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.

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Jurassic Management and You

We live in times when communication is flowing faster than ever. Not only the tools we work with are evolving fast, we are evolving fast. People don't have careers anymore --they have jobs-- and jobs change quickly! Work can be distributed around the globe (think croudsourcing), and collaboration rules (think wikis and open source). Shift really happens (and if you haven't seen any of the "Did you know" videos you are really out of touch). So...to the point: the management you have observed looking up the corporate ladder is probably not the management you have to replicate. Unfortunately there is no road-map to follow... and I can only help with a few don'ts and some tips.


Don't #1 - My first advice is not to copy your "good'old boss".

If you are reading this blog chances are that you belong to the generation X, and you will be managing a mix of gen Y's and X's and a few boomers. Your boss is probably a baby boomer who manages gen X's. By all means, learn from him but do not copy him. He probably has a different challenge than you have so don't replicate... It just won't work the same way.

Don't #2 - Don't get in the way of things. PR-managers talk well, and their value comes primarily from reporting-up what the team is doing and managing down whatever the business guidelines are. Today, value can't come from being a communication agent. E-mail, webcasts and instant messages are fast and efficient. CEOs are emailing their employees like that: zap! ... and some are blogging or twittering. Same thing for micro-managers...the volume of things going on is so huge that it's impossible to keep-up with everything that is happening. Both the PR-manager and the micro-manager will get in the way of things and add very little in the process... well, other than slowing-down everyone's work by adding time; They are poised to fail. 

Don't #3 - Don't be a father for your team. I still see some "papa-managers" out there... If you are one of them, you take care of your team members as if they were family; you protect them from the cold corporate world and nourish them with your experience. Get real; it won't last long; the family will be devastated by turnover and you'll fall into depression.


Enough Don'ts... time for some constructive tips!

Tip #1 - Understand your organization and culture. No one is better placed than the manager to understand how the organization and culture play at the different levels between the company, the business unit and the team. Spend time on this. Organizations are getting more complex. The management structures have evolved from pyramids to matrices, to .... let's call them hyper-organizations. See the big picture: where do you fit with your company organization, your stakeholders, your suppliers, the corporate process owners, your business environment? What moves the myriad of players around you, how can you leverage them (how can they leverage you?), and what creates barriers to the success of your team's mission? Map this, do a force field analysis. Think about the culture as well. You can only underestimate the impact it can have in the success or failure of a project. 

Tip #2 - Hunt for complexity. Simplification is in vogue. People communicate well and can digest the work for you. Powerpoint presentations, 3 bullets per page, one hour reviews to skim the surface, "you only need to know this", big picture bla, bla, bla! I see this everyday! Today it's too easy to get out of touch with what happens on the ground, what things really mean, or metrics really measure (no, I don't work in finance... but the story is the same, we manage a system we don't always understand). How simple everything looks! But look under the hood and see the complexity! If you decompose how things work you'll be amazed: in my work, to close a "simple action" you have dozens of people involved from 5 places around the world, relying on systems that are unreliable and that are managed in _ _ _ (fill the blanks). You get the picture... things are getting more complex and it's your job to see where the complexity is.

Tip #3 - Take action. The first tips are about doing good analysis... so don't forget to use your analysis and take action. Sometimes you can simplify things. Do it! Sometimes you can only do risk management. Hey, better than nothing.


Tip #4 - Outsource yourself. Well, not literally. What I mean by outsourcing yourself is that you should tap into others when you can. Use your networks and the distributed resources that are available for free... How? By asking questions an helping others to better communicate. If you ask questions you'll have other's brains working for you. And if they can tap into other brains themselves... you see the picture. Sometimes I ask a difficult question and I get an answer right there, on the spot. I hate it, I did a bad job asking or whomever answered didn't get it. I wanted him or her to ask the question as well and then come with many better answers. In summary, If you ensure that your team members are well connected and communicate well, you'll receive direct benefit through networks effects. Use that network!