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Predictability as Hell: A Problem-solving Perspective

By Mike Lehr

Hell Image Text [IMG-0124]Businesses strive for predictability. Standardization helps them achieve that. Still, many employees like their jobs for their variability, “It’s something different every day.” Herein is a paradox.

On one hand, we have predictability containing expenses by minimizing surprises. On the other hand, work’s variability gives us pleasure. Could predictability make us wealthy but miserable too? Walter Kirn touches on this paradox in his article “Knowledge of the Future Is Messing With the Present” (The Atlantic, July/August edition) by asking:

Has making life more explicable actually made it any more pleasurable?

Perhaps by understanding predictability better, we could appreciate change better and strip its fearsomeness. The The Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place to Visit,” can help.

The main character, Rocky, is a petty thief who dies. A divine guide finds him to deliver the news and show him to his new “home.” At first, Rocky can’t believe his luck for in this place he gets whatever he wants. In poker, all the cards go his way. With women, none deny him. Despite his long list of sins, Rocky figures God granted him heaven.

However, after a while, he becomes bored with the predictability of succeeding at whatever he attempts, poker, slots, women, robberies, billiards etc. Finally, he approaches his divine host and says, “If I gotta stay here another day, I’m gonna go nuts! Look, look, I don’t belong in Heaven, see? I want to go to the other place.”

The divinity rebuts, “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea that you were in heaven, Mr. Valentine? This IS the other place!”

By imagining extremes, we alter our perspectives, permitting a more realistic assessment of our conditions. Not only do these perspectives influence our emotions (i.e. reducing fear of change) but also they improve our problem-solving skills.

 

 

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Categories: Analogies, Arbitrariness, Assumptions, Challenging Assumptions, Change, Conditional, Control, Decision Making, Emotions, Influence, Perspective, Problem Solving, Processes, Standardization, Uncertainty
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Vanilla Words and Uncreative Personalities, Cultures

By Mike Lehr

Just as music can set the tone, so can words. Just as music can help you assess personalities, words too. In business, standardization and processes play critical roles and bring their own jargon to facilitate communication in very much the same way as play calling facilitates football and military jargon facilitates warfare.

When we combine the two concepts, communication with efficiency, we create what I call “vanilla words.” Just as serving chicken at weddings is safe, words can serve the same purpose: palatability for all tastes. Yet, while such words facilitate communications, what kind of mood do they set? Just as “money” words cause us to think of work and “time” words relationships, what do vanilla words cause us to think and feel?

For example, what would you think of a person using nothing but vanilla words? How creative would you suggest his word choice was? How creative would you think he is? Long ago, as a merchandise buyer, a vendor showed me a 15-year old children’s bed sheet line that doubled sales in one year by simply changing the packaging. Similarly, many ideas seem fresh simply because of a different wording to present it.

If the creativeness and innovativeness of a culture correlates strongly to the presence of diverse personalities, why can’t the same be true for a person with regard to his word choice? Diverse word choice correlates to creativeness and vanilla word choice to standard thinking? Furthermore, if we return to the power of words to set our moods, what mood does a vanilla presentation set in us? An uncreative one? A standard one?

Thus, if we wish to help people or cultures feel more creative; we should spice up our word choice with some non-vanilla words.

 

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Categories: Analogies, Career, Communication, Creativity, Culture, Feelings, Impressions, Influence, Innovation, Personality, Phraseology, Power, Processes, Standardization, Talent, Thinking, Word Choice, Word Power, Words
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Assessing Creative Problem Solving: Outlier Technique

By Mike Lehr

Identifying creativity isn’t easy, but it is possible and can be done without assessment tools. It begins with identifying outlying answers to our questions. There are differences between people who give standard answers and creative ones, and differences between people who can solve problems and people who are problem solvers.

In other words, when we ask people questions, we should to anticipate their answers. The more different they are from the ones we expect the more creative they might be. Of course, different is necessarily creative. For example, someone gives a different answer to a question, but when we ask, “How did you come to do that?” and they answer along the lines of, “Well, some friends suggested I do that,” the act might be different to us but was not creative to the person.

This technique is similar to polling, meaning we need several questions on divergent topics to use it well. We also need to adjust for cultural and environmental differences. For example, people might give us different answers because their culture is different from ours and we have little experience with theirs. Thus, while their answers might be different from what we expect, our expectations might be too narrow.

On the other hand, their answers can’t be unconnected to our question. For example, if we ask, “How do you normally get to work?” and they answer, “Breakfast,” while it’s different, there isn’t a connection, and we’ll need to ask for one.

Nevertheless, in the end, the more different we find people’s answers are from our expectations and from what we could expect from their situations, the greater their creative potential is. That brings up another point: most people don’t realize how creative they are so they haven’t developed it.

 

Related article: Test Your Creativity: 5 Classic Creative Challenges

 

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Categories: Arbitrariness, Assumptions, Career, Conditional, Creativity, Expectations, Intuition, Performance, Problem Solving, Processes, Standardization, Talent, Talent Assessment, Techniques
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Extremely Unified Groups: More Aggressive, More Destructive

By Mike Lehr

Groups change people; a person in a group is very different alone. Subliminal influences encourage groups to accept those who adopt its ways and to excommunicate those who don’t. Since new approaches disrupt the status quo, creative people often fall in the latter.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (August 1971) clearly showed what can happen to individuals when they form groups without constraints: abnormal behavior erupts from normal individuals. Daisy Yuhas’ article, “Emotions in Lockstep” (Scientific American Mind, May/June 2012 edition), follows a similar theme.  She discusses the work (Synchrony, Compliance, and Destructive Obedience) of Scott Wiltermuth from University of Southern California Marshall School of Business in which he:

. . . demonstrated that cultural practices involving synchrony can enable people to bind other people to them, making those others more likely to comply with others requests and engage in destructive obedience.

In other words, when people perform synchronized movements, their emotions become more unified and more open to aggressive and destructive behavior than when they aren’t synchronized with others. Thus, as Yuhas writes:

Military leaders have long known that marching in unison makes for a tight-knit platoon. . . . A more tightly knit team, it seems, is a fiercer foe.

However, the challenge is that while good can come from such unification so can bad. The determining factor will often be the leader. This only reinforces the importance of the environment and culture that a leadership team establishes for its enterprise.

While negative manifestations might not be as overtly destructive as in the Stanford and Wiltermuth experiments, a culture overemphasizing standardization, compliance and planning will covertly retard an enterprise’s ability to adapt, create and innovate. One of the main ways this will occur is by the gradual expulsion of disruptors and dissenters.

 

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Categories: Change, Context, Creativity, Culture, Emotions, Influence, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Power, Practices, Processes, Standardization, Team Building, Unconscious
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Too Much Information & Indecisiveness

By Mike Lehr

Tony Hey in his article, “The Big Idea: The Next Scientific Revolution” (Harvard Business Review, November 2010 edition ), and Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman in theirs, “To Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple” (Harvard Business Review, May 2012 edition) talk about the challenges of too much information, too much choice. These become tougher when we are acquiring more information at an unprecedented rate. However, these trends also apply to everyday business activities.

For example, research is cited in Spenner’s and Freeman’s article concerning the following:

  • Too much information will tend to cause us to postpone or neglect decisions
  • People naturally tend to overthink and second-guess trivial decisions
  • The harder a decision is the more important we seem to believe it is
  • The more time we spend on a decision the more important it becomes in our minds

Now, if we combine these tendencies with the acceleration of information, we could easily have business leaders thrashing more and more with their decisions. In other words, if you believe your organization has problems making decisions now, it’s only going to get worse.

This creates an ironic paradox. While technological advancements allow us to produce and deliver products and services faster, they slow down our decision-making. This means we become even more wedded to our standard processes for longer periods, thus retarding adaptability. In short, we miss opportunities because we respond more slowly to new facts and circumstances; we can only handle decisions that fit within our standard parameters.

Therefore, the stockpile of unmade decisions will grow and clog our already overstressed decision-making processes. We will wrestle with more decisions longer than we ever did. We’ll have the information at our fingertips, but we’ll be indecisive about what to do with it.

 

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Categories: Change, Decision Making, Innovation, Organization, Performance, Problem Solving, Processes, Standardization, Statistics, Technological Advancements, Technology, Thinking
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Process vs. Flexibility: The Tradeoff

By Mike Lehr

We often overlook the downside of processes in our businesses because we enjoy how they allow us to scale and reduce labor costs. However, they often become the infrastructure that retards flexibility and adaptability as people’s self-interest and comfort zones become wedded to the processes.

The November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, which focused on leadership lessons from the military, Boris Groysberg, Andrew Hill and Toby Johnson wrote about the tradeoffs between process and flexibility. Their article, “The Different Ways Military Experience Prepares Managers for Leadership,” discussed the tradeoffs that each of the four branches of the U.S. Military made and how they influenced leadership styles.

Their research showed that CEO’s who had military experience in the Navy and Air Force tended to “take a process-driven approach to management; personnel are expected to follow standard procedures without any deviation.” This allowed them to excel “in highly regulated industries and, perhaps surprisingly, in innovative sectors.”

Conversely, those with an Army and Marine Corps experience tended to “embrace flexibility and empower people to act on their vision.” They were able to excel “in small firms, where they are better able to communicate a clear direction and identify capable subordinates to execute accordingly.”

Throughout the article, the authors contrasted the process orientation of the Navy and Air Force with the adaptive one of the Army and Marine Corps, the important point being that there is a tradeoff between the two. Even though they justified why each branch had the orientation it did, they still contrasted the two orientations as a trade-off. In simple terms, it’s hard to have both.

Therefore, when we rush toward processes to create standardized, consistent and repeatable outcomes, we need to leave room for adaptation. After all, life never duplicates itself in exactly the same way.

 

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Categories: Approaches, Business Strategies, Change, Culture, Experience, Freedom, Influence, Leadership, Management, Methodologies, Organization, Performance, Processes, Standardization, Talent
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Best Practices = Inside the Box Thinking

By Mike Lehr

One of the paradoxes of best practices is that they promote unimaginativeness because if everyone followed best practices the differentiation among competing firms would drastically narrow.

In its raw form, BP is copying. Companies do not transform markets or shoot ahead of the competition by copying. If they do, they need to enhance the original. A better practice than the best practice will achieve this especially if every other company in that space is following the best practice. As a result, BP’s encourage “inside the box thinking” resulting in a workforce based upon complying with the BP rather than thinking about making the best better.

This occurs because to find a “best practice” people only need to dredge the internet or current research material. If they don’t want to do this, they only need to find an unimaginative expert who has already done this for them. However, bettering a best practice requires much thought and inspiration. That’s why in many law firms there are research assistants assigned with this task so attorneys have more time to think about the uniqueness of their cases.

Of course, many unimaginative people offer this defense: “Let’s not reinvent the wheel.” What they don’t realize is that since 1790 the United States Patent Office has approved over 30,000 patents for wheels. This number doesn’t include many specialty wheels in toys and machines such as the wheels on toy cars or the pulleys in machines like transmissions. It also doesn’t include the Ferris Wheel.

BP’s encourage employees to do exactly that: not reinvent the wheel. They don’t encourage them to think about improvements to make the wheel better or for other purposes. BP’s say, “Someone else has already solved the problem.” Thus, the best practice of inside-the-box thinking is to adopt a best practice.

 

Additional recommended reading: the post “The Downside of Best Practices” by Mike Wyatt

 

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Categories: Approaches, Change, Change Management Tactics, Conditioning, Creativity, Culture, Employees, Innovation, Inspiration, Management, Methodologies, Performance, Practices, Problem Solving, Processes, Standardization, Thinking, Training
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Star Wars, Women & The Good Guys

By Mike Lehr

If you examine the two opposing sides in the Star Wars Epic, The Empire (Bad Guys) and The Rebels (Good Guys), there are two major contrasts:

  1. There are no women on the bad side.
  2. The good side has diverse characters, the bad side doesn’t

Upon contemplation, Point #1 is easy to see. Point #2 is a little harder, but essentially the Empire’s army consists of robotic droids who all look alike in white, shock-troop armor. Conversely, the Rebels are a collection of species, some humanoid, most alien and some even animalistic. Moreover, whereas the Empire’s forces are all dressed alike, the Rebels are not. Similar themes exist in Lord of the Rings.

What does this mean? Very simply, we tend to see evil as being a life of conformity without feminine qualities. In business, this movie helps us to see the emotional forces aligned against standardization and processing. It might also help us to understand why women are making such advancements: perhaps as an offset to these negative forces. Finally, it shows our inherent emotional propensity for diversity including in personality.

Women are closely associated with diversity; as they’ve been the first ingredient of diversity in many business settings. Heck, their wardrobe alone adds immense diversity to them. What would happen if two women actors arrived in the same dress for the Academy Awards: chaos, confusion, anxiety? What if two men came in the same black tuxedo, would anyone even notice?

Movies tend to tap into our deep, unseen, collective emotional currents. Consumer research shows there is often a different between “what people buy” and “what people say they will buy.” Thus, while we wring every cost saving from standardization and processing, perhaps on a deeper emotional level we feel “The Bad Guys” are winning.

 

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Categories: Analogies, Computers, Control, Creativity, Culture, Emotions, Innovation, Interpretation, Intuition, Organization, Personality, Processes, Standardization, Technology, Unconscious
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Standardization: A Form of Thought Control

By Mike Lehr

Expressing our thoughts is challenging especially when we don’t know the words to do so. Therefore, restricting our vocabulary will tend to restrict our thoughts. As a result, we will experience more difficulty influencing others and solving problems. It’s important for us to expand our vocabularies, to allow stylistic differences and to exercise our minds by defining the fine differences between synonyms rather than assume they are the same (i.e. truth vs. clarity, influence vs. control, power vs. authority).

George Orwell’s book 1984 details this thought control through a state working feverishly to restrict the words of its citizenry. By eliminating words like “freedom” and “revolution,” citizens would have difficulty thinking of these concepts.

We don’t have an Orwellian state; however, business and company cultures tend toward self-censorship because they need standardization for efficiencies. Standardization often requires standardized communication practices, as exemplified in warfare and football. They save time.

I call such words “vanilla” words. They tend to be:

  • Inoffensive to the group (politically correct)
  • Repeatedly used to enforce positivity and optimism (i.e. great, awesome, super)
  • Technically or narrowly defined
  • Promoting cost-control, speed and efficiencies
  • Easily understand (no dictionary needed)
  • Buzz words, phrases and acronyms
  • Void of emotionalism and feeling (i.e. business reports and legal documents)
  • Emphasizing groups over the individual (i.e. We versus I, They versus He/She)

Basically, vanilla words encourage us to look at our businesses in vanilla terms. We cannot arrive at new flavors by using words that encourage a vanilla filter. The cost is employees who can only think inside a vanilla box.

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Categories: Change, Communication, Culture, Emotions, Feelings, Influence, Practices, Problem Solving, Standardization, Techniques, Thinking, Words
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Good Sales Managers from Good Sales People

By Mike Lehr

We often hear that good sales people don’t make good sales managers. While incorrect, the transition is admittedly difficult. However, few give reasons. I have identified three major attributes that distinguish a good sales person who can be a good sales manager from one who can’t be: patience, adaptability and introspection.

Good sales people by habit are not patient; if one prospect says, “no,” they go onto another. We can’t rollover sales people as quickly as we can prospects. As for adaptability, good sales people usually find a workable style and stick with it; they rarely need to try others. Contrastingly, as managers, we have to deal with multiple selling styles. Lastly, many good sales people will run their processes without knowing why they work; often they don’t need to know. Sales managers need to understand the “why’s” so they can solve problems and duplicate successes.

As a result, good sales people who become sales managers tend to have developed little patience, adaptability or introspection. They will tend to push their people into a single style, usually the one that worked for them, and reprimand those who don’t implement quickly or successfully. In effect, they are sales administrators not coaches.

Experientially, this means that the best sales managers who were good sales people are likely to be those who had to struggle to be good. Perhaps they had to try a lot of different things until they found their style. This might have included a real close look at what they were doing and why some things worked and others didn’t. Finally, they learned to have patience with their own development.

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Categories: Career, Change, Competence, Experience, Learning, Management, Motivation, Nurture, Organization, Performance, Personality, Processes, Quality, Sales, Standardization, Talent, Talent Assessment, Training
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