Mike Lehr's Blog

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.

One can read endlessly about leadership. However, if plays play on a stage, if baseball plays on a diamond, movies on a screen and chess on a board, where does leadership play? It plays in the mind of every member of the group.

Yes, we often see leaderships as having a good vision, strategy, idea or something tangibly similar. In reality though, these aren’t any good if leaders can’t inspire members around these things. By putting leadership on this emotional plane, it becomes subjective; a leader to one could be the Pied Piper to another.

Additionally, leadership comes from the word lead. Lead implies movement from one place to another. This is a change, so leadership is about change. Thus, by combining emotions and change, we arrive at a the conclusion that:

Leadership is an affect – felt by members and personified by one individual – which induces change.

We can see this more clearly in business if we ask: Are employees’ hearts into following their leader? After all, inspiration is a far better motivator for change than compliance. For example, if a leader can personify some of these feelings into an affect, that leader could be a powerful change agent:
 

Since groups are an abstraction, leaders become the “faces” groups, the vehicle through which members can give their feelings a human form. Leaders become the manifestation of their members’ feelings.

The practical outcome of this is that leadership changes from a project- or action-oriented endeavor to a relational one. This means people are more important than vision and relationships are more important than processes. Thus, leadership transform from something mechanical to something human . . . and possibly divine.

In the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review Jeff Weiss, Aram Donigian, Jonathan Huges discuss in their article “Extreme Negotiations” the importance of affecting process not just outcomes in negotiations. The same holds true in problem solving since negotiations are only problems of bringing two sides to agreement. Thus, you can get different solutions by changing your problem-solving process.

In one simple situation, Manager A took the initiative of drafting a plan for review. Manager B did not like it. Thus, they decided to collaborate on the next rendition. As another example, two hiring managers couldn’t agree on a candidate, so they changed the process by requiring the candidate to write a business plan for his hire.

Here are some techniques I use to alter the problem-solving process. I change the:

• Process by having another person or group create it
• Point at which people work independently and then come together
• Definition of the problem to include more lower-tier variables
• Makeup of the people or teams involved in the process
• Documentation required even to the point of using different forms and templates
• Timetable of when a solution is needed
• Any screening and filtering steps to allow more or fewer options
• Stakeholders involved in the process usually by adding new ones
• Objective of the process such as focusing on options not the solution
• Facilitator of the process
• Location of any meetings such as from office to offsite
• Forum for any meetings such as in person versus video conferences
• Initial parameters of what constitutes a viable option for processing

Of course, each problem-solving situation presents its own additional aspects that could effect change in process. So, if you’re not getting the solutions you want, change the process.

When I’ve written about the illusion of free will, I’ve focused on the advancement of technology and research methodologies to uncover subconscious thought patterns. However, these advancements are also discovering a connection between chemical reactions and some of our emotions.

In the September 24, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Rogue Hormones,” reports on the research of John Coates, a  neuroscientist from Cambridge University. His research of derivative traders showed that when they “are on a winning streak their testosterone levels surge, sparking such euphoria that they underestimate risk.” This biochemical process produces extremely “powerful emotions” encouraging traders to “go crazy.”

This helps to explain why we often learn more from our failures than our successes and why success can deliver us to a state of hubris, an exalted arrogance that can corrupt our decision-making processes. Such biochemical processes help explain why such exuberance can infect many people to think and act similarly without communicating with each other while each is believing he is responding of his own free will. Thus, such events as financial bubbles and housing bubbles can occur on a broad scale.

A way to mitigate this effect is to diversify your workforce to include many types of personalities in decision-making positions. For instance, the article concluded that hiring women, who generally have about 10% as much testosterone as men, could help offset “irrational exuberance.” Experience can also help especially if it contains crises brought about by excessive risk taking. Moreover, even from strictly a gender perspective, not all men will experience the same increases in testosterone levels from success making them prone to erroneous risk assessments.

Of course, it’s not easy to manage a diverse workforce.

When we approach problems too logically and reasonably, we tend to place too much faith in the dominance of consciousness and to discount subjective influences that vary by person. For example, the Innocence Project, by using DNA evidence, has helped to exonerate 271 people wrongly convicted of crimes, but almost a quarter of these people had confessed or pleaded guilty. Why would people give false confessions?

What research shows is that we can easily extract false confessions from others especially when using certain interrogation techniques. The article, “Silence is Golden”, in the August 13, 2011 issue of The Economist mentions two such research projects. The journal, Law and Human Behavior, published one by Saul Kassin and Jennifer Perillo of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York while the other is the work of Robert Horselenberg and colleagues at Maastricht University.

Since we tend to believe in free will and the dominance of consciousness, we consider confessions fairly damning because no one in her “right mind” would give false ones. Therefore, interrogations assume false confessions aren’t possible. Yet, people give them for many reasons including:

• Avoiding unpleasant interrogations
• Accepting that they might have accidentally committed a wrong
• Believing that
  -   Investigative process will show innocence
  -   Authorities and experts know better
  -   Objective truth and justice exist and will surface
  -   Technologically collected evidence is faultless

Many times our business processes assume people behave with a “right mind.” Yet, as this example shows, by questioning this assumption in our processes, interrogations in this case, we automatically call into question the outcomes derived from those processes, here confessions.

Thus, our processes need to account for more subjective, subconscious and intuitive factors or risk disconnection from reality and erroneous analyses.

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the fourth of a five part series.

One of the biggest problems we have in promoting change is the assumption that people are light switches. We expect to say something once, and they will change. Advertisers learned long ago that running an advertisement just once doesn’t encourage behaviors of consumers and build brands inside their heads. Repetitively encouraging people to adopt change is a natural part of the change management process. Generally, we should expect to have to instruct and model the change three to four times, maybe more.

The problem is that we often position this more as following up to ensure people do what we told them. Typically, we code this as accountability in our business jargon. It’s better to position this repetitiveness more as a normal part of the instructional and modeling process; it’s a natural part of the change management process. We can do this by saying something like:

I don’t expect you to learn and perform these changes well overnight. There will be challenges. Therefore, I will commit to being available to you on a regular basis so we can help one another make these changes as easy and natural as possible for all of us.

This language establishes an expectation that our follow up is normal and not punitive. It indicates we’re in this together. Otherwise, they could easily construe our actions as micromanagement. The actual frequency of our repetitive instruction and modeling will depend upon the nature and scope of the change.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #3: Very Small, Simple Steps
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration

The Hot Spotters, by Atul Gawande in the January 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker spoke primarily to minimizing medical costs but had much relevancy to my experiences in effecting change. It covered five tactics. This is the third of a five part series.

Tactic #3 involves breaking down and delivering change in very small, simple steps. For organization-wide change, every manager has responsibility for detailing this for every one of his employees. This is difficult.  Usually, there are two problems:

1. Failing to uncover some important details
2. Seeing only one step where there are two or more

Unfortunately, the difference between too little and too much detail isn’t clear. Generally, it’s better to err on the latter; while keeping in mind timing and the threat of over planning, and accepting that we will always overlook some details.

When we bring the change to the individual level, it’s extremely important that we break down the change into small bites and deliver them one at a time. Emotionally, the change is too daunting if we show someone all of it at once.

Often, the worse person to detail these steps is someone who performs them well because they come naturally to her. Thus, what she sees as one step could easily be five to ten. In these cases, someone with a project or process management orientation is helpful. He can observe and work with the model to detail the steps. If the change is dramatically new and lacks a model, he can jointly work with the expert on the new process and those affected employees to detail the new steps.

Once detailed, someone with a training attribute can help organize them into a developmental plan for the manager’s use with his employees.

Other links in this series:

• Change Management – Tactic #1: Pick the Right Moment
• Change Management – Tactic #2: Strengthen Relationships
• Change Management – Tactic #4: Repetitiveness
• Change Management – Tactic #5: Request Demonstration

I’ve had a lot of success solving problems by trying to address the challenges of moving an idea from the abstract to the practical. It doesn’t matter what kind of idea it is – product, process, service or solution – the challenges remain the same. That means examining it from its initial inception (defining it) to its potential implementation (identifying details). I have found that people have the toughest times with the beginning and the end, so I start here.

Moving an Idea from the Abstract to the Practical

First, I ask, “Have they defined the problem correctly?” Obviously, there is no point solving the wrong problem. People tend to define the problem too narrowly. That means they are addressing the wrong problem or restricting their set of potential solutions.

Second, I ask, “Have they identified details with enough specificity?” In most cases, people don’t. Where they see a single step, there are often two, three, five or ten. While it’s impossible and unnecessary to capture all details before implementation, the fact remains that many ideas fail here.

For example, the integration of new technology is often seen simply as a technology problem not a human one; the problem is defined too narrowly. No matter how good the technology, if people don’t embrace it or can’t use it, it’s no good. Often, training is the solution, but if we look into the details of training, we find too often it’s “one size fits all.” Everyone goes through the same training classes. It doesn’t take into account the important detail that employees assimilate technology at different rates. That means wasting training hours on users in which the training is too slow or too fast.

In problem solving it’s important to define the problem correctly, too often it’s too narrowly defined, and to refine the details, often they’re too general.

Frequently, I’m asked about the difference between instinct and intuition. The question is difficult because everyday conversation has a gender bias. Men tend to prefer the word “instinct” over “intuition” to describe their emotional processes while women tend to prefer the reverse. So, listening skills are important.

Analogously, instinct is to intuition what an accented note is to a song. Just as an accent adds a particular emphasis to a specific note in the song, instinct adds a particular emphasis to an emotion in the intuitive process. Very simply, there are three types of instincts: survival, paternal and maternal. Survival protects our well being through fight or flight. It accentuates emotions such as guardedness or avoidance. Paternal extends our dominance and control, accentuating emotions such as aggressiveness and competitiveness. Maternal protects and nurtures others, accentuating emotions such as protectiveness and sacrifice.

While instincts can serve us well in urgent, severe situations, they can lead us astray and allow us to be easily manipulated in modern life’s intricacies. For instance, instinctively lashing out at someone for a threatening act could have consequences in the workplace. Intuition would help us balance the emotions accentuated by that threat with the ones fearing the consequences to arrive at a pragmatic alternative fitting our context.

Returning to our musical analogy, this means that rather than reacting to the one accented note we are waiting to hear the whole song before we think and act. It also means that while there isn’t much to creating a single note, creating a song is more involved. Therefore, just as it takes practice to develop cognitive skills it also takes practice to develop intuitive ones. Instincts are innate and thus our default. As such they require very little, if any, development.

As we saw with an earlier post, intuition arrives first when we make decisions. But, how does this happen? How does intuition become involved in our response to an event?

Consider for a moment a restaurant’s ambiance. Objectively, it has nothing to do with the food; however, if it’s unclean, disorderly and ugly we will tend to feel there is also something wrong with the food. Why do children ask their moms and dads, “Are you in a good mood?” They know their parents’ emotional state will affect their decision-making.

Figure 1 illustrates what’s happening. For any event, there are conscious (solid lines) and unconscious aspects (transparent lines). Our cognition cannot capture consciously all an event has to offer.    Analogously, ponder light: some of it we can see some we can’t (such as heat, infrared, ultraviolet and radiation). Still, even if we can’t see unseen light, it affects us. The same holds true for events. Even if we can’t consciously grasp the unconscious aspects; they slip through our conscious defenses and affect us.

Figure 2 demonstrates how this happens. The unconscious aspects impact our emotions which triggers our intuition. Our intuition produces more complex emotions that impact our cognition, our thinking processes. These emotions will select the rationale that best express our wants, desires and needs. These are a function of our personalities and give insights into who we are (red lines).

Returning to our restaurant analogy, the negative feelings produced by the ugly ambiance trigger negative emotions. These in turn encourage us to select a rationale that might have us translate the ugliness into unsanitary. Therefore, we’ll rationalize that the food is unsafe and not good. Conversely, if the ambiance produces good feelings, we will tend to like the food more.