We don’t have written records, but I’m imagining that groups of cavemen made decisions around the fire in largely the same way we run sophisticated organizations today.
About a hundred years ago, three disciplines helped create the modern world:
Scientific management used a stopwatch and the assembly line to relentlessly improve the productivity of the industrial age.
Scientific advertising brought measurement and rigor to the work of creating ads and buying media.
And engineering brought physics and the scientific method to everything we build. Bridges don’t fall down, computer chips get faster and cheaper and the things we make rarely break.
But the bosses still do what they always did. They place comfort and convenience over effectiveness. If the hard-working people in any other part of the organization approached their work the way they do, it wouldn’t last.
One estimate is that the direct labor cost of time spent in meetings at a Fortune 500 company is over a quarter of a billion dollars a year. Per company.
And yet, meetings occur regularly, with no measurable outputs. Few people do the reading or prep, and many show up late or uninformed. The room isn’t designed for the purpose it’s being used for, and no one is taking notes or sending out follow-up action requests.
There’s rarely an interlocutor–a neutral moderator who asks questions, guides the conversation and leads the group to a decision. People are rarely given feedback on their meeting productivity, and aren’t encouraged to get training or improve their skills.
You’ve probably been to a thousand meetings. How many can you remember that achieved what could have happened with that much time and talent invested?
In my experience at large organizations, the physical dynamic in the room is often left to the facilities person who ran the AV cart in high school or the office supply vendor who was asked to fill a square room with furniture that would serve many purposes. That’s not how we invest in an assembly line or a semiconductor fab…
And many decisions, if implemented, remain unexamined. There’s little time or focus invested in learning from what came before, and no one is keeping track of whether the loud voices are usually right. Famous CEOs shoot from the hip, and seem to think that wrong action fast is better than thoughtfully doing the right thing tomorrow.
Corporate culture usually pushes people to avoid speaking up, to prize comfort over progress, and to support the status quo unless there’s an emergency. We either invite too many or not enough people into group decisions, and end up using superficial or extraneous information to make choices.
We reject a job applicant because they had parsley in their teeth, didn’t go to a famous college or they don’t look like us. Deniability often seems more important than progress. We use easy proxies and measures instead of the ones that really matter. And we repeat patterns that worked with the old systems, but make no sense with the new ones.
*The job of the Chief Decision Officer, then, isn’t to make decisions. It’s to create the conditions for the organization to do a better job of it. Not only at a Fortune 500 company, but at a thriving non-profit, a government agency or a small start-up.
Surgeons scrub before entering the OR. It’s hygienic, but also a ritual. It reminds them that this place is special, it has a purpose, rules and outcomes. Don’t come in if you’re not prepared to do your part.
The CDO ought to establish the same approach for the way we make decisions and take action on those decisions.
It often seems that everyone is talking about what everyone is talking about.
No one cares about a song or a movie or a political issue–and then they do. Then it’s everywhere.
But of course, that’s precisely why. Most people feel safe when they’re engaging within the expected social norms. It’s easier to fit in and to avoid an error. Or, if that’s your thing, it’s easier to stand out in contrast to everyone else who is trying to fit in. Either way, we’re always on the lookout for a bandwagon to hop on.
The media, in their relentless search for newsstand sales, clicks and likes, seek precisely the same thing. PT Barnum figured out that putting a marching band on a wagon at the front of the parade drew a crowd, and then Dan Rice, an actual clown, realized that politicians would be eager to ride on a wagon that had a crowd, which drew others to the crowd and the cycle continued.
The math is simple: you can’t bandwagon by yourself. The nature of bandwagoning means that it will always be overrepresented in any sampling of the media.
Just because someone organized a parade doesn’t mean you have to be in it.
I just built a page containing many of my books. Click on any one of them and it’ll take you to a directory of where you can get a copy. And the page then re-indexes based on which ones get the most clicks.
Thanks for reading.
We’re unprepared.
In high school, the quarterback isn’t allowed to call the plays, the actor isn’t allowed to write the lines and the math whiz isn’t allowed to choose what to prove.
We all grew up in the age of compliance (and indoctrination).
The long tail of the internet and the astonishing leverage of AI has made this training much less valuable.
No matter what you do for a living, there’s a machine standing by, waiting for instructions. Instructions from you, if you choose, or from your overlords if you don’t.
And following the playbook isn’t much help, because the world is changing so fast, a playbook is obsolete by the time someone hands it to you.
One reason AI got such a fast start is that it gave people seeking compliance a chance to wait for the AI to tell them what to do next. Quick, cheap answers.
AI gives bosses a cheaper (and often more compliant) alternative to hiring humans to do some tasks.
For those indoctrinated to comply, this is stressful. The stress is due to a desire to get things back to normal, to give them a chance to comply again, but right here, right now, is as normal as things are ever going to get. “Good jobs” are no longer sinecures where success comes from following instructions.
It’s an abrupt change, and winging it is insufficient. Handling this sudden transition alone is too difficult. But we have a chance to find the others, to connect and be part of a cohort that challenges, educates and encourages each other on the path to find a way forward.
We accepted that it was required to spend years being trained to handle a life of compliance. Now we have the chance to lean into the hard work we’ll need to do to thrive in an age of initiative.
Juan Tamariz and Wendell Berry recently passed away. Between them, they had more than 170 years of generous contribution.
Juan was a card magician. His students are generally considered the best working in the world today.
Wendell was a farmer and a writer. His essays on non-industrial farming and community-building will resonate for generations.
What each had in common was the patience and commitment to choose depth. To seek out the inconvenient path because it mattered.
Neither traded for easily measured metrics or convenience. Instead, they chose a path and followed it, leaving things better than they found them.
Looking back a century, it’s easy to appreciate this. And yet, each and every day, it requires a recommitment. “Under the circumstances,” it’s tempting to justify the small compromises that corrode our work. The hard part is to realize that we’re not under the circumstances; we are them. We can start today.
[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]
Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.