Month: November 2020

One of the things I’ve had to learn as a consultant and a coach is that my clients mostly want results.

 

They have a problem that they want to solve: how to create a culture of innovation, say, or how to make their law firm run more smoothly.

 

My mental model is that they don’t really care how it gets solved (as long as it’s within the bounds of integrity).

 

In general, they’re not so interested in the fact that my approach is grounded in Gestalt, or machine learning, or whatever. As long as the solution is credible, I could give them a button to push to solve the problem and they’d generally be happy. What they care about is getting the problem solved.

 

That’s important because it helps me focus on the fantastic results my clients will get (and they do!) rather than on the process.

 

I think that Amazon’s obsession with their customer is a fantastic example of this at work. That obsession, which isn’t usually noticeable because it manifests itself as a total absence of friction in transactions with Amazon, springs into relief when I have to deal with a business that doesn’t think about its customers.

 

I buy a lot of things off of Amazon and the experience is generally incredible. Even when something doesn’t work, it’s usually no hassle to return things.

 

But, very occasionally, I buy things in the real world. And, very often, I regret that decision.

 

A little over a year ago, I bought an Instant Pot at QFC, a local supermarket chain. I got it home and, lo and behold, I realized it was way too small. So, I boxed it up with the receipt and put it in my car for the next time I was close to a QFC.

 

About a week later, I went into another QFC location I happened to be near to return the Instant Pot. I waited in line at customer service, receipt in hand. Here’s what happened:

 

Clerk: Hmm… I don’t think you can return that here.

 

Me: …?

 

Clerk: We don’t sell those at this location.

 

Me: …?

 

Clerk: If you returned it here, we’d have no way of getting it to another store.

 

Me: …?

 

Clerk: We couldn’t do the accounting properly. There’s no way to move the credit from our store to the store where you bought this.

 

Now, this clerk was just doing his job. I harbor him no ill will.

 

But I’ve been trained by Amazon to expect awesome customer service. I don’t really care how the grocery store’s internal accounting system works. I don’t care how their internal supply chain works.

 

I just wanted to return the Instant Pot.

 

This is an important lesson for business of all kinds. What problem is your client trying to solve? And what’s the best way you can help them solve that problem?

 

Thinking in terms of solutions can help shake some fundamental assumptions about your business.

 

Let’s say you run a law firm. Do your clients really want to deal with hourly billing? Or is that a convenience for you that shifts the risk on to them? Would they (and possibly you) be better off if you had fixed fees for well-scoped services?

 

Back to my grocery example: I eventually drove across town to return the Instant Pot to the original store. And I haven’t bought anything there since.

 

What about you? What things are you doing in your business that may not actually solve your clients’ problems?

 

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This past week revealed that our democracy works—but barely.

 

Regular readers know that I spend a lot of time thinking about systems — technology, teams, and organizations.

 

This week has got me thinking about the American political system writ large.

 

In 1997, Donella Meadows published an essay called “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” Though the piece doesn’t focus on politics, it’s a remarkable guide to the current state of our modern political situation.

 

In it, Meadows, a biophysicist with a PhD from Harvard, lays out the ways that we can influence the systems around us. Our American democracy, it turns out, is a quintessential example of a complex system.

 

The core of Meadows’s argument is that changing parameters—essentially the strength of different connections—has the least impact on our systems. Yet parameters are the focus of the majority of our discussions about our democracy. We focus on ideas like voter turnout and suppression, campaign finance reform, the role of lobbyists, and how we draw voting districts.

 

These sound like huge issues, but in the context of democracy as a system, they’re small potatoes. That’s because in a complex system, as Meadows argues, we have the most impact when we think about the rules and dynamics of the system itself.

 

In other words, the effect of changing voter turnout pales in comparison to the ability to change how the different parts of our system interact.

 

The good news is that, in recent years, a discussion is emerging with an explicit focus on democracy as a system. John Dickerson’s Atlantic piece (“The Hardest Job in the World”) and his subsequent book argue that the fundamental structure of our national elections selects for presidents ill-suited to govern. And, in 2018, The Economist published an insightful analysis of how population migration and the electoral college bias elections in favor of Republican candidates. And my friend (and upcoming podcast guest) Roger Martin argues that part of the issue is America’s unbalanced obsession with growth and efficiency.

 

It would be a mistake to think of this as a partisan issue. Before the 2016 election, for example, a Gallup poll showed that only 18% of people approved of the job Congress was doing. Yet, for the House of Representatives, 97% of incumbents won reelection. In the Senate, the number was 93%. This inertia comes from systemic factors—our primary process, winner-take-all voting, and the import of fundraising—that arise from the organization of the political system itself. And it’s only by understanding these factors that we can start the critical conversation about the structure and outcomes that we want from our modern democracy.

 

One of the insights of behavioral economics is the importance of choice architecture: the context of a choice can matter more than the content of the choice.

 

The classic example of this is making employees opt out of 401(k) plans rather than having them opt in. By defaulting employees to participants, savings rates (and retirement preparedness) increase dramatically.

 

In the US, we haven’t had enough conversations about the choice architecture of our democracy. We take the two-party system, the primary process, and the electoral college as givens.

 

But they’re not. They’re features of the system chosen by people. Features, I would argue, that impose far more costs than they provide benefits.

 

The current incarnation of our system pushes us into increasingly polarized camps. The electoral college creates opportunities for contests to be decided by incredibly small margins—even in the face of large margins in the popular vote. The two-party system and winner-take-all voting doesn’t serve our citizenry; it serves those who already hold political power.

 

The content matters: people have different beliefs and that should be reflected in their electoral choices. But the context matters even more.

 

Context shapes the conversation. It restricts our choices without our noticing. And it creates far too many opportunities for small differences to have massive effects.

 

America needs democratic progress—but that progress won’t come from new party platforms or business as usual. Talking about context is the first step toward a more civil and unified country.

 

What about you — what parts of your work (or life!) have you been thinking about in terms of parameters? And how could you shift to thinking about the structure of the system instead?

 

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Holy cow.

 

Doesn’t April 21st, 2020 seem like a decade ago?

 

It does to me. That’s the day that Harvard Business Review published the article I wrote with two Seattle-based physicians on managing the COVID-19 crisis.

 

The article was about how one hospital system built a sustainable response to a dynamic and evolving crisis.

 

I had the opportunity to reread the article recently and reconnect with its universal message: whether it’s managing hybrid schooling or helping teams shift their approaches on the fly, things are changing so fast that we need to learn and adapt as quickly as we can.

 

Even though the article is about a hospital, there’s an aspect to it that applies to life more broadly right now:

 

“We’re learning from the initial stages of our Covid-19 response and focusing on creating sustainable practices. Unlike the response to an earthquake or a plane crash, we need to be able to undertake months of response activity. ”

 

Living during COVID-19 is a marathon and not a sprint. We need to work in a way that is realistic and sustainable; otherwise, it’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed.

 

So, do what you need to do to take a break, when and where you can.

 

It may involve backing off goals and realizing that you can’t move quite as fast as you’d like.

 

It may involve blocking off 30 minutes to sip tea.

 

Or, *gasp*, it may involve calling into your Zoom meeting, so you can take a walk.

 

Let me know what you’re doing to take care of yourself right now.

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