Leadership
You Can’t Think Your Way Out
Aug 4th
You’ve come down with a serious cold. You feel miserable. You start trying to figure out who or what gave you this cold: Was it not washing your hands after that bus ride? Was it that guy that coughed on you while you were standing in line to get groceries? We all want answers to these questions. We’re also good at concocting explanations for why something is the way that it is.
Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t have nearly enough information. That doesn’t stop our emotions from telling us that we need to avoid whatever caused this, so our intellect works overtime trying to figure it out. But you can’t think your way out. No matter how hard you try, your brain doesn’t have sufficient building blocks to reconstruct the explanation with any form of certainty. The result of this is two-fold. First, we waste a lot of energy seeking an explanation this forever alludes us. Second, when our brain gets tired, we might settle on one or more of our explanations, creating needless fear about something innocuous.
It isn’t just explaining past events that create this situation. We also face this when making a very difficult decision about our future. We collect data. We think through pros and cons. We think through the possible outcomes and try to assess the statistical risk. But in the end, there is no assurance, no simple solution, no “right” answer.
In either case, we have to recognize our own limitations — to admit that there are some things, we will simply never know. Recognizing this can let us move on to things that we can impact. We stop trying to reach perfection in our decisions (or explanations) and start focusing on what’s next. We make the best decision we can, and trust God with the result.
Our ability to think is an amazing gift and we should use it to the best of our abilities but it is finite. You can’t think your way out of every problem.
Life By Autopilot
Jul 21st
We live in a highly complex world but with a very limited amount of focus. This limits the amount of conscious decisions we make. The rest of our life runs in autopilot: we decide not to decide. This, as it turns out, is our default choice. It’s why states that require you to opt-in for organ donation have significantly lower participation than states where you opt-out. How many of us want to actively decide on where our organs go after we die?
As discussed in the commencement speech I linked to in my last entry, we can choose what we think about. Everyday thousands of things scream for our attention. By default, we think about the loudest of those things and the rest are decided on without thought. We simply use our autopilot.
Living life without challenging the autopilot will result in moments of surprise. Drown by the urgent, we occasionally gasp wondering how we got here. Unfortunately, the autopilot doesn’t sound alarms for significant things: autopilot will happily crash into a mountain it doesn’t know is there.
It’s easy to let our autopilot make the hard decisions and instead focus on the things that seem more fun at the moment. However, our health, relationships, and life are far more impacted by our default actions day-in and day-out, than they are by a brief decision to do something different once. Reflecting on our own autopilot can teach us ways to specifically improve it, and over the years, this can make all the difference.
Have you considered whether your autopilot is making the right choices?
The Unstated Rules
Jul 7th
Earlier today, my wife, Ann, and I were eating at a restaurant and we watched a two-year old solve a maze like the one above, connecting point A with point B. She solved the maze in a couple of seconds, then moved on to the next activity on her placement. How did she do it so quickly? She simply connected point A and B with a straight line. The visceral reaction to this — “that’s cheating, it’s not how a maze should be solved” — is exactly the kind of reaction we have when the rules that we believe are constant suddenly change.
We like to believe that the rules of the past remain immutable. A constant we can depend on. But they do change, and this is often how newcomers to a field are often able to pull off what the establishment couldn’t. Like the 2-year-old, they didn’t know you must not cross the lines when solving the maze and suddenly the game changes. Interestingly, the arguments made by the establishment when someone disrupts the game are the same as those who watch someone else solve a maze by simply drawing a straight line.
The problem is that when rules change they don’t tell you that they have changed. They don’t stand up and scream to be heard; they simply no longer apply. It is only by reevaluating the rules that you discover their absence.
So if you’re facing a difficult problem relationally or in your business and you can’t see an easy solution, is it because you are playing with rules that no longer exist? Are their rules that you depend on to keep your competitive edge? Are you sure they still apply?
In Search of Simplicity
Jun 30th
I just finished reading When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein. This book documents yet another example of humans desire to seek simplification even when that simplification doesn’t truly model reality.
In short, LTC believed they had figured out a way to make money that was very low risk. Each transaction could only make a little money, so they took out huge amounts of loans in order to maximize their return. For 3 years, they returned double digit percent returns to the fund only to lose more than they had made in 5 weeks during 1998. In their models, the chance of this happening was zero; the reality is that they had ’simplified’ the complexity of life into a formula, and failed.
Many entries on this blog document the various ways that we try to find a simple answer to the complex world around us. This commoditization of life helps us deal with the complexities that we face every day. But if we don’t recognize our over-simplifications, we can easily fall into a false sense of confidence that leads to our own disgrace.
Other entries that illustrate our desire for simplicity:
Being Great Even Though You’re Not Perfect
Jun 8th
About nine years ago, I went on a trip to Latvia with a group of more than 50 people from eight different countries including Russia, Sweden, US, Holland, and Latvia. The age ranges in the group were from 16-60 and contained people from all walks of life. The purpose of the trip was to provide food and clothing to impoverished Russian people who had stayed behind after Russia pulled out of the Baltic States. When Russia was in power in the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), they discriminated against the natives. After Russia left, the natives returned the “favor” to those Russians who stayed behind, making it difficult for them to obtain jobs.
The leader of our group was gifted with extraordinary vision and charisma. He established audacious goals and got everyone excited to work toward accomplishing them. This strength, however, was offset by a sizable lack of skill in administration. You might think this would have caused problems, but instead it created a team dynamic rarely encountered.
On our team, were some incredible administrators (one of which was his wife). The administrators’ strength was revealed when they took on his audacious goals and helped him organize the team to pull it off. This dynamic rippled through the team; other members stepped up to lead activities they were good at and the rest of the members contributed to help them succeed by utilizing their own set of gifts. In spite of the incredible diversity in the group’s demographics, the team succeeded. More than that, everyone exercised their own passions and strengths depending all the while depending on others doing the same. This enabled some whose gifts may not have been readily apparent, to shine. There is no greater feeling than being a part of a team that is truly synergistic.
This dynamic is only enabled when the leader is willing to set the tone. If our leader had limited his vision to what he knew he could personally administrate, we would have lost out, not only on his strength, but also the strengths of the administrators and the resulting ripple effect that brought out the strengths in the rest of the team. If everyone in a team can focus on the strengths they bring to the effort rather than feeling the need to shore up their weaknesses, incredible things can happen; however, this depends on the leader not requiring perfection in everyone, including themselves, and instead making way for each to express their own ability.
Are you willing to do that?
Amplifying Noise
Jun 2nd
Yesterday, Ann and I were watching a Mexican dancing television show at a restaurant. Something about it struck me very funny and I laughed out loud. At the same time, I looked over to see a waiter and a waitress pretending to dance like they were on the show. After my laugh, they looked over at me and assumed I was laughing at them. I smiled at them and they smiled back and it was the end. There was no opportunity to clarify.
Too often we find ourselves interpreting the actions of others out of context. I have met people for the first time and decided that for whatever reason, they didn’t like me; however, after being with them a few more times, we became good friends.
Its easy for us to emphasize subtle messages in new relationships that are fake. We amplify these messages to a level of importance they shouldn’t have, and it can have a profound affect on how the relationship develops. I believe this stems from three things. First, we are constantly searching for cause and effect. Second, we see what we want to see. Third, we seek confirmation rather than negation of our conclusions.
Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan, writes: “People are explanation machines.” We create completely logical explanations for the phenomena we see. We maintain this explanation until we are presented with evidence that contradicts it. Then, we create a new story for the phenomena remaining just as confident in our new answer as we were in our incorrect answer. The reality is that we don’t have enough information to come to any form of certainty in our conclusions, but we do anyway.
Every person has a view of the world that they use to interpret new data. In this way, new relationships can resemble Rorschach tests. People will interpret messages or actions differently. Some will treat an action as irrelevant, others will decide the person is being rude, someone else that they are being gracious — all based on our own expectations. Living in a country where the culture is different from your own only compounds this effect; however, as relationships grow, we learn what signals are important because we have more knowledge of the other person.
Finally, we search to confirm our conclusions. Once we have an idea in our minds, we go about collecting evidence to corroborate our original opinion rather than looking for indications that we might be wrong. In fact, we can even ignore the data that doesn’t fit with our idea and add importance to the data that does. This causes us to amplify our misconceptions.
This process happens not only with new friendships but also with all new relationships, including those with new customers. We pick up what we think are signals for good or bad and amplify what is probably just noise, giving it a level of importance that it shouldn’t have. This can lead us to make bad judgements both about the other person and about the relationship in general that can be difficult to change.
If, instead, we withhold our judgments, we don’t give more credibility to a message that is simply noise. If we find some subtle communication troubling we should search out all the possible reasons for it, giving as much deference to the other, rather than going with our initial instinct. This not only helps us recognize how little we truly know, but also starts to build a better context to interpret new information. It also keeps us from looking for confirming evidence because we admit that we simply don’t know. It is only in this way that we keep ourselves from being trapped by our own preconceptions and making mistakes that we may later regret.
The Fine Line Between The Great and the Amateur
Mar 11th
What makes a dancer, singer, or speaker great? I mean really great, like genius-level great?
There are three things that make the great different:
First, they stand out. They break conventions. No one gets excited if they play it safe. In fact, they know “playing it safe” is one of the most dangerous options around because at best, no one even notices your existence.
Second, they perform with confidence. When a performer takes the stage and is reserved about their performance, hoping for greater acceptance by not going too far into the extreme, we sense the tension, and it makes us all feel uncomfortable. As a result, it feels like an amateur performance — someone who wants to be great, but simply isn’t.
Third, it requires polish and class. It’s amazing how often you see someone go out and try to push the boundaries, but something is missing and as a result, they fail, and usually, they fail badly. When someone without skill tries something new, they lack the experience to add polish. On the other hand, the genius has an intuitive sense for why the convention exists, and thereby knows how to circumvent it with class. We still find their rule breaking shocking; but we are also extremely impressed.
Sometimes it’s easy to tell the great from the amateur and enumerate why, but most of the time, there is a fine distinction between the two. Its something we sense when we witness it, but can’t exactly put our finger on it — you know it when you see it.
As the world increasingly moves toward commoditized ho-hum, we must instead be great at our jobs like any great performer: Pushing the limits, not settling for safe, and breaking the rules with both confidence and class. However, we must be careful of becoming excited simply because we are breaking free of convention. Too often people think that being different is enough and as a result, they get lazy about their execution. Being different is not enough. You have to be different and you have to do it well.
[Side note: Even though dancing is not really my thing, I've found the videos by the LXD pretty incredible. The mixture of the extraordinary dancing coupled with storytelling is very compelling. In case you haven't seen any of their performances, here was their presentation at TED this year.]
The RapidChip Fallacy
Mar 7th
“The market is going to face this big, nasty problem and they will have no other choice but to use our product to solve it.” – Excited Entrepreneur
Most of the time, this entrepreneur is committing the same fallacy that we faced when working on a failed project called RapidChip.
This fallacy is related to, but different from the “If you build it, they will come” fallacy. This one is committed by excited technologists assuming that simply building the superior technology will draw customers. It leads to a rude awakening when, even though the technology is amazing, no one wants to buy it.
Instead of committing this fallacy, our excited entrepreneur knows that success comes from reducing a customer’s pain. Unfortunately, his excitement about his own solution creates a blindspot when regarding how the customer sees his solution. Solutions not only need to solve a customers pain, but also need to solve it in a way that the customer is expecting.
You can image an entrepreneur selling bionic feet believing he has the perfect solution to foot pain. Simply amputate the foot, and use this amazing bionic replacement. Unfortunately, this fails to consider how people think about solving foot pain (usually something other than cutting it off).
A more real world example was RapidChip. The intent was to solve a big industry problem: as transistors continue to shrink, manufacturing the silicon gets more expensive. RapidChip provided a solution. Essentially, we would manufacture half of the chip, allowing customers to customize the other half. Because the cost of manufacturing half of the chip would be shared between multiple projects, the overall cost of each project would be significantly reduced.
At first glance, this appeared like a great solution, but it overlooked the perspective of the customers. We assumed that customers would continue to create products that relied on custom chips. But this wasn’t their only choice. One option was for them to buy another companies chip; another was to make their next product applicable to a wider class of customers thereby justifying the cost. Our solution was only attractive if the customer had already decided to look for a new technique for manufacturing chips and knew that we existed when they were doing their planning. Our solution only works if multiple projects can share the bottom half, unfortunately, this means designing your chip around a specific half that already exists. This was a constraint they never had to deal with before, and so they were solving the expense problem with other solutions, or demanding we create a custom bottom half just for them, which unfortunately eliminates the entire value proposition.
This wasn’t the only reason that RapidChip failed, but once the above fallacy took root in the minds of those working on it, we failed to consider what other alternatives customers would use, nor had we considered how to convince them to accept the additional constraints of RapidChip. We didn’t seek to design the technology to be easy for customers to move to. It is easy to become so enamored with the elegance of your own solution, that you fail to consider the way a customer will see it.
Every solution introduces its own set of constraints. Just because your customer has a critical problem and you have a solution, doesn’t mean yours is the only solution. More importantly, never underestimate the ability of a man in desperation to find a solution no one else had considered.
Always, always, always consider the alternatives that a customer may already have to solving their “unsolvable” problem and be honest about the constraints that your solution imposes on your customer, and then design the solution so that the customer sees it as an obvious choice.
Further reading:
- Customer development – A process described in detail by Steven Blank
- If it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s a duck – A good discussion of lessons learned from a failed start-up. His paragraph with this title is related to the above.
Doubt is the Spark Killer
Feb 15th
It may be that “Fear is the mind killer”, but doubt is the spark killer.
Earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to hire a number of great engineers and tried to help cultivate their careers. In the process, I found that one of the most difficult things to teach was initiative. Some were capable of seeing what wasn’t there and knowing how to fill the gap. They had the spark to initiate without asking, and moving the group closer to its goals. This is one of the most important skills that anyone can cultivate.
At the same time, it’s hard work. After hiring the full team, I then had to lay them all off. I went from being a manager back to being an individual contributor. Honestly, I was looking forward to taking a break from identifying and driving a number of projects to being told what projects to drill deep on. I noticed however that I was still raising issues and working more with my manager’s manager than directly with my manager. I asked him about whether I should be getting more direction from him. He said, “Look, you’re a senior engineer. I fully expect you to be out there identifying and driving issues with all levels of management that you need in order to bring them to resolution”. It was the kick in the pants I needed.
Much like a spark plug, it requires a lot of high-voltage energy to initiate. It can be exhausting and because you see so many gaps, it can be difficult to know which one is most important and which will add the most value. In fact, the ability to correctly identify the most valuable and most important is a key refinement of the skill of initiation.
I’ve seen some try to take initiative but were not able to filter which of the missing things was most important. Sometimes functionality is more important than aesthetics, other times it’s the opposite. Investing your time by initiating a project that is not important, ends up being a waste. Much like many of the inventors on the show “America’s Top Inventor”, unable to see that their invention was not important nor even necessarily relevant, in spite of spending their whole life refining it. Unfortunately, there usually isn’t someone to guide you in whether something is important because you’re the only one that sees just how important the initiative is.
As a result, doubt and second guessing is common place. I’ve seen many very intelligent and capable people not initiate because they worry about whether they will succeed. They don’t feel like they know enough, or can learn fast enough, or can make good decisions. Or they don’t take their head far enough away from their own assignment to look around and see what is falling between the gaps because it’s harder to do that, than just staying nose down. So they pause, they hesitate, they wait for someone else to be the spark.
In the end, this is what prevents more initiative than anything else, doubt that you can. Everyone has doubt, even the leader who appears incredibly confident. But those who face their doubt, and initiate anyway, are the ones who move things forward.
While it’s certainly true that you can’t have everyone initiating in random directions, and as we saw earlier, sometimes initiating is choosing to follow someone else’s crazy idea, still, people with the spark is what both our world and our businesses need most: People who step out and take a risk because there is a gap that needs to be filled.
Nature of Leading and Following
Feb 11th
Concrete and concise stories of leadership are hard to come by, but the video below provides exactly that. It creates a visual picture of the relationship between leaders and followers.
I originally saw this video on Seth Godin’s blog in the middle of last year. Seth mentioned that we need more “Guy #3″s. Since then, I’ve often come back to reflecting on this video when I think about leadership and the nature of crowds. It’s proven to be a valuable mental picture when thinking about how movements spread.
So when I saw that this video was used in a TED talk by Derek Sivers, and that he made some additional excellent observations, I wanted to share it with others. Plus, he received a standing ovation at TED, and it’s easy to see why.
Below is his version. Enjoy: