from estimation games that will improve real-world problem solving, particularly when people are involved. Consider, for instance, any scenario in which you need to work with other people or cooperate with another organization and where your goals are not necessarily in complete alignment.

It’s easy, as the left-field group did, to limit participation in the discussion. In fact, this is often necessary, as too big a group can easily become unmanageable and prevent any productive discussion from taking place. However, keeping the size of the group small does not mean keeping the knowledge base available to the group equally small. Group members need to track their assumptions and the conclusions based on those assumptions. They then need to go out and verify as many of their assumptions as they can: it’s easy to find evidence to support your conclusions; the hard part is looking for evidence that will contradict them. The second is what needs to happen. Identify what information would tell you if you’re making a mistake, and then figure out to identify that information. Speculate. Play “what if?” games.

Of course, it’s also important to remember that marbles in a jar have no motivation (outside of a bad joke about method acting). Situations dealing with people have considerably more moving parts.

An important part of “people estimation” is understanding motive. When dealing with human systems, being able to think about what other people are doing and why they might be doing it is critical. Peter Ossorio, of descriptive psychology fame, makes the argument that in any given situation people will try to make the most advantageous move they can. This doesn’t mean that they’ll always get it right or that they’ll always execute even a right action correctly or effectively. However, it does mean that it can be very productive to consider how other people might view a problem or situation and consider what their likely course of action might be. Consider as well why they might doing what they are doing.

Their reasons might not be obvious, they might not be comfortable for you to think about, and they may contradict some of your basic assumptions, but those reasons exist. Figuring out what they are goes a long way to enabling you to make a better “estimate” and take actions that are more likely to get you to a result that you like. To be fair, maybe the other people involved are stupid or evil; I’ve certainly heard this given as an excuse for not considering their perspective. Ultimately, what difference does it make? They will still take actions, and your success may well depend on your ability to anticipate and work with or around those actions. Approaches which shut down speculation and exploration are most likely going to do nothing more than decrease the accuracy of your estimate.

When dealing with marbles in a jar, being in left field just means that you’ve failed to win a prize. When dealing with people problems, being in left field might just mean that you’ve lost something considerably more valuable. In this case, maybe it’s not so bad if you’ve only lost your marbles.

What does lack of control do?

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

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, our own stress response is one of the signals that tells us that we are in danger. When we feel threatened, we look for the threat. If our attempts to identify the threat and make it go away fail, we first start to see the people in other departments as the source of the threat, and eventually our own colleagues as well. Fear is not that precise an instrument! In a very real sense, it doesn’t matter if we are physically afraid or afraid of being embarrassed or losing status, the reactions are the same. If anything, our fear of embarrassment or loss of face is often greater than our fear of physical harm!

Thus, when fear takes over, cooperation and teamwork suffer. People start to fight over little things, as they attempt to exert control over something. When we feel out of control, we seek to take control of what we can in whatever ways we can. When we don’t know what to do, we do whatever we can, whether effective or not, whether appropriate or not.

Teams in Space

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

Go back to our discussion of silos and spaghetti in Chapter 1. When the borders between groups are vague and intermingled, you start to get spaghetti organizations. It’s easier to take information out of context: people chat with those around them, without really thinking about the context of the information they are discussing. A message meant for marketing might well be misinterpreted in engineering and vice-versa. In each case, the message might well have been delivered in the context of the team’s primary responsibilities; stripped of that context, the meaning changes.

On the flip side, when the interfaces between groups are difficult or hard to cross, you get silos. Locked doors or separate buildings are two obvious examples, but sometimes it’s just the attitude expressed toward those who “don’t belong here.” In New England, it’s customary to give directions in terms of the landmarks that used to exist: “Go straight down the road and turn right where Jack’s barn used to be before it burned down in ’92. Then continue to the…” and so on. This form of direction giving is something of a code to see who belongs and who doesn’t. When groups become too insular in their space, they stop communicating effectively. Mingling is good; you just don’t want the space intermingled.

“…Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives…”

– Sid Probstein, Chief Technology Officer, Attivio – Active Intelligence

Chasing the Ball

My son is eight years old. Like a lot of kids his age, he’s into baseball and plays in the kids’ Little League every spring. Watching a bunch of little kids playing baseball can be very entertaining. When someone on the other team scores a hit, most of the kids go chasing after the ball. When one of the kids finally catches up to it, they’ll usually throw it in the general direction of first base. Unfortunately, this is of limited use since the first baseman is usually part of the crowd that’s chasing the ball. That’s actually not a problem, however, since the two teams tend to pretty well matched in skills. In other words, having hit the ball, the runner might go the wrong direction, lap another runner, or forget to bear left at the base: he, and it is usually he, just keeps running in a straight line, sometimes into the game taking place on the next field over.

There are lessons to be learned from this. No, it’s not that the typical employee acts like an eight year old. Why would you think that?

What we can learn are some important lessons about workplace behavior. What we’re seeing with the kids is that they don’t really understand how baseball works. Sure, the rules were explained to them. As simple as they may seem to us today, to an eight year old, they are confusing. Perhaps more to the point, without context they are relatively meaningless. What does it mean to “round a base?” How about “steal a base and run home?” In one of my daughter’s favorite stories, Amelia Bedelia took that advice extremely literally: she gathered up each base and ran off the field and back home.

So how does this tie in to office behavior?

Structured goal setting is one of the most effective means of creating a productive work force. Despite this fact, it quite frequently fails to work. Goals are set but they are not successfully accomplished. The problem is one of context: just as the rules of baseball don’t initially make much sense to eight year olds because they lack sufficient context, so too do goals often lack context for newer employees, or on new projects, or when someone is on a new team, or when the team has a new manager. The more “new” in the mix, the greater the probability that the goals will be confusing. Moreover, most people won’t want to admit that they don’t really understand their goals. Indeed, the more the organization views asking for help as a sign of weakness, the less likely people will ask questions when their goals don’t make sense.  Even when the organization doesn’t have that little problem, it can still be difficult to get people to ask questions. Therefore, as a manager, you might have to have some questions prepared so that you can prime the metaphorical pump.

Another issue is recognizing something those kids do not: baseball is about playing your position. The second baseman doesn’t go running off randomly. He stays at second and waits for the ball to come to him, rather than running after the ball and slamming into the outfielder who is also trying to catch that ball. When that happens, rather than hitting a glove, the ball hits the ground. A big part of what makes a team member dependable is that they are where they should be when they should be there. When they are not, the system breaks down. We examples of that on both sides in the World Series. The Sox won in the end in large part because they were better at being where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there.

Similarly, in an office, people need to know what they are supposed to be doing and, to a lesser extent, not doing. For example, in software development, it’s not uncommon for a problem in one part of the code to trigger an “all hands on deck” callout. Everyone is expected to help solve the problem, whether they have anything to do with that piece of the code or not. Sure, it can be tempting to call everyone out to solve the problem, but in reality the people who know that part of the system best are the ones you want to have working on it. Adding unnecessary people to the mix only risks a metaphorical collision and a dropped ball.

Unfortunately, if you reward people for chasing the ball instead of playing their position, pretty soon you’ll have an entire team that goes chasing after every ball. The net result is that no one will be in the right spot at the right time, and your team will waste a lot of time and energy. It will also generate a lot of headaches. It can be difficult to not respond to every ball that goes by, but sometimes that’s what it takes.

In the end, baseball is about learning the context in which the rules and goals make sense and playing your position. The office is really not all that different.