Companies strive for error elimination, hiring advisers and relying on sophisticated management tools such as Six Sigma. It’s little wonder, then, that most decision-making books follow suit, encouraging you to focus narrowly on mistake avoidance today rather than provoking you to plan for the stream of decisions that you will face tomorrow.
Schoemaker feels so strongly that in complex, dynamic environments (like any business) deep-rooted assumptions are the seeds of decline, he challenges us to make "deliberate mistakes" - violating one of these deeply-held beliefs (in a limited, experimental setting), to measure whether it is still valid.
The idea of deliberate mistakes causes me to think of Cynthia Kurtz's story work. Cynthia was adamant that any observation she made (or that I made) about a project we were doing should be countered with an alternate view. If I thought a set of stories pointed to a positive view of the client, Cynthia would counter, "What would a pessimist say?" And after exploring that for a few minutes, I could equally well make the case that those stories also had an ominous subtext. Evaluating situations in this way began to illuminate their complexity, as jewels that shone differently depending on which facets were held to the light.
I spent many months working with a large wireless carrier, helping them make sense of stories their customers were telling them in customer-service calls. It struck me that many of the leaders, upon hearing of an issue, would very quickly formulate a strong hypothesis about what was going on, without any specific evidence.
In one case, we were trying to investigate a situation where an alarmingly large number of customers, when they were changing their rate plans, were dropping their data packages. The immediate reaction was this: "customer service representatives are not trying hard enough to sell the value of the data packages."
I tended to identify more with the customers, given that I had little history with the company, and saw a few different possibilities. I tried to use Cynthia's approach to add nuance to the problem: "What would your customer service rep think is going on here?" "What is the customer's view of this?"
The managers I worked with on this project - lower- and mid-level managers - were receptive. They could easily place themselves in the shoes of the customer, or the rep. A few alternate hypotheses surfaced quickly: customers might not be getting value out of the data package, and the rate plan change caused them to do this evaluation; customers might have a fixed budget and could not keep the new plan and the package without raising their bill; customers might be looking specifically for ways to lower their bill.
Soon we had six hypotheses that we could test. Yet, on this and other projects, the complex truth had to fight against simple judgments, and it was a hard fight. If the practice of deliberate mistakes could be ingrained in companies like this one, we could spend more time trying stuff out and finding what works instead of arguing our own viewpoints.
Which arguments, at the end of the day, don't matter to the business.
No comments:
Post a Comment