The Business Sensei

Timeout for the Timeless Children

“Zaphod’s just this guy, you know.” – Gag Halfrunt

[Normally I blog about organizational psych. Today I’m blogging about Doctor Who]

I’ve been trying to figure out why “The Timeless Children” bugged me so much.

It’s not like Doctor Who never changes. It’s a show about change, and sometimes its hard to accept just how profoundly the show can change from one regeneration to another. I recall one regeneration where I thought the show had changed beyond recognition; where it seemed to be upending everything that made the Doctor the Doctor; where the very definition of the character seemed to change beyond recognition.

Jodie Whittaker? No, not Jodie Whittaker. Don’t be silly.

I’m talking about the time the 5^th Doctor unraveled the scarf and broke the sonic (or sonic screwdriver as it was called back then).

I’ve been watching the show for over 42 years, since I randomly turned it on one Saturday afternoon while sitting around the house bored. It so happened that I got the first episode of Robot, which fans my age (and hopefully others) will recognize as Tom Baker’s first serial. My introduction to the show was seeing this guy lying on the floor turning into someone else, and then seeing that person walk in and out of a blue box. Each time, he had on a different set of clothing until he emerged with the scarf (and I think the hat as well). I was hooked.

It was the late 1970s and getting Doctor Who on TV was challenging. By the time I left for college, I still hadn’t seen all of Tom Baker. It was a long time before I finally did, and saw my first regeneration (I’m not counting the bit at the beginning of Robot since I didn’t know what that was at the time). It took some getting used to, but it quickly apparent that the Doctor was still the Doctor, just with a different face. The physical details are a fun quirk of the character, but really the Doctor is always the Doctor, young or old, male or female, with or without a 12-foot-long scarf (that last one was hard to accept).  

But who was the Doctor? That wasn’t such a big deal back then. We knew the story: a young, disaffected Time Lord who couldn’t bring himself to sit idly by and watch others suffer, so he stole a TARDIS that was in for repairs. Nothing terribly complicated. The Doctor was no one in particular. The 4^th Doctor says as much in “The Brain of Morbius” when he challenges Morbius to mind-bending, with the goal of making Morbius’s artificial brain case short out.

Morbius: “You challenge me? I am a Time Lord of the First Rank! What are you?”

Doctor: “Oh, nothing, nothing. A mere nobody, but I don’t think you’re in the first rank anymore.”

Granted, the Doctor may not be telling the truth, but the way the contest goes it certainly seems as if he is. Morbius only loses because the brain-case shorts out, and he’s still able to deal a mortal blow to the Doctor. The Doctor is saved from death only because the Sisterhood gives him the Elixir of Life.

(Yes, I’m ignoring the whole bit about the images in the mind-bending contest because really just because some were previous regenerations doesn’t mean they all were. They could be anything.).

Now, of course, in the Timeless Children episode we find out that the Doctor is not the mere nobody claimed by the 4^th Doctor but she is something special: an eternal being, gifted with infinite regenerations, the source of Time Lord regenerative power. This rather ignores the earlier claim that regeneration somehow results from exposure to the Time Vortex, which is why Riversong could regenerate: her mother traveled in the TARDIS while pregnant, exposing River to the vortex from conception onward. But that’s a minor nit really.

So the Doctor isn’t a mere nobody. In fact the Doctor is really somebody. Or should that be Really Somebody?

So why should it matter that the Doctor is a mere nobody? In a sense, that’s the whole point of the Doctor: she’s not special. She’s not important. Oh maybe now, maybe after 3000 years or so, she’s become somebody important, but she didn’t start that way. She didn’t steal a TARDIS because she was special; she stole it because she wasn’t. She cared and wanted to do something, not stand idly by.

With Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who, we’re given someone who is no longer the nobody who took action and became someone important. Instead, we’re given a godlike being who has existed for billions of years, immortal, virtually unkillable (think about it – even Time Lords can die, so what does it take to survive for billions of years? Morbius’s body was disintegrated, and his brain couldn’t regenerate on its own, so there are limits. Yet the Doctor keeps on going.).

Even the Doctor’s motivation isn’t real any more: we see in the episode that an earlier incarnation of the entity that would become the Doctor (should we call that incarnation the Intern?) volunteered to be one of the agents who would go out and do the Time Lord’s (dirty) work. So maybe the Time Lords put a more romantic notion in their head, but ultimately Chibnall is telling us that the Doctor’s motivations may not even be the Doctor’s motivations. I’m not sure if that’s what Chibnall intended, but that’s the logical consequence of how its presented.

Again, why does it matter? Part of what makes the Doctor a sympathetic and approachable figure is that he or she is no one. The Doctor is the hero with a thousand faces (okay, in the Doctor’s case this is more than figurative. However, it shouldn’t be literal — see below). The point is, you don’t have to be a god to make a difference; you can start out as no one at all. As Gag Halfrunt reminded everyone, Zaphod Beeblebrox (to mix my shows, but, to be fair, Douglas Adams did write for Doctor Who), erstwhile president of the galaxy, was just this guy.

The Doctor can wear a scarf or a stalk of celery or a rainbow coat. The Doctor can be he or she. Those are all superficial. The character is everyone. But no longer. It’s no longer the story of a wanderer trying to do some good in the universe, and often (though not always) succeeding. Now it’s the story of a wandering god who perhaps has forgotten its divinity, but is still a god. It’s kind of like getting to the end of the Lord of the Rings and discovering that Frodo was really a Valar all along.

But Wait, It Gets Silly

Doctor Who has always had inconsistencies and continuity errors. That’s the nature of a time travel show where the rules are fluid. However, Timeless Children has a couple of other logical inconsistencies — or maybe “laugh out loud” moments — that go above and beyond even what is typical for the show.

In this brave new Who, the Doctor has been around for billions of years. If we assume an average incarnation duration of 500 years (which is probably optimistic given the Doctor’s lifestyle, but it’s an easy number to work with), that means that over a billion years there would be 2,000,000 Doctors. That is, 2,000,000 Doctors per1 billion years. We don’t know exactly how long Gallifreyans have existed, but the implication throughout the show is that they’ve been around a significant fraction of the universe’s 13 billion years of existence. So what does that give us? 8,000,000 Doctors? 10,000,000? More?

But wait, it gets sillier.

Did all the Doctors go to London in 1963? Jo Martin’s Doctor is supposedly a completely different regeneration set, yet somehow her TARDIS is stuck as a blue police box. How many other “first” Doctors did the same thing?

The population of London in the early 1960s was about 8,000,000 people. Given what appears to be a lot of Doctors visiting London in the same approximate time period, it’s odd that they’ve never bumped into each other. Or filled up the city. Are they source of the traffic congestion? Or is London a city of Doctors? Is the Doctor their own species? Can they reproduce with one another? Did the Doctor inspire Robert A Heinlein? (think about it…).

And who was the second agent in that brief scene where the Doctor’s early incarnation was being told they passed some test? The Master? Or maybe the Master is really a different set of Doctor incarnations? Let’s face it, there are enough to go around.

Speaking of the Master, how did he manage to destroy Gallifrey? Where did the Master get that sort of power and why didn’t any of the Time Lords regenerate?

Not that saving Gallifrey would be all that difficult. At least the first time Gallifrey was destroyed Russell Davies had the plot device that it was time locked as a result of the Time War and the Weapon. The Doctor couldn’t just go back and fix it, nor could the Time Lords easily escape through time (the whole point of David Tennant’s final stories). Now, though, the Time Lords of the past can always dispatch a Doctor, or even a few dozen Doctors, to fix it. Sometimes show-runners write themselves into corners. This corner has a trapdoor, a window, and a bloody big hole in the ceiling. Also, a door, and it’s unlocked.

On the other hand, why should we even care about Gallifrey anymore? What made the first destruction of Gallifrey poignant was the Doctor’s pain and loneliness. But now, Gallifrey doesn’t matter. The Doctor is alone no matter what. And somehow, it’s really hard to care.

The Master thought he could break the Doctor by showing her that there were more of her than she thought and that the Time Lords were using her. The Master blew it. He should have said, “You think you’re so good, so noble? You were programmed. You’re a deep-cover agent who was programmed to think you care and you volunteered to be programmed. You left Gallifrey because you were programmed to leave. You never made the choice.”

This is not the first time Doctor Who has had plot holes. Most of them, all things considered, were pretty small. This may well be the first time the plot hole is bigger on the inside.

Okay, now what?

So what really changes at this point?

Pre-Chibnall the Doctor was a wandering Time Lord, a member of somewhat mysterious species whom we think we know a lot about, but really don’t. The Doctor is long-lived, hard to kill, knowledgeable, and imperfect.

Now the Doctor is a wandering… something. A member of an even more mysterious species (the Thyme Lords?) from beyond the universe. The Doctor is long-lived, hard to kill, knowledgeable, and imperfect.

The Doctor is now special by birth.

There are now a lot more of the Doctor.

The writers can grant the Doctor ever more godlike powers because now the Doctor is some other being and they’re no longer constrained by what we thought we knew about the Time Lords.

For a big, earth-shattering (Gallifrey-shattering?) reveal, the Timeless Children manages to simultaneously feel huge and sort of silly at the same time.

Doctor Who has always been about change. But the changes existed in a tacit framework or set of constraints about who the character is and how the world works. The constraints on the story create the dramatic tension. A great story is one where the author sets up the rules of the world, creates what appears to be an impossible situation, and then reveals a solution that fits the constraints and is also (hopefully) unexpected. A poor story is one where the author just blows up the constraints whenever it’s convenient. And sure, skilled authors change the constraints of their stories all the time – they just do it in ways that aren’t obvious, which (at their best) don’t tip us off to what they’re up to, and which leave us feeling like it all made sense the whole time.

Maybe the best we can hope for is that it’ll turn out that the Master screwing around with Time created some sort of discontinuity, and this is the result. The Master “rewrote” some of the mathematics of the universe (perhaps in the style of Logopolis only more so) and fixing it will also remove all this nonsense from Chibnall. Unfortunately, I think we’ll have to wait for a new showrunner before that happens.

Three Cats, No Pride

I walked into the kitchen one morning to find all three of my cats playing together. I immediately wondered what was going on. The three cats never play together: the young male will happily play with either of the two, but the older female never wants to play with him. I started looking a little more carefully at what was actually going on.

At first glance, the cats were playing with one of the catnip mice we have kicking around. Then I noticed two more significant details: one, the mouse the cats were playing with was gray, not green. Two, when one of the cats dropped the mouse, it moved on its own. This is not a trait typically associated with catnip mice.

These two observations led, in turn, to a reevaluation of the action. The cats were not playing with one another. Rather, they were all attempting to be the one cat who caught the mouse. However, as soon as one cat dropped the mouse and it started running, another cat would block the first cat from chasing it. This would leave the third cat free to chase the mouse. As soon as the mouse was cornered, it would immediately bare its little tiny teeth and raise its little tiny claws and squeak fiercely at the cat. This would so surprise the cat that it would hesitate, the mouse would run, and another cat would get in the way again.

It was very much like an old Tweety and Sylvester cartoon, in which Sylvester and a strange cat spent more time fighting one another over which one of them would get to eat Tweety than they did trying to catch Tweety, with the result that neither got the bird. With the real cats, I eventually caught the mouse and tossed it outside. Had the cats cooperated, of course, the cartoon bird and the real mouse would each have been toast.

What we had here was the proverbial failure of teamwork. Like many teams, there was a clear and agreed upon goal: for the cats, it was catching the mouse; in the office, it is the moral equivalent. What there was not, however, was any organization or leadership. Without leadership, the cats had no pride. Similarly, in an office environment, a lack of leadership means wasted effort, miscommunications, and a lack of pride in the work. In other words, having what is nominally a common goal doesn’t work well without someone there to provide direction and to communicate that goal to the team. For example, the creations from Black Lagoon Technology are routinely badly flawed because the company insists on a policy of leaderless teams. Lacking leadership, the team members constantly argue and get in one another’s way until the pressure of a looming deadline either causes the team to come together to throw something out the door, or causes the team to come together to blame one another for failing to throw something out the door. This approach cost the company on the order of six figures per month in customer refunds and cancelled contracts. To make matters worse, much like the cats and the mouse, new companies were starting to enter their space and steal their customers.

Solving the problem involved a recognition that leaderless teams literally don’t work: to wit, they get nothing done.

It is the job of the leader to not just get team members excited and working together, but to keep them that way. People work hard when they have pride in their work. While threats of being fired may produce compliance, pride in the work is what produces commitment, enthusiasm, and the willingness to put in that little extra effort that makes the difference between “good enough” and “outstanding.” It is the leader’s ability to effectively and enthusiastically show each member of the team how their contribution matters that determines the quality of the outcome.

 Like the cats, when there is no pride, there is no teamwork. If you want to be successful, your team members need to care about what they are doing and take pride in the outcome. Otherwise, you may as well be herding cats.

Plays Well With Others

Once upon a time, for that is how these stories always begin, there was a brilliant engineer. This brilliant engineer could come up with all sorts of creative ideas in a flash. Because of this, he decided to start a company. His company did reasonably well, although it did have some problems. One of the big problems was that this brilliant engineer, now a brilliant CEO, was not always all that skilled at playing well with others. He always had the best answers to all the technical challenges the company was facing.

Now, to be fair, his answers really were the best, at least according to some standards. On a technical level, he understood the technology of his business extremely well. His solutions were always technically brilliant. And that is where the problem arose.

One day, an engineer in the company was charged with developing a solution to a particularly vexing problem. This engineer went off and studied the problem. He worked hard at the problem. On the appointed day and hour, he presented his solution. Everyone loved the solution except, sadly, for the brilliant CEO. He knew the technology like no one else, and he immediately saw A Better Way. Over the course of the next few minutes, the CEO proceeded to demolish the engineer’s solution. Indeed, he reduced it to metaphorical rubble. If the engineer’s idea had been a village in Eastern Europe, it would have looked like the Great Mongol Horde had just swept through, leaving no stone standing upon another stone nor any blade of grass unplucked.

And then, the brilliant CEO explained how it could have been done better. Truly, it is said by some, that he waxed poetic in his analysis of what to do and how to do it.

There was but one small, one tiny problem: no one understood what he was talking about. Everyone did agree that his solution was clearly better, but, alas, they were simply not sufficiently worthy to understand it. When the CEO had finished speaking, the incomprehension in the room was of such depth that even Nik Wallenda, that master daredevil  who crossed the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, might well have hesitated before attempting to traverse it.

In the end, there was nothing. Rather than a functional idea and a staff of loyal engineers motivated and enthusiastic about carrying it out, the company was left with no plan at all. An imperfect plan, well, that can always be improved. But no plan at all? That can be a bit of a problem.

Sadly, for the brilliant CEO, this was not the first time this sort of thing had happened. Having the Great Mongol Horde sweep across the landscape of ideas, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake, is not something that any company can long survive. In such an environment, it is not long before people stop suggesting ideas lest they draw the attention of that aforementioned Great Mongol Horde. The Board of Directors came to the same conclusion, and decided that it was time for the CEO’s tenure to also come to a conclusion. He was forced out, and the company went on its way without him. Perhaps their ideas were no longer quite so brilliant, but they had ideas. Perhaps their plans were no longer quite so ambitious and clever, but they had plans. Perhaps their products were no longer quite so perfect, but they had products.

From this, we can draw several important lessons:

1. When you crush every plan or idea people propose, eventually they stop proposing ideas or suggesting plans. It is unwise for one person to be left as the sole source of ideas.
2. Tearing people down does not motivate them. Indeed, it does precisely the opposite. If you want to motivate people, find ways to build them up.
3. If it can’t or won’t be built, it doesn’t matter how perfect it is. Insert whatever you’d like for “it.”
4. Having the best mousetrap today is less valuable than having a consistent, repeatable process for developing good solid buildable mousetraps.
5. Point 4 will only happen when you know how to connect with your team and build them up.

In the end, playing well with others might not guarantee that you will live happily ever after, but it helps.

That’s Impossible!

Remember the old Bugs Bunny cartoons? There would be a sudden snowfall and Bugs would strap a pair of tennis rackets to his feet and voila: instant snowshoes. These amazing tennis snowshoes would let Bugs run effortlessly along the top of the snow. It’s one of those things that looks incredibly easy, until you actually try it. Then it turns out that while snowshoes do help, it’s not quite so smooth and effortless as Bugs Bunny might have you believe. In fact, what Bugs did was impossible, at least outside the world of cartoon logic.

Attending a jujitsu clinic a few years ago, I had the opportunity to take a class from a 75 jujitsu master, a seventh degree black belt. He effortlessly threw people fifty years younger and easily a hundred pounds heavier than he was. It was quite the impressive demonstration. When the rest of us tried to imitate his technique, we had somewhat less success than he did. It wasn’t long before we were dripping with sweat and gasping for breath.

“This is impossible!” exclaimed one person angrily. “It’s all a trick!”

Now, to be fair, when you’re late twenties and in top physical condition, it’s pretty upsetting to watch a skinny 75 year old effortlessly doing what you cannot do. It’s even more upsetting when he effortlessly does it to you. But was it impossible? It really does take a special kind of person to argue that something is impossible, especially after experiencing that something up close and personal.

Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, was famous for the loyalty he engendered in his employees. When an IBM salesman was badly injured in a car accident that killed his wife and young son, Watson was waiting in the man’s hospital room when he woke up. Watson wanted to make sure the man knew that everything that IBM could do for him, IBM was doing for him. When a train full of IBMers on their way to the World Fair went off the rails, Watson drove out to the middle of nowhere New York to organize the rescue efforts.

Dramatic as these incidents were, they had their real power because they emphasized something that was already there. Tom Watson built loyalty by building relationships. He traveled around the company, visiting people, talking with them, getting to know them. No matter what job you did, Watson was willing to speak with you. As the company grew bigger, he hired managers who could do the same thing. People at IBM knew one another; because they knew one another, they trusted one another; because they trusted one another, they were loyal to one another and to the company. In its heyday, IBM was known for its customer focus and the customer loyalty it built. That customer loyalty came from employee loyalty: dedicated, loyal employees care about the business and that creates dedicated, loyal customers.

I’ve been told by many CEOs that Watson’s approach is impossible today. It just won’t work. They don’t have enough time or they have more important things to do. People are different, times are different, the world is different. The explanations are sometimes long, sometimes short, always persuasive, and always wrong.

Building loyalty isn’t difficult, once you know what you’re doing, but it requires consistent, sustained effort. Watson demonstrated loyalty every chance he had, and he made sure that he had lots of chances. It’s taking the time to do it that derails so many would-be CEOs: they want instantaneous results or instant loyalty. Watson built loyalty so that it was there when he needed it. At Silver Key Systems, their CEO took Watson’s lessons seriously. He took the time to get to know his employees. He built connections and kept them going. Most importantly, he was always sincere when he asked someone about their bicycle race or congratulated an employee whose daughter had just landed a part in the school play. When Silver Key hit a bad economic period, employees stuck with the company and pulled it through. Today, it is a thriving business. You might even have recognized the CEO and the real name of the company by now.

Running along the top of the snow like Bug Bunny in snowshoes is impossible. However, with a little effort and practice, you can certainly learn to move pretty well in snowshoes. You can definitely move a lot faster and through much deeper snow than you can without them.

Learning to throw someone twice your size does take more effort and a good instructor, but that too is eminently possible. The guy who decided it was impossible didn’t learn it. The rest of us got the basic idea and are getting better at it the more we practice. You can’t even start, though, until you believe that it can be done.

Learning to inspire loyalty in your employees is neither as impossible as running on snow, nor as difficult as learning to throw a person. It is an eminently teachable skill. It does, however, require that you believe that it can be done and that it is worth doing.

Some people find the idea of snowshoeing lots of fun and are willing to make the effort to do it even they can’t pull a Bugs Bunny. Some people find the idea of being able to throw someone twice their size cool and exciting. Suffering the bumps and bruises of practice is worth it to them.

What is employee loyalty worth to you?

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a… Frog?

A frog?

Well, okay, it wasn’t a frog. But that incongruous answer definitely got people’s attention in the old Underdog cartoon. The whole phrase, minus the frog anyway, was made famous by the old Superman cartoons of the 1940s, before it was parodied by Underdog and Rocky the Flying Squirrel in the 1960s. The fact is, when we see something flying through the air, we can be reasonably certain that it really is a bird or a plane, not Superman or a flying dog, squirrel, or even frog. However, if it were one of those things, we’d probably have much the same reaction as the people in the cartoons: at first glance, we’d see what we expect to see, not what it is actually there.

Professional magicians rely on this phenomenon all the time. It’s not so much that the hand is quicker than the eye, it’s that in an ambiguous setting, the eye can be fooled quite easily. This can be quite enjoyable when watching a magic show. In competitive sports, such as fencing or judo, that sense of ambiguity or uncertainty is what makes it fun. On the other hand, being tricked into seeing and responding to the wrong thing is particularly frustrating as you can quickly have points scored against you. At least the feedback is immediate and you can quickly adjust your strategy now that you know what to look for.

If you’re leading a team or a business, however, that rapid feedback is frequently not present. While most people know to doubt the evidence of their senses if they do happen to see a flying dog, squirrel, or frog in or out of the office, most ambiguous situations are not so clear cut. The problem with ambiguous scenarios is that when we don’t know exactly what to do, we tend to do what we can do. As many an athlete has learned, that’s not usually the way to win.

The problem with ambiguous situations is that, without appropriate training, we tend to see what we expect, a bird or a plane, not what is actually there: that rare flying frog. Or, to be a little less facetious, we tend to ignore the warning signs of trouble exactly because we are so focused on the success we expect to find. After all, those warning signs probably won’t amount to anything.

The fencer, of course, solves this problem through training. When something they ignored hits them, in a very literal sense, they practice to avoid making the same mistake. They can do that because they are in an environment in which they get rapid feedback and in which they have a coach who can help them analyze what happened.

For a manager or a business leader, it’s more difficult. While I’ve certainly helped various managers, directors, and so forth, analyze a situation and develop a plan to move forward, coaching is only half the solution. The other half is learning to become comfortable in ambiguous situations. Like the athlete, we have to become aware of the types of mistakes we tend to make before we can act to correct those mistakes.

The secret, in turn, to becoming comfortable in ambiguous situations is to spend time in ambiguous situations. However, not all scenarios are created equal. Fencers learn to deal with ambiguous situations in fencing by practicing sword play. Judo players learn to deal with ambiguity by practicing throwing one another competitively. We want to be in scenarios that require us to use our professional skills: that force us to lead others, motivate people who may not be interested in our goals, and negotiate with those who are opposed to our success.

In one such predictive scenario, a manager wasn’t sure whether he could count on a particular team member. He responded to that uncertainty by minimizing the person’s involvement. Eventually, that person become so frustrated that he went to another team in the exercise and offered to work with them. They enthusiastically accepted his contribution. His original team failed to complete their goals without his involvement. Afterward, that same manager was able to recognize that his handling of similar situations in the office had cost the company several top employees. Similar situations provoke similar behaviors… and results. Finding out what those results are is much cheaper in an exercise than in the real world.

Whether you see what is there or whether you overlook key clues is up to you. What are you doing to increase your ability to handle ambiguity?

China Design Torture

China can be a problem.

No, not the country. The dishes. Choosing a China pattern can be a particularly stressful and exhausting proposition, a form of torture not dreamt of by the Inquisition. And somehow, I suspect that making people have to choose China patterns as an interrogation method wouldn’t make particularly convincing television. Nonetheless, the process of making multiple decisions leaves many people so drained they can’t make even a simple decision afterward.

Decision making is an interesting phenomenon. As simple as making a decision may seem, it turns out that we can only make so many decisions each day. Actually, let me be more precise: we can only make so many good decisions each day. The more decisions we make, the harder each one becomes. And while taking a break or having a meal can help recharge our decision points, that trick only goes so far.  Ultimately, decision points run out and the only option for recharging is rest.

How much of a problem decision fatigue causes really depends on what you’re deciding. If it’s China patterns, maybe that’s not such a big deal so long as you don’t mind becoming skilled at covering the plate with food. However, if you’re making major financial decisions or running a company, well, that’s a bit more serious. Making the wrong decisions can have long-term consequences, and, in this case, there are two types of wrong decisions: first, there are what most people think of as wrong decisions. When we run out of decision points we become increasingly prone to decisions that appear to not change anything, but which lead to poor outcomes: decisions which make the problem worse, decisions that miss critical opportunities, and decisions that lead us down blind alleys.

Then there’s making the wrong decisions: making decisions that are below your paygrade. If you spend your points making decisions that could be handled by someone else, then you risk not having anything left for the more important financial and strategic decisions that can only be made at your level. The second type of wrong decisions leads inexorably to the first. If you use up your decision points on decisions that should be made by other people, you will inevitably miss strategic opportunities, persist when you should change direction, and become up close and personal with a lot of blind alleys.

Knowing how decision-making works is the easy part. Changing how you make decisions is hard. It requires a lot of decisions! It requires putting in the time and energy to find and train people who can make those lower-level decisions for you. It requires creating the infrastructure so that they have the necessary information. And, it requires accepting that they may not make exactly the same decisions you would make; rather, the question is whether or not they are making decisions that you can work with.

Fortunately, there are ways to make it easier to make good decisions.

• The best decisions are made early in the day, after lunch, and after an afternoon break. There is a theme here: being rested and having eaten recently do help with making better decisions. In general, it’s better to sleep on a decision than make it late in the day.

• Conduct meetings and discussions in light, well-ventilated rooms. Recent studies find that the carbon dioxide content of meeting rooms goes up rapidly with only a few people in the room. Sitting in a stuffy meeting room quickly makes us feel sleepy and interferes with our abilities to make good decisions.

• Take frequent breaks. Decision making is an endurance activity. Don’t try to sprint the marathon.
• Don’t make important decisions after choosing China patterns 😊.

• And, circling back around to the beginning, avoid making decisions below your paygrade. Use your good decision-making time to create the infrastructure you need to delegate. Save for yourself the decisions that only you can really make.

The ability to make good decisions is a powerful, yet limited asset. Treat it accordingly.

Leaders, Followers, and Jokers

As an organizational psych professor, I would ask my students to list leaders. They could name anyone from real life or fiction. The list invariably included famous historical figures like George Washington and Abe Lincoln, well-known business figures like Steve Jobs or (later) Tim Cook, fictional characters like James Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard, Luke Skywalker, and even Aragorn from Lord of the Rings.

Eventually, I’d pause and ask the students if they could identify anything that all of their leaders had in common and anything that was missing.

With enough prompting the class eventually noticed the obvious: the lists were almost entirely made up of men, usually white men, and the choices of leaders listed were mostly unaffected by the racial and gender makeup of the class. This is one of those results that is both unsurprising and surprisingly unimportant. While race and gender are certainly factors, they are also hard to change. Going down the rabbit hole of the obvious obscures the more interesting questions: what else did these leaders have in common, and what causes some people to be seen as leaders and others not to be seen as leaders?

The key point that students consistently missed is that leaders have followers. A leader without followers is just some joker taking a walk. While this may sound like the first rule of tautology club (which is the first rule of tautology club), the relationship between leaders and followers changes the question to “how do I get followers?” This isn’t always easy.

How leaders get followers varies considerably with the leader and the situation. For example, being tall and having a deep voice — characteristics more common in men than women — can provide a significant leg up. However, if that doesn’t describe you, there are plenty of other methods. Indeed, one of the key points in understanding leadership and how to become a leader is realizing that there are many paths and part of being a successful leader is figuring out the techniques that work for you. While I’ll talk about a few of them here, I can’t possibly cover all of them in a short article.

Leaders are perceived as being confident. Therefore, appearing confident is a way of looking like good leadership material. Unfortunately, appearing confident doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is actually competent. Appearances can be deceiving, and often are. However, just as our fictional leaders always seem to know what to do and always appear very confident when they take risks, we expect the same of our real leaders. Similarly, appearing to be energetic makes you seem more like a leader; conversely, if you can make other people seem low-energy, they will also be seen as less charismatic, and hence less like a good leader.

One of the currently popular concepts around leadership that we hear in politics is the “beer” metric: is this someone I’d like to have a beer with? The beer metric is really a narrow slice of the more general concept of likability. It’s well established that people like to do business with someone they like, so good salesmen try to get you to like them. Some leaders will do the same, particularly if likeability is important to them being a leader. Naturally, it is to a potential leader’s advantage to define likeability in terms that favor them and exclude as many other people as possible. If it’s the case that the beer metric were to favor, as a wild example, men over women, then it is clearly advantageous for a man to emphasize that metric. Understanding that’s what is being done makes it easier to reframe the debate and focus on other areas of likeability.

A powerful likeability technique is demonstrating that you are similar to your potential followers. This can be done via speech patterns, cultural references, modes of dress, shared activities, and pretty much anything else you can think of. A particularly pernicious form of similarity is created by attacking outside groups, such as the other teams in sports, other companies in business, or other racial or ethnic groups in politics. Attacking the Other creates a point of reference that is not your target group of followers. Because the Other is now a psychological anchor, the differences between the would-be leader and their potential followers are minimized (or erased) by comparison. This may not be such a terrible thing if we’re talking about Red Sox vs. Yankees, but can easily spin out of control as the stakes get higher.

A strong situational component of leadership is that leaders are seen as providing safety, structure, and inclusion. How much these factors matter depends on the specific circumstances. In small groups where no one really knows anyone else, the person best at providing structure and sense of safety often becomes the leader. Even when a formal leader is assigned to the group, de facto leadership may well devolve on the person who best provides for a sense of safety and inclusion. Creating structure, for example by helping people know how to behave or how to deal with a confusing situation, is seen as a mark of leadership. Potential leaders who can do that, even if by creating chaos that they then solve, can build followers, particularly since chaotic situations are harder to keep track of and the relief when the chaos is resolved is often a powerful form of “safety.” Indeed, one of the very effective strategies I’ve observed in years of live role-playing games is that if you can get people excited, scared, confused, or into a variety of other strong emotional states, and then provide them a path of action, they will usually take it. That’s in a game; it works even better in real life.

One of the funny things about attracting followers is that eventually it becomes a self-perpetuating process. Here’s a simple experiment you can do with the help of a few friends: on a city street, stare up at a spot on a building. Every five minutes or so one of your friends joins you. While one person staring at a wall is just a joker staring at a wall, once several people are doing it random people start to join in. They might even convince themselves that they’re seeing something. So yes, one way to get followers is to pay people to be followers until the real ones show up.

Ultimately, leadership is really about attracting followers. Without followers, you don’t have a leader, you have a joker. The mere presence of followers is often enough to attract more followers, and so on, leading to the impression that you are following the leader. Therefore, when someone impresses you as a good leader, see if you can spot the techniques they’re using to get you to feel that way.

There’s a lot more to this topic and I’ll talk about some other techniques in future posts.

Balanced For Success

The story is told of a young student watching Aikido founder, O’Sensei Morehei Ueshiba, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. No matter what the opponent did, he could never strike Ueshiba or throw him to the ground. Afterward, the youngster said to Ueshiba, “Master, you never lose your balance. What is your secret?”

The master replied, “You are wrong. I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it.”

Ueshiba could not be thrown because he knew the instant he was off balance by even the slightest degree, and he would shift to regain his balance before his opponent could take advantage of the opening. From the outside, though, this constant adjustment was invisible. It appeared to observers and to those he fought that he never lost his balance.

Ueshiba recognized that training with the idea that he would never be off balance was an impossibility: either through the skill of an opponent or through mischance, sooner or later he would be drawn off balance. If he always planned to be on balance, then that moment of off-balancing would prove to be his undoing. Thus, he trained not to be perfectly on balance, but to rapidly and smoothly recognize being off balance and correct it before it could be used against him.

In the business world, being physically off balance may not happen all that often, at least not the way that Ueshiba Sensei might experience it. However, being mentally off balance can happen quite easily, with potentially devastating results. Consider Darren, the CEO of a mid-sized, publically traded company. One quarter, his company missed its numbers. This had never happened to him before, and he was stunned. Rather than stopping to regain his mental equilibrium, he panicked. Within two weeks, he’d sold the company for a song to his largest competitor. Darren did learn from the experience, though, as his performance in his most recent, highly successful, venture demonstrates: he’s managed to regain his balance despite several significant setbacks, and come back stronger each time.

Fortunately, learning to regain your balance isn’t that difficult: the hardest part is remembering to do it! Unlike Ueshiba Sensei, if it takes you a few minutes, or even a day, to collect yourself, odds are no one will be throwing you to the ground in that time. There are a number of techniques that are used by martial artists and Olympic athletes when they need to rapidly recover their mental or physical balance in competition.

The first is a technique used by martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Whenever he felt disoriented or overwhelmed, he would ask himself what he had just thought or imagined to make himself feel that way. He would then imagine writing that thought down on a piece of paper, crumpling it up, and throwing it away. That let him focus on what could go right instead of what might go wrong.

Another technique is to simply pay attention to your breathing: a few deep breaths can work wonders. When we’re feeling off balance, though, the tendency is to take short, rapid breaths. Deep breathing breaks the cycle and convinces our bodies that the danger is past, allowing us to think clearly and act calmly.

Ueshiba achieved his amazing ability to regain his balance by paying attention to his balance all the time. Any time he noticed he was standing off balance or in poor posture, he would adjust his position. He would also stand when riding the subway and not hold on to anything: the fine art of subway surfing. Paying attention to balance all the time seems like a lot of effort, but the exercise becomes second nature very quickly. Oddly enough, when someone is physically on balance, it is very difficult to take them mentally off balance.

One mistake many managers and even CEOs make is to talk to someone close to them in the company. Unfortunately, when the problem is at the company, the other person is also off balance. Two people who have both lost their balance are going to be figuratively hanging onto one another to avoid falling over: very amusing when done in a slapstick comedy, but not so funny at the office. This is what happened to Darren: by talking to the people around him, he only magnified his sense of being off balance. Instead, find someone unconnected to the company with whom you can talk. This can be a close friend, coach, or trusted advisor. Their lack of deep emotional involvement means that they are not going to be knocked off balance and hence will be able to act as a stable anchor.

In the end, Murphy’s Law is inevitable. It’s not a question of whether it will knock you off balance, but how rapidly you’ll recover when it does.

The Solution is the Problem

“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 which 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, that 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.

It Was Supposed to Fly?

“Alright, let’s see it fly.”

“We can’t do that.”

“What do you mean, you can’t do that? It’s a helicopter. Of course it flies!”

“Look at the specs. You didn’t say it had to fly!”

Imagine that you’re in a design contest to build a helicopter. You are being evaluated on various criteria such as efficiency, beauty, cost to build, and so forth. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable contest. In fact, it actually exists, although the details are omitted to protect the guilty.

The second place finishers designed a really quite excellent helicopter. There was only reason they didn’t come in first was that their helicopter wasn’t as cheap to build as the winning model. The second place model included an engine.

I wish I could make this stuff up!

The team designing the first place helicopter noticed a minor omission in the criteria: there was no rule that said that the copter actually had to fly! They saved an enormous amount on cost and weight by not including an engine. As a side benefit, their helicopter was also the most fuel efficient and the safest model in the contest.

It didn’t actually work, but that wasn’t an official requirement at the time.

While we might celebrate the team’s ability to think outside the box, there are times when being inside the box isn’t such a bad place to be. Imagine shipping non-working helicopters to the customer… possibly not a problem if the customer ordered scale models for a display or for kids to sit in, but maybe not such a good idea if the customer wants to fly rescue missions. Indeed, when dealing with customers, it’s often a good idea not to get fixated on exactly what the customer says they want: what the customer asks for is often their best guess as to what they want, not something that will actually solve their problem.

Soak Systems, a software vendor, landed a huge contract with a certain major telecommunications company. The telecom provided Soak with a very detailed set of specifications for what they wanted. The company set a team of engineers to work on the contract. Although several people wondered aloud about some of the elements in the spec, no one bothered to go and ask anyone at the telecom. After all, the reasoning went, if they didn’t explicitly say they wanted something, clearly they must not want it. No doubt it would all make sense to the customer.

After all, helicopters don’t really need to fly.

When Soak delivered the product, it was, shall we say, missing the engine.

Confronted with this, everyone at Soak, from the lowest engineer to the VP of engineering to the CEO all responded by saying, “But we gave you what you asked for. And just look at how elegant and efficient our solution is!”

Replied the telecom, “You didn’t solve the problem.”

“But you didn’t say it had to have an engine! And it is what you asked for, so stop complaining.”

Fundamentally, when a customer has a problem, they can really only imagine the solutions they wish you could provide. If you don’t know how to ask them what their problems are and then help them see how your solutions can benefit them you are likely to deliver a helicopter without an engine.

Even worse, most of the time what the customer is actually complaining about is not the problem at all: they are complaining about the symptoms of the problem. They might think that they are solving the problem, but really all they’re doing is treating symptoms. The software the Soak designed did, in fact, address some of the more irritating manifestations of the problem, carefully replacing those manifestations with a different set of irritating manifestations. They no more solved the actual problem than painting a helicopter green, making it soundproof, and providing a really good stereo system will enable it to fly. Only providing an engine will do that.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how elegant and efficient your solution is if it doesn’t work!

Thus, it’s critical to take the time to find out what’s behind what your customer is looking for. What do they really want and why do they want it?

Realizing that the rules don’t specify that the helicopter needs to fly may work fine in a contest, but it doesn’t win you friends in the real world.

The contest rules were subsequently corrected. The cool thing about design competitions is that each year you get a do-over. Soak, on the other hand, did not.

What are you doing to make sure you know how to speak to your customers?