All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

Authoritarianism is on the rise.

No, this isn’t one of KJR’s occasional thinly disguised political rants. I’m talking about private-sector authoritarianism.

As you might recall if you’ve read Leading IT, you have five ways to make decisions:

  • Consensus: We all agree to it, even if we don’t all agree with it.
  • Consultation: Everyone with a stake in the decision shares their knowledge with the decision-maker and then trusts the decision-maker’s decision.
  • Authoritarianism: The decision-maker makes the decision and announces it.
  • Voting: There’s safety in numbers, so let’s just tally them. Nobody can blame the decision-maker for the wisdom of crowds.
  • Delegation: Turn the decision over to someone else and ask them to make it using one of the remaining four ways to make a decision. It’s the remaining four because delegated decisions shouldn’t be re-gifted.

These five decision styles aren’t a matter of preference, or shouldn’t be. They have very different characteristics. Consensus maximizes buy-in; authoritarianism is quick and cheap; consultation strikes a balance between the two. Done right, delegation puts decisions in the hands of those better-qualified to make them.

Voting has little to recommend it, other than providing a way out when no one person has the authority to make a decision that has to get made anyway.

A couple of decades ago, consensus decision-making became popular in executive circles, pulling consultation and delegation along with it. The theory was that more employees felt empowered … they felt more influence over decisions that affected them … and so would bring more energy and commitment to their work.

It wasn’t a bad theory as these things go. So far as I can tell, though, it’s falling out of favor. Authoritarian decision-making appears, based on my entirely subjective perception that’s the result of an at best accidentally non-random sample of What’s Going On Out There, to be increasingly popular. Consensus and consultative decision-making, in contrast, are more and more associated with group hand-holding coupled with Kumbaya and the singing thereof.

My sense is that this shift away from high-involvement techniques is due to one or another of these three factors: (1) impatience (let’s get on with it); (2) arrogance (I know the right answer so let’s get on with it); and (3) ego (I’m smarter than anyone else involved, so no one has anything important to tell me about the subject that I don’t already know. I know the right answer so let’s get on with it).

Meanwhile, delegation continues to be used but not really. I’m seeing an increase in de-delegation as a fraction of all delegated decisions, de-delegation meaning “I’m delegating this decision to you unless you don’t make the decision I would have made or don’t make it the way I would have made it.”

Delegation, that is, is becoming little more than authoritarianism in disguise.

Is this trend, assuming it is a trend and not just an example of KJR being guilty of plausible blame, really such a bad thing? After all, we all know business is speeding up and authoritarianism’s core value is speed.

True enough. And as OODA devotees will agree, faster decisions, all things being equal, speed up the whole loop, leading to more wins and demoralized competitors.

The problem is, not all things are equal. Slapdash information-gathering (observe) and a poor understanding of context (orient) — natural consequences of authoritarian decision-making — lead to uninformed and poorly thought-through decisions. There’s nothing in OODA theory suggests that, faced with a set of possible choices, any old decision will do.

OODA theory is about speeding up each step in the cycle without diminishing its quality, so you complete the loop with just-as-good information, an undiminished sense of place, decisions that are just as smart, and actions just as disciplined and competent.

And one more thing: OODA, and for that matter most of what’s been written about the importance of speeding things up, is silent on the subject of buy-in. In the interest of filling this gap:

What’s needed to achieve buy-in might very well slow down one or two early OODA iterations.

But failing to achieve buy-in in these early iterations can slow down the iterations that follow. After all, managers and employees whose primary motivational state is apathy are, when the time comes for action, less likely to bring the energy needed for getting the desired results quickly and efficiently.

The difference, it’s said, between ignorance and apathy is “I don’t know” and “I don’t care.”

The other difference is ownership: Authoritarians own the ignorance. Apathy is the logical employee response.

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|In: Digital|Last Updated:

I’m getting hands-on experience with DevOps.

No, not as a member of a DevOps team. It’s that I use Office 365.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Office 365, to the extent it’s possible to like this sort of thing.

Except that once a week or so when I fire up my laptop, I have to hunt for features that mysteriously moved from their accustomed spot on the ribbon when I wasn’t looking.

It’s like Who Moved My Cheese?, where someone moved the protagonists’ cheese to an unknown location with no obvious reason for doing so and little or no notification that it had happened.

So to all you hardworking DevOps team members, and especially to the fine folks responsible for implementing Office 365’s epics, features, and user stories (here at KJR headquarters we’re nothing if not Fully Buzzword Compliant (FBC)) …

To all you hardworking folks: DevOps’ CI/CD mantra can stand for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery or Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment.

If it’s Deployment and what you’re Continuously Deploying includes UI changes, CD has a third translation: Continuous Distraction.

Which brings us to the serious business of self-promotion, specifically, the impending (September) release of There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change.

User Interface and User Experience design is one (or are two, depending on your perspective) of the topics we touch on in the book. In it we establish what most businesses should establish as their core UI/UX metric: Annoy customers and users as little as possible.

Yes, yes, yes, Tom Peters is still flogging excellence and delighting customers as what you should strive for. And far be it from my co-author, Dave Kaiser, or myself to denigrate excellence or customer delight in general.

It’s in particular that we have some concerns, namely, the nature of many business relationships is such that customers have no interest in being delighted. If you’re among them, managing to not irritate them is doing well.

Trying to delight them inevitably results in more and longer contacts, when what they want are fewer and shorter ones.

And if you accept the KJR distinction between quality (absence of defects and adherence to specs) and excellence (flexibility, customizability, adaptability and the presence of desirable features) … if you accept this distinction, simply delivering what you promised to deliver — quality — might not be enough to delight anyone, but compared to your competitors and earlier self they might be pleasantly surprised.

Try to get inside your customers’ heads. When they’re looking to buy something, what do they care about? What do you care about when you’re looking to buy something?

While not a universal truth, the odds-on favorites are price and convenience.

Look at the big business success stories of the last few decades, and for every Excellence-and-Delight example (Facebook and Twitter, maybe?) companies that focus on price and convenience are making a lot more money. Google, Amazon, and Uber are three noteworthy examples. At least they are from the perspective of revenue. I’m thinking Uber will turn a profit before investors lose interest, but you never know.

Google is an interesting example because when we use it we aren’t its customers. We’re its product, to which it sells access to its customers, which are the advertisers who want to reach us so as to tell us their stories. Google makes buying access to us easy. Whether it’s cheap depends on the details of how you measure the cost of customer access. Certainly, it’s no more expensive than the other ways businesses have to gain access to interested buyers.

Amazon is more straightforward. Whether you’re looking at its bread-and-butter retailing, its Kindle books, or AWS, price and convenience are everything.

Likewise Uber. Compared to traditional taxis, Uber costs less and is a lot more convenient. Uber doesn’t delight its customers except by comparison. But it sure has thought through the factors that irritate ride buyers and has done quite a good job of minimizing them.

There are, of course, exceptions to the price-and-convenience rule. If you’re in the business of selling Lamborghinis, Ferraris, or Aston Martins, neither price nor convenience are what your customers are after. Likewise if you own a professional sports team or Marvel and its stable of superheroes. If that’s you, excellence and delighting your customers by giving them a great experience is exactly what you need to do, because the customer experience is what you’re selling and they’re buying.

If, on the other hand, you’re the purveyor of more prosaic merchandise, just not irritating your customers is a pretty high bar.

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