Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Segmenting The Body Politic
Where do you stand?
As a marketing executive, I’m accustomed to the process of segmenting markets. My software companies divided markets by company size, SIC code, geography, and installed software. By doing so, we could identify and communicate with companies that were most likely to buy our products and services.
The Pew Research Center has done something similar with America’s body politic. Rather than two major political parties, Pew identifies eight different clusters of political thought and action: four for the Left and four for the Right. Let’s take a look at each. (Click here for the complete report and here for a Q&A on the methodology).
Among Conservatives
Core Conservatives support traditional Republican positions including smaller government and lower taxes. They also believe that the nation’s economic system is fundamentally fair. Core Conservatives generally support globalization, believing that the global economy creates opportunities for American businesses. This segment accounts for approximately 31% of all Republicans and roughly 13% of the American body politic.
Country First Conservatives are deeply concerned about immigration and generally believe that America should withdraw from the world. They strongly believe that the global economy is deeply threatening to American interests. More than any other segment, Country First Conservatives agree with the statement “If America is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation.” This segment accounts for 14% of Republicans and 6% of the American public.
Market Skeptic Republicans share many conservative values but are losing faith in the American economic system. They believe the economy unfairly favors powerful interests and are skeptical of banks and other financial institutions. More than any other group, the disagree with the statement “The U.S. economic system is generally fair to most Americans.” This segment accounts for 22% of Republicans and roughly 12% percent of the American public.
New Era Enterprisers form the most optimistic segment of either the Right or the Left. More than any other group they believe that the next generation of Americans will be better off than the current generation. New Era Enterprisers strongly support business and generally believe that immigrants strengthen the country. This segment makes up 17% of Republicans and 11% of the general public.
Adding it up (with some rounding errors), the four Conservative segments account for approximately 42% of the American body politic.
Among Liberals
Solid Liberals have liberal attitudes across the board. They overwhelmingly support government involvement in health insurance and government activism to ensure that blacks have equal rights with whites. They support government regulation of business and don’t believe one needs to be religious to be moral. Solid Liberals account for 16% of the general public 33% of Democrats.
Opportunity Democrats agree on many policy issues with Solid Liberals. They’re more likely, however, to be pro-business and to believe that most people can get ahead if they work hard. They comprise 12% of the general public and roughly 20% of Democrats.
Disaffected Democrats are positive about the Democratic Party but cynical about government in general. This is one of two minority-majority segments. They support activist government programs and believe that we should focus less on problems abroad and more on domestic issues. Disaffected Democrats account for 14% of the general public and 23% of Democrats.
Devout and Diverse is the second minority-majority segment. Like Disaffected Democrats, they face financial hardships. Among all the groups, this segment is the least politically engaged. They resist government regulation and strongly believe that one needs to believe in God to be moral. The Devout and Diverse account for 9% of the public and 11% of Democrats.
Adding it up, the four Liberal segments account for roughly 51% of the American body politic.
So if Conservatives account for 42% and Liberals for 51% of the general public, where are the rest of our voters? According to Pew, roughly 8% of the general public are Bystanders, described as a “relatively young, largely minority group” that is “missing in action politically”.
So where do you stand? Thanks to the Pew Research Center, you can now find out. Pew has published the Political Typology Quiz. Click here, answer a series of questions, and you can figure out which group most closely represents your worldview. I’ll be writing more about this in the future. You may want to know which group you’re in to follow along.
Managing Agreement: The Abilene Paradox.
I want to be a team player, but….
I used to think it was difficult to manage conflict. Now I wonder if it isn’t more difficult to manage agreement.
A conflicted organization is fairly easy to analyze. The signs are abundant. You can quickly identify the conflicting groups as well as the members of each. You can identify grievances simply by talking with people. You can figure out who is “us” and who is “them”. Solving the problem may prove challenging but, at the very least, you know two things: 1) there is a problem; 2) its general contours are easy to see.
When an organization is in agreement, on the other hand, you may not even know that a problem exists. Everything floats along smoothly. People may not quiver with enthusiasm but no one is throwing furniture or shouting obscenities. Employees work and things get done.
The problem with an organization in agreement is that many participants actually disagree. But the disagreement doesn’t bubble up and out. There are at least two scenarios in which this happens:
- The Abilene Paradox – in the original telling, four members of a family in Coleman, Texas drove 53 miles to Abilene in a car without air conditioning in 104-degree heat to have dinner at a crummy diner. After driving 53 miles back, they ‘fessed up: not one of them had wanted to go. Each person thought the others wanted to go. They agreed to be agreeable. (A variant of this is known as the risky shift).
Similar paradoxes arise in organizations all the time. Each employee wants to be seen as a team player. They may have reservations about a decision but — because everyone else agrees or seems to agree — they keep quiet. Perhaps nobody agrees to a given project but they believe that everyone else does. Perhaps nobody wants to work on Project X. Nevertheless, Project X persists. Unlike a conflicted organization, nobody realizes that a problem exists.
- Fear – in organizations where failure is not an option, employees work hard to salvage success even from doomed projects. Admitting that a project has failed invites punishment. Employees happily throw good money after bad, hoping to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Employees agree that failure must be delayed or hidden.
The second scenario is perhaps more dangerous but less common. A fear-based culture – if left untreated – will eventually corrupt the entire organization. Employees grow afraid of telling the truth. The remedy is easy to discern but hard to execute: the organization needs to replace executive management and create a new culture.
The Abilene paradox is perhaps less dangerous but far more common. Any organization that strives to “play as a team” or “hire team players” is at risk. Employees learn to go along with the team, even if they believe the team is wrong.
What can be done to overcome the Abilene paradox in an organization? Rosabeth Moss Kanter points out that there are two parts to the problem. First, employees make inaccurate assumptions about what others believe. Second, even though they disagree, they don’t feel comfortable speaking up. A good manager can work on both sides of the problem. Kanter suggests the following:
- Debates – include an active debate in all decision processes. Choose sides and formally air out the pros and cons of a situation. (I’ve suggested something similar in the decision by trial process).
- Assign devil’s advocates and give them the time and resources to develop a real position.
- Encourage organizational graffiti – I think of this as the electronic equivalent of Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner – a place where people can get things off their chests.
- Make confronters into heroes — even if you disagree with the message, reward the process.
- Develop a culture of pride – build collective self-esteem, not just individual self-esteem. We’re proud of what we have, including the right (or even the obligation) to disagree.
The activities needed to ward off the Abilene paradox are not draconian. Indeed, they’re fairly easy to implement. But you can only implement them if you realize that a problem exists. That’s the hard part.
Debiasing and Corporate Performance
Loss aversion bias? Or maybe I’m just satisficing?
Over the past several years, I’ve written several articles about cognitive biases. I hope I have alerted my readers to the causes and consequences of these biases. My general approach is simple: forewarned is forearmed.
I didn’t realize that I was participating in a more general trend known as debiasing. As Wikipedia notes, “Debiasing is the reduction of bias, particularly with respect to judgment and decision making.” The basic idea is that we can change things to help people and organizations make better decisions.
What can we change? According to A User’s Guide To Debiasing, we can do two things:
- Modify the decision maker – we do this by “providing some combination of knowledge and tools to help [people] overcome their limitations and dispositions.”
- Modify the environment – we do this by “alter[ing] the setting where judgments are made in a way that … encourages better strategies.”
I’ve been using a Type 1 approach. I’ve aimed at modifying the decision maker by providing information about the source of biases and describing how they skew our perception of reality. We often aren’t aware of the nature of our own perception and judgment. I liken my approach to making the fish aware of the water they’re swimming in. (To review some of my articles in this domain, click here, here, here, and here).
What does a Type 2 approach look like? How do we modify the environment? The general domain is called choice architecture. The idea is that we change the process by which the decision is made. The book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein is often cited as an exemplar of this type of work. (My article on using a courtroom process to make corporate decisions fits in the same vein).
How important is debiasing in the corporate world? In 2013, McKinsey & Company surveyed 770 corporate board members to determine the characteristics of a high-performing board. The “biggest aspiration” of high-impact boards was “reducing decision biases”. As McKinsey notes, “At the highest level, boards look inward and aspire to more ‘meta’ practices—deliberating about their own processes, for example—to remove biases from decisions.”
More recently, McKinsey has written about the business opportunity in debiasing. They note, for instance, that businesses are least likely to question their core processes. Indeed, they may not even recognize that they are making decisions. In my terminology, they’re not aware of the water they’re swimming in. As a result, McKinsey concludes “…most of the potential bottom-line impact from debiasing remains unaddressed.”
What to do? Being a teacher, I would naturally recommend training and education programs as a first step. McKinsey agrees … but only up to a point. McKinsey notes that many decision biases are so deeply embedded that managers don’t recognize them. They swim blithely along without recognizing how the water shapes and distorts their perception. Or, perhaps more frequently, they conclude, “I’m OK. You’re Biased.”
Precisely because such biases frequently operate in System 1 as opposed to System 2, McKinsey suggests a program consisting of both training and structural changes. In other words, we need to modify both the decision maker and the decision environment. I’ll write more about structural changes in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you’d like a training program, give me a call.
Failure Is An Option
Houston, we have a problem … but we’d rather not talk about it.
The movie Apollo 13 came out in 1995 and popularized the phrase “Failure is not an option”. The flight director, Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris), repeated the phrase to motivate engineers to find a solution immediately. It worked.
I bet that Kranz’s signature phrase caused more failures in American organizations than any other single sentence in business history. I know it caused myriad failures – and a culture of fear – in my company.
Our CEO loved to spout phrases like “Failure is not an option” and “We will not accept failure here.” It made him feel good. He seemed to believe that repeating the mantra could banish failure forever. It became a magical incantation.
Of course, we continued to have failures in our company. We built complicated software and we occasionally ran off the rails. What did we do when a failure occurred? We buried it. Better a burial than a “public hanging”.
The CEO’s mantra created a perverse incentive. He wanted to eliminate failures. We wanted to keep our jobs. To keep our jobs, we had to bury our failures. Because we buried them, we never fixed the processes that led to the failures in the first place. Our executives could easily conclude that our processes were just fine. After all, we didn’t have any failures, did we?
As we’ve learned elsewhere, design thinking is all about improving something and then improving it again and then again and again. How can we design a corporate culture that continuously improves?
One answer is the concept of the just culture. A just culture acknowledges that failures occur. Many failures result from systemic or process problems rather than from individual negligence. It’s not the person; it’s the system. A just culture aims to improve the system to 1) prevent failure wherever possible or; 2) to ameliorate failures when they do occur. In a sense, it’s a culture designed to improve itself.
According to Barbara Brunt, “A just culture recognizes that individual practitioners should not be held accountable for system failings over which they have no control.” Rather than hiding system failures, a just culture encourages employees to report them. Designers can then improve the systems and processes. As the system improves, the culture also improves. Employees realize that reporting failures leads to good outcomes, not bad ones. It’s a virtuous circle.
The concept of a just culture is not unlike appreciative inquiry. Managers recognize that most processes work pretty well. They appreciate the successes. Failure is an exception – it’s a cause for action and design thinking as opposed to retribution. We continue to appreciate the employee as we redesign the process.
The just culture concept has established a firm beachhead among hospitals in the United States. That makes sense because hospital mistakes can be especially tragic. But I wonder if the concept shouldn’t spread to a much wider swath of companies and agencies. I can certainly think of a number of software companies that could improve their quality by improving their culture. Ultimately, I suspect that every organization could benefit by adapting a simple principle of just culture: if you want to improve your outcomes, recruit your employees to help you.
I’ve learned a bit about just culture because one of my former colleagues, Kim Ross, recently joined Outcome Engenuity, the leading consulting agency in the field of just culture. You can read more about them here. You can learn more about hospital use of just culture by clicking here, here, and here.
Innovating The Innovations
It’s a mashup!
Mashup thinking is an excellent way to develop new ideas and products. Rather than thinking outside the box (always difficult), you select ideas from multiple boxes and mash them together. Sometimes, nothing special happens. Sometimes, you get a genius idea.
Let’s mash up self-driving vehicles and drones to see what we get. First, let’s look at the current paradigms:
Self-driving vehicles (SDVs) include cars and trucks equipped with special sensors that can use existing public roadways to navigate autonomously to a given destination. The vehicles navigate a two-dimensional surface and should be able to get humans or packages from Point A to Point B more safely than human-driven vehicles. Individuals may not buy SDVs the way we have traditionally bought cars and trucks. We may simply call them when needed. Though the technology is rapidly improving, the legal and ethical systems still require a great deal of work.
Drones navigate three-dimensional space and are not autonomous. Rather, specially trained pilots fly them remotely. (They are often referred to as Remotely Piloted Aircraft or RPAs). They military uses drones for several missions, including surveillance, intelligence gathering, and to attack ground targets. To date, we haven’t heard of drones attacking airborne targets, but it’s certainly possible. Increasingly, businesses are considering drones for package delivery. The general paradigm is that a small drone will pick up a package from a warehouse (perhaps an airborne warehouse) and deliver it to a home or office or to troops in the field.
So, what do we get if we mash up self-driving vehicles and drones?
The first idea that comes to mind is an autonomous drone. Navigating 3D space is actually simpler than navigating 2D space – you can fly over or under an approaching object. (As a result, train traffic controllers have a more difficult job than air traffic controllers). Why would we want self-flying drones? Conceivably they would be more efficient, less costly, and safer than the human-driven equivalents. They also have a lot more space to operate in and don’t require a lot of asphalt.
We could also change the paradigm for what drones carry. Today, we think of them as carrying packages. Why not people, just like SDVs? It shouldn’t be terribly hard to design a drone that could comfortably carry a couple from their house to the theater and back. We’ll be able to whip out our smart phones, call Uber or Lyft, and have a drone pick us up. (I hope Lyft has trademarked the term Air Lyft).
What else? How about combining self-flying drones with self-driving vehicles? Today’s paradigm for drone deliveries is that an individual drone goes to a warehouse, picks up a package, and delivers it to an individual address. Even if the warehouse is airborne and mobile, that’s horribly inefficient. Instead, let’s try this: a self-driving truck picks up hundreds of packages to be delivered along a given route. The truck also has dozens of drones on it. As the truck passes near an address, a drone picks up the right package, and flies it to the doorstep. We could only do this, of course, if drones are autonomous. The task is too complicated for a human operator.
I could go on … but let’s also investigate the knock-on effects. If what I’ve described comes to pass, what else will happen? Here are some challenges that will probably come up:
- If drones can carry people as well as packages, we’ll need fewer roadways. What will we do with obsolete roads? We’ll probably need fewer airports, too. What will we do with them?
- If people no longer buy personal vehicles but call transportation on demand:
- We’ll need far fewer parking lots. How can cities use the space to revitalize themselves?
- Automobile companies will implode. How do we retrain automobile executives and workers?
- We’ll burn far less fossil fuel. This will be good for the environment but bad for, say, oil companies and oil workers. How do we share the burden?
- If combined vehicles – drones and SDVs – deliver packages, millions of warehouse workers and drivers will lose their jobs. Again, how do we share the burden?
- If autonomous drones can attack airborne targets, do we really need expensive, human-piloted fighter jets?
These are intriguing predictions as well as troublesome challenges. But the thought process for generating these ideas is quite simple – you simply mash up good ideas from multiple boxes. You, too, can predict the future.
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