Answers.
'You only have the answers for things that don't matter.'
- Peter Block
You don't say 'I don't know' too often and keep your job.
We're paid to Know.
People rely on us to Know.
There is little patience even for I'm Not Sure.
Which means our Widget doesn't matter.
Could this be why only 13% of the world's workers are engaged in their work?
Or why only 7.5% of workers consider themselves productive?
I'm not sure.
Structures.
The job of a manager is to balance enforcing structure while allowing creativity through good decision making.
In a recent interview with Lord David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary who helped bring peace to Bosnia in the 1990s, this tension can be seen at the level of sovereign states.
He was asked how he began negotiating an end to the fighting between the Serbs and the Muslims:
'All this time, you're trying to form structures which can give people a measure of security and, to some extent, decentralised power. And then on top of it, you're trying to construct an overarching organisation for the whole country.'
Lord Owen was talking about the situation as he found it in 1992. The war ended in December 1995.
Simple. Create some governance in your nation or workplace that makes people feel safe. Delegate decision-making power downwards. People will respond by laying down their AK47s, dropping their bullying complaints, and living and working together in productive harmony. A triumph of diplomacy, reason, and our better angels. Sack the lawyers and spend the savings on vision statement coffee mugs, running fun team building days and bean bags in the common rooms.
Then the interviewer asked:
'Do you accept, ultimately, that in the case of Bosnia, what ended the war was the use of military force from outside?'
Boo! Hiss! Of course not! Structures! Power-sharing! Human reason! Self-organising system!
Yet Lord Owen, career politician, diplomat, negotiator, peacemaker said:
'Oh, absolutely. I argued for force. I wanted to enforce the Vance-Owen Peace Plan, as it was called in May 1993. And had we done so, we'd have brought the war to an end two years earlier...'
Sometimes you have to drop bombs. As the Director of Values said in one organisation: 'People should be given the freedom to perform their duties defined by clear boundaries. If they cross them they should be shot.'
Most organisations have the structures of an old Hollywood movie set. They are the out-of-focus backdrop to the main action. Come up against them and they'll randomly either fall away or crush you.
All workplace conflict would be quickly resolved if the consequences were clear, timely and as promised on the label. It's best for all in the long term.
It's called Integrity - doing what you say you're going to do.
Artist.
'Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen. Suppose you describe the job ‘artist’ as ‘a person who creates situations in which you can have art experiences.''
Brian Eno
Good decisions are the vehicles of experiences.
Leaders are good decision makers who engage in a process that creates situations that allow others to have those experiences.
Leaders are artists.
Cranky.
This is how Linda - an educator - explained the painting:
'I don't know exactly what direct experience Scarlett has had with "the cranky man," but she certainly knows the truth of him. She explained to me that he figure in her drawing was "a cranky man" so I had to ask her why he was cranky. The truth according the Scarlett came down to this:
'He is a cranky man because he doesn't like his house. It's not got any bathroom, kitchen bedroom or anything to eat.'(Enough to make anyone cranky, but the real truth followed) 'He doesn't know what he wants because he is a cranky person and he's always a cranky person who says he doesn't know!'
I felt in the moment that she was sharing this meaning with me that I was being given a great insight into what makes someone cranky, not knowing what you want and the consequences of that...
Widget Thinking. From the mouth of a three-nearly-four year old.
Switch.
‘When did the flame ignite for you?’ the interviewer asked champion runner Robert de Castella. ‘Most people think that the idea of running for 42 kilometres without stopping over and over again is self-mutilation or insanity. When does it become something you think you want to do for a career?
‘I know exactly when it was and Pat [coach Pat Clohesy was there. I’d been a really good junior until the age of 17 or 18 and set national records and things. Then I went to Europe where I had a bit of a period where I went backwards and it was partly because I was training hard with the older guys and probably socialising a fair bit. But I still managed to get selected into an Australian team to compete in the World Cross Country and went to Limerick and Pat [Clohessy - his coach] was the manager of that team.
‘In the World Championships I had one of the worst runs that I’d ever had. I finished 62nd or something. It was a shocker. And the next week we had another race in Italy – a race called the Cinque Mulini – the Five Mills. I had an awesome race. I just came into the last few hundred metres with a couple of the heroes that I’d looked up to, shoulder to shoulder. They kicked away but I was up there racing them and it was something that I never thought I would.
‘That night after we had dinner we were walking back to the hotel and everyone else had walked off and Pat and I were at the back and I said to Pat ‘After this run today, I ran so badly last week and I’ve run so well this week, maybe I can really be a good runner. Maybe if I dedicate myself.’
‘Pat stopped and looked at me and he said ‘I’ve been waiting two years for you to say that.’
'That was a switch for me and my whole approach to training and my commitment changed from being a runner to being an athlete and I was serious.’
In December 1988 while eating lunch on a park bench in Supreme Court Gardens, Shaun and I discovered Objectives.
We realised that the content of what was taught to students should be determined by what they needed to do at the end of the training. The trainer needed to be able to justify how everything that was taught in the classroom helped to achieve the objective. The objectives needed to be written in terms of what the student needed to be able to do – not what the teacher did.
As we walked back to our respective offices in the city, we felt a new command over our role as instructors and clarity about how we could apply our craft.
Years later Shaun told me that Benjamin Bloom had discovered Objectives in 1956.
When we make a decision we switch from runner to athlete.
From consumer to creator.
From child to adult.
From another to ourselves.
When we create the space for another to decide, we switch from parent to leader.
From master to servant.
From fear to love.
Make.
“Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.”
Brian Eno
Good decision-making is an act of creation.
Good decisions are gifts we make.
Our piece clicks into the Puzzle.
Each decision draws someone forward with their piece and so on.
Until we have the complete picture.
Our piece indistinguishable.
Good decision making is an act of service.
Perhaps - an act of love.
Appearances.
He ended his written complaint with 'Thank you for appearing to care'.
Brilliant.
He knew the difference between our Weekday and Weekend Widgets.
Arrows.
'You could always tell the scout on a wagon train because he was the one with all the arrows in him. Any time that you try to go to new ground. Any time that you try to go to territory that you've not been in before, you're going to have resistance.
But there's a whole line of people behind you that are kind of hoping that you make it. There are people who are waiting to get permission to think that way. To get permission to love that way.'
- Dr Joel Hunter
Love.
'We've come to love you,' the nurse said after introducing herself and another nurse.
It was the strangest and most beautiful thing to say to me as I lay in my hospital bed a day before elective surgery. Spoken in the same tone as 'If there's anything that you need, please just press the call buzzer.' Not in a sentimental voice nor a perfunctory one nor in a rote meeting of a mission statement. She meant it.
They left and I looked out of the window and felt held in an overwhelming peace.
Imagine going to work and loving.
Ridiculous. Work is work. There are Widgets to be made. Budgets to be met. Profits to be achieved. Love is a powerful, erratic, distracting, whimsical emotion that is reserved for intimate relationships built up over time through trust and commitment and has no place in a professional workplace.
We leave love at home along with the novel by our bed, the guitar and sheet music in the spare room, the cookbooks in the kitchen, the half written MBA assignment.
We spend about a third of our lives at work - not seeking, offering nor expecting love.
Is it possible we are not engaged with our work because we've partitioned it off from love?
Is the exclusion of love in labour - whether experienced as workers, bosses or customers of someone else's work - a contributor to almost half of all Australians experiencing mental illness at some time in our life?
If a military commander believes that love is a prerequisite for Leadership then shouldn't our boss feel the same way?
Is love of every person and thing a science that can be learned and applied as in the short story A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud?
Do we choose to work to escape the demands, obligations and struggles of loving?
If we are to become who we are - can we do so without loving and being loved at work?
'The old man still held the collar of the boy's jacket; he was trembling and his face was earnest and bright and wild. "For six years now I have gone around by myself and built up my science. And now I am a master. Son. I can love anything. No longer do I have to think about it even. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. All stranger and all loved! Do you realize what a science like mine can mean?"'
- 'A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud', Carson McCullers
Grace.
I had decided before the phone landed back on its cradle.
I was annoyed. Angry. Frustrated. Indignant. Irritated. Offended.
I was right and they were wrong. It was irrefutable. I was their boss. I was going to do my job and boss them.
I rose from my chair to walk the seven minutes down to where they were waiting. I was going to put things right. Out the door. Beneath trees splintering 5.30pm sunlight. Through the aromas of earth, heat and bush. Propelled by my duty I tracked towards my wayward charges.
That person did not meet them. Someone else did.
They had held onto their anger and emptied it over me. Mine had peeled off in transit. They spat their argument. Mine straggled behind me kicking gum nuts. They had been rehearsing their demands. I had been seven minutes free in the late afternoon.
We all discovered a better position for the coffee machine.
They were still wrong and I remained right. Just as the gum nuts had obediently arced away into the softness of leaf debris in response to my boot. So what?
Their rebellion had gifted me seven minutes glimpsing wisdom and Grace.
The Abbot used to say that there aren't as many Holy people as there once were. I think that he was talking about Leaders.
Leaders are much, much rarer than the many to whom we award that title. Very few people have all the qualities of a leader because they are counter-intuitive. Study Leadership and the conclusion is that Leadership is impossible. May as well be a boss instead.
The answer?
Grace.
The aspiring Leader attends to the list of qualities and inevitably edges her brain towards the abyss of contradictions and vulnerabilities - until she closes her eyes and leaps into her fears then feels the soft tug of the silken parachute of Grace filling with air above her and lowering her gently back down to earth.
Never to be the same.
Seeing.
'You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader, You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it. And without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance.'
General Eric Shinseki - Ex-US Army Chief of Staff
The Air Commodore saw the Flight Lieutenant waiting at the Orderly Room counter.
'How are you finding the job so far, Bernard?' He remembered my name. He was the Air Officer Commanding Training Command with hundreds on his immediate staff and thousands more at the units under his Command scattered around Australia and overseas. He remembered me after being introduced a month earlier when I began my first real Air Force posting.
'Busy?' he asked. I gave the only answer that I could to my boss's, boss's boss. 'Well, you need to find a couple of days to spare,' he said. 'How would you like to come with me on a Staff Visit to RAAF Base Wagga?'
The next day I accompanied the Air Commodore and his senior staff to all his meetings with the various commanding officers of units at RAAF Wagga. 'I think it's important that all junior officers get to see what we do first hand,' he told me in his car on the way there. 'You need to get out of Headquarters as much as you can to see what our people do.'
I watched how a One Star commander listened, spoke, deliberated, questioned, joked, sat, responded, decided, commanded. No other boss ever gave me an opportunity like that, let alone a boss's, boss's boss. The second most senior commander in the Air Force.
No other boss saw me.
On the drive back to Melbourne he asked me 'What did you think?'
A good boss sees.
She sees you and stops to help you [to become who you are].
She sees because she is looking.
She is looking because she is confident that she doesn't know and that you may.
She hands you her map and says 'Take us there'.
Error.
But what if I'm wrong?
'Anything worth doing is worth failing at'.
- Fr Greg Boyle
‘Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.’
- Josh Foer
‘An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. We learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again.
- Niels Bohr
‘The only mistake is when I'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did.’
Stephan Harris Jazz Musician
‘What amazes me is that people rarely see today's problems as new challenges born out of yesterday's perfect solutions.’
- Anon
‘The freedom to fail is more important than freedom to succeed. A big creative adventure vs. a small, safe future.’
- Anon
‘Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.’
- President Obama
'It is only at the moment of humans' realistic admission to selves of having made a mistake that they are the closest to that mysterious integrity governing the universe.'
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Simplicity.
'Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.'
- Carl von Clausewitz
The more business education about decision making, the worse the decisions.
The more complex the decision-making environment, the more need for simplicity of decision making process and tools.
These were the conclusions from a PhD thesis.
The participants in the experiments who were given a simple objective - make a profit - made the best decisions. Those who made the worst decisions were the ones who were distracted by information about their competition and the need to maintain market share.
The participants who were given simple tools to work through their decisions had the flexibility to adapt to dynamic circumstances.
Widget Thinking and the Five Steps provide both the simplicity and the 'sense making' that serve good decision making.
Good decision makers check their progress against their Widget as their True North.
In 1983 John Bertrand and the crew of Australia II were down 1-3 in the seven race Americas Cup final. This was his response at a press conference:
'Basically, nothing has changed. After Sunday afternoon, we had to win three boat races. Today we still have to win three boat races.'
He held his nerve and Australia won the next three races and the Cup.
Leaders don't measure their progress by where they are with respect to anyone else. They make good decisions and the rest takes care of itself.
Underpins.
The Report into the Inquiry into the 2013 WA Senate Election provides further rich examples of Good Decision Making - particularly Widget Thinking.
The Executive Summary details the many complex challenges confronting the Australian Electoral Commission in conducting an election. It concludes with this statement (italics added):
[T]his Inquiry noted a range of issues involving culture, planning, systems and practices that contributed to the loss of the ballots. The implementation of the various recommendations, findings and observations throughout this Report could assist the AEC in its future operations. The Inquiry believes that these could be achieved by pursuing a future state where the sanctity of ballots underpins all aspects of the AEC’s operations, from planning to training, to materials management and all other aspects covered in this Report.
How does the AEC/Organisation X resolve the competing demands on it leading up to and during an election/doing business? How does it ensure that there is clarity amidst the chaos/organisational life?
It asks itself: 'What decision will ensure the sanctity of ballots/our Widget?'
It resolves all issues according to this outcome.
Conflict.
There are two types of workplace conflict:
- You Conflict: I don't like you.
- Widget Conflict: I don't like your Widget.
If only workplace disputes were all Widget Conflict.
Creative.
Passionate.
Focussed on better Widgets.
Instead – and despite how we usually argue our position - most workplace conflict is us feeling frustrated that our boss isn’t helping us to produce our Weekend Widget.
If it really was about our Weekday Widget…then who cares more about that our boss?
Never care more about something than the boss does.
Productivity.
Whenever you talk in the abstract or the generic to a large group of people, every single person thinks that you're talking to them. Except for you, because you're special and smart.
- Merlin Mann
I designed, organised, advertised and prepared for five presentations on Good Decision Making open to the public.
An hour. Free.
No one registered for the first one.
Two people registered for the second. Neither turned up.
We cancelled the rest.
Lots of possible reasons why. All my fault.
Meanwhile...
A study has found that bosses are losing an average of three months per year of productivity from each worker.
Those with the most unused 'discretionary effort' were knowledge workers.
One of the conclusions was lack of clarity about outcomes. Widgets.
Australians spend more hours at work than those in most other countries and yet according to another study, we rank second last on productivity growth, just ahead of Botswana.
Perhaps everyone who read about my Workshop was part of the 7.5% who considered themselves productive.
None of this applies to you and me though.
Evidence.
The CO of the Squadron was waiting for his two F111s when they taxied in to their hangar bays. Two days later he was waiting for me.
'The future of military aviation - indeed aviation in general in Australia is at a crossroads,' he began. 'The Minister wants us to deal with this incident in a way that ensures continuing confidence in our responsible use of airspace to conduct our training.'
My legal boss had put it more bluntly when he'd tasked me as the Prosecuting Officer. 'If you don't get convictions, don't bother coming back.'
The two pilots had each flown a low level 'spacer pass' by the control tower at the bombing range 30 seconds apart. Their speed was just below the sound barrier, causing a sonic 'disturbance' that blasted the tower into $100,000 worth of damage. The range controller was showered in glass but otherwise unhurt and with a great story to tell.
I arrived at the Base on the Friday. The trial was to begin on Monday. Everyone at the Squadron was as respectful as my rank required in assisting me to gather evidence. But no-one wanted to help me to convict two of their own pilots.
'There was an airman who filmed it,' the CO had told me. I found him and asked if I could have a copy of the video. 'I gave it to the Squadron Safety Officer,' he told me. The Squadron Safety Officer shrugged. 'I deleted it,' he said. It wasn't the smoking gun, but it would have helped.
Three years later and I'm visiting the Directorate of Flying Safety in Canberra to give some legal advice. I'm chatting with the two Squadron Leaders about the F111 trial and ask their opinion about some of the questionable technical evidence given by the pilots.
'Would you like to see the video?' one of them asks. My jaw falls open.
My role as Prosecuting Officer in a Defence Force Disciplinary Act trial was to use an adversarial process to present admissible evidence that proved beyond reasonable doubt that two pilots had broken the law and should be punished to deter both them and others from doing the same. In SPEAR terms I was helping to Patrol the Space.
The role of the Directorate of Flying Safety is to use an inquisitorial approach to gather information about aircraft incidents to learn from them and pass on those lessons to all pilots to keep them safe. It was helping to Create the Space.
Same information - different Widgets.
Mother.
Liz taught me.
'She's chosen to work instead of caring for her son. She'd be determined that every minute away from him was worth what she's sacrificed.'
A humbling insight into the working Mother.
She has an impressive CV even before she closes her front door or the gate from the day care centre. Endorsed for the following Skills & Expertise:
Time management, team leadership, risk management, instructional technique, project management, conflict management, human resource management, food management, multi-tasking, servant leadership, first aid, change management, team building.
That's what 'committed to' looks like.
The working Mother is primed to be Engaged.
Foot.
'Tis all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a foot, a Chancellor’s foot; what an uncertain measure would this be? One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot: ‘tis the same thing in a Chancellor’s conscience.’
Many knowledge workers' decisions are adrift from their boss's widget.
It may have happened when their bosses changed. Or when there was a restructure. Or there may have never been a connection in the first place. They are products of poor management. Which - ironically - encourages their sense of expertise because they are usually an island of decisiveness amidst timidity.
They are almost always good people who are dedicated and work hard and long hours. They are often called 'indispensable'.
They make decisions that they feel are morally right. This adds to their defensiveness and disproportionate reaction if challenged. Much like Selden's Chancellor's foot, their decisions are an extension of them, not transferrable and attached with an equal degree of organic stubbornness.
They are 'experts' whose advice is sought by others, thus further affirming their sense of expertise. They have become so simply by having exclusive access to information and authority and not because of any objective qualification or because the pillars of their decisions have held up a bridge. They're knowledge workers after all.
They spend much time at meetings, conferences and other forums where experts gather and talk.
At staff gatherings, they're nursing the cupcake in the corner surveying the room with the weary look of the veteran, regularly glancing at their watch to ensure that they are back at their desk to answer the important phone calls and emails and not let anyone down.
They mark their own homework. Their decisions are rarely tested.
They design, manufacture and quality control their own widget.
Their only accountability?
Complaints.