Tonight’s Dinner.
Do not mistake outward action for inward thought.
Those eyes looking up at you at your meeting or presentation?
Most are checking off a shopping list, or peering inside their refrigerator or shopping cart for an ingredient for tonight’s dinner.
You are Not Alone.
Decision making is often portrayed as a lonely business.
It shouldn’t be.
Step 1: Step Back is the only period of isolation. The retreat. The forty seconds, minutes, hours, days in the desert. The selfishness that is the springboard for selflessness. Preparation for re-entry into the world of others.
Step 2: Define the Issue. Look up and out from your pinhole camera. Point your telescope to the stars. Feel your place in the cosmos of possible futures your decision may lead to.
Step 3: Assess the Information. You’re out there. Soliciting facts, opinions, stories, contributions. You’re gathering collaborators, companions, a community of joint ownership and shareholders in your decision. You’re the host of a seminar of contributors who - unknown to each other before now - share a common interest in your search for a better future. ‘Help me to understand,’ you ask with humility and dependence. And they respond generously.
Step 4: Check for Bias. Stand up and look back at yourself. See yourself as others see you. Are you outward looking or navel gazing? Are you genuinely open to the better argument? Are you detached enough from your self-interests to see the person seated either side of you and the humanity you share with them? Are you hearing all the voices?
Step 5: Give a Hearing. Is there anyone who may be adversely affected by your decision? Scan the people who you recruited to your decision journey in Step 3. They trusted you by coming forward. Honour their generosity by telling them what you’re thinking that may not be what they expected. Invite them to tell you why you’re wrong. Be strong and humble enough to hear it. Wise and confident enough to weigh it up. Turn around and look at the line of people who have followed you on your path to making your decision. Accompanied you. Held you. Challenged you. Made it difficult and easier. Told you their truths so you can find yours.
A good decision making process is a communal act.
Your Silence Speaks.
You Step 1 - Step Back in your Five Steps to Good Decision Making.
If you have an audience - ie anyone affected by your decision - they will wait for you.
As they do, they will fill the space you created with more words in their thinking than you ever could if you spoke instead of stepped back.
By you stepping back - you also gift them the time and permission to benefit from a reprieve from the reflexive response to the information you’re called upon to make a decision about.
Your silence speaks more eloquently and productively in the voice in the mind of the other.
Stepping back is the beginning of you accompanying them.
It’s the Gaps.
What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too. - Verlyn Klinkenborg
The good decision making process is a net made up of gaps that you cast out into the world.
It’s the gaps in between that haul in the catch.
Do Both.
'There's an Icelandic artist called Dieter Roth who said something to me once which I thought was very clever. He said 'Faced with a choice, do both'. So if possible I try to, at least in thought, go through both possibilities and say 'Okay, if we did this, what would happen?' Or 'Let's do this and see what happens'. And then 'Let's do this other one and see what happens'. And usually....it becomes obvious which is the better option.'
- Brian Eno
A good decision making process allows us to do both … and many.
The process allows us to war game multiple decisions and outcomes
But wait. There’s more
We can review the decision consequences, learn from them, identify the step or steps in the process that had most influence on the outcome, and apply those lessons to our understanding of the world.
Thus one decision informs many.
The problem with most decisions is our many biases skewing us towards a predetermined outcome that blinds us to objectively following the process with a mind open to the better argument.
Faced with a choice- take the time to follow a process.
It may reveal other hidden choices.
A Compass.
Teaching leadership theory is like teaching a lost man the history of the compass.
The Blue Shirts.
I’m wearing a blue shirt when I do something stupid.
I support the Falcons team and I do something remarkable.
I’m a man and I hold a minority opinion.
Someone who loves Vegemite on their pizza declares men who are blue shirted Falcon supporters to be dangerous radicals.
Mostly what causes people to do and say things is nothing more profound than it seemed to them to be a good idea at the time.
But that isn’t an interesting story.
So they or we attribute their behaviour to their blue shirt or their tribe or their gender or … anything that explains it and says ‘Those Blue Shirts are not me.’
Stop, Thief!
Gallup found that a staggering 70% of the variance in worker engagement is determined by the boss.
Bad boss = Bad employee engagement.
Worker disengagement costs the Australian economy $211 Billion each year. $380,000 a minute. Every minute
Bad bosses are thieves.
Price’s Law
Price's law says that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Four workers in your team, board, division, staff room, or company - two are doing half the work.
A hundred - ten of you are doing half the lifting.
Explains a lot.
Get Out of the Way.
The law encourages and protects rescuers by removing liability for harm they suffer during their rescue.
The exception is the rescuer who represents they will go to the assistance of another, then fail to do so or abandons their attempt without good cause. The law says that by doing so, the person prevents others from going to the rescue, and may therefore be liable to the person in distress.
Bad bosses are like the bad rescuer.
They hold a position and perform their duties badly to the exclusion of another who may do it well. They expose their workers to stress, overwork, and risk to their health and wellbeing that could be prevented by a good boss. Customers, clients, and suppliers also suffer. Potential good bosses or good workers are deterred from joining the organisation due to the bad boss at the helm.
As the old saying goes: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
A Form of Love.
Working with good people helps me understand the world better.
Understand myself better.
It leaves me with a a deep and grateful affection for those people.
Perhaps a form of love.
Change.
It won’t work the first time.
Nor the second, third, or fourth.
Maybe you coaxing us out of our trenches with your jaunty invitation to be open and honest in our feedback will take fifteen or twenty times before any of us ventures forth.
The rest of us will stay hidden behind our fake smiles and ‘Nothing to see here’ rote behaviours, watching out of the corner of our eyes how you respond to that brave worker who speaks honestly to you. We will keep watching. It may take weeks, months, or even years before we trust you enough.
Can you blame us? The workplace is littered with stories of what happened to those who took you on your word - or took another boss on theirs in another workplace. Or knows someone who knows someone who did.
Power will buy you many things - but not Trust.
Students Don’t Scale.
Schools are unique organisations.
Most organisations and systems strive to scale their widget. They look for ways to do one thing the same way hundreds, thousands, or tens of millions of times, depending on what their widget is. They structure themselves so that there is a centralised decision making for everything to do with their widget. The closer you are to the widget assembly line - whatever that may look like - the less power, authority, or knowledge you have to influence the widget. Anything that can be automated - is. Anything that can reduce human labour and discretion - is done.
Have a system with two or more members - and the same thinking should be applied. Almost.
If the same decision or action is needed in more than one school, these can be centralised. One policy for the two or two hundred schools. One purchasing process. One hiring process. One IT system. One communications platform.
Everything in a school scales. Except for the ‘Almost’.
Student.
Students don’t scale. Each student is unique. Which makes schools unique in terms of System thinking.
We don’t centralise decision making in schools to create a single uniform standardised widget. We do it to allow for the one, twenty one, one hundred and one, one hundred thousand and one … individual, unique students to learn and grow and develop to their potential.
We liberate every teacher from as many tasks that do not allow her to focus on what only she can do: know and grow each student’s knowledge, understanding, skills, and attitudes. Any administration that does not contribute to this sacred task must be removed. Any minute that at the teacher is not teaching - nobody else is.
Students don’t scale.
Duty of Care v Duty to Care.
I’ve long wrestled with how to explain to teachers the difference between a moral duty of care - and the legal principle of Duty of Care.
Perhaps the answer lies in distinguishing between a duty TO care - and a duty OF care.
The former is a choice governed by our ethical view of our obligations to others, whereas the latter is an obligation imposed by the Law.
The distinction can be seen in the judgment from which duty OF care is derived. The judge referred to the ‘rule’ that we love our neighbour. Whether a person is next door or on the other side of the world - the ethical view is that they are our neighbour because they are a fellow human.
But the judge then said this rule ‘becomes in law’ - something much narrower. Our legal neighbour is any person who I can ‘reasonably foresee’ would be likely to be injured by my acts or omissions. If I had a remote control that I could use to pause the world at any moment as I was going about my day, who might be harmed by what I’m doing or not doing? Only those people become, in law, my neighbours. My duty OF care is to cease the behaviour or take the action that prevents them from suffering harm.
Thus, if we look at the Gospel of Luke which tells the story of the Good Samaritan from which the ‘love thy neighbour’ is derived, the behaviour of the priest and the Levite who ignored the victim on the roadside might be a failure of their moral duty TO care. It would not be a failure of their legal duty OF care.
Imagine a Worker.
Imagine workers who knew exactly what the boss needs of them and what they must do to meet that need.
Imagine workers who were self-propelled, self-organising, need no supervision or management.
Imagine workers who the boss sets a task, and they don’t meet again until the task is complete.
Imagine workers who, other than a minimal induction (‘Here’s the toilets. Here’s the boss’s office. We do casual Fridays’) hit the ground running and are productive from the first day.
Those workers exist.
They’re called ‘contractors’ or ‘consultants’.
Is there any reason why the majority of workers don’t work this way?
Other than ‘This is how we’ve always done it’ - and ‘If there are no workers - then what will the boss do?’ - the answer is no.
Own It.
If you have to use someone else’s name or authority to get a point across, there is little merit to the point (you might not believe it yourself). If you believe something to be correct, focus on showing your work to prove it. Authority derives naturally from merit, not the other way around.’ - Kim Scott Malone
Never lend the weight of a superior to an order.
Don’t leave the meeting, boss’s office, or strategic planning day without the confidence you can give directions to the punters as if you came up with them yourself.
If the boss can’t show their working out, then you backward engineer the decision enough to explain it.
Then start looking for a new job.
Wind the Clock.
Though no one uses [the analogue clock in the F16] to keep time, seasoned instructors would say, “Before you make a decision, wind the clock”. It was a seemingly useless process; However, it’s prevented people's first inclination of rushing to solve the problem. Winding the clock occupied the pilot’s attention for just a few seconds, and physically prevented them from touching anything else. It forced their brain to spend time assessing the situation before they acted, allowing them to make far better decisions. ‘ Hazard Lee ‘The Art of Clear Thinking’.
We all need the equivalent of the analogue clock in the digital cockpit of the F16.
We need a habit or routine that distracts us from the decision at hand (Step 1: Step Back) long enough to allow us to avoid - or affirm - our reflexive, instinctive action in response to information.
Mouths of Babes.
‘Instead of arguing over who’s to blame for losing it, let’s assume neither of us is. Then we can both focus on finding it’.
So said my 14 year old to my 11 year old.
The Work in Work Isn’t the Work
Too often the ‘work’ in Work' isn’t the Work.
It’s the politics. The poor communication. The mediocrity. The meaningless meetings. The empty slogans.
The pretending. Everybody pretending.
Acting is hard. Ask any actor.
It’s hard work trying to make sense and coherence out of the mayhem of messages. Day in and day out. It’s dispiriting trying to keep your authentic self breathing as you sink into the quicksand that is workplace nonsense.
Then one day you find yourself on a project with people who are good at what they do. People who are eager to learn from you. People who are generous and honest and straight talking. People who take your work and make it better and therefore you better. They make it all seem effortless. They are not pretending. They are almost oblivious to the nonsense that lies beyond their area of focus. Occasionally they have to down tools and waste time with everybody else in senseless meetings. But then they return to their work and get on with it.
Once you experience those people and that possibility - even if only for an hour or two - you never see work the same way again. Sadly, the majority of workers never experience this. For them, work is work because of the liars and their lying. And the effort of pretending because they think this is what Work is.