All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Speaking of confirmation bias …

Confirmation bias is a tendency we all have. It’s what leads us to accept without question expositions we agree with no matter how flawed they might be, while nitpicking to death ones we dislike no matter how carefully constructed.

We typically unleash our confirmation biases on presentations consisting of evidence and logic. But I’ve noticed that clever quotes, wisecracks, and even cartoons can also trigger the effect.

Cartoons (not this week’s subject) are probably the most pernicious, because really, don’t you feel silly arguing with a sketch and a caption? But clever quotes are, I think, a close second, which brings us to the subject of this week’s diatribe – Admiral Grace Hopper’s frequently repeated, “I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission.”

It’s a quote that, when you don’t stop to think about it, encourages us to stick it to the bureaucrats who force us to jump through a cube-farm-full of flaming hoops before we can do something that is, to our completely objective foveae, Common Sense.

When you do stop to think about it, your flaming hoop is someone else’s hard-won wisdom.

Maybe I’m just confirmation-biasing Admiral Hopper because of her role in creating COBOL – a hideously inelegant language whose approach to basic arithmetic: ADD L TO M GIVING N is harder than Roman numerals to quality-assure, in contrast to FORTRAN’s more enlightened N = L + M.

But my confirmation-bias aside, I wonder if, as a naval officer, she would have been as forgiving to a subordinate who neglected to ask her for permission before charging ahead with something risky as she hoped for forgiveness when she took her own advice.

We’re faced with a dual challenge. An organization’s policies, procedures, governance, and compliance requirements represent the accumulated knowledge, judgment, and wisdom it has acquired since it first launched itself into the marketplace.

Ignoring them because they’re inconvenient given what you’re dealing with right now might not be the best way to stay on the right side of the line that separates self-confidence from arrogance.

But on the other hand, all the accumulated knowledge, wisdom and so forth is about the past. The action you’re contemplating is about the future.

To the extent you expect the future to resemble the past, you should, at a minimum, take the time to make sure you can articulate why waiting for permission would be damaging.

And to the extent your expectations of how the future will come out make the organization’s stored memories irrelevant, the day you take your first step on the path toward needing to ask for forgiveness isn’t too soon to start preparing a compelling narrative that explains why and how today’s constraints aren’t relevant to what tomorrow will require.

Compare Admiral Hopper’s formulation to that of a different naval officer: D. Michael Abrashoff, former Captain of the Benfold and author of It’s Your Ship: “Whenever the consequences of a decision had the potential to kill or injure someone, waste tax-payers’ money, or damage the ship, I had to be consulted. Sailors and more junior officers were encouraged to make decisions and take action so long as they stayed on the right side of that line.”

Bob’s last word: There’s another dimension to all this: Sometimes opportunities and threats arise all by themselves. They’re both real and ephemeral – by the time you finally get approval they’ll have passed the organization by.

Admiral Hopper’s guidance was, I hope, directed at these situations, where tactics legitimately get ahead of strategy.

That is, what I hope she meant is that if you had jumped through all the flaming hoops you would have ended up receiving permission eventually.

Wise leaders, though, provide guidelines along the lines of those Captain Abrashoff gave his crew. Do this and you make asking for either permission or forgiveness irrelevant.

Bob’s sales pitch: I’m always interested in what you’re interested in … and what any non-subscribers you know would be interested in.

My most frequent topics are, in no particular order: leadership and personal effectiveness, business ethics, career management, metrics, office politics, organizational change and effectiveness, project management, and architecture.

To name a few, but I’m open to other suggestions, too.

Please take a few minutes to let me know.

And yes, I do accept emailed in ballots. And no, I don’t require a photo ID to accept your vote.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “Why every IT leader should avoid ‘best practices’,” explaining why CIOs would be wise to know there are no best practices, only practices that fit best.

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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

The First Amendment allows us to express our opinions free from undue governmental interference. But allowing us doesn’t obligate us.

My random sample of strongly held opinions suggests that while opinions are protected, more often than not silence should be encouraged.

Management has parallels. It has practices at its disposal that are legal, but whose legality doesn’t make them good ideas.

For this week’s example there’s the form of metrics abuse described in “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score,” (Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, New York Times, 8/14/2022), which tells of businesses that have installed automated monitoring systems to make sure employees aren’t exploiting their employers’ good will by not being provably busy at all times and in all circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, these monitoring systems exhibit all four metrics fallacies:

Metrics Fallacy #1: They measure the right things wrong, leading to the wrong results.

Metrics Fallacy #2: They measure the wrong things, again leading to the wrong results.

Metrics Fallacy #3: Anything they don’t measure you don’t get, because you’re only paying employees for what they measure.

Metrics Fallacy #4: They extend their system of metrics to individual employees, which pretty much guarantees they’ll game the system.

For a closer look:

MF #1: Measuring productivity isn’t intrinsically wrong. Productivity is, sometimes, a good thing. But these systems don’t measure productivity. They measure activity, which doesn’t matter a bit.

MF #2: In many employee roles, productivity isn’t what’s needed. For example (I’m not making this up) measuring hospice chaplains’ productivity through the accrual of “productivity points.” As the article explains the system, “A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.”

MF #3: Productivity tracking systems only track what they can detect, such as keystrokes and the presence of the employee in front of their laptop camera. But few employee roles can be fully satisfied by typing. Attending meetings is an obvious, but far from the only example. Once you’ve established a system of metrics you get what you measure and only what you measure. Anything you don’t measure you don’t get.

MF #4: Step 1 – sit in chair. Step 2 – bring up Wordl on your smartphone. Step 3 – idly rest your hand on your laptop’s keyboard. Step 4 – plug in a “mouse jiggler” (a physical one so IT can’t detect it). Step 5 – concentrate on solving today’s Wordl while drumming your fingers on the keyboard.

Bob’s last word: Two features demonstrate why these practices are, to borrow a movie title, dumb and dumber.

They’re dumb because they assume employees require this level of supervision or they’ll slack off. But if your business leaders have hired employees who will only work if Skynet is looking over their shoulder, your business leaders are hiring all the wrong people. You don’t need monitoring technology. You need better leaders.

And they’re dumber: Employers are complaining they can’t recruit and retain the employees they need. Employers like those chronicled in Kantor and Sundaram’s article won’t be able to recruit the employees they need because their recruiters will be epoxied to their chairs and only paid for their keystrokes, not for the talent they bring in.

They won’t be able to retain the good employees they have because who would want to work for a company like this if they had any choice?

Extra Credit: Assess these systems using KJR’s exclusive “7 Cs” framework and post your results in the Comments.

Bob’s sales pitch: Looking for some thoughts on how to approach a topic? Try searching KJR. That’s what the “Search for” box is for.

Or do you have a few minutes to spare and are bored with Wordl? Check out the Archives. Just click a month at random, or maybe click on whatever I published ten or twenty years ago to enjoy a blast from the past.

There’s good stuff in there, if I do say so myself.

Now on CIO.com in the CIO Survival Guide: “Why every IT leader should avoid ‘best practices.’” Short version (but the whole article is worth taking your time to read), it’s because there are no best practices, only practices that fit best.

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