All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

I have to.

Way back in 2001 I wrote, “Popular culture has it that our brains should defer to our guts, despite conclusive anatomical evidence that guts digest food while brains digest information, and the success of the scientific method demonstrating that facts and logic are superior to instinct.”

I’ve been on something of a crusade about the dangers of trusting your gut ever since.

Not as way back … five days ago as I’m publishing this missive … President Trump disagreed, saying, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Give President Trump his due. His statement appears to be correct. His gut does seem to tell him more than anybody else’s brain does.

Nor is he alone, nor is the purpose of this little epistle to ridicule our current president. He isn’t the point. He just illustrates it.

The point is that “trusting our “guts” … our instincts and pattern-matching abilities … over the hard work of collecting and interpreting evidence continues to be a popular method for making important decisions.

To be fair, there are situations in which this effortless alternative truly is superior. Take, for example, how we identify people we know: We look at their faces, listen to their voices, and we’re done.

And outside the realm of doppelganger-oriented horror movies, and except for the occasional identical twin, we’re generally correct.

This works just fine until there’s a need to prove it, as when we contact our bank over the phone. Imagine a financial institution that relies on innards-based customer identification and authentication: Instead of providing your date of birth, last four digits of your social security number, and the make and model of the first car you ever owned, you schmooze a bit, discover you’re both Cubs fans, and further discover you agree that had Ernie Banks faced the Cubs pitching staff he’d have broken every batting record in the game.

Then you say, “I wonder if you could help me. I’d like to transfer everything in all of my accounts with you to my bank in the Cayman Islands.”

“No problem,” replies the helpful newbie customer service staffer. “You sound like a trustworthy person. My gut tells me you’re okay. Now what were those account numbers?”

Clearly, when the subject is customer identification, multifactor authentication … using forensically defensible and auditable techniques for validating identities … is a whole lot more reliable.

Second example: You’re now an IT executive. You task one of your staff — call him Derek Duodenum — to lead the selection of a replacement for your company’s aging ERP system.

Imagine Duodenum considers his gut to be just as presidential as that of our current POTUS. It’s the team’s kickoff meeting. Duodenum starts it off with these words: “I trust my gut, and my gut tells me SpleenWorthy is the right answer for our company.”

The question: Just because he trusts his gut, does that mean you should trust his gut?

Of course not. Among its many disadvantages, beyond being no more reliable than a dart board or Ouija Board, trust-your-gut-based decision-making precludes consensus, because it leaves no room for discussion. Everyone’s answer to the question of why they reached the decision they did is the same — they trusted their guts — and everyone involved thinks their gut is more brilliant than anyone else’s gut.

The only proposition they do agree on is that all of their colons are more perceptive than anyone else’s frontal lobes.

Which is why, when you inform Duodenum that you’re removing him from the ERP selection effort, your reason isn’t that your gut tells you he’s the wrong person for the job.

You explain that you rely on evidence and logic for making decisions. The evidence demonstrates he’s incapable of making evidence-based decisions, so logically you have no other alternative.

Let him deal with the recursion on his own time. Take yours to scratch your head, trying to figure out how he ended up in a position of influence in the first place.

Am I suggesting you should ignore your metaphorical gut when it metaphorically speaks to you?

Not at all. Quite the opposite, you should pay close attention. What’s commonly called your gut is more properly characterized as the voice of your accumulated experience. To the extent your experience is both extensive and relevant, you should definitely pay attention to it.

Should you believe it? Probably not.

Listening isn’t the same as unquestioning acceptance, so when your gut speaks to you, that should begin your inquiry, not finish it.

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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

We consultants live and die on methodologies. Just as double-blind therapeutic trials are what make modern doctors are more reliable than shamans for preventing and curing diseases, the methodologies we consultants use are what make our analyses and recommendations more reliable than an executive’s gut feel.

Take, for example, the methodology I use for application, application portfolio, and application integration rationalization (AR/APR/AIR).

It starts with collecting data about more than twenty indicators of application health, redundancy, and integration for each application in the portfolio. It’s by analyzing this health data that my colleagues and I are in a position to reliably and provably recommend programs and strategies for improving the enterprise technical architecture’s application layer, along with the information and platform layers the applications rely on.

For large application portfolios the process is intimidating, not to mention invasive and expensive. Fortunately for you and unfortunately for me when I’m trying to persuade clients to engage our services, there is a more frugal alternative. In most situations it’s amply reliable for guiding AR/APR/AIR priorities as our sophisticated methodology, while costing quite a lot less.

Call it the TYE methodology, TYE standing for “Trust Your Experts.”

But first, before we get to TYE, take the time to clean up your integration architecture.

Maybe the techniques you use to keep redundant data synchronized and present it for business use through systematic APIs are clean and elegant. If so, you can skip this step on the grounds that you’ve already taken it. Also, congratulate everyone involved. As near as I can tell you’re in the minority, and good for you.

Otherwise, you need to do this first for two big reasons: (1) it’s probably the single biggest architecture-related opportunity you have for immediate business and IT benefit; and (2) it creates a “transition architecture” that will let you bring new application replacements in without hugely disrupting the business areas that currently rely on the old ones.

And now … here’s how TYE works: Ask your experts which applications are the biggest messes. Who are your experts? Everyone — your IT staff who maintain and enhance the applications used by the rest of the business, and the business users who know what using the applications is like.

And a bit often missed, no matter the methodology: Make sure to include the applications used by IT to support the work it does. IT is just as much a business department as any other part of the enterprise. Its supporting applications deserve just as much attention.

What do you ask your experts? Ask them two questions. #1: List the five worst applications you use personally or know about, in descending order of awfulness. #2: What’s the worst characteristic of each application on your list?

Question #1 is for tabulation. Whichever applications rank worst get the earliest attention.

Question #2 is for qualification. Not all question #1 votes are created equal, and you’re allowed to toss out ballots cast by those who can produce no good reason for their opinions.

Once you’ve tabulated the results, pick the three worst applications and figure out what you want to do about them — the term of art is to determine their “dispositions.”

Charter projects to implement their dispositions and you’re off and running. Once you’ve disposed of one of the bottom three, determine the disposition of what had been the fourth worst application; repeat for the fifth.

After five it will probably be a good idea to re-survey your experts, as enough of the world will have changed that the old survey’s results might no longer apply.

You can use the basic TYE framework for much more than improving the company’s technical architecture. In fact, you can use it just about any time you need to figure out where the organization is less effective than it ought to be, and what to do about it.

It’s been the foundation of most of my consulting work, not to mention being a key ingredient in Undercover Boss.

TYE does rely on an assumption that’s of overwhelming importance: That you’ve hired people worth listening to. If you have, they’re closer to the action than anyone else, and know what needs fixing better than anyone else.

And if the assumption is false … if you haven’t hired people worth listening to, what on earth were you thinking?

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