The Business Sensei

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.

Tortoise and Hare Schedules

Remember the old story of the tortoise and the hare? Aesop’s old fable about a race between the extremely fast hare and the slow tortoise is a famous one, appearing in countless children’s books. It also made its appearance on Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Bugs Bunny Show. In the latter case, the role of the hare was played by no less a personage than Bugs Bunny himself, which is almost, but not completely, totally unlike getting Sir Lawrence Olivier to appear in a high school production of Hamlet.

The fact is, though, the story has tremendous longevity. This little race fable has, as it were, “legs.” If there is one thing that story tortoise, it’s that speed simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, one of the fastest people I’ve ever met was a 75 year old Judo master. He never seemed to move all that much, but no matter how fast we tried to hit him, somehow we always hit the ground instead. His secret, he told us, was that we simply had to be in the right place at the right time. As long as we could do that, we didn’t have to move very fast.

This same question of speed plays into how we experience time and, by extension, how productive we are. When we feel that we don’t have much time, we try to move faster. This is tiring: the hare, as you’ll recall, fell asleep before the end of the race. Not only that, and odd as it may sound, the faster we move, the less time we feel like we have. In a shocking counterpoint to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says that the faster we go the more time slows down, when we go fast, time seems to speed up as well. My physicist friends assure me, however, that this would change if I could simply move at a rate approaching the speed of light. Failing that, we need to learn to experience time differently, and use time in ways that maximize our productivity without leaving us exhausted.

Fortunately, there are ways to do this. Instead of viewing time as ticks on a clock or blocks on a calendar, we need to step back from that rigid construction of time and instead view time for what it actually is: Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once. Time imposes a sequence on our activities, and it does that no matter how much we may wish otherwise. That sequence, however, can be used to our advantage. Instead of being locked into a rigid, clock-based image of time, we can instead view time as a series of events. Each event triggers the next event. What does this mean?

When we are locked into a clock-based view of time, we attempt to start and stop activities according to the number on the clock: 3pm have pre-meeting meeting, 3:30pm meeting, 7pm post meeting discussion, and so on. When we are working with others and need to coordinate a variety of different people, use of space, and allocation of other resources, then we need to impose some of that clock based ordering. Too much of it though just slows us down: if something takes longer, or shorter, than expected, suddenly the whole schedule is thrown off. We get distracted and suddenly find ourselves running behind or forget to take breaks and wear ourselves out too soon.

Instead, within our blocks of time, and whenever we are working in a relatively unstructured environment, we need to think in terms of events. What events are happening around us? What events are we causing? Our events can be used to trigger us to change activities or take breaks. In one office, the coffee cart coming around was the trigger for people to take a break and move to a different task. An engineer working at home used the school bus driving by in the morning and mail deliveries in the afternoon as events to trigger him to switch tasks. We can even take this a step further, and create explicit linkages of events for our own uses: when I finish testing this piece of code, I will make a cup of coffee. When I finish my coffee I will review the documentation. When I finish… and so on.  When we plan and connect events this way, it’s amazing how much time we don’t waste just trying to decide what to do next.

The other piece of managing our perception of time is to create a schedule that we can beat. It’s quite amazing: when we’re ahead of schedule, we are simultaneously more relaxed and more energized. We focus better and come up with more creative solutions to problems. Unexpected obstacles are fun challenges. When we are behind schedule, we feel rushed. Every delay feels like a crisis. We take shortcuts and make more mistakes.

Ultimately, teams that are ahead end up further ahead. Teams that are behind, end up further behind. People who are rushed don’t see what is in front of them, lose track of where they are, and exhaust themselves too soon. If you want to win, design a schedule that you can beat not one that beats you.

Mirror, Mirror

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”

Magic mirrors have a habit of showing up in fairy tales and legends. The most famous, of course, was the mirror owned by the wicked queen in Snow White. But don’t think that magic mirrors were solely the province of the wicked queen. There were plenty of evil sorcerers, kings, and especially evil grand viziers who had magic mirrors of one sort or another. Given how ubiquitous those mirrors were, one can only imagine that entire fantasy economies must have depended on their manufacture. But that, as they say, is another story.

The interesting thing about magic mirrors is that what they show us is, well, us, with an emphasis on making us feel good about it. That’s the problem with magic mirrors: when we look into them long enough, we might actually start to believe that we really do look that good. If that happens, anything that spoils the illusion becomes a problem to remove rather than feedback that things might not be as they seem.

“Sorry Queen, but it is Snow White who’s better looking by day or night.”

We all know how that worked out.

In a business setting, the magic mirror is the people we work with. When we work as part of a team, we can see everyone on the team: we can see what they do, we react to their work, we hear their words. The one person we cannot see is ourselves. Is our work good or is it poor? Are we behaving intelligently, foolishly, wisely, or carelessly? We can only really tell by how we are reflected in the eyes of our team mates. Without that feedback, we have no point of reference. Sometimes, the mirror doesn’t show us what we want to see.

This mirroring phenomenon is a big part of how a group of people who happen to be wandering in the same direction learn how to come together as a team. We look at others and we see how people act, look, and dress. Because team members always seek some degree of similarity, we try to mimic what we see so that we’ll feel like part of the team. This is especially true when we are new to the team (when everyone on the team is new, each person is doing this. That can make things a bit tricky). Similarity brings the team together, but differences make it effective. The trick is making use of the first without losing the second.

Assuming that each member of the team sees and reflects the appropriate actions, appearances, and behaviors, the team has a much better chance of coalescing and achieving very high levels of performance. On the other hand, if people don’t reflect to one another or, in other words, see too much difference, the team doesn’t come together, members are less loyal, and the team is more likely to dissolve.

Points of similarity can be many things: behavior, clothing, common goals, an outside threat, annoyance at a particular member of the team, skin color, gender, etc. Some of these work better than others. Superficial characteristics such as physical appearance and gender can certainly help bring a team together, although at the risk of creating a more homogenous team. Simply looking at people who look like you might feel good, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to stimulate creative thought; for that, difference helps. As Terry Pratchett observed, we go on vacation so that we can come back to view home through new eyes. Seeing those who don’t look like us helps us consider multiple options and perspectives, an important component of successful products and services.

Bringing a team together against an outside threat has good short-term results, but often only succeeds in suppressing disagreements and preventing the group from learning how to argue effectively and develop consensus. Unifying around annoyance at a particular member of the team creates its own special set of problems. Both of these approaches tend to suppress difference in favor conformity. Common goals, interests, imitating behaviors, and having a common vision work best at building similarity while preserving differences.

How a group unifies then determines who else it lets in. Humans naturally form in- and out-groups, and we are all subject to viewing members of our in-groups more favorably than members of our out-groups. That means that we will tend to favor those who resemble the people around us. Over time, the group will reflect the dominant identifying characteristics: be that skin color, a penchant for puns, gender, style of dress, incisive problem solving capabilities, and so on. The magic mirror is telling us what the group looks like and, by extension, what new members should look like. And, because, we’re human, we are also very good at explaining why our group looks the way it does. In fact, we might decide that there are very good and very serious scientific reasons why it must look that way, and why any other group composition would be wrong. In reality, there may be nothing special about many of the dimensions of group composition other than happenstance.

Indeed, when we recognize the important dimensions of similarity, we can also take advantage of our differences. A key strength of a high performance team is its ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives, to generate diverse ideas, and to explore different and unexpected approaches. Team members must become comfortable along the axes of their similarities and their differences for that strength to manifest.

Just to make things more complicated, not all group members will always recognize which dimensions of similarity are the relevant ones for the group. For example, some people might assume gender or physical appearance is the driver, when, in fact, they are simply coincidental. Part of how a group matures is for members to connect along more significant dimensions than the merely superficial. People who cannot make this adjustment ultimately cannot remain as part of the group. Some will leave after discovering that the group is not what they thought; others will demonstrate their inability to connect along the important dimensions or will demonstrate that they are intolerant of valuable differences and will need to be forced out before they poison the team.

The team is a mirror for each of its members. It’s important to stop and reflect, and then learn to use the feedback correctly. Getting fixated on superficial similarities can break the team and lead to a great deal of bad luck.

The Measure Of All Things

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

It’s a familiar refrain, one I hear quite often. There’s even some truth to it, at least for those things that are easily measureable. After all, if you want to keep track of how many widgets you are stamping out, maximize efficiency, profit, and so forth, then it really does help to be able to measure it. If you’re mixing ingredients for a cake, it helps be able to precisely measure out a cup of sugar or three eggs. The problem is, not everything quite so easily lends itself to being measured. Take, for example, enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is something everyone wants; let’s face it, unenthusiastic employees are particularly hard to motivate, whereas enthusiastic people are very much self-motivated. Enthusiasm, however, is difficult to measure. The most common attempt to measure something like enthusiasm is to look for things that might indicate enthusiasm: perhaps people arriving early and leaving late is a good marker of enthusiasm. On the other hand, perhaps neither of those behaviors are markers of enthusiasm. After all, why should they be? I admit that it seems likely that they are, but seeming likely is no guarantee of anything. In this case, we’re falling into the trap of grabbing onto something that easy to track and using it to measure the thing we care about. That’s sort of like using a tape measure to determine the correct quantity of flour for a cake simply because the tape measure is handy and the measuring cup is not. In fact, while some people manifest enthusiasm by showing up early and leaving late, others manifest enthusiasm through greater intensity of focus for shorter periods of time or by coming up with ideas at weird hours and so forth. The manifestation depends a lot on the person and the job to be done.

A related problem is confusing how we’re trying measure a thing for the thing itself. In this case, after deciding that coming in early and staying late must be valid ways to measure enthusiasm, someone comes up with the brilliant idea if you just require that everyone arrive early and leave late then they will become enthusiastic. In fact, quite the opposite is likely to occur. A Geiger counter measures radioactivity, but, outside of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, rewiring a Geiger counter so it clicks wildly doesn’t make the area radioactive.

So, we have a problem. We don’t want measure something by just picking the most convenient yardstick and hoping that it works. We also don’t want to mistake that convenient yardstick, or even an accurate yardstick, for the thing we’re trying to measure. What do we do?

At root, measuring is just a way of comparing two things. A ruler lets us measure length by comparing the length of an object to something – the ruler – with a known length. A Geiger counter lets us measure radioactivity by translating radiation into something we can hear. Thus, if we want to measure enthusiasm, we need to figure out what things we really are trying to compare with one another. Does enthusiasm mean less failure work? Does it mean fewer bugs in the product? More work done in a shorter time? How about greater creativity or a desire to come up with novel solutions to problems? Or maybe people coming up with unexpected and imaginative ways to approach their jobs? Any of the above, but not all of them at once?

Measuring by comparison does provide us with an approach to measuring, and potentially managing, things are inherently hard to measure. It does, however, lack a certain level of precision. On the other hand, that may not be all that important. Sometimes, all you really need is a reasonably good sense of which direction you are going.

“If you can’t compare it, you can’t manage it,” isn’t quite as snappy or as simple as “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” but it is more useful. You just have to find the right points of comparison and be willing to work with a certain degree of imprecision. Once you can do that, it’s amazing how many different, and effective, ways there are to manage the things you can’t measure.

The Secret Life of Pies

So there you are on Thanksgiving. Dinner is over and it’s time for dessert. You bring out the traditional impressive array of pies. However, with the exception of some teens, everyone is stuffed (five minutes ago, this included the teens).  The pies just sit there, and you are facing the possibility of a house full of leftover pie.

Of course, some people might not have any problem with this.

But let us suppose that you really would like your guests to eat the dessert. I’m not sure why; perhaps you don’t want a house full of desserts or maybe it involves a clever plot to take over the world (hey, it’s no less believable than many James Bond plots). In any case, how do you get a lot of people to eat the pie?

Well, if you have a lot of people there, it’s not that hard. Just bring out one pie. The moment it looks like there’s not enough dessert for everyone, suddenly everyone is hungry again. Once one person takes a piece, the rest won’t be far behind. Fortunately, the odds are extremely low that your dinner will degenerate into a frantic struggle for control of the pie, although putting out a single pastry could result in a sudden game of scones.

So what does this have to do with business? That depends on how much your company values teamwork. In some companies, teamwork is irrelevant. No one cares, it’s not important, and it’s not how you get things done. In that case, you probably won’t care about the rest of this article. On the other hand, if teamwork does matter to you, then you might want to keep reading. Teams of all sorts tend to be very concerned with pies, and it’s not because an army travels on its stomach. Rather, much like that Thanksgiving dinner, what matters is the size of the pie. Different flavors can help, but primarily size matters.

Ultimately, the degree to which team members will cooperate or compete with one another depends very much on the size of the metaphorical pie they are working towards. When the pie is perceived to be large enough for everyone, you get cooperation. When the pie is perceived to be too small, you get competition.

But isn’t competition healthy? Friendly competition can be healthy under the right conditions. However, when the competition is at work, and the “trophy” directly impacts your job, then the competition quickly starts to look like an episode of “Tom Slick,” complete with all the dirty tricks and without the humor. In other words, not particularly healthy competition.

If all this seems too theoretical, or is just making you hungry for pie, think about Microsoft. For much of their corporate existence, they practiced employee stacking:  members of each team were rated from high to low. The highest rated people got the rewards, and the lowest rated were eliminated. Now, there is a claim that this encourages people to work harder. What it actually did was encourage their top people to avoid working together so that they wouldn’t be in competition with one another. It encouraged hiring weak performers so that there would always be someone to take the fall. It encouraged team members to sabotage one another rather than cooperate. It encouraged people to become very skilled at looking like they were sharing information while still withholding critical details. To be fair, they did work very hard at these tasks. Unfortunately, it can take years to regain the trust lost along the way.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the big pie encourages cooperation while the little pie triggers competition. If you want a successful team, and a successful company, find ways to expand the pie, and focus your competitive instincts on your real competition.

And if you’re bored after your next big holiday meal, you can always try serving a single pie and see what happens. Let me know how it goes.

When Goals Take Over

“Just give me the numbers!”

Falling firmly into the “I just can’t make this stuff up” category, the preceding statement was made by the head of a certain engineering department. He wanted the performance figures on a series of database lookups so that he could determine if the database code was performing up to specifications. This would be a perfectly reasonable request except for one minor problem: the database code was not producing the correct results in the first place. Performance was sort of irrelevant given that getting the wrong answers quickly is not necessarily all that helpful, although it may be less irritating than having to wait for the wrong answers. It’s rather like driving at 75mph when lost: you may not know where you are or where you are going, but at least you’ll get there quickly. Or something.

In another example, the engineers developing a bioinformatics data analysis package spent all their time arguing about the correct way to set up the GUI elements on each page. The problem was that when they actually ran one of the calculations, the program appeared to hang. In fact, I was assured by everyone, it just “took a long time to run.” How long? The answer was, “maybe a few weeks.”

This may come as a shock to those few people who have never used a PC, but a few weeks is generally longer than most computers will run before crashing (or installing an update without warning). Besides, the complete lack of response from the program regularly convinced users that the program had crashed. The engineers did not want to put in some visual indicator of progress because they felt it wouldn’t look good visually. They refused to remove that calculation from the product because “someone might want to try it.” Eventually, they grudgingly agreed to warn the user that it “might take a very long time to run.”

In both of these cases, the team was solving the wrong problem. Although there were definitely complaints about the speed of the database, speed was very much a secondary issue so long as the database wasn’t producing correct results. And while the user interface decisions were certainly important, designing an elegant interface for a feature that will convince the user that the product is not working is not particularly useful. At least rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic was only a waste of time. It didn’t contribute to the ship sinking.

So why were these teams so insistent upon solving the wrong problems? If you give someone a problem they can solve comfortably, and one that they have no idea how to approach, they will do the former. At that point, once goals are set, they become the focus of everyone’s attention and a lot of work goes into accomplishing them. That is, after all, the best thing about goals; unfortunately, it can also be the worst thing about goals.

While clear, specific goals are certainly good things, goals also have to make sense. You need to have the right goals. It can be a very valuable exercise to look at the goals assigned to each person and each team in the company. Do those goals make sense? What problems or challenges are they addressing? Are the goals complementary, or are there significant gaps? If the engineering team is being evaluated on how many bugs they can fix and the QA team on how many new bugs they can find, what happens to the step where fixed bugs get verified? If no one is responsible for that happening, it won’t get done (and didn’t, in several software companies!). If the team focuses on the wrong problems, they’ll spend their time fighting symptoms or revisiting solved problems, and never deal with the real issues.

Therefore, even before you can set goals, you have to know what the problem is that you are trying to solve. That means first separating the symptoms of the problem from the problem itself. The symptoms are only symptoms; frequently, they can point to many possible problems. It’s important to look at the symptoms and brainstorm which problems they could be indicating. When you start developing possible solutions, you then need to ask what the final product will look like if you go ahead with your solution and you need to know what success looks like. Make sure that your proposed solution will actually solve at least some of the potential problems you’ve identified, and develop some way of testing to make sure you are solving the correct problem. In other words, have some checkpoints along the way so you can make sure that you’re actually improving things. Only then can you start to set goals that will effectively guide you to producing the results you actually need.

Once goals are set, they have a way of taking over. What are you doing to make sure you don’t set goals before you know where you’re going?

Solving Yesterday’s Problems

Once upon a time there was an employee working on a knotty biotech problem. Weeks, then months, passed with no results. The employee’s manager decided that the employee clearly wasn’t working hard enough, fired him, and hired someone else.

Weeks, then months, passed with no results. The second person was also clearly not working hard enough and was swiftly replaced.

The next two people didn’t work hard enough either.

The fifth person got lucky: someone in a different lab was working on a similar problem and figured out that the process was fatally flawed. No one had noticed. Everyone, especially the manager, assumed that it must be correct. The manager, in particular, was unwilling to even consider the possibility that the problem could be the process, not the people, until it was shoved in his face.

In a slightly different example, I was conducting a leadership and negotiation exercise with a group of would-be managers. As part of the exercise, they were each given various items and told to obtain various other items. Naturally, everyone started trading back and forth. Some items, though, simply could not be found. As a result, the people who needed those missing items started hording the items they did have: they wanted to make sure they had leverage to get other people to give them the items they needed.

At the end, there were a number of very frustrated people complaining that the exercise was unfair because items were missing.

“I needed an apple, and there were no apples,” complained one irritated individual.

When I asked him why he hadn’t just gone down to the cafeteria and bought an apple, he just stared at me.

One woman complained that no one in the room had willow leaves. I asked why she didn’t just walk outside and pick some off the tree.

Again the stare.

Because each person was visibly presented with a bag of items, everyone immediately jumped to the assumption that all the items were present and that they could be obtained through trade. Even when that failed to work for everyone, no one questioned the basic assumption. Instead, those who couldn’t find what they needed assumed that people were withholding items and responded by withholding their items. Instead of engaging in brainstorming or problem solving, they just glared at each other. Unlike the biotech manager, the option of firing one person and hiring another was not available. This was probably fortunate under the circumstances.

In both the lab and the exercise, the people involved had become so focused on the results that they weren’t thinking about how they were trying to accomplish those results. Indeed, the process had somehow achieved the status of holy writ, to the point that no one even thought of questioning it.

Results are important, make no mistake about that. However, it’s equally important to think strategically about how to accomplish those results. By mindlessly assuming that only one path exists or one way of working exists, the different groups trapped themselves in failure.

The more difficult the problem being solved, the more important it becomes to pay attention to the process. Assuming that there is only one process or blindly believing that everyone has to fit a certain image or work a certain way reduces the likelihood of success and can even lead to the results not being accepted. The lab manager could have made something of a name for himself if he’d been the one to publish the identification of the flawed process! The groups looking for the items could have all succeeded if they’d stopped to revisit their assumptions and seek out alternate means of accomplishing their goals.

If you’re trying to solve yesterday’s problems, then ignoring the process is frequently a great way to go about it. By the same token, it would be very easy to win the lottery if you could only buy based on yesterday’s paper. Unfortunately, the first option is actually available in business.

The more complex the problem, therefore, the more important it becomes to stop and look at what you’re trying to accomplish, how you’re trying to do it, and why you’ve chosen to do it that way. If you want to think strategically, it helps considerably if you don’t limit yourself to preconceived notions about how the problems must be solved. The more hidden assumptions you can overturn, the more likely you are to accomplish your goals.

Of Cats and Unwanted Prizes

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration.

In an office environment, however, a catastrophe is anything but a cause for celebration.

The worst thing about catastrophes is that they happen about as often as a cat sitting down on top of the book you’re reading. At least, to listen to some managers, it certainly sounds that way. Somehow, every little thing, every small problem, was magnified until it had the aura of impending doom. In short, every setback was becoming a prize for the cat with the most beautiful behind. At one company, the conversation went something like this:

“We’ve found a major bug in the software.”

“We can’t delay the ship.”

“We can’t ship with this bug.”

At that point, the manager started screaming that the product would go out on schedule, or else. When he finally calmed down and I was able to talk with him privately, he told me that he knew that if the company didn’t ship on time, the customers would abandon them and they would go out of business. He was happy to ship non-functional software to avoid that fate.

When he calmed down still further, he agreed to delay the ship.

I am sure that most readers are chuckling to themselves right now. After all, delays in software are legendary. Obviously, this manager was overreacting. True enough; the question is, why? Why would a perfectly sensible, intelligent man react so negatively to something which is, frankly, a common event in the software business?

It turns out that this particular company prided itself on holding to very aggressive schedules. The schedule was so aggressive that they were virtually always running behind. Therein lay the problem.

Time is a funny thing. We react very differently depending on how we perceive it. Being behind schedule all the time had the effect of generating a certain sense of urgency, which was the stated intent of the aggressive schedule. Unfortunately, the urgency generated in this situation was of the slightly breathless, heart-pounding sort similar to what one might experience if being chased by a very large cat of the “has a big mane” variety. A cat which, I might add, is looking to do more than just sit on your book.

The problem with aggressive schedules is that, in fact, being behind schedule can generate the same panicked response in people that they would feel in a situation which actually was dangerous. While in those situations, we’re very good at running away or fighting desperately, but we’re not good at making cool, rational decisions or developing innovative solutions to problems. Each pebble encountered along the road becomes a giant boulder. When we do finally get to the end of the project, rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment and success, there’s more of a sense of relief that at last it’s over. What’s missing is the thrill of victory that energizes people for the next project. That feeling of success is the key to getting, and keeping, people excited and motivated.

In short, instead of the team beating the schedule, the schedule was beating them.

Conversely, when a team is running slightly ahead of schedule, something very different happens. Running ahead of the game means that the team is feeling a constant sense of success. When people feel successful, they work harder, they are more creative, and they look forward to coming into work each day. Teams that are running ahead of schedule are more likely to develop innovative new solutions to problems rather than just slap on band-aids. Feeling that you have the time to stop and think is critical: just think about how easy it is to miss the obvious when you are feeling rushed.

The trick is to view your schedule as a living document. It’s something that you will constantly adjust according to the situation, especially at the beginning of a project. The less you know about potential difficulties down the road, the harder it is to plan: so don’t. Instead, plan to plan. As you move forward, you can revise and project the schedule further and further into the future.

If you find yourself running behind, that’s feedback. Pay attention to what it’s telling you. Is something more complicated than expected? Is someone overwhelmed with a task that turned out to be significantly more time-consuming than you thought? Did something go wrong? Is a vendor habitually late with parts? Is your schedule just plain too aggressive?

If you’re running ahead, that’s also feedback. It might mean that the schedule is too easy and your team isn’t being challenged. Be willing to become more aggressive. It could mean that you need to slow down: are people rushing and cutting corners? At one company, pressure on QA engineers to rush product inspections led to some very expensive and embarrassing recalls and some very irate customers. Moving way ahead of schedule could also mean that your team is working too hard too soon: success is a marathon, not a sprint. Burn out early and you won’t reach the finish line.

Leave the catastrophes to the cats.

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 McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” and “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” He is also a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” 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.

What a Hissing Cat Teaches Us About Teamwork

One of our cats recently needed a course of antibiotics. Now, this particular cat is quite large, but also very sweet and has a purr that would put a motorboat to shame. Giving her pills is really a very simple task: pop the pill in her mouth, give her a treat, and we’re done. She never runs away, never puts up a fight, just gives me a dirty look and then gobbles up the treat. Thus it was that when we realized that we’d be out of town for a few days during the cat’s course of antibiotics, we didn’t think it would be all that big of a deal to have a friend come in and give the cat her pill.

As it turned out, the cat had a different opinion about this. The first night we were gone, we were treated to a series of text messages detailing the ongoing adventures of the friend who had come by to pill the cat. Apparently our sweet lump of a cat had transformed into Demon Kitty. She was loudly expressing her opinion, while ducking under pieces of furniture and also demonstrating her willingness to remove any human limb that happened to come in after her. At the first opportunity, she dodged past our friend and disappeared.

She did not get her pill that night. On the other hand, our friend was intact.

The next morning went somewhat better. Eventually, the cat did agree to eat the pill. The basic problem was that the cat didn’t really know the friend who came over, but once she came by the house a couple of times, the cat began to accept her. At that point, there was a relationship and the cat was willing to submit to being pilled. Cats don’t like people they don’t know sticking things down their throats or doing other unpleasant things to them. They don’t necessarily like it when someone they do know is doing it, but at least they are more likely to tolerate it.

Cats are suspicious of people they don’t know. They approach carefully, if at all. They want to take their time getting to know the person before they will tolerate much, if any, contact. Although we are less likely to hide under chairs hissing and spitting, people are surprisingly similar to cats. We are also suspicious of people we don’t know, although we do a better job of hiding it than a cat might. I’m not sure whether this says something profound about people or cats!

Like cats, we have a variety of social rituals and behaviors that we use when we meet someone new. These behaviors are the moral equivalent of cats sniffing at each other and checking each other out. These behaviors become increasingly important when a team is coming together, when a new leader is assigned to a team, or when a new person joins an existing team. In each of these cases, different members of the group need to build relationships with each other.

At first, those relationships are professional: distant, polite, and, above all, superficial. No one is quite sure of where they stand or what behavior is appropriate. What will offend someone else? What will embarrass us or another person? Which behaviors will help us gain status and acceptance, and which behaviors might get us thrown out of the group? Push people too hard at that point and the reaction can be quite strong. Think about groups you’ve been in: how often did you find yourself agreeing with an idea or a suggestion because you assumed that other people knew better or because you didn’t want to upset anyone? How often did what seemed like a simple suggestion or off-hand comment provoke an unexpectedly angry or intense response? Conversely, think about who has the right to criticize you: people whom you know well, or people whom you don’t? Superficial relationships produce lower quality work.

It takes time for those relationships to move from keeping people at a safe distance to actually engaging with the other person at a deeper, more productive level. It’s easy to say that in the office we need to focus on the issues, not the person, but it’s hard to do. The less we feel we have good relationships with our colleagues, the more we’re likely to feel that they are trying to shove something down our throat. It’s only after we’ve been working with them for a few months that we might really start to develop a sense of trust and comfort. That’s assuming, of course, that the process is handled correctly. Try to rush it, and it only takes longer. That sense of trust and comfort is vital, though, for actually doing high quality work.

As with cats, we have to take it slowly. Everyone involved has to recognize that mistakes will happen. So long as you don’t take anyone’s head off, it is the process of making mistakes and recovering from them that actually builds the relationship. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the cat runs and hides. Sometimes the relationship gets destroyed and people flee the team or the company. But the only way to achieve high quality relationships, and do high quality work as a team, is to take the risk of being scratched.

Such a Bargain!

I recently read the claim that, “Each American wastes $300 worth of food every year.” That’s right, three hundred dollars of food is wasted per person per year. The piece went on to offer a variety of products designed to help people eliminate this waste from their lives. Naturally, this is something worth jumping on, right? Well, let’s take a look: $300 per year comes out to 82 cents per day, slightly less on leap years. For a family of four, we’re talking about wasting $2.50 per day. Would it be nice to eliminate that waste? Of course it would; the question is whether or not it’s worthwhile. How much effort is involved in saving $.82 of wasted food per person each day? Just how much food is that anyway? A few grapes? Half a cup of coffee? What is the cost of that effort in terms of time, money, and emotional energy against the returns obtained: $300 in a year, plus whatever sense of feeling good that may result? One fewer cup of coffee each day would save far more than $.86, but is it worth it? Intangibles, such as concentration, motivation, alertness, happiness, and so forth, are difficult to measure, but their lack definitely impacts the bottom line.

One always has to wonder if a savings or a bargain is really as good as it seems. While it’s initially very easy to find major savings in almost anything, as the system becomes steadily more efficient it becomes harder and harder to continue to find cost-effective savings. Thus, requiring employees to not fly first class is an easy way to save quite a bit of money and probably will not significantly impact business. Requiring employees to fly red-eye flights in order to gain minor savings can have a significant impact on productivity, creativity, and decision making. In this situation, only the easily measured aspect of the value gained is being examined: the cost savings on the airline ticket. Why the company is sending the person on the flight, what benefits the company hopes to gain by doing so, and whether those benefits will still be achieved if the employee is sleep-deprived or unable to concentrate during the flight are not being factored in.

Naturally, this is a mindset that manifests in a variety of ways in a business. At one company I worked with, an engineer requested a raise; this employee had a skill set that was very much in demand, and he had discovered that he was being significantly underpaid. The CEO refused on the logic that it would cost the company too much to provide the raise. The person quit, taking a job at a salary considerably higher than what he’d asked for at his original company: he wanted to stay, he just didn’t want to feel taken advantage of. The CEO discovered that it was not so easy to find someone with that skillset, especially at the salary they were willing to pay. They eventually found someone much less experienced and whom they had to pay almost as much as the person who had left. The CEO was actually happy because he hadn’t had to pay a salary for about six months, and then “got a bargain” because the new person was slightly cheaper. The engineering team was furious because they lost the expertise of the person. The cost to the company of not having available the skills and knowledge of the senior engineer is, of course, impossible to calculate. Clearly, however, this person provided some value or he would never have been hired in the first place. It’s worth noting that the company is no longer in business.

Now, the fact is, people love bargains. Most of us love a chance to save some money or make things a little more efficient. The problem is things are often worth what they cost. There’s a reason why a BMW is considerably more expensive than a Saturn or a top notch engineer demands a higher salary than someone less skilled: in the case of the engineer, you expect a far greater return on your investment. It’s not a bargain if it ends up costing you more than you gained. It’s not a savings if the effort involved in saving the money reduces the value of the result by more than the amount saved: saving $.86 on food is going to cost most people at least several dollars a day in effort or lost opportunities.

So how does a company go about figuring out whether or not something really is a bargain? It’s extremely important to ask the right questions:

• What are we trying to accomplish? In other words, what is the actual problem we’re facing?
• What savings are we looking for? What benefits do we think will accrue?
• What is the cost of this solution? Are we looking only at things that are easily measured, such as an expense report or a salary? What intangible factors, such as team productivity, motivation, happiness, increased distraction, etc, might factor in?
• What does success look like? How narrowly or broadly are we defining it?
• What opportunities will this solution cost us? Is there another way?

It’s time to see what your bargains and your savings are costing your company.

This article originally published at Practical Performance Analyst.