Decision Laundering II
All organisations engage in Decision Laundering. And we’re complicit.
It begins with our whiter-than-white job application and interview. ‘If I have a weakness, it’s that I care too much about puppies in this space going forward …’.
The potential boss knows that we know that they know that we’ve laundered the spots and stains and scuff marks from our previous jobs. In short - we’ve lied. Great fit, because his organisation does, too.
We get the job. We read and listen to the induction rah-rah stuff about People Are Our Most Important Resource (a ‘human resource’) and we know that they know that we know it’s mostly branding nonsense. All good.
Until …
‘My Gran is sick’. ‘You’ve got no leave, sorry.’ ‘But that thing about people being important …oh yeah…’.
The closer we are to decision makers, the more we witness institutionalised decision laundering. A poor, dubious, or sometimes illegal decision is made, and requires execution.
The boss (or the boss’s boss’s boss) tells us to do something. We do it. We do it well. Bleach it. We buff out any uneven edges. So rewarding to smooth the rough.
The further we are from the original decision, the less likely we are to notice the flaws in the decision, especially if those above us have done their jobs well and polished away those scratches.
The closer we are to the decision, the more challenging and therefore satisfying decision laundering is. It is rewarding both intrinsically and in our boss’s eyes, to turn a wonky widget into one that fits our boss’s Widget. There may be cognitive dissonance as we try to reconcile our execution of the decision with the the organisation’s slogans. We routinely shoehorn ill-fitting decisions into a glass slipper.
We deal with our deep unease by telling ourselves virtue stories.
We are helping the boss (parent). We are a good worker (child). We are thanked and possibly promoted and can pay our mortgage and care for our family. We are a team player. We serve a Greater Good that transcends our laundering of the dirt. The boss knows what she’s doing and we trust her. We get a thank you at the staff meeting.
There’s another corrosive effect of decision laundering boss’s always overlook.
If we know we’re laundering the dirty decisions that come across our desk clean, then what of all the decisions affecting us? What of the promotions and pay increases and benefits and other decisions? What went on behind closed doors? How can we know whether those decisions they were made fairly and legally and with my best interests taken into account? What can we believe? What soil was bleached white?
Do, or witness decision laundering often enough, and we become ethically numb to the whitening; seduced and soothed by the ten year old inside us who wants to please their parent.
Or we join the majority of workers protecting their souls by disengaging.
This is why it’s often the outsiders who point out the laundering - only to be rebuked and even shamed by an insider.
Colonel Nicholson : You're a fine doctor, Clipton, but you've a lot to learn about the Army.
What’s the answer?
Major Clinton could have responded to the list of virtuous outcomes by reminding his superior of his Widget: To defeat the Japanese. He could even have referred to sources of authority: for him as a Doctor, the Hippocratic oath, and for Colonel Nicholson, the multiple military codes against collaboration with the enemy, and the obligations on prisoners of war.
In short - he should have engaged in constructive subversion.
When subordinate widgets - the doing-of-good-work, the following-of-orders, the ‘attaboys’, are laundering the dirt from the original decison, then the superior Widget must be invoked. Everything must serve the Widget. If it does not, then it must be removed.
Or there will be a reckoning.
As in the movie, there will be a ‘What have I done?’ moment.
Seeing It The Way It Is.
COL Mulholland: Pretty confident for a guy who’s never done this before. Never been to war.
CAPT Nelson: I don’t see that as a disadvantage Sir.
COL: Well, maybe you should explain that?
CAPT Nelson: We’re teaming up with a warlord we know nothing about. We’re not going to be able to tell our enemies from our allies. Every step we’re gonna take is going to be on a minefield from a hundred different wars. And no-one’s every called in a smart bomb airstrike from a B52. So anyone who tells you they’ve done this before or has experience in this is lying, Sir. There’s no playbook here. We have to write it ourselves.
COL Mulholland: I briefed five potential captains for this mission. About a hundred years of military experience between them. But you’re the only one that sees it the way it is. I choose you. You and 11 men. Task Force Dagger.
The first job of a leader is to define reality.
Think Aloud Honestly.
To solve serious problems, humans have to think aloud honestly, make missteps and refine ideas through civil debate.
Bernard Lane
Each of the Five Steps to a Good Decision is thinking aloud.
They also show our working out, and invite debate - even if just with ourself.
They are also the black box recorder that we can recover from the smouldering wreck of our decision and use to learn what went wrong and refine our ideas.
The Master's Tools.
The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.’
Those who built the team, department, organisation, community, society must either change it or defend it - usually the latter - often under the banner of ‘stability’.
Those who choose to join the team, department, organisation, community, society must confirm and defend the reasons for doing so, and thus the integrity of the entity.
That’s the social contract between two or more people who benefit from membership.
Reform needs at least one person to identify change is needed, and the tools to do so.
Both must get past the gatekeepers.
The insider can easily do so, because they are a member. But what of their tools? How can they smuggle ideas past the gatekeepers?
It takes courage and what the military strategist Liddell Hart called ‘the indirect approach’.
"Throughout the ages, effective results in war have rarely been attained unless the approach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponent’s unreadiness to meet it… In strategy, the longest way round is often the shortest way home. A direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, where as an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance".
Or as Sun Tsu wrote:
"In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.
The Master’s house will usually not be dismantled by persuading the Master - who would otherwise have initiated the demolition.
The sowing of ideas among conversations, meetings, projects, and forums. Harnessing mediums such as podcasts, team posts, blogs, videos for others to incorporate into their work and make their own. These are the indirect approaches.
Or you can quit and take your ideas elsewhere.
Agencies External to the Aircraft.
An instructor wrote the following assessment of a student Navigator’s training flight:
He struggled in situations where he had to develop his ability to prioritise tasks in a flexible environment and engage with agencies external to the aircraft.
It’s easy to offer advice and opinions and theory on decision making and leadership and management and the range of skills required in a workplace.
We’re in our chairs typing, or standing before a group of conscripts going through our Powerpoint deck. Slide 1. Slide 2. Questions? Slide 3. Morning Tea. Slide 4…
Will our listener or reader or student or client struggle applying that information when confronted with asynchronous agencies aka Real Life?
Ground school is easy.
Life is hard.
Personal Vision.
Imagine that you have two cohorts of people within your organisational structure and you wanted to increase their productivity and job satisfaction.
Let’s say you had three.
One cohort you just left to their own devices.
The second you ask to formulate a vision for how they were going to be better employees and to write that down.
The third you said formulate a vision and plan for how you would have a richer and more engaging and productive life. Make a life plan.
Set these cohorts head to head and look to productivity over a one year period.
What you find is a 10% productivity improvement in the group you have developed a personal vision and no improvement in the group that only specifies corporate goals.
- Jordan Peterson
Dr Peterson explains why when organisations ask me to deliver Good Decision Making workshops, I begin by inviting participants to privately identify their ‘Weekend Widget’. I don’t need or want each person to share it. Only to acknowledge its existence and that it’s separate (usually) to their weekday widget. We then move on to identify our Weekday Widget.
I have learned that unless we identify and distinguish between our Weekend and Weekday Widgets, we risk expecting our boss to meet our ‘personal vision’ as Dr Peterson describes the Weekend Widget. This leads to workplace conflict as we act out our frustration and disappointment that our boss and others are failing to serve our Weekend Widget.
According to Dr Peterson, in just the first five minutes of a Good Decision Making workshop, I can potentially improve my client's productivity by 10% AND helped every participant to identify their Weekend Widget.
Room for Reflection.
Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.
- Simone Weil
Taking time to Step Back is the beginning of acting justly and with prudence.
Allowing ourselves to indulge in feeling what we feel - to be fully absorbed in ourselves as if we are all that matters - to stare in the mirror of our self-pity.
Only in fixing on our reflection can we truly recognise and understand the smallness and irrelevance of our concerns for self, in comparison to all the misery and mystery lying beyond the frame of our ego. We laugh at the absurdity of what a moment, or hour, or day ago, seemed so important and noble and righteous: our feelings.
Only after Step 1 can we turn our full attention to the task at hand: Justice.
Much Harder.
[He] should be evaluated like an Olympic diver. He was asked to do something extremely difficult — something much harder than anyone on this list was asked to do.
- Peter Feaver, Duke University Professor, referring to Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accompanying President Trump to survey the aftermath of a political protest.
There are decisions.
And there are Decisions.
General Milley, Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, apologised for failing to recognise he was being put into a compromising position by his Commander in Chief. The President criticised him for apologising.
A good decision is one that advances you towards where you want to be.
General Milley’s decision to accompany the President undermined his credibility with his subordinates and the American public. Arguably it did not advance him towards where he wanted to be - Defender of the US Constitution. - even though it advanced his status in the eyes of the President - his Commander in Chief.
General Milley’s decision to accompany the President led to his decision to be alert to what may unfold leading up to the Presidential Inauguration five months later. He was said to almost have had a ‘crystal ball’ in his predictions.
The General set several goals for himself: stop the US going to war; maintain the military’s integrity, and his own; and prevent the President from using the military against the American people.
General Milley described his ‘bad’ decision as ‘a teachable moment’.
‘Every month thereafter I just did something publicly to continually remind the force about our responsibilities … What I’m trying to do … is keep the military out of actual politics.’
In the chaotic period before and after the 2020 US Presidential election, it was said General Milley ‘did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries.’
General Milley’s decision to accompany President Trump advanced him towards where he wanted to be: defending the Constitution when it counted.
Word Coleslaw.
Word salad isn’t so bad. A verbose, long winded, over-written document or speech written or delivered by somebody who mistakes length for relevance and importance. With word salad, you can distinguish the lettuce from the olives from the tomato from the cucumber from the red onion.
It’s the Word Coleslaw I don’t care for.
The verbosity and volume of a word salad but coated with a cloying sauce of jargon, buzz-words, ‘going forward’ corporate speak, platitudes, cliché and slogans. You can’t separate the substance from the nonsense. You know there’s a cherry tomato of information in there, but everything is smothered in sweet nothingness.
Followed by hours of bloating and flatulence.
Lucky.
You could always count on Phil Schiliro to come up with a solution. And it would always be the third way that worked.
And the President said ‘Phil. What’s that third way?’
And Phil - who’s normally a very optimistic person - kind of looked down and said. ‘You know Mr President unless you’re feeling really lucky I’m not sure there is a third way.’
The president gets up and walks around the office and he starts to look out the window and I’m kind of wondering ‘What’s he doing?’
He said “Phil where are we?”
And Phil said “Sir, we are in the oval office”
And he said “And what’s my name?”
And Phil said “President Barack Obama.”
And so the President turned around with this great smile on his face and he said
‘Well Phil of course I’m feeling lucky!’
- Valerie Jarrett
One day we’re going to wake up and wish we could make a decision we used to make routinely. Wish we had the faculties or status or authority or information or memory to make a decision. Look with envy at anyone with more agency than us.
Less and less decisions. Either slowly or suddenly. Until death takes it all away.
It’s a privilege to make a decision. To be the person who, even imperceptibly, tweaks the course of affairs in a direction otherwise not taken. To be at the helm of our ship and read the winds of circumstance. To influence another.
Where are we?
We’re here. Now. Alive. Commander in Chief of Our life.
Ready to choose.
We’re lucky.
Detach from the Mayhem.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
Prioritize and execute. I learned this in combat.
When things are going wrong, when multiple problems are occurring all at once, when things get overwhelming, you have to prioritize and execute.
Take a step back.
Detach from the mayhem.
Look at the situation and assess the multitude of problems, tasks, or issues.
Choose the one that is going to have the biggest impact and execute on that.
If you try to solve every problem or complete every task simultaneously, you will fail at all of them.
Pick the biggest problem or the issue that will provide the most positive impact.
Then focus your resources on that and attack it.
Get it taken care of.
Once you have done that, you can move on to the next problem or issue, then the one after that. Continue doing that until you have stabilized the situation.
Prioritize and execute.
- Jocko Willink, Former US Navy SEAL
If a special forces soldier can find time to step back amidst the mayhem of people trying to kill him and those he’s leading, I suggest we all can.
Perfectly Disengaged from Himself.
I think of all the great statesmen I have known the Duke of Devonshire was the most persuasive speaker; and he was persuasive because he never attempted to conceal the strength of the case against him. … What made the Duke of Devonshire persuasive to friends and foes alike was that when he came before the House of Commons or any other Assembly, he told them the processes through which his own mind had gone in arriving at the conclusion at which he ultimately had arrived. Every man felt that this was no rhetorical device, but that he had shown in clear and unmistakable terms the very intimate processes by which he had arrived at the conclusion which he then honestly supported without fear or favour, without dread of criticism, without hope of applause. … In the Cabinet, in the House of Commons, in the House of Lords, on the public platform, wherever it was, every man said, ‘Here is one addressing us who has done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side which either weighed with him or moved him to come to the conclusion at which he has arrived. How can we hope to have a more clear-sighted or honest guide in the course we ought to pursue?’ That was the secret of his great strength as an orator.
- A.J. Balfour
The Duke of Devonshire showed his working out. He’s a Duke. He’s in the Cabinet. The House of Commons. The House of Lords. He’s oozing positional power. He could easily declare: ‘It is thus so!’
But the Duke showed his working out.
‘Without dead of criticism or hope of applause’.
After his death, it was said he:
… was a man whose like we shall never see again; he stood by himself and could have come from no country in the world but England. He had the figure and appearance of an artisan, with the brevity of a peasant, the courtesy of a king and the noisy sense of humour of a Falstaff. He gave a great, wheezy guffaw at all the right things and was possessed of endless wisdom. He was perfectly disengaged from himself, fearlessly truthful and without pettiness of any kind.
‘Perfectly disengaged from himself.’
My Orders.
My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions. I just need to send some information!
- Jack Ryan ‘The Sum of All Fears’
It’s simple in theory: Get the right information to the people who make the decisions.
There’s a commendable and necessary naivety in Jack Ryan’s statement.
What is the ‘right’ information? That alone is a library-full of debate.
How do I get it to ‘the people’?
Who are those ‘people’ and what qualifies them to make the decisions?
What decision will they make with that information?
Why am I forced to persuade this intermediary of my need to send information?
This is the lot of the knowledge worker. The information water carrier. No judgement about the information (other than it’s ‘right’), nor on the people who make the decisions.
Not unless we see how they use that information, and whether it justified our blind loyalty, effort, and obedience - and the frustration of getting past the gatekeeper.
Whereupon we may have to make some decisions of our own.
Time Discloses the Truth.
"We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth." - - — Seneca
Step 1: Step Back.
Creating Something Complete.
‘There are very few things that we can make on our own.
Most things we do with a lot of help from other people. And most people do a fraction of an activity that goes into something else. And that makes it harder for us to see what we’re doing. It makes it harder for us to see our own contribution to something.
But I think that we need to help that. We need to help people see that they’re contributing to something and what it is that they’re contributing. Employers need to give people the sense of this creation and doing and contribution and ownership for it.
It’s also the reason why many of us go to all kinds of hobbies. Our hobbies are our outlets for creating something complete. I can do a chair - and even though it takes me two years its a chair that I have done everything from scratch or I can create a drawing and I’ve done everything about the drawing. I think we crave that notion that there is something that we have created.’
- Dan Ariely
Boom. Widget Thinking.
Almost.
The best learning we can make is when we almost get it right.
- Dr Gerardine Robinson
A good decision is one that advances us towards where we want to be.
If a decision doesn’t deliver us to where we want to be - then we failed.
And yet - we only know we aren’t where we want to be because our decision taught and affirmed where we want to be. Our failure - reinforces our knowing. ‘This place is good…but …it’s not as good as where I want to be. Keep going.
Next decision.
Slow Down and Get Perspective.
And perspective is exactly what is wanted. At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted, the ability to slow down and get perspective, along with the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes — those two things have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president, I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.
- President Barack Obama
Perspective comes from Step 1: Step Back.
Slowing down comes from Step 1: Step Back.
Getting in someone else’s shoes comes from Step 5: Give a Hearing.
Only One Thing Worse.
There’s only one thing worse than being criticised to your face.
Not being criticised to your face.
The critic who takes their criticism elsewhere, even if it’s only in their judgement of me, denies me (and them) the opportunity to be heard.
I am forever defined by an interpretation of my words or behaviour. I am, in the eyes of the critic, anyone they tell, and for those the tellers tell, frozen in time as the sum of a speck of a fraction of my life.
The critic and their followers are denied the rest of me, and I am denied them.
I am denied the opportunity to correct my course and be better. To say sorry.
And I’m oblivious.
Instead of the sharp slap and sting of direct criticism quickly soothed by time, the silent critic sows an unseen, unfelt, undiagnosed tumour within my soul, numbing the feeling between us.
The law recognises the humanity of giving a person the right to hear first hand the criticism. To allow me to remedy, heal, and ‘shape the course of my future conduct’ - including with them.
Step 5 of the Five Steps to a Good Decision: Give a Hearing.