The Information Gap.
We naively assume that an information gap explains another’s conduct.
‘Let’s give that person the benefit of what we know! That will cause them to change their minds and behaviour!’
No amount of information will be enough.
Their minds are made up.
It’s not lack of information that’s the problem.
It’s lack of desire.
And … ACTION!
And … ACTION!
Bad Boss enters Stage Left.
Soliloquy.
Boss exits Stage RIght.
CUT!
Sycophants rise to their feet and applaud and stomp the floor.
Tripping the Power.
If too many people in a team or organisation actually fully applied their total capacity.
They will draw too much attention away from the boss.
Tripping the power.
They Said.
‘Innovate!’ they said.
‘Seek excellence!’ they said.
‘Be brave!’ they said.
‘Goodbye.’ they said.
The Clock Isn’t Ticking.
A broken clock is right twice a day.
A fool who doesn’t fix the clock thinks it’s always 2 o’clock.
An ignorant fool who only ever checked the time once thinks it’s only ever been 2 o’clock.
An ignorant insecure fool who once asked someone the time and was told ‘It’s 2 o’clock’ feels affirmed in their stupidity.
Rock the Boat.
If you’re going to innovate, you’ll end up rocking the boat.
Just make sure the captain is okay with that.
Matter and Manner
“I take issue with the decision you made to cancel my membership.”
The ‘matter’ on which we disagree.
“I take issue with the decision you made to cancel my membership - you idiot.’
The ‘manner’ in which we disagree.
Survivor’s Guilt.
Bad bosses must cope with survivor’s guilt.
‘I am a bad boss, and yet I’m The Boss, so I had to make those decisions affecting Good People.
So they tell themselves a story:
‘Someone had to do it. I did. Even though I know I’m a Bad Boss, I still made those decisions.’
‘I am a brave Hero.’
Sitting in Tranquil Truth.
Oh, the sweet, peaceful feeling of keeping a virtuous act to yourself.
Watching as the bus of external praise, acknowledgement, and validation closes its doors and pulls away.
Leaving you sitting in tranquil truth.
The Any and the Few.
Anyone can trumpet their organisation’s virtues on their webpage.
Few can practise them when put to the test.
The Drowning Man.
Empathy is watching a drowning man and feeling his pain of gasping for air.
Sympathy is standing on the shore, shaking your head, and saying, “That must be hard.”
Compassion is diving in to save him.
Stupidity is refusing to dive in because that would be judgemental.
Nobody Has Got a Crystal Ball.
We all deal with uncertainty and judges, just as doctors, or parents, or teachers - all walks of life - have to make decisions where there is uncertainty involved. Nobody has got a crystal ball into the future. Indeed, often we don't have a crystal ball into the past to determine what happened. And when you make decisions based on uncertainty, it can turn out that the prediction isn't that which you made as best you could with the information at hand.
Fear about making decisions … can lead to bad decisions.
Every time there's a catastrophe or a disaster arises, naturally, people will ask, ‘Who got this wrong?’, or ‘Why was it wrong?’ And sometimes there is something that has genuinely been missed that ought not have been missed. And of course, it's natural to look at that.
When a disaster happens, and you look back at those 100 cases, you can't find any difference between the one that went into a disaster and the 99 that didn't. Now, one answer to that may be, well, then we should just never make decisions. The problem with that is the system would grind to an absolute halt. Tens of thousands of these decisions are made every year, and we don't hear about the tens of thousands of decisions that are made each year in which nothing goes wrong.
Now that's not to say that you can't learn from situations where something does go seriously wrong. But it would, as I say, grind our system to a halt if everybody approached every decision to say, ‘I'm not going to make the decision. Because even if there's only 1% chance that I'm wrong … I'm going to be pilloried, and so the only way I can avoid it is to not make a decision at all’.
And that's a real risk. It's not just for judges and magistrates. - The Hon. Peter Quinlan, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia
Like a Kite.
Some people are like a kite caught in a tree.
All colour and flutter and bobbing and flapping.
Going nowhere.
Transparent.
The transparency of an organisation is inversely proportional to how often it says it’s transparent.
Because if an organisation is transparent - it doesn’t have to tell us what we can’t see.
