Engage the Enemy.
Engage the enemy and see what happens.
Napoleon
A good decision is one that advances us towards where we want to be.
‘The enemy’ is an infinite number of futures.
Closed doors.
Engage one.
Open it.
See what happens.
Reveal what other enemies and doors await to take its place.
For you to engage.
And see what happens.
Identical.
Chaos. Conflict. Dissent. Low morale. Staff turnover. External criticism.
Transformative stewardship looks almost identical to Dysfunctional leadership.
Leaders are rare.
Leaders are brave.
Leadership is hard.
Pie Warmer.
Pie Warmer (n.):
A person in a position of power, adding no value who simply maintains the status quo.
Translated from the French:
Bain-marie.
Attaboy!
In the act of praise, there is the aspect of it being ‘the passing of judgement by a person of ability onto a person of no ability.’
- Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, ‘The Courage to Be Disliked’
The ‘Attaboy!’ is a standard currency of every organisation. The reflex taught in school of rewarding progress by certificates and public acknowledgement segues into our workplace parent-child dynamic.
The same blush of pride we felt when the teacher returned our work with a gold star is repeated when the boss says:
Attaboy!
Thus gently reminding us who is in charge of our mortgage and our self-esteem.
Positional Power.
We never credit the undercurrent for carrying us so swiftly; we credit ourselves, our talents, our skills. I was completely sure that it was my swimming ability that was carrying me out so swiftly that day. It did not matter that I knew in my heart that I was a very average swimmer, it did not matter that I knew that I should have worn a life jacket and flippers. On the way out, the idea of humility never occurred to me. It was only at the moment I turned back, when I had to go against the current, that I even realized the current existed.
Shankar Vedantam
You work.
Progress.
Get promoted.
Get rewarded.
Work harder.
Get promoted.
Watch others stagnate, fall back, leave.
Feels good.
Life’s good. You’re good.
A small slight. An injustice. A boss dumb decision.
You speak up. You question. You turn. You paddle.
Next thing, you’re treading water. Then going backwards. You paddle harder. You’re tiring. Why is it so hard just to stay afloat when it used to be so easy to move ahead?
As you sink, others effortlessly float past - riding the rip of positional power.
Killer.
The etymology of ‘Decide’ has roots in the Latin verb caedere, meaning ‘to cut’, or even ‘strike’, with ‘ide’ having its origins alongside ‘homicide’ and ‘suicide’.
When we decide, we kill other futures.
Open Loops.
Open Loops.
Not following up. Not taking ownership. Not giving advice. Not making decisions.
Everything stops.
Anyone trying to do good work is forced to chase and attempt to close open loops.
Like playing frisbee without a partner.
Tossing a stick without a dog.
It’s exhausting.
Fancied Situations and Imaginary Problems.
Professional ignorance is often the real source of the ethical problems that men feel. For with more knowledge … men know instinctively what they ought to do and they do not conjure up fancied situations and imaginary problems.
- Sir Owen Dixon, Chief Justice
You’re not a bad person.
You’re not devious or corrupt or seeking personal gain.
You were professionally ignorant.
You felt embarrassed and ashamed.
You sought to hide your ignorance.
You spoke on, or advocated for, or decided upon - a subject not within your expertise.
It went badly.
You felt more embarrassment and shame.
You covered it up with fancied situations and imaginary problems.
And your positional power.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
You’re the boss now.
Cover and Move.
‘Cover and move’ describes the tactic soldiers use to advance (or withdraw) through a battlefield or hostile space.
One soldier directs suppressive fire towards the enemy, forcing them to keep their heads down, while another soldier moves across open ground. Once the soldier has reached safety, they provide suppressive fire allowing the other soldier to join them. Each solider relies on the other to achieve their objective, leap-frogging via cover and move.
It’s a simple example of teamwork. Yet like all good teamwork, it’s selfish.
Each solider uses the other to advance further than the soldier could alone.
The individuality of each solider is literally preserved (they don’t die) and enhanced (they move towards their objective) by covering the other soldier.
‘Teamwork’ is another word for regression to the lowest common denominator. You join a team, and are forced to listen to every opinion, wait your turn, and slow down to the pace of the slowest or most disengaged member. Your skills and expertise are diluted as you are forced to integrate with, or at least indulge, other team members’ skills. You become stuck in a traffic jam of mediocrity.
Your only escape is to become a ‘leader’.
No.
Teams should only be formed, and people forced to join them, if each person’s skills will be enhanced by achieving the team’s objective. A person should not be included in a team without evidence of this. There is no ‘must’ in ‘team’.
Lazy or incompetent people love teams because they can hide in, or behind them. They contribute little or nothing to the team. Or they use the work of the team to explain why they have not done their job. Bad bosses use teams as alibis for their failure to execute.
If discovered, the lazy or inompetent person can rely on the misguided kindness of at least one team member to ‘support’ them, further depleting the team. It’s like a crack combat unit carrying a wounded soldier on a stretcher.
Teams are mostly formed for administrative convenience to serve the needs of HR or accountants or a boss who needs followers to justify their position or salary.
Sometimes it’s just geography. A group of people share an office or building or floor or cluster of cubicles, and so they are a ‘team’. A team needs a leader, and thus one is appointed, further reinforcing and calcifying an artificial construct.
Teams are rarely the result of someone carefully selecting skills that allow a person to cover and move.
Teams are another example of how most organisations herd racehorses and race sheep.
Decision Laundering III
Decision laundering is the process whereby the corrupted intent of a higher level decision maker is cleaned by each subsequent person in the chain of advice or execution applying their professional judgement. The original stain of the lie or fraud is removed by the good work of faithful subordinates who correct, execute, and defend the decision, usually (but not always) ignorant of the cause of the stain.
The result is one decision or many that, individually, have integrity.
Except when it isn’t.
There are always people who are inside enough, or smart enough, to know the original stain, and therefore their boss’s nudg-nudge, wink-wink dark beneath the white. They were at the meeting or read the report where the truth was spoken and labelled a risk and so the boss crafted a cover story. Those people know the organisation’s tolerance for lying.
The stain, and the process of cleaning it, weaken the threads binding an organisation - literally its integrity. Those threads include its people.
Decision laundering - while cosmetically strengthening an organisation by removing blemishes - weakens its fabric in multiple ways.
First, at least one person knows their boss, and even their boss’s boss, is a liar.
Second, those who know of the stain are often the ones to exploit their knowledge to rise higher in the organisation and exert more influence. They usually do so without the talent or skills to operate at their level of promotion. Their incompetence amplifies across the organisation, including through those they recruit. As the saying goes: Sevens recruit sixes and fives.
Third, the good and faithful servants running the laundry, initially buoyed by the challenges of bleaching those stains and getting their boss’s attaboys, grow tired and disillusioned, particularly as they see those sixes and fives joining and being promoted ahead of them, and making life harder.
Finally, and most dangerously, are those on the front line who see the shadow of the original stain as permission to exploit the corrupted intent in their actions. This is most catastrophic in organisations with noble missions who decision launder.
Faith organisations whose members exploit vulnerable people.
Governments whose bureaucrats overwhelm a dissenting citizen with red tape.
Defence forces whose combatants bend or break the laws of war.
Parents who burden their children with intergenerational guilt, shame, and fear.
The antidote to decision laundering is constructive subversion. At every opportunity reminding the organisation and its decision makers of their Widget. Not the small ‘w’ widget that may justify laundering if isolated from the Capital W Widget.
A good decision maker applies the Widget test every time.
Leaders stand back far enough to ask that question of their subordinates, and support the difficult conversations that follow.
Those good and faithful people down the line who put their livelihoods at risk by asking the same question, albeit without the positional power of the leader.
An organisation with some stains is more human.
More like you and me.
The Amendments.
Few non-citizens know anything about the United States Constitution as written by its wise authors.
We all know of its ‘errors’, though. Bits those smarty-pants left out.
Freedom of Speech aka The First Amendment.
Carrying guns aka the Second Amendment aka Another Bit Left Out.
Taking the Fifth aka the Fifth Amendment.
We know more about United States people, culture, and history through the ‘mistakes’ made in its source of authority.
Think about that next time someone red pens your work.
An Invitation.
A Special Forces soldier told me that they were banned from conducting night raids in Afghanistan, even though doing so under cover of darkness was less dangerous.
The soldiers boarded helicopters in the pre-dawn darkness, ascended 5km above the earth … and launched their mission the second the sun lipped the horizon.
Every rule is an invitation to break it.
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.