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