The Business Sensei

Spotting the Gordian Knot

Fans of cycling’s Tour de France might recognize the name of Johann Bruyneel, the coach who helped Lance Armstrong  become the first man to win the Tour seven times in a row. Lance Armstrong is undoubtedly one of the best cyclists alive today. What can a coach offer him?

Simple. Lance can’t see the back of his own head. Johann can.

In other words, Johann provides external feedback. He is the person who can step back and see the big picture and provide Lance Armstrong with knowledgeable, expert feedback. That feedback, in turn, enables Lance to improve his cycling skills and consider strategies that he might never have imagined on his own. Johann’s not magic of course; as the 2010 Tour demonstrated, even Lance can be defeated by age and bad luck.

Nonetheless, the advantage of having that person showing you the back of your own head is invaluable. As part of a management training exercise, I provided participants with a variety of items and each person had to obtain various different items to accomplish their goals. As expected, the participants immediately started trading with one another.

Where events became interesting, though, was when they started to notice that no one had certain items, or at least would not admit to having them. The people who needed the “missing” items became convinced that other people were holding out on them. They then responded by actually holding out on other people, until eventually no one would trade with anyone else. Before long, the group became paralyzed; they were unable to accomplish the relatively simple task they had been given.

What made this scenario particularly intriguing, though, was that the group was so focused on its initial assumption about how to solve the problem that they were apparently incapable of considering alternatives. For example, the person who needed an apple could have obtained one from the cafeteria. The person who needed leaves from a tree could have walked outside and picked some off one of the many trees visible through the windows, and so on.

Stories of Alexander the Great tell of his being confronted with the Gordian knot, a knot so complex that it could not be untied. Alexander solved the problem by slicing it in two with his sword. When I pointed out to the participants in my exercise some of the alternative paths to solving their problems, their reaction was comparable to what I imagine was the reaction of those who saw Alexander slice the knot: stunned silence, followed by head slapping and cries of “Why didn’t I think of that?!”

To be fair, the inhabitants of ancient Telmissus probably didn’t do Homer Simpson dope slaps, but I suspect they had a very recognizable equivalent!

The key point, though, is that the people actually involved in the exercise were no more able to see the alternate solutions than Alexander’s contemporaries were capable of thinking of cutting through the knot. Confronted with a knotty problem, as it were, they locked into one approach to solving that problem. It took an outsider to consider something different.

In sports, locking into a strategy can be devastating. One top US saber fencer gained quite a reputation when he launched a series of attacks, and promptly got hit. So he did it again, and got hit. He lost the match because he couldn’t see the back of his own head: he couldn’t break out the mindset that the particular strategy he was using simply wasn’t working against that particular opponent. He was so sure that it would eventually start working that he refused to consider anything else.

In a business environment, this sort of blindness can be even more expensive. At one company, a belief about how client training should be conducted was costing the company business. They were losing engagements left and right. Their attempts to reverse the losses were focused on sales campaigns and aggressive marketing. Even though the company was filled with experts in the business, no one could see the real problem; instead, they were locked into an ineffective delivery strategy. It wasn’t until an outsider looked at what they were doing and informed them that the fundamental problem was that the training was ineffective that things changed. Quite simply, how they taught wasn’t working: clients felt that they were wasting their time and money and not learning anything. Once they understood what was actually going on, they were able to cut their particular Gordian knot and business picked up rapidly thereafter.

So how do you see the back of your own head? One way is to find someone who isn’t steeped in the assumptions of the organization, someone who will ask the “stupid” questions because they don’t know what to take for granted. Another method is to spend some time looking at what you are doing and brainstorm alternate methods of accomplishing each task. You do this whether or not the task is already completed or on going. The key is to view how you’re doing things as merely one suggested method instead of as holy writ. Best of all, of course, is to use both methods.

Once you have the perspective of the back of your own head, it’s amazing how easy it is to spot, and cut, that Gordian knot!

The Team Driver Paradox

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Imagine for a moment that you’re taking a ride on the subway, or, as we say here in Boston, the “T.” Somewhere up in that front car is a driver. That person sits in a little chamber and drives the train along the tracks. Someone not familiar with the T might assume that the driver isn’t doing much at all: after all, the trains are traveling through tunnels most of the time and along tracks all of the time. Yet, when an accident occurs due to a driver texting, it becomes painfully clear that the driver is doing a great deal. It just may not be obvious.

Driving a car is oddly similar to the train: When my children were very young, they didn’t understand just how much I was doing as the driver. They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t pick up a dropped toy or why I was tired after a long drive. Adults who don’t drive have more of an appreciation of the concentration involved than do children, but still tend to grossly under- or overestimate it. Indeed, if you were driving along a large, empty Midwestern highway, someone unfamiliar with driving might well assume that you were doing nothing at all, just sitting there as the car effortlessly zoomed down that long, straight road. The actions and almost constant adjustments you make are so small, so apparently insignificant, as to easily escape notice, unless, of course, you didn’t do them. Then everyone would notice!

In a very odd way, a successful team is much like that car, and the leader of the team much like the driver. In the best performing teams, it often appears that the leader isn’t doing much of anything. In fact, it often seems that the leader could be removed and the team would go on without a problem. That’s true, in the same way that the car would continue down the highway if you removed the driver and simply put a brick on the accelerator. If you decide to try that, please let me know so that I can be somewhere far away!

I have had CEOs, vice presidents, directors, and other executives and senior managers tell me that their company has leaderless teams. They even insist that their teams are performing at a very high level. Despite that, earnings are not where they could be, products are shipping late, and there is a very high degree of failure work. The teams, when looked at more closely by an outsider, turn out to be more along the lines of disorganized hordes. There is little sense of team spirit or community, rather each person is out for him or herself. Goals are vague, often to the point of uselessness. That’s OK, though, because everyone is operating on the basis that “there’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.” In one particularly egregious example, the following conversation occurred at product review meeting I attended:

Manager: “Is the feature complete?”

Engineer: “Yes.”

Manager: “Does it work?”

Engineer: “There are some bugs.”

Manager: “What’s wrong with it?”

Engineer: “The code’s not written.”

Luckily, I had already swallowed my coffee!

The most amazing part of the whole meeting is that no one seemed to find this particularly odd. It was simply seen as a normal part of how business was conducted. If that guy got fired, oh well, someone else would take his place. Without someone to lead, the team really never figured out which way to go and no one really cared.

That said, there are certainly times when it appears that a team is functioning just fine without a leader. You may even have been lucky enough to have seen such a team in action. Like the driver of the car, there’s a leader there. He or she just may not be obvious, until you take them away. That team and that leader did not start out working at that level. Rather, like any new driver, there were undoubtedly some bumps and wrong turns along the way. Even for experienced drivers, it can take a while to get used to a new car, to learn all of its idiosyncrasies and quirks. The apparently leaderless team is the product of a lot of hard work. It’s also not really leadless; it just appears that way.

Like the driver of the car, the apparently insignificant, or even invisible, adjustments made by that leader are working to keep the team from going too fast and burning out, from going off the road, or even from smashing into an unexpected obstacle. The results are only obvious when the leader is removed. By then, of course, it’s often too late.

If you truly think you have a leaderless team, look again. The leader may not be obvious, but he or she is there. And if you want to have a leaderless team, be patient. You can’t start that way and you won’t get there without some bumps along the road!