Beyond Six Sigma

It's time to launch a new consulting business. Name?

7 Sigma - For When You Just Can't Get Enough Sigma.

Or,

5 Sigma - When You've Had Enough of Sigma

The Myth of Proof

Stephen Covey was fond of using the lighthouse as something that symbolizes guiding principles. I prefer to think of it as something that symbolizes a state of transition.

A lighthouse is a warning for a boat. Its message is simple - you are entering a point of transition and what you've been able to do up to this point will no longer work. Save for a few amphibious crafts, most vehicles are designed for either water or land - to try the transition from one state to the other, from water to land without a change from boat to car is to court destruction.

Right now, your business has proof of what works and what does not. That's fine and reliable as long as the context, the state, in which you work does not change. But once that happens - once the demographic of your customer changes, the competition introduces new solutions, the market transitions from national to international ... when you see such a change, you are seeing a lighthouse. The proof you have about what works in the water may prove irrelevant once you find yourself on land. Motor boats and sail boats alike move poorly on land.

Don't become complacent about proof. We're entering the end of the information age. The point is no longer to disperse more information to knowledge workers. The point is to disperse more decisions, more market signals, more autonomy, to knowledge workers. It is unlikely that you have much proof about what works in such a context. And reliance on past proof will only confuse you.

What should you do? Start generating theories. Test them in small and rapid experiments. Proof is valuable, but to get proof about what works in a new context you have to approach the situation with an open mind about what works and what does not. Proof is like yogurt - it is never entirely clear when it has gone bad with age, but it does go eventually go bad. Be sure that your proof is fresh.

Myth of "Focus"

"Just focus on your work."
"If we could just get our people to focus on their work, to not be so distracted, we'd get twice as much done."
"I really do have trouble focusing at work. Emails, meetings, conversations, sounds drifting into my cubicle all distract me."

Two things seem to be generally accepted in today's modern work place. One, if only we didn't live in an information age so ripe with distraction, we could focus on our work. Two, such focus would be a huge boon to productivity. Maybe.

Our minds simply don't work in a vacuum. Deming used to say that if you were to tell an employee to "clean a table," they wouldn't have a clue about how to proceed. Do you want the table cleaned off so that we can do our paperwork on its surface? Do you want the table cleaned off so that we can eat? Perform surgery? Assemble microelectronics? Until she knows why you want it cleaned off, she can't work.

Our brains need a context, a purpose, an environment in which they can place our work. Without that, brains wander unmoored. One job of leadership is to create a context for employee tasks. This is not so much a matter of "focusing" on the particulars of a task as it is a matter of "connecting" the task to the outside world. Creativity is almost invariably a matter of connection - and that requires us to be aware of our environment, not disconnected from it.

The Myth of Productivity Without Creativity

I was in some meetings with two heads of a health care company’s new business division who are obese. From what I could glean, they didn’t take the time for exercise largely because they worked so many hours. They’ve compromised their own health as they are busily pursuing business solutions to health problems.

The boundary between work and home has disappeared along with the wires we once needed for phones and computers. Work hours are steadily creeping upwards.

For me, the worst thing about this is that it overlooks what research into the mysteries of the mind has repeatedly proven: gestation is a necessary component in creativity. When people are continually rushed to translate problems and information into solutions, the solutions they arrive at are almost invariably clichéd, predictable, and of little value. Research indicates that people need time after immersion in a problem to let it gestate before expecting a breakthrough.

My work with dozens and dozens of organizations has convinced me of this: there is no shortage that creativity cannot overcome. Whether the organization is short of customers, cash, or talented employees, the shortage can be overcome by creativity. Creativity, however, has trouble overcoming a shortage of time. And as organizations become less creative, they feel compelled to work longer hours, which further reduces the level of creativity.

Lest you think this hypothetical, you may be interested to know that Darwin worked only two to four hours a day. Last I heard, his insights had led to research and products worth hundreds of billions - perhaps trillions of dollars by now. You can't calculate the productivity of creativity any more than you can calculate the number of apples in an apple seed.

The Myth of Rating and Ranking

Once or twice a year, supervisors all over the world sit down and solve for X in the following equation:

Y * X = 47

X = the employee performance.
Y = the system they perform within.
47 (or whatever value) = what the employee was able to create within that system.

There are so many things that are wrong with this equation, literally.

For one, the value of 47 is itself subject to massive amount of measurement error. The performance of an individual in a system typically results in indeterminate and hard to measure outcomes.

If Y is the value of the "system" in which the individual performs, this system is constantly changing. Even if the company is static, its environment, its markets, its technology are all changing. Y is a dynamic variable, not a static value.

Nonetheless, supervisors around the world are sitting down right now to solve for X. The scariest thing? Most will actually think that they've found "the" value of X and will never realize that as long as they attribute complementary values to Y, they can justify any value of X that they want.

[And yes, alert readers, this is basically a recap of an argument that Deming repeatedly made onto deaf ears. Apparently, the millions of administrators demanding grades and managers giving performance reviews all understand systems, and variability more than the departed Dr. Deming. Either that or they just don't get it and feel compelled to continue with a system of grading and ranking only slightly less archaic than sinking women in water to determine whether or not they are witches.]

The Myth of Motivational Distinctions by “Class”

An often-observed myth held by senior and executive management is that subordinates, especially those well down the hierarchical chain, are motivated solely by a subset of the things that motivate managers higher up the chain. What do we mean by this?

Specifically, when you sit in the boardroom listening to senior executives talk about what motivates the ordinary worker, the character of their conversation takes on a distinctly paternalistic and condescending flavor. The whole conversation seems to descend from an attitude that the senior executives are the caretakers of those in their charge, and that the meek and the poor workers will be ever so glad just to have a minimal set of needs satisfied in order to attain happiness. So the conversation tends to center on the company’s pay scale compared with the industry’s, fringe benefits as a percent of salary, and small rewards and discretionary bonuses for employee suggestions. The dialogue continues with a focus on how much merit increases should be and how happy workers should feel to get them. It next centers on how benevolent the leadership is for paying such a large percentage of health care costs, and how lucky everyone should feel that the company helps pay for long-term disability. Finally, the corporate “fathers” talk about how beneficent they are by having better than average vacation or time-off policies. And what about the company’s 401K contributions?

But when these same senior managers talk about what motivates them—in addition to their big fat paychecks, incentive compensation, stock options, and restricted share awards—other factors arise in the conversation. They talk about the specific challenges of their job and the enjoyment and satisfaction they derive from meeting those challenges. They talk about the range of experience they have gathered and their desires for increased visibility and accountability. They talk about their accomplishments and the pride they take in them. They talk about their ability to contribute to the company’s bottom line. The talk about the challenges to their organization, the steps they’ve taken to overcome them, and their specific achievements. They also talk about their future goals and what it will take to accomplish them.

What we have almost never heard during our time in the executive boardrooms during conversations such as these is a focus on incentives that might otherwise interest a host of employees at least as much, if not more, than the pale subset mulled over by management. Not commonly discussed were things like added responsibility, changing job status to gain experience and knowledge, increased organizational visibility, flexibility in career assignments, greater autonomy, participation in more entrepreneurial activities, more time for personal development and innovation, and participation in more technically challenging work. Why is this?

What if managers saw their employees as having the same potential they see in themselves and devoted time and energy to creating similar kinds of positive incentives and opportunities to fulfill those potentials? What would a company be like then?

A Myth: It’s OK to Create Personal Goals in a Void

We have to admit that we’re always amazed when a supervisor of ours comes to us once a year and asks us to write up our personal goals for the next year and have them on his desk the next Tuesday. (We’re not talking for the moment about personal development goals, but those that target discrete activities to improve the business, its processes or its products.) How is it that anyone in management thinks an employee can set meaningful goals for improving the business without reference to some framework, some overarching strategic context, to guide him or her?

Our first and immediate reaction is always to ask the same questions, if not out loud, at least in our heads: (1) What are the corporation’s goals for the next year? (2) What are the primary strategies the company is employing to realize those goals? (3) What are the departments’ goals for the year and how do your own personal goals tie with and support them? (4) What specific activities do you think we’d be best suited for that would support all of the above, and (5) How do you see us being best able to align our goals with those at each layer of organization to make sure that what we’re doing is fully supportive of and synchronized with them?

Why does it not seem to dawn on management that one of the most powerful forces they can harness inside an organization is to make sure that everyone is aligned around the strategic objectives the company has set for itself for the ensuing year? Everyone under the sun has heard about “rowing the boat together in the same direction” to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. If these goals truly meant something to the corporation, wouldn’t they want everyone's to contribute maximally to accomplishing the company’s annual goals? Wouldn’t they want to make sure this happened by paying particular attention to synchronizing them at every level (from the company's marketing and product development strategies down to departmental work instructions), and across all the functional silos, as people developed and planned them. And wouldn’t they want to make sure that both up and down and across the organization everyone knew who was doing what, so they could harmonize their efforts throughout the year to produce the greatest effect?

The “Human Nature” Justification Myth

This entry is more along the lines of a “pet peeve” than some great management insight. But please bear with us because it’s important to get this off our chests.

Have you ever noticed that one of the quickest ways a manager (or anyone, for that matter) can end a dialogue, particularly one concerning a point of disagreement, is to pronounce your point of view “countrary to human nature”? This assertion is presented as being definitive, unarguable, sacrosanct, and therefore, finally determinative of any point under discussion. Once this decree has been uttered, any further disagreement or challenge may simply be viewed as argumentative and insubordinate. The issue has now been decided once and for all, by fiat and undeniable truth, hasn’t it?

Resorting to this argument, in our estimation, simply avoids having to confront or deal with any criticisms of the status quo, recommendations for change, or counterpoints to prior assertions. It is all that is left to be said when the manager runs out of valid and cogent counterarguments to your proposition. But its message is clear: leave it alone.

To what extent do you view your manager or supervisor as a great student of human nature? When he or she blurts out in the context of a debate something like “human beings are by nature competitive animals, and therefore trying to put together incentives for group cooperation is a waste of time,” how often do you actually find yourself in agreement with the manager’s pronouncement? Do you sit and question the degree to which you actually believe his or her statement and the conclusions implicit in it?

How many supervisors have actually been educated to any extent on the “nature” of human beings? Are they literate in the most recent scientific findings concerning human perception, human psychological development, human motivation, or attitude and belief formation. Or has most of their learning come through the “school of hard knocks,” whereby virtually all of their conclusions about human nature have been filtered through their old work environments’ cultures. Aren’t they simply bearing witness to the way things have always been in the worlds in which they’ve survived in the past and figured out ways to succeed? How much of their experience and personal evolution has been fueled by environments that encouraged individual learning and growth, risk-taking, experimentation, and continuous formal education. Is their pronouncement simply more along the lines of “we’ve always done it that way,” or “better not challenge the status quo if you know what’s good for you”?

We would argue that it’s not far-fetched to claim that it is human nature to defecate in the woods, if history is any guide of how humans behaved for thousands years before the advent of fixed communities and plumbing. Nevertheless, humans have evolved over the millennia with the advent of ideas such as civility, cleanliness, cooperation, and social responsibility. One of the great advantages of being human is that, unlike other creatures in the animal world, we are not saddled once and for all with our instinctual behaviors. Nor do we have to be slaves to prescriptions justified by pronouncements that they correspond with “human nature.” We can actually use our cerebral cortexes to develop new ideas and ways of thinking and acting that generate more positive and effective outcomes in the world.

The “Openness” Myth

John was sitting on a weekly departmental “all hands” phone call when the question was asked by the general manager, “How valuable did you find the 2-hour web training session that was conducted yesterday by the IT department?” After some brief hesitation by all the participants, someone eventually pipes up to say that he thought the training was quite well done and very valuable for all of the participants. You smile to yourself because you know that the training was horrible: the trainer failed to present the material cogently and succinctly; the trainer offered no context for the material being presented; and, the material seemed to be presented disjointedly, in random order, without observations about the relative importance of different elements, and with little explanation as to its use cases. What do you do now? Should you say something?

Well, what you do depends largely on the culture of your organization. If it’s permissible to be honest and open about how you felt, diplomatically of course, you voice your concerns over what you think was missing from the training and make suggestions on how to improve it. You also acknowledge your appreciation for the effort made, but suggest concrete ways in which it could have provided greater benefit to you.

If it’s not permissible to be open and honestly critical of the effort made by another employee, then you simply parrot the same positive refrain issued by the first commenter and let it go at that. In fact, to do otherwise might be viewed as openly challenging or confrontational by the first commenter, who might therefore be offended by your “flagrant” contradiction. So, you refrain from saying what you think; you try to figure out what to say and how to say it so as not to offend the original speaker or the trainer. Or maybe you just waffle and slur some comments in ways that make them largely indecipherable.

Many companies take great pride in what they consider to be their open and honest work environments. But underneath management’s affirmations of these core values and beliefs--honesty and openness--often lies much withholding of sincere dialogue, innovative ideas, suggestions for process improvements, and valid criticisms of current process and policies. People ultimately disengage from the company meetings and supervisor dialogues for three primary reasons: (1) they know that their comments and suggestions will largely be ignored; (2) they realize that their ideas and contributions will be dismissed without explanation or exploration, because that’s what has always happened, or (3) they come to resent management’s “air” of indifference and condescension for anything that challenges the norm. Without the ability to make open and sincere contributions to the company’s body of knowledge and to influence how things are done, people will eventually withdraw from making such offerings. Once this happens, the company loses not only the immediate opportunities for individual and collective performance improvements, but it begins to stifle the development of its employees’ potential through their disengagement from improving the organization and any real long-term organizational learning.

In all honesty, ask yourself the following questions: How often does you manager solicit ideas and feedback from you and others about what's happening inside the organization? In what ways specifically do your supervisor and senior managers work to create a climate of openness, honesty, and trust with respect to the feedback they solicit? Do they then comment directly on the observations, criticisms and recommendations you make; give them due consideration and provide you with their perceptions and conclusions in return; or simply listen and then ignore everything you’ve said, with no explanation? What kinds of dialogues are held around your offerings? How are people rewarded and recognized for such contributions? How does your supervisor react when people’s recommendations or comments appear to contradict the mainstream thinking? Depending on your answer to these questions, your organization may be learning a lot or nothing at all.

The Myth of Home Grown Solutions

Obviously, each organization and person has to customize solutions for their situation and goals. But there are some general principles in regards to the importance of priorities, communication, system dynamics, variation, and processes that will be constant. Engineers, doctors, and architects are generally expected to be licensed and / or recipients of a formal education before they can practice their craft. They, too, must improvise and problem-solve in situations that weren't covered in class - but they have a body of knowledge upon which they can rely when doing so.

The field of management is perhaps not as mature a science as meteorology, physics, or engineering. But some fabulous minds have delved into the topic and come out with insights that could change how you do business.

It seems a crime that so few practitioners of management have heard of the leading thinkers like Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming, Russell Ackoff, Edgar Schein, and Peter Senge. Their writing is not always easy, but it generally seems easier to understand their insights than to manage without them.

Next time you are debating about whether to work overtime or do something personal, compromise: read a book by one of these great thinkers.

The Myths of Change

There are two myths of change. One is that change, if done right, should be easy. The other is that organizational change can occur when the individuals within it don't.

Change is hard. Anyone who has tried to change a bad habit can attest to this. If you are going to change anything significant you have to make it a priority and be prepared to struggle with it for some time.

Organizations emerge out of the interactions of individuals. Unless those individuals change their way of being, their relationships, their paradigms, their perspectives and their actions, the organization will not change. A change effort is always intensely personal. The change efforts doomed to fail are those that tell management that the change is directed towards the employee or tell the employee that the change is directed towards management.

The Myth of Potential

One of the popular myths, embraced even more widely outside of management circles than within them, is the myth of potential. More precisely, the myth that anyone has the potential to succeed, or to do well, in any environment. It is a matter of will that makes the difference.

Yet one doesn't have to point to the extreme example of Wilt Chamberlin succeeding as an NBA center or Willie Shoemaker succeeding as a jockey to point out that potential is very personal and far from unlimited.

Two things may very well be true of most of us. One, we do not realize our own potential. Two, we have no idea how much work it will take to realize that potential.

People are not infinitely capable or malleable. The smart manager realizes how different are the potentials of his team members and adjusts strategy to accommodate that reality.

The Context for Providing These Myths

In rereading the postings so far, we can see that it might be easy for readers to simply think this is just another management bashing venue, painting a more serious and somewhat pedantic face over the types of vignettes and behaviors characterized in the very mocking “Dilbert” cartoons. But that is not our intention at all. We need to take a moment to set straight the context for our site’s entries.

Our intention is to expose some very deep-seated beliefs that appear to be both commonplace among senior managers and somehow so deeply ingrained into their subconscious that they remain invisible and, therefore, unchallengeable and unexamined. It’s almost a truism that the beliefs people hold very much define and fix their attitudes, decisions, and actions, and this is no different for managers. (Beliefs affect even people’s perceptions, i. e., their interpretation of direct inputs to their sensory devices: eyes and ears). Look behind what managers do and you can begin to discern what they actually believe, not necessarily what they say they believe. But, in what contexts are those beliefs ever actually examined or challenged in the workplace?

If people want to change how they perceive, speak and act, they have to change what they believe. Unfortunately, what senior managers actually believe is not always clearly discernible, and even when most employees correctly infer what their managers consciously or subconsciously believe, it is almost never discussable. Listen to Peter Senge discussing the idea of “mental models”:

“. . . new insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models—surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works—promises to be a major breakthrough for building learning organizations.”

Our intention is to make visible the kinds of deep-seated beliefs that very often operate in the business world, particularly high in the executive councils, because those beliefs and the corresponding attitudes they engender tremendously affect people’s perception of the company, their attitudes about both the workplace and their bosses, and the degree to which they choose to participate in and work to improve organizational functioning. If managers want to begin to harness the tremendous intellectual and emotional energy that resides in their employees, they need to examine how their current beliefs or “mental models” de-power employees and limit the employees’ opportunities and desire to contribute. Conversely, seriously examining their uncovered beliefs in light of the myths we offer here may shed additional light on real opportunities to unleash the full potential of their employees and improve their workplaces.

The Myth of Power

Russell Ackoff makes a distinction between power over and power to. If you have power over someone, you have power to limit their behavior. "You have to be home by midnight." "You are not authorized to make purchases of more than $500." By contrast, power to enables. If you give someone the power to, say, repair refrigerators or set broken bones, you have given them power to.

“Power to” is elusive and difficult. Also, it often doesn't even look like what is traditionally thought of as power, so reliant is it on the education and empowerment of the subject. By contrast, power over looks like the cliché that animates the actions of so many; it clearly has a powerful person and one subject to that power.

If you are in a leadership position, take a different kind of inventory. Assess to what extent your people have new capabilities, have new sets of "power to," in the last 12 months. It is this increase in power, this increase in ability to create value that ultimately defines progress. Don't succumb to the allure of the myth of power taken out of children's literature about kings and queens.

The Myth of Proof

"Can you prove it?"

This is more than proof that you're dealing with a pragmatist. It is also a convenient way of avoiding the need to change and demonstrates a misunderstanding of change.

If something is truly innovative - if it represents a significant change - it simply can't be proven in advance. No examples substitute for a theory and no proof can be generated until after you've actually attempted the change.

And this cuts both ways. "Proof" that something works in the past is really no guarantee that it will work in the future. Phonograph records sold rather well for decades. As the mutual fund ads say, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Perhaps the worst kind of success is success that isn't well understood but can be "proven" with data. It is one thing - and a wonderful thing - to have success. It is quite another thing to be able to repeat it.

You will never have proof that something will work in the future. As Deming continually said, "management is prediction." Although you can never have proof, you should have a theory of knowledge, a set of testable predictions that you regularly test and update. It is a theory of knowledge (one of Deming's four elements of profound knowledge) that is perhaps the most important bridge out of the world of management myth.

Who Cut the Cheese? - the Myth of Management Wisdom

If you have sat through a business meeting, you have had one of those moments when you have sat mute, incredulous that the person talking is wasting your time to prattle on about such inane and obvious things. (Hint: if you have not had such a moment, you are the person prattling on.)

Apparently some people like to use meetings to connect, to come to agreement. One sure way to do this is to talk about the obvious. Who can disagree with a conclusion that this customer making up 40% of the business is an important customer? Who can disagree that it was a bad idea to offend their lead procurement guy? Who would disagree that we need to work things out? And who would disagree that we need to make this an important task? And yet the admonitions spill out, and different levels of managers trip over one another to reinforce what even an 8th grader with an iPod can by now repeat.

At halftime, it may be obvious to the team trailing by 12 points that they have to get out there and "turn things around." This is both obvious and unhelpful. What would help - and what can too rarely be provided - is actual coaching about how to turn things around. Suggestions for specific steps, certain strategies, changes in match ups. Players want to win. They do not want to be humiliated. Players are hungry for good coaching, tips that make them better, whether it comes in the form of words of encouragement or correction.

Employees don't need to be berated or subject to inane pep talks. When things have gone wrong, they need coaching that makes a difference, coaching that can actually improve their performance.

The Myth of Uniformity

Around the time of the American Civil War, gun manufacturers Colt and Smith & Wesson popularized interchangeable parts for production. This uniformity was wonderful because it meant that companies could begin producing in volume. Within decades, factories around the world began to make affordable even products as complex as cars.

Companies became enamored of uniformity and quality has been frequently seen as synonymous with minimal variation. Well, that depends.

If you have a community in which every person is the same, you have little basis for economic progress. Trade is one key to progress and if you can trade your furs for my salmon, we both do better. If all you have is salmon and all I have is salmon, there is not much we can do to improve life for one another. Variation actually improves the quality of life in many domains.

It is a very big leap to make to go from encouraging uniformity in production parts to encouraging uniformity in school children or employees. Yet many communities have done exactly that. If we are serious about creating organizations in which individuals are allowed to realize their potential, we have to get serious about finding ways to create the equivalent of internal markets that allow each person to find a niche, whether it is hunting fur or fishing for salmon, that brings value to the organization.

No one ever realized his potential through conformity. And no community ever fully realized its potential without encouraging its members to realize theirs. Don’t encourage uniformity with your people. You have machines for that.

The Myth of Communication

When surveyed, employees often indicate that they want more communication. The response to this is often short-lived, involving a flurry of newsletters, executive addresses, and an increase in email traffic, yet it inevitably misses the point. This is because the very notion of communication is misunderstood.

A default concept of communication seems to depend on a picture of information as a substance that moves from one person to another, like water poured from a pitcher into a glass. (Which suddenly makes those teacher admonitions to "sit still!" so much more comprehensible.) But communication doesn't work like that.

Instead, communication is a process of remote control, pushing buttons from afar, and hoping that you get it right. When I say "freedom" to you, I actually push your "freedom" word button. For one person that sounds like tiresome 4th of July speeches, to another it means complete lack of accountability, and to a third it conjures an invigorating concept. Depending on what interpretation the word freedom launches in your brain, what I say has very different meanings.

To compound this problem of communication, almost invariably organizations are made up of a variety of functions. Each function - accounting, legal, engineering, advertising, production - has a different worldview and is inclined to interpret any communication differently from the other. Hence, a large stream of communication that flows through any organization inevitably shows up as chatter, as static, rather than a meaningful signal or message.

When employees say that they need more communication, they aren't asking for more static. They are asking to be heard. Until you hear their story, understand their frustrations, goals, and experiences, you don't even know how to talk to them. Worse, as long as a person goes unheard, he or she gradually grows disengaged from your enterprise.

It is no myth that your organization needs more communication. It is a myth that such communication should begin with even more management pronouncements.

The Myth of the Management “Team”

A corollary to the myth that people are endowed with specific attributes, knowledge, skills and experience simply by virtue of the position or title they hold is another myth, the myth of the management “team,” described quite well in Peter Senge’s 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline.

Mr. Senge talks about this august group of senior executives who battle collectively to define the organization’s pathway, knock down internal and external obstacles, and provide the wherewithal for the organization to compete and survive in the marketplace. But in describing how this “team” functions in reality, he makes the point that the way they function tends to minimize any chance for collective or individual learning. Listen to what he has to say:

“All too often, teams in business tend to spend time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team’s collective strategy—maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team. To keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid stating them publicly; and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person’s view foisted on the group. If there is disagreement, it’s usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions and experience in a way that the team as a whole could learn.”

Senge continues by referencing Chris Argyris’s book, Overcoming Organizational Defenses, about the fact that, while executive team’s can function quite well in managing more mundane issues, their cohesiveness and performance break down under encounters with real problems or crises:

“Argyris argues that most managers find collective inquiry inherently threatening. School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people we excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues. (When was the last time someone was rewarded in your organization for raising difficult questions about the company’s current policies rather than solving urgent problems?)"

Senge continues:

“Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain or ignorant. That very process blocks out any new understandings which might threaten us. The consequence is what Argyris calls ‘skilled incompetence’—teams full of people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning.”

Perhaps we should focus more time and energy on examining the quality of the questions being asked inside our organizations rather than just focusing on the quality of the “answers.” When was the last time your management asked you to focus on the nature of the questions being asked inside your organization?

The Pareto Principle Myth

In his 1966 book, The Effective Executive, management guru Peter F. Drucker admonished professional managers to put “first things first.” This expression, later popularized by Stephen Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, essentially instructs people to pay to attention to those things that are most important to the success of their company (or their own lives). Drucker embellished his own expression by stating, “If there is one secret to effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.”

What seems so funny is that virtually anyone who has been around business for any length of time has not only heard of the pareto principle, but can recite its definition and argue the logic of its principle, its reasonableness and its efficacy. This principle essentially says that 20 percent of any set of activities effectively produces 80 percent of the beneficial effects or results from those activities. In business terms, this implies that something on the order of 20 percent of a company’s products generate 80 percent of its profits or revenues, or that 20 percent of the research engineers produce 80 percent of the company’s innovative product ideas. This principle also implies that senior executives should spend the preponderance of their time and attention on those areas that produce the greatest benefits to the future of their company, whether it is developing a new strategy to the market, putting in new manufacturing lines, or recruiting and developing knowledge workers.

But many management consultants who work continually with and coach senior executives of major corporations bemoan that fact that many senior executives’ time seems driven not by what is important, but what is most urgent. The myth is that managers and workers, who always profess to believe in the pareto principle, actually apply it to the way they manage their daily activities and the way they set priorities. In fact, in talking one day at a Critical Chain conference with Fred Weirsma, author of The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market, he observed that getting senior executives to just focus on any single thing that would improve the company’s performance would produce significant benefits.

What is apparent over time is that senior executives tend to be driven by a myriad of issues of the moment—whether it’s a temporary shutdown on the factory floor, a quality problem, adverse publicity about the company’s stock price, or the latest budgeting exercise—issues not necessarily of their choosing and issues that continually diffuse their attention to the point that nothing is followed through consistently or expeditiously. And what’s even more interesting is that when asked, senior executives tend to think they spend much of their time on strategic thinking and problem solving. But recent studies show that most executives spend their lives in 6-7 minute meetings dealing with a multitude of everyday, mundane matters that burn a lot of time and accomplish little towards improving workplace productivity and bottom line performance.

The lesson here is that, whether you are a senior executive or anyone up and down the organization, first, be very clear about and set your priorities based on the significance that your defined tasks have to the long-term sustainability and profitability of the company. And, second, if you really believe in the pareto principle, make sure you allocate the preponderance of your time to the high priority item(s), the ones presenting 80 percent of the potential or expected return on your time. Otherwise, you may be misapplying your time and attention and your company may not be realizing its full potential.

Using the Carrot as a Stick - the Myth of Motivation

Audrey introduced Candice and Paul and was quite happy that the two were as delighted with one another as she thought that they’d be. About a year later, Candice and Paul were married. They had a little ceremony and served cake but no meal. Audrey was hurt that she was not invited.

Audrey wasn’t hurt because she introduced Candice and Paul with the expectation of free cake. She was hurt because she wanted to share in the natural consequences of something she’d done, expected some recognition. And this gets to the heart of what is perhaps the most thoughtlessly relied-upon myth: the myth of extrinsic motivation.

There is such a huge gap between research and common practice on this point of employee motivation that the average person is usually stunned to learn that virtually all formal research indicates that extrinsic motivation does not work. Offering free cake as an inducement to get friends to introduce potential couples simply doesn’t work.

Extrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from outside of the person and typically shows up in the form of the classic carrot (bonus if you achieve this goal) or stick (humiliation or demotion if you don't achieve the goal). This belief in the efficacy of extrinsic motivation is so ingrained that, as Alfie Kohn says, research reporting on conclusions seems to invariably begin, "Contrary to hypothesis."

There are a variety of reasons for this confusion about a myth being fact. I will focus on only one here. The real problem with extrinsic motivation is that it places the locus of control over the task in the hands of someone not doing it. This practically guarantees that the task won’t be done creatively nor well. Rather, it will be done rather perfunctorily; people will do what’s needed for the reward but not necessarily what is needed for the task.

If you manage people, share the consequences of their work with them. Invite them to the wedding or have a profit sharing plan or some means to create a linkage between what they have done and what results from it. But don’t confuse that with the hope of controlling their behavior as if you were dangling fish in front of dolphins at SeaWorld. Let them eat cake - just don't use it to get them to jump through hoops.

The Automatic Attribution of Competence by Role

One of the most amazing phenomena (myths) we all witness through the course of our careers is the attribution or inference of knowledge, skills and particular competencies simply by virtue of the position someone occupies or the title someone holds. In other words, just because someone is promoted to a management position, the inference must be drawn, particularly by the supervisor who promoted him or her, that the individual actually knows how to “manage” people and lead the organization. However, since few companies actually seem to have any formal training programs, tutorials, handbooks, or other learning modalities to familiarize or immerse people into what it truly means to manage other human beings, one has to wonder how the newly promoted managers magically acquired these competencies. How does an individual who has never had any prior managerial experience or training become endowed with the knowledge and qualities needed to motivate, lead, train, guide, evaluate, and promote their new subordinates?

Or take another example. The senior executives bring in a new individual to become general manager of an operation. What are the specific attributions or inferences of competency that must be drawn (and granted) as a result of that simple act? Well, all of the competencies ascribable to that job, of course. Otherwise, we must assume that the new individual wouldn’t be there, right? And, the new general manager expects us to understand immediately that he or she must be “smarter” than we are because, after all, he or she occupies the titled position and we don’t. And the new individual must act and “look” the part, if for no other reason than that they can’t be found out by their manager to be less than “all-knowing” in their new role. They will only be rewarded and promoted for “looking good” and “being right.” After all the person who put them into the position is not paying them for “not knowing,” for asking too many questions, for being indecisive, or being wrong. Having the answer is what it’s all about and sounding intelligent is essential, even if the ideas or opinions expressed are not founded on articulable theory, hypotheses generated from trial and error, specific knowledge, corroborated information or fact. So the charade begins.

And we all play the game, become complicit in inferring the manager’s infallibility and omniscience. We decide it is unreasonable (or potentially career limiting) to point out errors in the individual’s thinking and decisions, and we stay quiet even when we know that wrong questions are being asked, the focus is misplaced, the identified problem is really only a symptom of something deeper, or the decision is off target. We quietly do what we’re told even when we know it won’t make a difference for the organization, or worse, will hurt the organization. And, this myth of infallability is exacerbated even more by the emergence of an increasing portion of workers as knowledge workers. Knowledge workers' specialties and particular skills very often distance them over time from their supervisors or managers' competencies, supervisors and managers whose technical knowledge and skills may have been acquired long ago, may be outdated in today’s environment, or may never have really been germane to the task (or tasks) that his or her employees now face. How do CFO’s or COO’s make intelligent decisions with respect the work of digital circuit designers, test engineers, marketers, or salesmen? How does a hospital administrator, trained in hospital management, begin to fathom the difficulties of the task decisions faced by oncologists or cardio-pulmonary specialists?

They often can’t. But we can’t say so and neither can they.

Why is Management Addicted to Myth?

One intention of this blog is to categorize various myths that we've seen. But I would like to explore why management seems to be addicted to myth in lieu of testable hypotheses or a coherent theory.

One reason may be the enormous pressure to be a part of the club. From outside of an organization it is easy to underestimate the enormous pressure to be a part of the management in-group. This group is defined by a particular worldview and if you don't share that worldview, you aren't really a part of the group. And if you aren't really a part of the in-group, you are part of the out-group. The consequences of such exclusion are real: those in the in-group can easily afford private school for their children, the latest luxury cars, and a second home in the mountains. If the boss makes comments like, "You need to really ride them to make sure they get that done," then you aren't about to make nerdish comments like, "have we ever tested the null hypothesis of that claim?" To suggest that the business be run as an experiment is to suggest your way out of the conference room and into the coffee break room with the other commoners. If you want to be a part of the tribe, you accept the tribal myths.

http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/nardelli-at-home-depot-hd-one-third-of.html