Author: Chris Clearfield

Practical tips to avoid change management screw ups

 

We’ve all been part of boneheaded changes in our work. Somebody gets an idea about how things could be better, and, all of a sudden, we’re using a new piece of software, emailing weekly status updates to our manager, or wasting time filling out those dreaded TPS reports.

 

Many of these changes are dumb. Full stop.

 

That’s because, in most cases, the ideas come from people who don’t really understand the problem. Managers reach for control to tame uncertainty (even though that’s actually what they need to embrace).

 

Even people who understand the problem may not get the solution right. They come up with something that works but only in a specific context.

 

As a result, people resist the changes.

 

People resist good changes, too. It’s only natural. Humans value autonomy and security and being told to change threatens both of those things.

 

Right now, I’m working on two big projects — one with a group changing how Microsoft consumes and delivers all things legal, one with another Fortune 10 firm — where I help leaders use curiosity to accelerate transformational change. We spend a lot of time talking about resistance, about the importance of getting everyone to understand the “why” of a change, and about the details — from who needs to be involved to how we plan meetings with stakeholders. (Quick tip for meetings: try to limit any presentation about change to five slides and, instead of presenting data, ask people how they’re feeling).

 

One of the models I use when I consult with companies is the cycle of change, developed by Rick Maurer. We use the tool to understand where different stakeholders and individuals are on the change journey. And it all starts with seeing the need for a change.

 

Credit: Rick Maurer

 

I find it delightfully ironic that I was recently in the process of flubbing a change inside my own firm.

 

I made all the classic mistakes that leaders make. I assumed that it was a small change. I assumed that the reasons for it were obvious. I assumed, basically, that people wouldn’t care about it.

 

For context: I want to change how we track the hours that people spend on different projects, so that I can better steward the company’s resources and understand the return on investment we receive from different projects, such as the mailing list, the (teaser alert) podcast we’re launching in a month, the marketing for my one-on-one coaching work, and the consulting work.

 

To me, it seemed like a very straightforward change.

 

It was my executive assistant who clued me in to the fact that I was missing something. She was concerned that the way we paid people would change under the new system. To me, that seemed like an unrelated matter — but it made me realize that I was pushing forward on a change without understanding the concerns of the people who will be affected by it.

 

So, I changed course by doing a few simple things:

 

1. I raised my awareness. I realized that while I was ready to roll out the change, I hadn’t spent time sharing the why. I had no idea whether my team even knew that there was a problem to solve.

 

2. I communicated. (To go meta for a second, this post is actually part of that communication. Some of the team will help get it out the door, and I’ll send it to everyone after it’s finished.)

 

3. I made a short video talking about the reason I saw a need for the change. In the video, I asked the team to think about what was working with the setup that we have now so that we make sure that any solution meets their needs, too. (The video is very “inside the sausage factory,” but I’m sharing it in case it’s useful.)

 

4. I set aside time for us to talk about it as a group. These things only took a few minutes and they are super simple. But that doesn’t mean that they are easy. Far too often, even thoughtful and well-intentioned managers (like me!) charge ahead without understanding the ripple effects of change.

 

For my part, my hope is that sharing my reasoning and opening up the conversation will help my team and me create an effective solution that works for them — and meets my needs to understand how we’re using resources. A small shift like this can make all the difference.

 

Are you working with any colleagues on change? If so, share this article with them because they might find it helpful!

 

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If you want a different outcome, you have to do things differently.

 

What’s that mean?

 

Here’s how I put it in a recent article about innovation:

As someone seeking change, you’ll be asking people to do things differently. It can be helpful to remember that you’re embedded in the organization: if you approach the work in a way that feels comfortable, you’ll get the same results. So invite yourself to try new things and to take risks. Not only will this yield different outcomes, but you’ll also model the very experimentation you’re trying to facilitate.

 

On a recent podcast, my new friend and flight safety expert Adam Johns made this point very well (21:08). As part of shifting the safety culture at Cathay Pacific Airways, Adam intentionally made an effort to change the conversation happening around him.

 

He included short, bite-sized articles in safety committee meeting agendas and invited participants to reflect on how these topics applied to Cathay’s operations.

 

Adam found that leaders, after engaging with a new term from an article, would apply it fairly quickly. It would change their thinking.

 

In the context of safety, for example, managers would talk about and then, more importantly, start to internalize the difference between work as imagined (how a planner thinks a job is done) vs. work as done (what a person on the line actually does).

 

I’ve seen this in my work, too. Introducing the Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off helps managers appreciate that everything is a trade-off. That awareness helps managers own those trade-offs—balancing the pressure to execute quickly against the desire to have every job done in as thorough a manner as possible—rather than pushing them down in the organization.

 

In some sense, my book Meltdown is all about understanding the difference between complicated systems and complex ones (read a sample here!). That sounds like a simple difference in language, but it’s not. Separating the two things can help us make sense of the world in a deep way.

 

Complicated systems have a lot of parts—but their behavior can be quite predictable.

 

In complex systems, on the other hand, it’s the interactions that matter, rather than the number of parts. As a result, complexity produces unexpected results.

 

Beyond Meltdown, just think about the late Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation or Amy Edmondson’s idea of psychological safety. Words create a schema in our brains; those schemas literally change the way we see the world.

 

And it’s not just systems: as a coach, I use curiosity to help my clients change their internal language. I’ve personally seen those changes unlock tremendous value for my clients, all because of a small shift. What looks like a failure from one perspective can turn out to be a success from another, but we only get there when we start to probe the language that we use in our stories.

 

As a writer, I’m biased, but I think language matters a lot. It changes the way we think, and it changes our awareness of possibilities.

 

What about you? How have you used language to change the conversation?

 

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I think the answer is yes. But I’m not confident. Perhaps you, dear reader, can help?

 

Here’s the background: last week, I took my kids and dog to a swimming hole about 50 miles east of Seattle.

 

When we parked and got out of the car, the air crackled with electricity. We were right under high-voltage power lines.

 

Really high voltage power lines, as it turned out: 115 kV (kilovolts), a thousand times more than what’s in our houses.

 

But I didn’t think much about it.

 

We hung out for a couple of hours, playing in the water and digging in the sand. (We didn’t actually swim; it was too cold for that!)

 

As I loaded my kiddos into the car, I noticed that the car had an electrical charge. When I touched the metal post that the door latches on to (which is, presumably, connected to the frame itself), I could feel the current running through me… it was eerie.

 

A little disconcerting, but also interesting. I thought enough about it to google it right then and there.

 

I found a few message boards with farmers writing about equipment dying under power lines. But others called it apocryphal.

 

I found a fancy pamphlet from a nearby power authority about safely living and working under power lines. Take a look:

Shocks are caused by a voltage induced from the power line into the nearby metallic objects….

The severity of nuisance shocks can vary in sensation from something similar to a shock you might receive when you cross a carpet and then touch a door knob to touching the spark-plug ignition wires on your lawnmower or car. The nuisance shock, however, would be continuous as long as you are touching the metallic object. Such objects include vehicles, fences, metal buildings or roofs and irrigation systems that are near the line or parallel the line for some distance.

 

That pretty much described my situation to a T.

 

As current flows through the power lines, it generates a magnetic field. That magnetic field changes as the current changes (as more or less power is carried in the lines). It’s that changing magnetic field that generated a corresponding electrical field in my car. It’s physics 15B (or at least it was when I was an undergrad).

 

Mystery solved to my satisfaction, we drove back to Seattle.

 

But wait, there’s more….

 

Two days later, the battery light in my car began to flicker as I drove home from the park. The next day, the car died right after I started it.

 

The weird confluence of circumstances made me feel like I was on Car Talk. My guess was that there was something wrong with the charging system.

 

I asked my co-parent to give me a jump; she did and stuck around for a half hour, so my battery could charge. Right afterward, I drove to the shop and arrived with a bit of energy to spare, as the car wouldn’t start for the mechanic when he tried to drive it into the bay.

 

Sure enough, they had to replace the alternator (which is responsible for charging the battery).

 

But when I proposed my theory to the mechanic, he looked at me like I was crazy, saying “I’ve never heard of something like that happening.”

 

Am I crazy?

 

The truth is, I don’t know.

 

In my mental model, my explanation is, of course, right!

 

But when I hold wild beliefs, I love to return to one of my favorite tools, the Ladder of Inference.

 

I’ve written about the ladder in earlier posts. It’s a tool to help us check our understanding with ourselves and others.

 

It moves the process of evaluating our beliefs from an implicit one to an explicit one.

 

In this case, let’s see what I did:

 

First, I already selected the data to the event that is salient to me: parking under the power lines. I didn’t share other things, like the fact that I jumped someone else’s car a few days before I parked under the power lines. There certainly could have been events that I didn’t know about (such as internal wear on the alternator) that played a role. And, during my internet “research,” I spent more time engaging with stories that supported my theory (a farmer describing a drained battery after parking beneath a powerline) than those that didn’t (posts declaring that “I’ve never seen anything like that.”).

 

There wasn’t a lot of paraphrasing, because I was dealing with fairly binary things (battery drains) rather than with the nuance of human communication. But there were some:

• The rawest “output” data I have is that the battery light came on while I was driving and then, the next day, the car didn’t start. I did a little paraphrasing from those observations to “There’s some kind of problem with the electrical system.”

• I also looked for other data to support (or debunk) my theory. I drove approximately 60 miles after parking under the power lines before my car died; Quora says that cars can drive 50 to 100 miles without an alternator.

• I also paraphrased data from other sources, like the manual from the power company.

 

Beyond that, I named what happened. I have a mental model of how the car’s electrical system works, so I further extrapolated to: “There’s a problem with the charging system.”

 

In all this, I applied some context: namely, my training in physics, engineering, and aviation. That’s where I got my mental model of the car’s electrical system. My mental model also makes it easy (perhaps too easy?) for me to see a connection between the power lines and the dead alternator.

 

With that context comes my explanation: when I parked the car under the power lines, it affected my electrical system.

 

So, I decided a couple of things. I decided not to ask just for a jump but instead to ask for 30 minutes of charging from another car. And I decided to take the car into the shop where, indeed, they found a bad alternator.

 

Now, of course, almost none of these decisions were explicit. I didn’t write down any steps; I quickly and implicitly formed beliefs — among them the totally unsubstantiated conclusion that parking below the high voltage power lines fried my alternator.

 

That’s the value of the Ladder of Inference, though. Suppose my mechanic and I really needed to come to some kind of agreement. By both of us making our thinking explicit at each rung of the ladder, we’d be more likely to have a productive conversation. “Here is the data that I am seeing. What are you seeing?”

 

By making our beliefs explicit as we move up the ladder, we can slowly build a shared mental model, one that drives alignment and common understanding. And when we find disagreements along the way, we can do more research and devise little tests to see if we can suss out which person’s perspective is more likely to match reality.

 

Here’s an exercise: take something that’s come up for you recently — at work or at home. A disagreement with a colleague or family member, say, or a tough decision at work.

 

See if you can use the ladder to make the climb to your beliefs (and your decision) explicit.

 

Let me know what you find.

 

P.S. Ultimately, of course, the mechanic wins either way by collecting my $723 for fixing the alternator.

 

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3 ways to get ahead of risk

 

One of the first big consulting projects my firm worked on looked at how Hurricane Sandy affected New York City and its surroundings.

 

The problems that Sandy caused were remarkably complex and intertwined — from gas shortages and closed hospitals to transit systems destroyed by flooding.

 

While the city and surrounding states could respond effectively to isolated challenges (getting food and water to people whose homes had been damaged, for example), most solutions required multiple things to go right at the same time.

 

Power restoration, for instance, required that linemen be dispatched to the right place, but clearing debris needed to be coordinated and done first. Often, that didn’t happen, so linemen drove to site after site without actually being able to turn the electricity back on.

 

The same kinds of catch-22s contributed to fuel shortages, too. Mass transit failures and infrastructure problems (a shutdown pipeline, offline refineries) affected the workers tasked with restoring operations.

 

Those are just two examples. Across the region, there were many system problems at play.

 

What struck me then (and has stayed with me) is the gap between a tactical response and the ability to meet an overall strategic objective.

 

We are, in broad strokes, pretty good at tactical responses. Linemen restore power. Workers operate refineries. Doctors intubate patients. The people who do these things practice them, sometimes every day.

 

But solving big strategic problems requires us to work across boundaries — team, division, organization, and even governmental boundaries.

 

And boundaries are a big source of misunderstanding, sloppy thinking, and, therefore, risk — something that shows up a lot in András and my research.

 

Here are three things I think about to try and get ahead of these kinds of risks on a project.

 

1. Ask how many things need to go right

 

When I’m working with leaders, one of the questions I routinely ask is “How many things need to go right for this project to succeed?”

 

It’s a simple question, but it can steer your attention to the challenges caused by complexity.

 

2. Slow it down

 

Readers of Meltdown will know that tight coupling exacerbates complexity. Tight coupling is a lack of slack in the system, a lack of ability to respond to problems.

 

Sometimes tight coupling is driven by reality — needing to get power restored as quickly as possible after a hurricane is an example.

 

If that’s the case, acknowledge it and rank your priorities. What will you work on first? What solutions will help you make the most progress?

 

But, many times, tight coupling is imposed by pressure coming from somewhere, often a senior leader in the organization. That pressure can translate to stress and tension in our work with other groups. As a result, we can start a drive toward solutions before we even let our partners know that there’s a challenge to think about.

 

Instead, remember that different groups will start at different places. People require space to understand the problem and think creatively. So, as much as you can, slow things down to allow for divergent thinking.

 

3. Practice

 

Some groups practice with simulations — running wargames that incorporate people from other organizations. And, while these can be useful, they have a lot of drawbacks. They interrupt normal work. They’re usually expensive. And they’re necessarily limited by the imaginations of the people who run them.

 

Instead, practice by working on bite-sized chunks of a bigger problem. Do you want to solve a complex problem? First, work with a group on a less ambitious challenge — or to solve a complex problem in one team or facility.

 

Even if the solution isn’t transformational, it will both make things better and build your problem-solving capacity. That experience can then be used to learn and guide the process moving forward.

 

— —

 

Teams often occupy the space between day-to-day tactics and overall strategy. How do you invest in yours?

 

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The value of outsiders and coaching at work and in life

 

Meltdown, as my regular readers will know, is about how we can understand and manage complexity in a different way.

 

When my coauthor András and I set out to write the book, we dug into failures like nuclear meltdowns and oil spills.

 

And, in studying these, we found ways for leaders to fundamentally change how they run their organizations.

 

In the book, we write about the power of outsiders to uncover and understand problems — from the truck driver who discovered that the Washington State Department of Corrections was releasing thousands of prisoners early to the regulators who unraveled the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal.

 

When I’m consulting, being an outsider is part of my value. I see what my clients can’t necessarily see: the water in which they swim. I often think of how we can create outsiders within a client’s organization, too: roles that can continue the practice of gentle challenge and discovery.

 

Beyond studying big organizations, András and I also discovered ways that complexity affects all of us on a day-to-day basis — and strategies that can help shift our behavior.

 

Indeed, individuals also harness outsiders — by talking with a trusted friend or engaging a coach. In my experience, coaches can be transformational, enabling progress and growth in a way that is both more easeful and effective.

 

Coaches help us stay accountable.

 

This spring, I trained for a half-marathon. I had a coach — sort of. I used an audio program recorded by running coach Katie Barrett. Katie did a few things for me (and, because she’s coaching at scale, the thousands of others who subscribe to her prerecorded programs):

• She established a workout schedule and cadence that took thinking off the table and kept me showing up for runs.

• She challenged me. Even though Katie was just a voice in my ear, when she told me to push and run faster, I did! (We humans are strange, right?)

 

Coaches also provide a space for us to shift our perspective.

 

When I coach business owners and executives, I help them make sense of their current situations. We think about why things are the way they are and dig into the stories that they tell themselves.

 

Those stories are often useful approximations that help us situate ourselves in the world. But they’re also the water that we swim in. But they’re just mental models and, many times, they constrain us in ways that we don’t fully see. Helping clients get curious about their stories is one of the great joys of the work that I do. That curiosity helps us see that it’s the stories themselves that create our barriers.

 

Simply put, curiosity is one of the most powerful forces for transformational change that I have ever seen at work.

 

What about you? Has a coach helped you see your stories and move past one of your barriers?

 

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5 keys to giving effective feedback

 

When I worked as a derivatives trader, I remember getting some feedback about my decision-making. During a year-end review, one of my bosses told me that he thought I could improve my judgment.

 

While parts of me were sad, angry, and surprised, a big part of me was really excited to learn what I could do better. So, I asked!

 

Here’s how I remember our conversation.

 

Me: Wow… OK, thanks for letting me know. I’d love to improve. Do you have an example of a situation where I exercised poor judgment?

 

Boss: Well… not really. I can’t think of anything.

 

Me: …

 

Boss: Actually, there was a time a few months ago where <thing> happened in <this trade>.

 

Me: Hmm… What could I have done differently?

 

Boss: …

 

Me: …

 

Boss: I don’t remember the specifics.

 

Dear reader, do you see the problem? There were definitely aspects of whatever situation that I had missed. But, with a delay of several months and no specifics, it was impossible for me to learn and improve.

 

Unfortunately, that’s how many of us give (and receive) feedback in our professional lives. Feedback occurs long after the event that caused it. It’s vague and it doesn’t help people learn.

 

It’s true that many of us weren’t taught to give good feedback. But there’s often another reason we’re reluctant:

 

We’re afraid of feeling uncomfortable. 

 

Boy, does that make sense… feeling uncomfortable is, well, uncomfortable.

 

It’s so much easier, in the moment, to dodge a tough conversation. But, when we do that, we’re robbing others (and ourselves!) of learning.

 

Part of the discomfort comes, I think, from a deep yearning for control. We want to be in control of what others think about us. It can be as simple as wanting to be liked.

 

We also want to be in control of our environment. If we give someone feedback, we take a risk. The ball is now in their court, and they may not improve.

 

If we stay silent—well, at least we’ll know the weaknesses of those around us. That’s controllable.

 

But real growth comes from letting go of control.

 

It’s recognizing that even the way you give feedback is a growth opportunity. You may not do the best job, but, with feedback about your feedback, you can improve.

 

Great feedback is rooted in the ability to hold everyone accountable for their decisions and mistakes—getting them to explain what they saw, what they thought, and why they made the decisions they did. When you start with the assumption that everyone shows up to do a good job, the outcome is learning for everyone.

 

Without further ado, here are the five C’s of great feedback:

• Contemporaneous: You give feedback soon after a relevant event.

• Contextual: Your feedback describes the broader situation, like why you see something as important in the first place.

• Concrete: You talk about what you saw, heard, or noticed, and you talk about the specific things that resulted.

• Curious and conversational: Feedback is a dialogue where you genuinely try and understand the other person’s perspective.

• Constructive: You have a specific action, path, or exploration that you’d like the recipient to try.

 

Finally, don’t buy (let alone eat!) the sh*t sandwich: the idea that negative feedback should be sandwiched between loaves of great things.

 

Instead, give lots of positive feedback, too! When you see something that someone did well, approach it in the same way. That way, people know what you like about what they’ve done. Positive feedback should outnumber corrective feedback.

 

Regular readers will see that all of this is designed to shift performance by injecting data into everyday work—transforming wicked, low-feedback environments into kind ones.

 

When you give good feedback, you’re likely to receive it in return—from your bosses and the folks who report to you. You learn. They learn. Your team and company learns.

 

Everybody wins.

 

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Updating a standard business metaphor

 

Fans of Jim Collins’s book Good to Great will recognize the concept of “First Who, Then What.” Take the example of Wells Fargo (well, the Wells Fargo of the 1980s, long before the inglorious fake account scandals that have plagued the modern-day bank). Instead of generating a grand strategy and getting alignment, CEO Dick Cooley hired talented executives, sometimes without having a specific role for them in mind. The idea being that we need to have talented people “on the bus” before we even set off on our journey. The right people, Collins argued, will be flexible enough to change and adapt as the destination changes.

 

Today, the metaphor is a bit dated. Not that we don’t need good people, but that we don’t want them on a bus!

 

A bus has one driver and a bunch of passengers. It has one direction and not much agility.

 

What we really need are the right people on the sailboat, which doesn’t go anywhere without people working together.

 

You need a captain, who is ultimately responsible for the safety and direction of the entire voyage. But you also need people that can read maps, understand weather and tides — to both watch out for risks and notice opportunities for particularly speedy progress.

 

You need someone who will nourish the crew (in spirit and body). You need someone who understands the technical aspects of the boat and crew members who know how to work the lines and the sheets.

 

And even when the destination is known, sailboats change direction all the time in order to reach it. All of this rings much more true to me than having a bunch of folks just sitting on a bus.

 

As a coach, I often help my clients get the right folks on their sailboats. That might mean making sure they have a skilled team working in their business, which can include the hard task of counseling underperforming employees out.

 

But I also like the sailboat metaphor as a lens on us as individuals.

 

We all have a unique combination of talents. We’ve ideally got a well-balanced sense of self that moves us forward with purpose. We’ve got parts of ourselves that are alert to both risks and opportunities. We’ve got skills, too: technical and relational. And hopefully, we have a way of taking care of ourselves and others and expressing love.

 

I love to help clients see all these aspects of themselves at work. Though there may be facets of ourselves that we want to change (I, for example, often wish that I could be more patient), we have to make friends with those parts because they often contain our gifts — my impatience stems from thinking and moving fast. The key is to be choiceful about how we express these things.

 

One of my favorite views on this comes from the Buddhist writer and teacher Pema Chödrön.

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.

 

What aspects of yourself can you see as both a neurosis and a superpower?

 

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How to leverage your intuition and make decisions

(even when the data isn’t clear)

 

I work with a lot of data-driven organizations.

 

Whether it’s finance geeks, business owners, software developers, or engineers, a lot of people who connect with my work self-identify as “data-driven.”

 

Don’t get me wrong, using data to make decisions is fantastic.

 

But, sometimes, it’s not enough.

 

At times, you may just need more data. You need to run an experiment longer, run a bigger survey, or just look more deeply at the data that you already have.

 

But, other times, you need a different approach; you need to break out of analysis paralysis.

 

Here are three approaches that you can use to make better decisions, even when embedded in a culture that celebrates data.

 

Broaden your perspective

 

I wrote recently about Chris Argyris’s ladder of inference. The ladder is a mental model of how we process data and make decisions. Its key power is helping us become aware of the way that we unconsciously filter and interpret data that we all make.

 

What we measure becomes the water in which we swim.

 

That’s OK — but the water often has a current that implies preexisting compromises. For example, an engineering manager at a tech firm might be incentivized to have her team close bug tickets swiftly. Open tickets may draw the attention (and ire?) of more senior leaders.

 

All of that influences her behavior in a particular way. If a deeper dive into a section of code would forestall future problems but would leave a ticket open longer, then an engineer may not be incentivized to make that investment — even if it would be good for the long-term health of the software.

 

In cases like this, using intuition and conversation to think through example problems can help us rethink our approaches. It can help us broaden what we measure and see more clearly what’s in front of us.

 

Realize that “the map is not the territory”

 

I’ve written here about how the environment we operate in changes whether intuition is a source of bias or a superpower to make great decisions. In an environment with a lot of feedback, we can learn from our decisions and improve our intuition.

 

Even in the most data-driven cultures, the map is not the territory. Data can never faithfully or fully represent the world as it is, whether that is because of the way that informal networks promote technology adoption or because work actually gets done in a different way than what’s written out as a procedure. That means that as data-driven as a culture is, data can’t be the only input for data.

 

As a result, many data-driven cultures struggle to incorporate intuitive solutions, even when they’re developed by experienced people drawing on their broad perspectives.

 

In these cases, rather than stake out and advocate a position, use intellectual judo to design an experiment:

 

I think we’d get newer developers up to speed faster if we paired them with formal mentors. Can we try an experiment where we do that for half of our starting developers and measure how much they deploy in the first three months?

 

These kinds of techniques work particularly well in big companies where you can benchmark internally. If you don’t have that option, you can still define smaller experiments where you predict specific outcomes and reflect on if you met your expectations.

 

Use HPPOs judiciously

 

When data fails, the default way of making decisions often follows the HPPO approach — to rely on the highest-paid person’s opinion.

 

That can be OK — sometimes a leader really does need to just make a decision. But groups often implicitly slide into this strategy. People might share their views, but subtly shape their input to match what they think a leader wants to hear.

 

That’s a mistake.

 

Instead, when you’re going to fall back on the highest-paid person’s opinion, make that explicit! A leader should proactively seek input while letting everyone know that she will ultimately be making the call. In this way, you can invite constructive dissent and empower everyone in the group to contribute.

 

That’s particularly useful when the data don’t show a clear path forward.

 

What about you? What approaches do you use to avoid analysis paralysis and make decisions, even when the data aren’t clear?

 

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Van Halen’s secret to avoiding disaster

I first heard the story on This American Life, but it seemed apocryphal.

When the band Van Halen was touring, the story goes, they required a bowl of M&M’s as snacks — with the brown ones removed.

For years, if the band’s requirement wasn’t discounted as a rumor, it was viewed as an absurd rock star excess. The band’s capriciousness demanded the removal of brown M&M’s from the bowl of candy, along with snacks like herring cream cheese and essentials (Tupelo honey and KY Jelly, for example).

Well, it turns out that it’s true! And there’s a really good reason for it.

Here’s David Lee Roth, the band’s lead vocalist, from his autobiography (as quoted on Snopes.com):

We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

… there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make [a show] function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

It’s brilliant.

One of the things that we write about in Meltdown (read a free sample here) is the idea that it’s hard to observe what’s actually going on in many complex systems. Whether that’s because of the hidden features of abstract things (like correlations between complex financial products) or the difficulty of observing physical systems (you can’t send someone into the core of a nuclear power plant or to the bottom of the ocean to see a wellhead).

But transparency is often the antidote to complexity: even when we can’t simplify our systems, we can make things more visible. For example, banks that used a unified system to quantify their exposures (compared with those that emailed spreadsheets around) had a better understanding of their risk in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

That’s akin to what Van Halen did with the brown M&M’s: find something that could help them understand the hidden risks they were facing.

It’s what I do with my consulting clients: we seek clear indicators for how our work is going and how we’re changing a team’s behaviors. I do it with my coaching clients: we create indicators that reveal the hidden beliefs that motivate actions, particularly the beliefs that work against someone’s stated goal.

What about you? How do you try and inject transparency into your systems?

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I recently came to the conclusion the other day that my child does not, in fact, have brain damage.

 

This despite outward signs of impairment: difficulty staying on task, emotional volatility, inability to read and write fluently.

 

In his defense, he is a seven-year-old.

 

This realization started as we were reading a bedtime story together. T is working on his reading skills and had arrived at a challenging sentence.

 

We do a lot of work around developing a growth mindset in our family. But staying with something difficult is still really hard.

 

In that moment, T backed off from the challenge and redirected himself to anything else: rolling around on a yoga ball, jumping off the bed, looking out of the window, and opining on the merits of various construction strategies in Minecraft.

 

For whatever reason, I was able to detach from my usual drive toward bedtime and just observe him. It was lovely.

 

What I remembered in that moment was: while T doesn’t have brain damage, he also doesn’t have the same brain that you and I, dear reader, possess.

 

His brain lacks a robust prefrontal cortex (PFC). This part of the brain drives what neuroscientists call executive function: the ability to pay attention, to plan, to see the consequences of behavior, and to control impulses, among other things.

 

From the perspective of a parent, this can be… how to put it… infuriating.

 

But it’s also tremendously powerful. As the PFC develops, kids get better at focus and attention. But until about age 25, it remains underdeveloped. As a result, adolescents are willing to take many more risks.

 

Or, in the words of science: “Due to immature functional areas in the prefrontal cortex, adolescent teens may take part in risk-seeking behavior including unprotected sex, impaired driving, and drug addiction.”

 

Wow, that sounds bad! Why would evolution set us up to take a bunch of risks? Let’s turn, again, to science:

Risk-taking serves as a means of discovery about oneself, others, and the world at large. The proclivity for risk-taking behavior plays a significant role in adolescent development, rendering this a period of time for both accomplishing their full potential and vulnerability… risk-taking behavior is a normal and necessary component of adolescence. [emphasis mine]

 

I’ll take this one level beyond the data by adding my own hypothesis: evolution sets us up to take risks—not just because it helps us to develop as individuals, but because it pushes us to try new things as a society.

 

I’ve written before about how change is built around threshold effects. As we observe others participating in an activity—whether that is adopting a new technology or marching for equal rights—we’re more likely to do it ourselves.

 

Segments of the population that are more risk-seeking are likelier to be first movers who spur change for us all.

 

This is a powerful observation. From an organizational lens, it suggests that innovation happens by respecting and incorporating the views of our most junior members. But hierarchy tamps down their views. Instead, change is usually a mandate from the top that’s pushed down.

 

It’s not that every change suggested by a junior hire will be a good one. It’s that some percentage of their ideas should be considered and tried, rather than relegated to the “that’s not how things are done here” suggestion box.

 

This jives with my experience. In doing innovation work with organizations, one of my guiding beliefs is that groups already possess the wisdom to create their own change.

 

It’s a matter of creating a structure and a space for discussion. It’s a matter of creating parity between senior leaders (who often have great ideas) and voices that may not otherwise have a forum to contribute (who often have great ideas).

 

It’s a matter of figuring out ways to prioritize and test those ideas.

 

And it’s a matter of thinking carefully about the people not in the room. Who among them will an idea resonate with? Who will resist? And who will be on the fence but will move if they understand the benefits of a new approach?

 

How have you seen change work (or not work) in your organization(s)?

 

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