The Coalition Of Enemies

When Boston University organized a leadership session with MBA alumni this year, one of the activities was to play cards. Ok, the cards were from the Center of Creative Leadership. They depicted different themes: a caring gardener, collaborative mountain climbers, creative artists, a happy family, a team of well-organized workers, a group of thieves, connecting rivers, etc. Pick a first card to illustrate your present status and a second one to represent your aspirations. Let me depart from this interesting exercise and focus on the one card that I chose as my first pick: two medieval armies turned their fight towards a third enemy. Big companies are highly politicized and conflict-prone when seen from the inside. Sometimes they appear to be a Coalition of Enemies. In this post I'll try to explain why it is so, and hopefully I'll be able to distill a few good tips on how to navigate successfully through conflict and politics.

Much like cars that have complex designs, corporations have complex organizations. A car has an engine designed to deliver acceleration and speed, at the same time it has well designed brakes and electronic systems to stop quickly. Like cars, corporations have organizations that have built-in conflictive functions, checks and balances if you wish. Some of these company-wide conflicts are well known: regions want to have more autonomy, salesmen seek volume, corporate wants to keep prices high and cut costs, and manufacturing grumbles against engineering who grumbles against quality assurance who in turn... you get the picture. Those broad conflicts trickle within the organization: VPs represent different perspectives, middle-managers take example on their function-head and bring the conflict one level down, and so forth by replication until it reaches every individual in the organization. At the individual level this overlays with a crossroad of conflicts due to overlaps in responsibilities, career aspirations, personal incompatibilities, etc. Then another dynamics takes effect: who can see the conflicts can also exploit the conflicts. If a child can play mom against dad at home, imagine what smart employees or managers can do in complex organizations!

So, how to deal with conflicts in your organization?
1 - First recognize natural conflicts. In doing so, remember that more often than not conflicts are good. In GE our most recent HR initiative is called “Boundaryless Collaboration” and has attributes like “Embraces Constructive Conflict” and at the same time “Leverages Teamwork”. Step-back and try to identify the natural biases of your surroundings. Create the car-like analogy that best matches your organization. Get your company context.
2 - Be skeptical. People will come to you with pre-packaged explanations of what is at play. It can be based on unhealed conflicts, it can be an attempt to play the system and many times it is a defense mechanism (“something is not working and it is not my fault, there is a conflict between…”).
3 - Gather information and perform interviews. People will explain the trade-offs they see, and their behavior and actions will make sense from their perspective. Things will fall into place. I like to write down simple “who thinks what?” two-column tables. It’s simple and powerful
4 - Judge: flag the forces that are good and healthy and segregate them from those that are bad and ill. This will help you drive your actions.
5 - Attack the ill forces. Tackle them; do it on the spot, every time you encounter them. Be courageous; don’t hide behind the “politically correct” and the “benefit of the doubt”. Remember that you always lead by the example first, and people are watching you.
6 - Build coalitions. There is no shame in that, as long as the purpose of the coalition is honorable. Work with your peers, align your teams, and manage up. Build common ground and start from shared values or aspirations.
7 - Communicate, communicate, and communicate. People in your team will understand better the decisions that are not to their liking. They will align and work more effectively. If you are in the engine, you’ll be happier to understand why the driver is braking…communicate!
8 - Close the loop. Continuously check your beliefs, confirm your assumptions, re-interview the stakeholders, re-do the analysis and adjust your actions accordingly. What if you are wrong? Reading this older post on decision and uncertainty can help you managing that.

If you want to dig this deeper, I recommend reading an HBR classic: How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight.

AV5JC3A5782B

The economist, the manager, and the doctor

Whether you are an economist a manager or a doctor, you have been trained to predict: the economist predicts GDP and downturns, the manager schedules and costs and the doctor diagnoses and predicts the effect of cures. What makes life interesting is that those predictions are far from perfect... So here is the dilemma of this post: should you improve your prediction skills or should you focus on managing your mistakes?

Let's start with the economists... they rarely predict well the future, but damn! how confident and thorough they are in explaining what happens! No shame involved. They understand the rules of the game: they live with their imperfect predictions, manage their image and move on. Brilliant!

My relationship with doctors is more personal. Two years ago my son could have died. Why? Sickness and an inaccurate diagnosis: the doctors assumed the most probable diagnostic to be certain. My son was very sick and suffered from respiratory issues up to the point of loosing consciousness and needing reanimation. Unfortunately for him, his twin brother was tested positive to RSV (an aggressive respiratory disease) while he was tested negative: "It could be a false negative Mr.Atria, he didn't have enough saliva for the test" they said. The 2nd day, in the hospital, they missed the time-window for the confirmation test: "It's not a big deal, we do the test only to confirm; we are pretty sure that he has RSV". The 3rd day they tested negative for the  RSV again... so they assumed he had another similar respiratory infection, and continued the treatment. To make a long story short, the poor kid had newborn's apnea and needed to be treated with caffeine. If only the doctors would have seriously considered the possibility that their predictions where wrong!

For the manager, what lesson can we take from the economists and those (bad) doctors? In my experience there is a higher pay-off for addressing the risks of an inaccurate prediction than for improving the prediction itself.

Here are some tips on how to do that:

Tip 1 - Do not try to confirm your predictions. It can be pointless. I'm often pulled-in into discussions where engineers are trying to diagnose some kind of technical problem. Most of the time, they have big discussions on what to test next and they end-up trying to perform tests that can confirm or refute their predictions. This sometimes works, but when it does not, they end-up having multiple hypothesis-test iterations, loosing critical time and money. Many times you don't have to know how something happens, but how to deal with what happens... so why bother knowing?

Tip 2 - Don't fall in love with your predictions. We all hate the unknown and --like a mirage in the desert-- we can easily be tricked by our own brain. Embrace the prediction at first, follow-it to the end and create a scenario that makes sense. When you are satisfied, throw your prediction away, call your alter ego Mr.Hide and start again. Continue collecting the scenarios, ask people around you to give you some new ones. Now you are ready to draw a comprehensive action plan.

Tip 3 - Build decision trees. This is a pretty good tool that can help you seeing the big picture. Many times the value of this exercise is not in the math or the probabilities of each branch, but the type of decision points you have, or their order.... which leads us to the next tip.
Tip 4 - Buy time. Why decide today if you can decide tomorrow? Don't jump to quickly on any action if you don't need to, delay your decision the most you can and let new information weight-in. You never know what tomorrow can bring. Be aware that this can be uncomfortable... it's in our genes, we hate the unknown!
Tip 5 - Buy options. Remember that the unknown works both ways... so be also an optimist and you'll be rewarded.  Assuming you have a grounded multi-scenario game plan, there are as many improbable bad things that can happen than good ones.

For what is worth....here is my prediction:
Failure will burn who does not mitigate risk and success will touch who's exposed to luck.

AV5JC3A5782B