Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Deciding Decisively
I want more options.
Last week. I wrote about Chip Heath’s presentation skills. Today, let’s talk about his cognitive skills. Chip, with his brother Dan, has written three books: Switch, Made to Stick, and Decisive.
I’ve written about Decisive before and I expect to write about it again. Today, I’ll give an overview of the four major parts of the Decisive paradigm. I hope this will be useful in itself and it should also serve to introduce future articles that delve more deeply into each of the four elements.
Heath suggests that the path to better decision making is summarized in a simple acronym: WRAP. Here’s a thumbnail description of each.
Widen Your Options – too often, our decisions come in the form of “whether or not”. For instance: “We need to decide whether or not we’re going to acquire Company Z.” Much better to say, “What’s the best way to invest our capital to increase our market share?” Heath reports on one study that suggests that multiple-choice decisions are six times more likely to result in good decisions than are whether-or-not decisions. (This is very similar to Paul Nutt’s concept of premature commitment or to a doctor’s narrow framing based on your medical record.)
Reality-test Your Assumptions – I’ve written about confirmation bias before; Heath says that it’s much more pervasive in business than we might realize. The boss wants to do something, so all of us underlings look for evidence that she’s right. Moral: don’t surround yourself with yes-people. Before making a big decision, hold a trial with two well-prepared groups arguing the pros and cons. Also, remember the base rates. If nine out of ten start-ups fail, there’s a 90% chance that your start-up will fail. Really, there is – you can learn more here.
Attain Distance Before Deciding – My Mom used to say, “It’s easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.” In essence, that’s Heath’s advice, too. Making a big decision stirs up emotions ranging from fear to greed and most everything in between. So, get some distance. Time can be a form of distance; putting off a decision may help you think more clearly. (But not always). You can also ask yourself a simple question: “If my best friend asked for my advice in a similar situation, what would I say?”
Prepare to Be Wrong – when I climbed in the Andes, my buddies and I would often create a go/no go decision like this: “If we don’t reach such-and-such point by such-and-such time, we need to abandon the climb and return to camp.” Heath calls these tripwires. They’re agreed upon milestones or events that will jolt us out of autopilot. Without tripwires, we may just go merrily on our way, assuming that our original decision was correct. Tripwires help us focus on unfolding events and take corrective action.
Is that all there is to decision making? Not at all, Heath tells some great stories along the way and I’ll write about them in the future. For today, however, that about WRAPs it up.
When Will We Have a Vision?
I’ve heard many executives try to answer questions about vision. The responses tend to be wordy. Perhaps the speaker meanders a bit. That’s unfortunate because a question about vision is often a plea for help.
Here are some questions you might hear:
- When will we have a vision?
- What’s the vision?
- When will you clarify the vision?
If the question comes from a junior employee, I’m inclined to take it at face value. The questioner just wants to know about the vision.
On the other hand, if the question comes from a more senior person – especially a person who manages other people – it may have a different meaning altogether. The question is not so much when we’ll have a vision but:
- When will we have a vision that I can (easily) explain to my employees?
The person may well understand the vision (in general terms) but doesn’t feel comfortable explaining and defending it. The question is actually a plea for help.
You could, of course, answer the question and explain the vision. But you would miss the opportunity to convert the person into an ambassador for your message.
If you answer the question literally, you’ll give information to one person. If you can create an ambassador, on the other hand, you can amplify your message and deliver it to hundreds of people. Moreover, your messengers will be trusted members of the local environment. That’s often much more powerful than hearing the same message from an executive who works thousands of miles away.
How do you create ambassadors? There are at least three steps:
First, make them feel like part of the team. Someone who feels they’re off the team, won’t convince others to join. How do you make
Oh, I see.
people feel like they’re on the team? Include them. Ask their opinion. Listen. Treat them with respect. Say “thank you”. It’s not so hard to do but it does take time and requires some thoughtfulness.
Second, simplify the message. You’re trying to put words in someone’s mouth – more or less literally. It’s easier to put a short message in someone’s mouth. Long messages tend to get filtered and edited in unpredictable ways. Short messages are more likely to survive intact as they pass from one person to another.
Third, repeat the message. And ask others to do it as well. Your target audience will need to hear the message at least half a dozen times before it sinks in. Even if you think it has sunk in, don’t stop delivering it. Take a hint from Coca Cola. We all know what Coke is but that doesn’t stop the soda giant from continuing to deliver the message.
Once you create ambassadors, be sure to treat them well. More people will hear your message from them than from you. That means you can use more of your time to do other things — as long as you can keep your ambassadors on message.
Time — The Infinite Resource
Budget this!
Time, cost, and quality. Pick any two.
It’s a good thought to keep in mind when managing a project. You can choose to optimize two — and only two — of the three parameters. The third parameter will always go in the other direction. Let’s say you want something done in less time and at lower cost. By optimizing those two parameters, you’ve sub-optimized the third – quality will suffer. If you want high quality at low cost, well… it’s going to take a long time. Pick any two.
Interestingly, we only measure two of the three parameters. We have armies of accountants to keep track of how we spend our money. We have quality control experts to measure quality. We have no one who keeps track of how we spend our time. Are we spending our time wisely? Are we allocating our time based on strategic objectives? Who knows? We treat time as an infinite resource.
Though we treat money and assets and goodwill as corporate resources, we treat time as a personal resource. How you spend your time is pretty much up to you. This higher you rise in the ranks, the more you control your own time.
And that’s a practice that needs to change according to “Making Time Management the Organization’s Priority,” a recent article from the McKinsey Quarterly. As the article notes, “Time management isn’t just a personal-productivity issue … [it’s] an organizational issue whose root causes are deeply embedded in corporate structures and cultures.”
How can you change the “time culture” in your organization? The McKinsey article provides six suggestions. To save time, I’ll cover three today and three more in an upcoming post.
Create a time leadership budget – this may sound obvious but far too few organizations actually do it. When you create a proposal for a new project, you always include a cost budget. How about a leadership time budget? You can think of leadership time as a general corporate resource – just like money. Let’s say you have ten executives working on new projects. Assuming, that each works 2,000 hours per year, that’s an overall “budget” of 20,000 hours. If you add a new project, how much leadership time will it take? What will you take away to make the budget balance?
Think about time when introducing organizational change – organizational change takes enormous resources, much more than we typically estimate. That includes time. Yet we often ask managers to change things while also doing their “day” jobs. Establishing a leadership time budget can help here. So can managerial restructuring. My rule of thumb — call it the Travis rule — is that more managers mean more meetings. Reducing the number of managers can (within reason) reduce the number of hours spent in meetings and re-balance the time leadership budget.
Measure and manage time – ask your leaders to keep track of their time by keeping a simple diary. As McKinsey points out, “Executive are usually surprised to see the output from time analysis exercises, for it generally reveals how little of their activity is aligned with the company’s stated priorities.” As the old saying goes, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Let’s exercise a little time budgeting here. Most people read at about 200 words per minute. This article is about 600 words long. So you’ve been reading for three minutes. Time to get back to work.
Give and Take and Corporate Culture
At your place of work, is it a good idea to ask for help? If you do, are you considered weak? Are you happy to ask for help or hesitant?
These simple questions about your own behavior can help illuminate your corporate culture. More importantly, they can help you understand whether your culture is pointed toward success or failure. That’s the gist of a new book, Give and Take, and an accompanying article, “Givers Take All: A Hidden Dimension of Corporate Culture” in the McKinsey Quarterly.
The author, Adam Grant, suggests that organizations should focus on developing a “giver culture” rather than a “taker culture”. Grant takes the example of various intelligence agencies in the period after the 9/11 attacks. The single best predictor of effectiveness was “… the amount of help that analysts gave to each other.”
What are the characteristics of a giver culture? It’s a long list and includes, “… helping others, sharing knowledge, offering mentoring, and making connections without expecting anything in return.” In taker cultures, on the other hand, “…the norm is to get as much as possible from others while contributing less in return.”
Grant summarizes the benefits of giving cultures, including increased productivity, improved customer care, greater innovation, and lower turnover. So why don’t more organizations commit to creating giving cultures? Because most organizations are set up to be competitive. Only one person can get that promotion. If my department gets a larger budget, yours gets a smaller one. It doesn’t pay for me to help you.
Grant suggests a variety of steps that executives and managers can take to reap the benefits of more giving cultures. One is simply to “keep the wrong people off the bus.” In the recruiting (and promotion) cycles, focus on identifying, hiring, and promoting givers rather than takers. How do you identify a taker? Three ways:
- Takers say “I” rather than “we” – they take the credit for themselves when it should be shared. (I’ve commented on this regarding the job interview process).
- They kiss up, kick down – managers may see them as supportive but subordinates will see them as little tyrants. Be sure to get references from subordinates.
- They badmouth others – similar to kiss up/kick down, takers will derogate others to improve their own relative status.
While you can hire and promote givers over takers, ultimately managers need to set the example that others can emulate. If you want employees to think outside the box, then you should think outside the box. If you want to create a giver culture, then be a giver yourself. If you pay it forward, you’ll soon be paid back.
Want a Good Decision? Go to Trial.
We all know what the decision should be.
Let’s say that you’re arrested for a terrible crime. After a few months in jail, you’re taken to court for a trial. In the courtroom, you meet your lawyer for the first time. The judge selects a jury. You notice that all the jurors are white males and that they all went to the same business school.
As the trial begins the judge tells the jurors – very directly – that she believes you’re guilty. The prosecutor then uses Power Point to present the evidence against you. The presentation consists of over 200 slides.
Your lawyer is not allowed to present any evidence – he can only respond to the prosecutor’s slides. He raises a number of objections but the prosecutor handles each one smoothly. You notice that the prosecutor doesn’t refute the objections but merely brushes them aside. The slides are complicated and hard to follow. You notice that some of the jurors are glassy-eyed. Others are checking their BlackBerries.
When the prosecutor’s presentation concludes, the jurors don’t adjourn to a separate room to discuss the case. Rather, the judge simply asks them, “So, do you agree with me?” Most of the jurors nod their heads and you’re whisked off to jail.
Could that really happen? Let’s hope not in a court of law. But, as Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book, Decisive, that’s exactly how corporations make bazillion dollar decisions. Echoing Paul Nutt’s book, Why Decisions Fail, the Heaths point out that most business decisions really are one sided.
Here’s how it goes. An executive gets an idea that just might be brilliant – or not. Then a process begins to justify the idea and convince top management to support it. Most of the members of top management recognize that a justification process is going on. They don’t really object to it because 1) they don’t have a forum to present their ideas; and 2) they don’t have the resources to develop the other side of the story or to investigate alternatives.
The justification process grinds on. As the Heaths point out, the process usually results in a “whether or not” decision. Executives don’t consider a range of alternatives but simply vote up or down, yes or no.
The process usually includes a top management meeting with a barrage of Power Point slides. I’ve participated in dozens of them. Usually someone in the meeting says, “Well, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment ….” No matter what that person says, the objection is somehow handled and brushed aside. The devil’s advocate may have a good point but he doesn’t have the data to back it up. The result is that the group feels “better” about the decision … “after all, we did consider both sides.”
Paul Nutt writes that business “…decisions fail half of the time. Vast sums are spent without realizing any benefits for the organization.” In other words, we could flip a coin and do just as well – and save a bundle on consulting fees.
We often complain about our judicial system. But the trial by jury – with evenly matched sides presenting evidence – is probably the best system ever developed for discerning the truth when the evidence is murky. In business, the evidence is often murky; we’re trying to predict the future with incomplete data. You want the best decision? Put it on trial.
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