Mike Lehr's Blog

Classical business literature emphasizes focus: set goals, plan, and then focus on execution. However, it’s relatively void of focus’ downside: obliviousness to peripheral threats and opportunities.

In the mid-1900’s, when conditions didn’t change as dynamically as today’s, extensive research, planning and focus worked. Today, most research is outdated upon completion. Consequently, situational awareness (SA) becomes more important as part of an adaptive business strategy.

SA is the degree to which a person or company can be aware of surrounding conditions while focused on a task or plan. Ironically, SA came of age with aerial combat; you need to know where you are in the sky while focused on engaging enemy aircraft. If not, you could crash your plane from flying too low or from enemy fire simply because you were oblivious to those factors.

Context strongly influences our planning; however, if conditions forming that context are dynamically changing, that means our plan – the object of our focus – might become invalid by new threats and opportunities, and our focus and poor SA might cause us to overlook them. Psychological influences such as anchoring and optimistic planning will create additional pressures to keep us focused and ignorant.

These will also influence our assessment of talent by tending to make it too static and historical. Rather than basing it on people’s potential within new conditions, we will tend to base it on performances under old conditions. We will tend to believe that successes and failures transfer rather than assess actual skills and actual aptitudes within a new set of actual conditions. More simply, this is pigeonholing.

Technology and the internet strongly influence today’s dynamic conditions. Our focus shouldn’t blind us. SA will help us see the many threats, opportunities and talents that will influence our success.

The downside of many personality tests is that you need to administer them. Yes, some will teach you how to assess without doing that, but you must learn their system. In reality, we can all develop and do a real-time personality assessment.

In the first post of this series, “Assessing Personalities thru Everyday Discussions (1.0),” I wrote that asking “Why?” in response to other people’s observations can give you insights into their personalities. In this post, I’ll explore how we analyze the answer.

If you ask two people why they like a car, most likely they’ll give two different answers. For instance, if one answers, “performance,” and the other “looks,” both answers begin to help you distinguish their personalities by identifying important qualities to them. These qualities will likely extend to other areas, but we need to realize we’re are only hypothesizing right now; we only have one data point.

Now, if we discuss their favorite athletes and ask why they like them, this gives us more information. If the first one says, “She’s the best in the game,” and the second one says, “He just looks like he’s ready to play when he shows up,” we have additional information reinforcing their answers about cars: performance and appearance. Thus, the first person seems to prefer performance related qualities while the second one prefers visible ones.

Therefore, when we discuss other subjects with these people, we will need to highlight the positive performance attributes with the first one and the visible ones with the second if we wish a positive response.

Obviously, it’s not always this easy and obvious, but over a five to fifteen minute conversation, through careful listening, patterns like these will emerge. These patterns will allow us to extrapolate on a person’s decisions and behaviors.

I decided to revisit the illusion of free will after running across two other articles reinforcing it. As technology and research methodologies advance, we are finding more and more that biological and psychological factors heavily influence us without our knowledge, further eroding the rational actor theory. This theory forms the basis of many decision-making models in business; however, it’s turning out we cannot expect people to behave rationally.

The article by David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” appearing in the July/August 2011 of The Atlantic, discusses recent brain and genetic research. Whether you believe nature or nurture is the more impactive force in our development, the point is this: we control neither. If free will really existed, we wouldn’t need drugs to cure depression because threats would work. As Eagleman also indicates, free will has tremendous difficulty overcoming what our subconscious has already decided to do. We cannot divorce behavior from biology or the unconscious. At minimum, free will operates in an increasingly smaller field of play.

We are also learning that genes don’t just change at an evolutionary rate but at a generational one too. In the July 23, 2011 of The Economist, the article, Baby Blues, mentions, “a mother’s stress while she is pregnant can have a long-lasting effect on her children’s genes.”
Biology and genes form an integral part of our personalities. As I mentioned in my previous post, if we look at personalities as being analogous to software in computers, we can see where knowing the personality can help us predict behaviors in much the same way as knowing the software can help us predict what a computer will do.

What this means is that our decisions need to factor in a reality where people don’t behave rationally because they aren’t free to do so.

Related link: Illusion of Free Will

The inverted problem-solving technique (IPT) involves looking at the opposing aspects of a problem. To see IPT’s value it helps to write down the problem. In simple terms, if the problem involves “doing something,” IPT suggests exploring “not doing it” as a potential solution (or “to do it” if “not doing it”).

For instance, I first ran across it as a child when I wanted to learn to play. The book, Complete Chess Course, by Fred Reinfeld had a section called “The Nine Bad Moves.” Rather than immediately teach you good moves, Reinfeld had you learn what not to do. Later, I applied the concept when I developed my training methods: I first identified what I didn’t like about training that I took.

We often spend extensive time evaluating and determining the best solution. In reality, there are often many solutions. Thus, IPT suggests that we look at avoiding a bad decision as a potential solution rather than trying to determine the best. For example, in change initiatives and technology rollouts not only ask, “What can we do to make this successful?” but also ask, “What shouldn’t we do?” Too often people only focus on what needs doing to solve the problem.

Additionally, IPT helps us explore problems deeper by qualifying its various parts. Often, we only ask, “Is this part causing the problem?” Such an evaluative approach limits us to “yes/no answers.” Rather than ask “Is this department hindering the rollout?” ask, “How is this department hindering it?” and “How isn’t it?”

We can even apply these questions to the problem itself (Why is it a problem? Why isn’t it?). After all, it’s not unusual to find people working on the wrong problem. Moreover, the answers themselves will help us find solutions.

As people’s careers progress, they tend to become more risk adverse, less willing to accept challenges. Much is because they feel they have too much to lose if wrong. Enough of these people in a company can retard its growth and our own too. Awareness of their existence will help to protect us.

In “The Paradox of Excellence,” an article in the June 2011 of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas DeLong and Sara DeLong write “high performers often let anxiety about their performance compromise their progress” even to the point that they “would rather do the wrong thing well than do the right thing poorly.” As a result, they tend to prefer options that worked well in the past to those that are best.

Early in their careers, things might have come more easily to them. As they progress and tackle more difficult assignments, they begin to function more and more on the outskirts of their attributes and skills. Rather than expand those limits they consolidate their gains, preferring consensus over what is right. As the Delongs attest, their careers flatten.

However, enough of this excellence in the right positions will flatten the company’s growth too. This conservatism will affect budget decisions, product development and talent acquisition. Expense control supersedes investing; existing products supersede new ones; the proven candidate supersedes the game changer. It helps to explain how the best and the brightest can bring about demise.

If we work for such people, the expansion of our limits could slow too. The challenges we seek will be thwarted by the conventional. It’s important to realize their existence and to avoid being blinded by their excellence and allowing our talents to rot under their light.

In “Before You Make That Big Decision,” which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* suggest that one way to overcome unconscious biases in decision making is that we ask the question: Is the base case [for the decision] overly optimistic? They make the point that:

• “Most recommendations contain forecasts, which are notoriously prone to excessive optimism.”
• “Groups with a successful track record are more prone to this bias than others . . . [especially if the] . . . team has been on a winning streak.”

However, in daily business life we often view those who try to rein in or express contrarian views as downers. As a result, in the desire to show who is less negative, a race to the top of optimism’s ladder begins and at some point becomes Pollyannaism.

Moreover, as we saw in the benefits of viewing a glass half-empty rather than half-full, the fear of being in an adverse situation can be a powerful motivator for taking action. Thus, a Pollyanna state could reduce a group to complacency. That means a team in the midst of success is less likely to change than one in the midst of crisis.

While clearly defining the demarcation zone between optimism and Pollyannaism is difficult, it once again highlights the failure of success and casts doubts on “nothing breeds success like success.” In fact, as the writers suggest, the best indicator that Pollyannaism might have infected a business culture is the degree of success it has been having.

After all, it’s kind of hard to reach a Pollyanna State if you’re not even in the State of Optimism.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

Previously, I listed some unconscious biases we have in decision-making. What I witness is that people just don’t believe that known wrong information has any affect on them.

For example, research in “Before You Make That Big Decision” by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review showed that dice rolls “suggesting” sentencing decisions to judges did in fact influence their final decision even though they knew these decisions were made by dice.

Cognitively and psychologically, we call this “planting of a seed” in our minds as anchoring. We experience its negative side when someone is locked on a thought based on incorrect information that we tried to expose for them. As with the judges, this erroneous information assumes a frame of reference for their decision on a subconscious level.

As the writers indicate, anchoring’s real danger is “that people always believe they can disregard them” because the information is incorrect. They don’t believe it. However, it affects them in the same way that intuition affects our thought processes. However, since people don’t realize it, they will shop for rationales to attribute elsewhere this influence on their decisions.

Anchoring also affects our views of people and contributes to the unconscious pigeonholing of people. This can tremendously affect our ability to assess and develop talent. This is why the gossip and unfounded opinions of others will still influence us even though we “ignore” them to form our own opinion.

We need to raise our awareness concerning the influence this has on others, and more importantly to us. We can’t believe we are immune; we need to make conscious adjustments or else we will fall prey to the influence of known wrong information too.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

Executives and senior managers often overlook their most important business asset: their personalities. We are blessed from birth with a personality that has an inherent power all its own. Too much though, we tend to discount or ignore it in favor of more objective qualities such as vision, planning, analysis and decision-making. Yet, interpersonal skills can encourage powerful motivations in others. When people are motivated, amazing things can happen.

I have found that executives and senior managers underestimate the impact they have on their people from a interpersonal perspective. They don’t realize how much their actions trigger the grapevine that many of them dislike. Rather than fight it, use it. The grapevine is word-of-mouth advertising. These effects are similar to the ones produced by management by walking around (MBWA) (detailed PDF on management by walking around), but our personalities are the tools that make it work. Moreover, there are specific interpersonal techniques that bring MBWA to life. I’ve discussed three in previous posts:

1. Remembering and using names
2. Shaking hands
3. Thank you’s

When executives and senior managers apply these techniques to employees, employees invariably tell other employees about the experience. A bank president was famous for remembering names; employees always recounted that talent when they talked about him. Thus, there is not only a direct impact on that employee but a residual one with others. It’s similar to the way the sun heats a stone and then that stone heats other things.

The downside to these techniques is that they require discipline and patience. Their effects have a compounding effect over time when relentlessly applied. However, our personalities are more powerful than any other motivational system on the market.

A colleague was concerned whether her advice was helping someone. Too many times, we focus on the advice rather than the process of giving advice. The real key to helping others is that you don’t have to be right. The best help is where you help others help themselves.

It’s a matter of encouraging, even challenging people to think along different lines, to look at problems from a different perspective. This develops their problem-solving skills and decision-making capabilities. In fact, good advice that doesn’t encourage people to think is worse than bad advice that does.

It’s similar to a math problem where we simply tell people the answer rather than showing them how to arrive at one. It’s similar to a job that we do for people rather than showing them how to do it. Thinking, not knowledge, is a source of true power.

Simply talking about a problem is helpful too. This along with good questions can go a long way toward triggering a brainstorming event within the individual. We don’t need a group of five, ten or a hundred to brainstorm. We can create a similar free association of ideas within a single person.

We also need to keep in mind that good advice is largely arbitrary. It’s conditional upon the person, time, situation and group. Since every event is unique, people need to tailor advice. They can only do this if they’ve learned how to think through problems, if they’ve learned how to solve problems and make decisions. They can’t do this if others have thought or made decisions for them.

If advisors only focus on giving advice, people will become dependent upon advisors and never grow.

This past month, I conversed with a resident of a Muslim country. He commented on how many of his fellow citizens couldn’t understand why Americans thought they were free. “They have all these laws directing them. They can’t drive as fast as they want and they even need the government’s permission to drive (licenses).”

Coincidentally, the December 16^th 2010 edition of The Economist reported on driving in Iraq. It’s true, at least there, that Iraq has far fewer driving restrictions than the United States has. It doesn’t even require driving licenses. However, driving there is dangerous. In fact, “the health ministry estimates that six times as many people now die in car accidents as fall victim to political violence.”

I also ran across an article about choice in the same issue. “Too much choice, concluded Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford, is demotivating.” The article went on to suggest that this is from the anxiety people often feel when making decisions; too much freedom of choice increases anxiety.

There are people who seem to prefer less, and almost no, freedom in their work. They prefer clearly defined directions, rules, policies and procedures dictating their thinking and actions. Why? I have come to learn that this produces a different kind of freedom for some: freedom from responsibility. How can we be responsible for decisions we did not make or regulations we did not write? For some it also produces certainty; they know what the “right” decision is.

As the diagram to the right asks, “When does more freedom become chaos and uncertainty to us?” For each of us, that varies. For some of us, it restricts freedom so much that it might not even seem like freedom anymore. So, is freedom for everybody?