A Sure-Fire Way to Create Resistance

What happens when good intentions go off the rails.

A mid-sized department (about 50 people) with global responsibilities for a several million dollar portfolio got together to plan their activities for the coming year. The starting point for this conversation was a set of five goals that had been set by the top leadership of the organization. The idea was to create cascading goals throughout the institution, based on these superordinate five.

The people in this department were to create strategies and work plans based on what they knew about their business and what they had been learning from each other during the previous two days of conversation.

So far so good.

I was surprised by the intensity of the resistance I saw in all the groups trying to complete their plans. Both substance and format were being subjected to withering criticism almost immediately. Even the department head, unfailingly positive in most situations, saw the futility in what they were doing. And that was after she spent the better part of the weekend trying to do something with the sow’s ear she had been given by her senior management.

Her comment to me: “We just have to do it.”

The issue was that the goals provided by the top were not connected to the work of this department and they couldn’t be made to connect in any meaningful way.

What really made this so unreasonable was that the organization’s leadership went far beyond specifying a direction for business activity and instead prescribed tasks and targets that were meant to be applicable across the enterprise.

Talk about an exercise in futility.

So, rather than engendering commitment and alignment, which I’m sure was the intent, leadership created the exact opposite effect, resulting in an enormous waste of resources and loss of goodwill.

I found this to be an object lesson in how not to win support for a new idea: no input was sought from those who would be responsible for the doing; the process was too directive with no recourse when obstacles were hit; and there was no flexibility in making it work, only one way to do it.

Nearly all the energy that day was spent on resisting, breeding cynicism, and finally meager compliance. I’m the last one to run from resistance; I’ve learned to expect it whenever something new is happening. But, I also think you shouldn’t be doing things that pretty much guarantee extra doses of it.

What do you think?

Leadership and B-School

A provocative call to transform the MBA.

Here’s a terrific piece from The Economist on an emerging view of leadership and leadership development. Sure, you can criticize it as too academic and too idealistic, but many of our best ideas start in the academy before they find their way into the world.

A couple of really interesting aspects leapt out at me:

• Business leaders who cultivate the courage to say “I don’t know.” In other words, leadership ought to start from a place of not knowing, from a lack of knowledge. Wasn’t it Socrates who said “The more I learn the less I know?” Leadership can come from having a couple of really good questions you need the answer to.
• The power of moral humility. This follows immediately from realizing you don’t know. Reflecting, then critiquing oneself as much as others.

Regular visitors to this blog won’t be surprised to read that all these things bring me to the notion of self-awareness. All leadership emanates from this.

As the world continues to shrink, holism and empathy will take the place of fragmentation and selfishness:

“Business schools could become more like the agora of ancient Athens, a place where commerce had its place alongside the academy, where philosophers discussed the meaning of the good life and how best to achieve it; a place of dialogue where citizens collectively addressed the limits of their knowledge.”

What do you think?

Harnessing Complexity

Using principles of complex adaptive systems to construct a marketplace of ideas. 

I was working with a client on their annual planning process for next year and beyond. We had about 50 people in the room, gathered from their offices around the world.

For the last portion of this two day meeting, I persuaded the manager to use the concept of a marketplace to generate ideas for the plans they had to create. The idea is derived from the town square or bazaar, socially constructed spaces where people congregate to transact their business. 

We built the marketplace on many of the basic principles of complex adaptive systems, including:

• disintermediation - people, information, and tools were all freely and directly accessible without the requirement to pass through intermediate channels.
• distributed cognition - knowledge and ideas were generated through the dynamic interaction between team members, tools, and the environment; no single individual held all the knowledge.
• proximity and connectedness - we had ready access in the room to the resources we needed.

We also agreed these essential ground rules:

• We had a clear objective or outcome - everyone knew the the target we were aiming at.
• We set constraints, boundaries, or parameters - these defined the field we were playing on. This is often seen as unneeded or a paradox: if we want people to think openly and creatively, how can we put constraints on them? In reality, it is impossible to be creative without constraints. 
• We encouraged the free flow of information, and this was both represented and demonstrated by movement in the room, movement of people and ideas. 

At first glance, it appeared chaotic. It was totally unlike the typical planning process where attention is focused in one place, usually the front of the room where presentation slides are being shown.

In the end, it turned out to be a thing of beauty, as people and information went where they needed to go. Large groups, small groups, pairs of people all found their way into the conversations they needed to have.

The experience proved once again the power and effectiveness of working with, rather than against, complexity. To do this, you must be willing to relinquish the need to control (i.e. prescribe) outcomes. Create a space where you can run small experiments that can safely fail. Allow answers to emerge. Rather than directing activity toward some precisely determined future, manage the evolutionary potential of the present.

On Collective Decision Making

Harnessing the power of groups when the stakes are high

I was with a senior management team recently that expressed ongoing frustration over its inability to make progress on several important issues. When I asked what was causing such upset, the more vocal among them started in on the topic of collective decision making and, specifically, their view that it leads only to the lowest common denominator. 

It is so interesting to watch groups continue to engage in activities and behaviors they believe will lead to worse outcomes than they'd actually like to achieve. But not surprising. We all do this.

What’s more, the unsatisfactory practice is often so ingrained we can't imagine another way to get what we want. "We're stuck with this." Or, "We've always done it this way." Or, "The only other option is to have the boss decide, and we like that even less." 

However, with the shift of an underlying assumption, collective decision making has the potential to create something that never existed before in a way that few other things can. 

Those of you who have studied economics are no doubt familiar with the possibility frontier. For those less well acquainted with the dismal science, here is a super-simplified explanation of the concept:

Also known by its more complete label as the Production-Possibility Boundary [Wikipedia link], it compares the production rates of two commodities using the same fixed total of the factors of production. It shows the most you can get of each of the commodities for a given set of conditions. The classic example is guns and butter: producing more of one means sacrificing the production of the other.

Moving away from economics to human interaction, in most instances a similar dynamic is at play: we enter a situation believing that the more you get, the more I have to give up. 

In the graphic at the top of this post this notion is represented by the dashed diagonal line where the midpoint is the optimal solution for us: we each give up a like amount of what we really want and walk away equally dissatisfied.

This is the "lowest common denominator" that many of us experience. 

That we can work only along this straight line is nothing more than an assumption we hold and one that doesn't serve us very well at that. 

If we change our assumption that the outer edge of our agreement, the place where we maximize the use of our inputs, is instead the possibility frontier, where does that take us? 

It shows us that there is a space where we can both get more of what we want and wind up better off than the pure compromise. This is the graphical representation of that overused and despised (by me) expression, "win-win".

The challenge in all this is that the solution set that exists in that shaded area between compromise and the possibility frontier is unknown at the time we start our conversation. It requires a not yet discovered combination of what we both want, unlike the horse trading that is typically part of reaching for a compromise.

If it offers solutions that are so much better, why don’t we usually head for the frontier? Mostly because there is fear involved, and this fear gets in the way. What might we be afraid of? We might be afraid of being pushed aside. Of not getting credit. I might have misperceptions about what is possible and where that might leave me. Perhaps I don’t trust you or this process. Or, I have too much self-interest wrapped up in what I want the outcome to be. I may be unwilling to let go of what I believe I know and other preconceived ideas.

Shouting into the Void

Let’s open ourselves up to an actual conversation about important events.

In the aftermath of the tragedy in Newtown, CT last week, I am struck by the nature of so much of the national and local discourse that is taking place. “Struck” as in disappointed more than surprised.

So much that is being spun out into the airwaves and blogosphere sets up along two sides of a debate: either you favor gun control or you support individual ownership of firearms as enshrined in our current interpretation of the Second Amendment. A collectivist and common good view of society or belief in the supremacy of the individual. Eurpoean-style socialism or American capitalism. Mediocrity and decline or Exceptionalism. Higher taxes or entitlement cuts. Left or right. Liberal or conservative. Right or wrong.

We have an unhealthy love affair in this country with splitting things into two pieces so we can determine who wins and who loses.

It is very discouraging.

What about a more sophisticated and nuanced perspective? One that rejects the notion that we have to create sides and then choose one.

What if instead we agreed that the better question to ask ourselves is “How do we allow for an individual freedom that is constrained by what we agree is best for everyone in the society?” Or, “How can the common good best support important individual freedoms?”

Asking questions like these allows us to open ourselves and enter into true conversation where we might learn something from one another.

It is only by learning from one another that we stand any chance of making progress on our apparently intractable issues. Otherwise, we wind up just shouting into the void.