The Operator's Blog

Ask your systems to give information that bites!

How simple is that? Why then, it doesn’t always happen? How many times in our daily activity of managing operations we ask for a report on something only to get deluged with information and charts that show many things but never really answer our question? I don’t know about you, but I have seen it more than once, both in my executive and in my consulting experience. So it got me thinking… What could the root cause of this problem be?

And then, in one of those “blinding-insight-into-the-obvious” moments, it hit me. If we ask, but don’t get, the root cause might be us, or as an old boss from UPS used to say “you get what you accept.” But could it be that simple? Is the ancient Greek axiom of “Determine a person’s intellect, not from the answers they have, but from the questions they ask,” true? Are we not as intelligent as we think we are?

I don’t know about you, but most of the executives I know and have worked with, with some notable exceptions I would rather forget and a temptation to link to their company websites I will resist (The book to read is The Peter Principle), are very intelligent people in many respects. Why then would the quality of our questions be poor? What can we do to improve it, and, what does it mean for those of us that work and manage operations in a world where Information Technology is supposed to be an enabler of efficiency and effectiveness but frequently is not?

I think there are three characteristics around our questions that lead to fuzzy answers: 1) We ask questions the wrong way, 2) We ask the wrong question all together, or, 3) We have conditioned our people not to want to give us the answer.

We ask questions the wrong way because of our culture and our desire to avoid conflict, even if it is creative and required. (The book to read is Crucial Confrontations). We ask wrong questions because we do not apply critical and systemic thinking to our operation (The book to read is The Fifth Discipline), or are not willing to deal with changes in our market place (The book to read is Who Moved My Cheese). Or we have conditioned our people to tell us what they think we want to hear, or not want to give us the answer at all, because we have established a low-trust, “kill-the-messenger” environment, or a groupthink culture that views any information that does not support our collective vision as heresy (The book to read is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team).

Asking the question the wrong way

Asking the question the wrong way is a symptom of culture and our educational system. In the Western Culture, there are four main types of questions: 1) The Binary type - Did we make our sales goals? 2) The Quantitative type – What is our revenue for the quarter? 3) The Qualitative, or Open Ended, type – What is our strategy to increase market share and how is it working? 4) The Multiple-Choice type – What options do we have to make our numbers for this quarter? a) Increase Revenue b) Cut cost c) Buy another company and hide behind the numbers d) Use Creative accounting e) All of the above .

In my everyday interactions with my teams and clients, which is most of the time, I am probing for understanding or working on establishing dialogue (the book to read is Crucial Conversations), and I use mostly open ended questions. But when I am in “operator mode” or working on a turnaround or in a crisis mode, I need information to bite.  In those cases I ask the question in Binary or Quantitative format. Only when there is no room for ambiguity, does the answer have teeth strong enough to bite.

Why then, are many managers in operating positions not comfortable asking questions of the first two types? I think one of the reasons is our culture, as it has evolved over the last 50 years. No one ever fails at anything; they have a “learning experience.” No one is incompetent; they are “mis-cast.” And no one ever gets fired; they get “downsized” or “leave to pursue other interests.” Some times I think we live in Garrison Keilor’s fictional Lake Wobegon where: “All the women are strong, All the men are good looking, and All the children are above average.” Rather than face the hard facts and deal with the current reality, we plaster smiley faces over them and happily go on with our lives, until the inevitable disaster strikes (Read the Dilbert cartoon collections in the book I’m not anti-business, I’m anti-idiot).

Another reason is the lack of strong leadership skills (The book to read is Leader of the Future by the Drucker Foundation ) required in the new hyper-competitive global marketplace we live in (The book to read is The World is Flat). With the battlefield promotions of the Internet boom, and the fascination with Ivey leage degrees or tenures with fancy consulting companies, some newly-minted operations executives are ill prepared for their jobs.  They choose harmony over productive conflict, certainty over clarity, and lead their organizations without a clear focus on results (The book to read is The Five Temptations of the CEO by Lencioni). And then we wonder why so many companies fail to deliver on their promises.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We all want to have happy people and a friendly workplace. But is this always the best thing to do for our organizations? Is it OK to give ourselves and our staff, an easy way out rather than deal with the truth, even if it bites, and hold all of us, accountable for our collective performance? Should we ask open-ended questions that allow meandering and “on-the-other-hand” answers, or guide the answers by proposing multiple choices that lead to a predetermined answer, or should we ask and get information that bites?

I think as operators, it is our responsibility to keep our organizations positive and the environment motivating. I also think we need to be grounded in reality, strong, nimble, and adaptable. And there is nothing like timely information that bites to do that.

Asking the wrong question

If we don’t understand our environment, we are unconsciously incompetent; We don’t even know the right questions to ask let alone knowing if the answer makes sense. But that's not fatal.  We can always learn.  It is fatal when we spend our time investing in systems and solutions that don’t make any difference in the organizations performance, or implementing strategies that bear no resemblance to the operating realities of our situation. It happens when we worry more about out personal standing or appearence of ignorance rather than the performance of the organization we lead. Now, I am not advocating being oblivious to the world around us and the need for political maneuvering, systems that meet regulatory requirements, or the need to placate a customer or some other power that be by adapting the latest management fad. But that is secondary to the operator’s job. Getting operations right is more important than many other activities on some of today’s executives’ calendars. “Thinking outside the box” has become a mantra for many executives and organizations, but let’s remember that to think outside the box, we must first have one to start with, and it must protect us from the outside while we are thinking, and support us when we climb its sides to get out. We spend so much time thinking outside the box, that we forget it is more effective to change systems from the inside by understanding them, than from the outside by brute force. We need to develop systemic thinking skills (The book to read is The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge) and the capability to execute flawlessly (The book to read is Execution by Bossidy and Charan).

Conditioning our people to not want to give us the answers

This is probably one of the most dangerous environmental reasons for organizational failure. When our people operate in a low-trust environment, generally a direct result of our leadership style, they try to protect themselves by adding various softeners to any bad news, or by obscuring the facts with fuzzy answers or by engaging in deceptive and downright illegal acts. In a low trust environment, they try to protect themselves by playing the Cover-Your-Assets-Constantly (CYAC) game. This is a major problem in many organizations and I have met managers (and again I will resist the temptation to link to their company websites) that have elevated the CYAC game to an art form. Some are so good at it, that have lost all touch with reality and the only thing that keeps them going is their ability to play the game. They have institutionalized CYAC so much that as that famous poem goes, by the time information gets to their executive suite “manure that should stink the place up becomes fertilizer that makes things grow.”

Good operators have a lot of things they can do to change this environment. Unfortunately, there is not a single panacea, and nothing works overnight (The book to read is Out of the Crisis by Edward Deming). But then again, if it was easy, everyone would be an operator or a turnaround executive.

We can start by asking our staff tough questions and observing their reaction. If they hem, haw, and fudge their answers, rather than lay out information that bites, then we need to look in the mirror and check for low trust behavior. Of course, the opposite of low trust, high trust turned into groupthink, can have the same effect. In this environment, our people "drink the cool-aid" and confuse trust and the need for faith in the people, the strategy, the executives, and the company, with the need to recognize and confront the facts and the market realities (The book to read is In Love and War by Admiral Stockdale). This manifests itself in the “Happy-Failures” syndrome. Everyone appears happy, and marches in unison singing the company anthem, but the company/strategy/project is sinking. This is when vision crosses the line into hallucination and plan execution becomes a Quixotical campaign, with people happily tilting at windmills. This is again a symptom of poor leadership, and can only be addressed at that level.

A strategic approach to getting information that bites

So what does all this mean for operating executives who are responsible for the development or evaluation of new projects or are put in charge of an operational turn-around? Asking the right questions, the right way, is a matter of executive and personal development. We can do that by: 1) Understanding our organization, 2) Identifying the critical elements and indicators we need to monitor and respond to, and 3) Developing clear requirements and objectives for our teams.

When it comes to trust, or groupthink, regardless of their power, there is little information systems can do for “kill-the-messenger” environments. That’s the stuff of practical leadership (The book to read is Leading Systems by Oshry or Managing from the Heart by Bracey) and the subject many books. Just like any other tool in our tool kit, there is little technology can do if the executive craftsmanship is poor. Creating a high-trust environment, or recognizing the onset of Groupthink disease, is something that can only be established at the top levels of an organization.

Information that Bites

There is one thing that Information Technology can do, and do it well to support the executive team. It can present us with the critical facts, sometimes in real time, and usually without any prejudices. If there is one thing about computers, is that they don’t play politics or the CYAC game. The best technical way to design the systems should be left to the IT professionals. After all, that’s why we hired them. But the responsibility of asking the right question, the right way, and dealing with the answer, whatever it might be, simply rests on us. At the end of the day, senior operating executives don’t develop the technology behind information systems (and it’s a good thing!). We do, however, direct the budget process, set priorities, and establish the acceptance criteria for functionality (Sign-off is a non-delegatable responsibility). We can determine what the right question is for our business, ask it the right way, demand the data is presented un-filtered and in a clear, easy to understand format, and deal with the answers in a responsive rather than a reactive mode. Until next time,

Carpe Diem – and make something out of it!