All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

We took a break from the Minnesota winter, so I decided to take a break from KJR, too. It was a timely opportunity: Vox recently published “Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong,” (Brian Resnick, 1/4/2019) which is well worth your time and attention.

It’s also an opportunity to say, once again with feeling, that I told you so! Yes, it’s ungraceful. Still, I did get there first, with the piece that follows, first published in 2007, along with this follow-up article that focused more on what you can do about it. – Bob

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Learn from your mistakes.

It’s barely adequate advice. You can fail in a thousand ways. Learn from one and, like bottles of beer on a wall, you still have 999 left.

Compare that to what you can discover from success. Learning how to avoid one route to failure leaves you many ways to fail again. Learn how to succeed and you succeed.

Learning from mistakes matters. Learning from successes is vital.

So here are two questions to ponder: Why are most organizations more than willing to repeat their mistakes and so unwilling to learn from their successes?

These are two entirely different questions.

One reason organizations refuse to learn from their mistakes is well-known and obvious: To learn from a mistake, the organization’s decision-makers first have to acknowledge it. That’s a problem in our winning-is-the-only-thing, hold-people-accountable, lean-and-mean (really, famished and feeble) business culture.

We might encourage risk-taking, but that doesn’t mean we’re willing to accept a little failure now and then. That we have to redefine “risk” to mean “sure-things-only” is a small price to pay.

As is making the same mistake over and over.

Another reason organizations refuse to learn from their mistakes is more subtle: Very often, those who make the mistakes are also those who define the metrics that measure success. This might not seem to be a problem but it is because of the three fallacies of business measurement: Measure the right things wrong and you’ll get the wrong results; measure the wrong things right or wrong and you’ll get the wrong results, and anything you don’t measure you don’t get.

Example: A CIO who presided over an enterprise with four business units. He established measures of success for the four service desks that supported them. Unsurprisingly, he established productivity as a key metric, defined as the number of incidents resolved per technician.

One of the service desk managers seriously underperformed the others — productivity was truly awful. Here’s what he did wrong: He established a very effective program of end-user education. Because it was so effective, end-users in his business unit reported many fewer incidents.

The CIO held him accountable for his failure and praised the other service desk managers. His metrics defined failure as success, ensuring the perpetuation of a mistake — failing to educate the end-user community.

This really happened. It probably has really happened in company after company. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that someone has enshrined “maximizing technician productivity in service desk environments” as a best practice.

This example also illustrates one reason businesses sometimes fail to learn from their successes: Metrics that define failure as success also define success as failure (if they don’t just ignore it completely).

For more than a decade, the business punditocracy has blathered incessantly about success being the creation of shareholder value. There’s a problem with shareholder value as a measure: It’s hard to know whether today’s rise in the price of a share of stock is a blip that’s due to actions that will harm a company’s long-term competitiveness, or is the result of a real improvement in the health of the enterprise.

Even worse, it isn’t clear that it matters. I created shareholder value today. Next year, or the year after that is Someone Else’s Problem.

Just an opinion: The proper definition of business success is that it is sustainable. Never mind that sustainability is hard to measure. Never mind that it’s hard to recognize. It’s the only goal that matters.

If knowing what success looks like is hard, connecting actions to results is even harder. The actions that lead to sustainable success rarely produce immediate, dramatic results. Important change takes time and patience. By the time the impact of successful effort is visible, many business leaders will have given up on the effort.

Then there is the most common reason businesses refuse to learn from success: The Not Invented Here Syndrome (NIHS).

Very few enterprises reward managers for sharing their formulas for success with their peers. They don’t reward managers for emulating the practices of other managers either. Nor does emulating a peer do much to feed the average ego.

Being the first to spot a useful idea from outside the company looks and feels a lot like creativity. But if I borrow an idea from you, you get more credit and I get none. Where’s the value and satisfaction in that?

Why do businesses so rarely learn? The barriers are immense.

The miracle is that, occasionally, they do.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Technically, they’re right.

I’m talking about Gartner and its new forecast, that “… by 2021, CIOs Will Be as Responsible for Culture Change as Chief HR Officers.”

They’re technically correct. Chief HR Officers aren’t responsible for culture change right now, and won’t be in 2021. Chief Information Officers also won’t be responsible for it in 2021, making them exactly as responsible as CHROs.

Why am I so sure? It’s because of the nature of culture, discussed here many times and codified in both Leading IT and Bare Bones Change Management. Culture is the learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment. Among employees, most of the environment each employee responds to is the behavior of the employees with whom they work.

And not all of these employees have an equal impact. Those who supervise and manage have more impact than those who don’t.

So today, tomorrow, and in 2021, employees’ managers will be the ones who have to change the culture, accomplishing this by changing their own behavior. Not HR, not the CIO. Every manager in the company.

Gartner’s forecast begins with the proposition that, “Successful Digital Transformation Initiatives Must Be Accompanied by Culture Changes.”

Which isn’t wrong. No matter how you define “digital,” it can’t succeed without a radical change to most business cultures.

The illogic starts shortly thereafter an assertion that the mission and values of an organization usually fall into the remit of HR.

There’s only one counterargument, but it’s compelling: WHAT?!?!

HR often does take charge of the dreaded Mission Statement. But, were you to take a random sample of corporate mission statements and their actual corporate missions, you’d find the correlation between the two is at best a miniscule statistical artifact, nothing more.

Asserting that HR is responsible for the corporate mission disqualifies Gartner as an advisor regarding How Things Work. (If you’re looking for a qualified advisor you know who to call …)

As for HR owning culture change, yes, smart CEOs, having superior CHROs, will consult with them and involve them in operationalizing the digital culture change. And increasingly, assuming they’ve also hired superior CIOs, they’ll consult with them, involving them in defining what a digital culture looks and feels like.

But consultation and involvement aren’t the same thing as delegation and authority, and any CEO willing to delegate the business culture to anyone else is misguided — misguided because it abrogates their single most important responsibility.

And more misguided because it can’t be done. Business culture is the learned behavior employees exhibit in response to their environment and in particular in response to their line manager’s behavior.

The company’s management culture is the learned behavior line managers exhibit in response to their environment, and in particular in response to their managers’ behavior.

Which in turn is a response to middle management behavior, which is connected to the ankle bone, which is connected to the thigh bone, which ossium inexorably ends up in the CEO’s office for the same reason that when you fall, the direction you go is down:

That’s how the world is put together.

But the fallacy starts upstream from there, with the culture change needed most for digital transformations to succeed. It’s in the executive suite, as I recently explained (he modestly pointed out) on CIO.com (“Digital transformation’s dark secret,” 10/31/2018). Neither the CIO (or Chief Digital Officer if your company has one) nor CHRO is going to lead an executive suite culture change.

Who is? Gartner needs to pick up the clue phone about this, because (it’s time for a blinding flash of the obvious) that’s the CEO’s job.

What’s the essence of the executive suite culture change? That, of course, depends on the organization in question and its current situation. One place to look is something we discussed last week: the lack of respect given to what are usually called “intangible benefits.”

Hidden among the benefits of digital strategies and transformations is a radical change in management thinking. In the industrial age of business, tangible, which is to say direct financial benefits, usually in the form of cost-cutting, was what mattered. Everything else was a means to that end.

Digital strategies, in contrast, focus, or at least should focus, on competitive advantage and what gives it to you. While in the end tangible financial benefits do happen, they’re a byproduct, nothing more.

So here’s the scorecard: Gartner is right about digital transformations requiring a change in corporate culture. I’m happy for Gartner that its analysts finally figured this out.

As for how to make it happen? Maybe, if its analysts start to read KJR, they’ll figure that out too someday.

They’ll probably take credit for it when they do.

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