All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Strategy and Tactics|Last Updated:

Does your organization have a climate change problem?

No, no, no, no, no. I’m not asking if your organization is or will be affected by anthropogenic climate change, or if it has a plan for dealing with it.

No, what I’m asking is about a parallel, namely:

While in spite of overwhelming evidence, some people still doubt climate change is real and potentially devastating, by now that’s an ever-shrinking minority. And yet, as a society we’re still unwilling to take the steps needed to address the problem.

A likely reason: “solution aversion,” (and thanks to Katharine Hayhoe, Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, for bringing this phenomenon to my attention).

Solution aversion is what happens when the solution to a problem is so onerous that our minds run away from it screaming “Murmee murmee murmee murmee” to drown out the voices insisting the problem has to be solved.

So when I ask if your organization has a climate change problem, I’m asking if it’s facing an emerging situation that threatens its existence or viability, except that it isn’t really facing it at all. It’s refusing to face the situation due to solution aversion.

The problem might be that your customers are aging and you have no strategy for replacing them with others whose life expectancy is greater.

It might be that your product architecture has painted you in a metaphorical corner, preventing your design engineers from adding the features your product needs to be competitive.

Closer to IT’s home, an “unplug the mainframe” initiative was chartered and budgeted with goals in line with its title: the plan is to migrate all of the hundred or so mainframe-hosted batch COBOL programs in your applications portfolio with a hundred or so cloud-hosted batch COBOL programs.

Which means that when IT finally unplugs the mainframe, all of the business managers who had put their plans on hold for two years will discover that the converted applications, having preserved their batch-COBOL legacy, are no more flexible than their big-iron ancestors. Which in turn means that by the time business plans become business realities they’ll be four years out of date.

If you think your organization’s decision-makers are succumbing to solution aversion, the obvious question is what you can do about it. The obvious answer is to try to persuade them to deal with their climate-change problem by putting together a solid business case.

The obvious answer is, sad to say, the wrong answer. You aren’t going to resolve this with evidence and logic, just as you aren’t going to solve it by tearing your hair out in frustration while saying, through gritted teeth, “That’s just kicking the can down the road.”

The only way to overcome solution aversion is to figure out an alternative solution that doesn’t trigger the aversion reaction. Usually, this means figuring out ways to nibble away at the problem in convenient, non-threatening ways.

In the case of actual climate change this might mean starting with painless steps like replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs, and making your next car a plug-in hybrid.

In the case of mainframe unplugging it might mean identifying a small number of the mainframe batch COBOL applications that, by rewriting them in a microservices architecture would generate an 80/20 benefit in terms of improved flexibility and future business agility.

Bob’s last word: My usual formula for persuasion starts with selling the problem. There’s no point in designing a solution until decision-makers and influencers agree there’s a problem that needs solving. And it’s only after everyone has agreed on the solution that it makes any sense to take the third step – developing an implementation plan.

The role of having a plan in a persuasion situation is to give decision-makers and influencers confidence that the solution can, in fact, be successfully implemented.

This week’s guidance doesn’t violate this formula so much as it augments it. It’s intended for situations in which the most plausible solution … actually, plan, but the folks who coined the term “solution aversion” didn’t ask for my input … “un-sells” the problem.

So it should be called “plan aversion,” but let’s not quibble. What matters is recognizing when your organization has a climate-change problem so you can find ways to finesse the plan.

Bob’s sales pitch: CIO.com just posted the eighth and last article in my IT 101 series. It’s titled “The CIO’s no-bull guide to effective IT” and it both summarizes and serves as a tour guide to the previous seven entries. Whether you’re new to IT management or are a seasoned CIO, I think you’ll find value in the collection.

Also: Remember to register for CIO’s upcoming Future of Work Summit February 15th through 17th, where, among an extensive program, you can hear me debate Isaac Sacolick on the business readiness of machine learning. Our session is scheduled for February 16th, 2:50pm CST. Don’t miss it!

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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

Politics is what happens when two or more people need to make one decision.

Innovation lives in the intersection of “I have a great idea!” and n*(n-1)/2 – the number of pairs in a group of n people. It’s why “I have a great idea” is as far as most ideas get, and why the politics of innovation doesn’t scale very well.

Imagine you have a great idea, or bump into one and like it. You think the idea should have a happy home in the organization you work in.

What comes next?

Well, you could gripe to your buddies over lunch (or Zoom), “You know what they oughta do?” The griping strategy wins you several points: Your buddies will find you tiresome, you won’t persuade anyone, and if you do persuade anyone they won’t be a member of the legendary, all-powerful group known as “They” – the ones who oughta do whatever you’re proposing.

You could, as an alternative, send an anonymous letter … yes, letter; in theory there’s such a thing as an anonymous email but I wouldn’t count on it … an anonymous letter, I say, to the CEO or other highly placed executive who is part of the all-powerful “They,” explaining the idea.

This approach works even better than griping to your buddies, because the only person or people who will find you tiresome won’t know who you are. You still won’t persuade anyone, but netted against buddy-griping you’re still ahead.

Rewind.

In any organization … in any group of people with more than one member … innovation attempts are inherently political. Within the group will be a subset that has to agree the innovation is worth pursuing. And right about here is where a lot of recommended approaches to innovation fail.

That’s because the moment an idea escapes your head and wanders off into the wild, it mutates: Every person in the subset who encounters it – the decision-makers – will, advertently or inadvertently, adjust it so it’s in tune with their expertise, personal experience, perceptions, mental models, and blind spots. And each one will adjust it differently.

For your idea to survive it will have to strike a difficult balance. It will have to resemble how things are now closely enough that each decision-maker can readily connect the dots to what you’re suggesting.

And, it will have to be different enough to get their attention.

And so, each decision-maker will alter the idea from what you originally had in mind in ways that range from trivial to important.

Then, each pair of decision-makers will have to reconcile the mutated versions of the idea that are in their heads, resulting in [n*(n-1)/2]/2 post-reconciliation versions.

Rinse and repeat. After a few iterations it’s possible your idea will still be recognizable, and that the decision-makers will decide to move forward on it. But by that point you’ll have lost all influence over how it evolves.

The process isn’t, of course, as well-organized as all this. It’s less of a flow chart and more a bunch of scattered conversations. I’m just trying to distill the essence of why and how ideas evolve.

Bob’s last word: Most large organizations have put proposal processes in place to try to make innovation more organized. These processes help everyone with worthwhile ideas understand what topics have to be covered to make the idea worth evaluating.

But no matter how well-written a proposal is, human beings will still apply a remarkable level of ingenuity in finding ways to misunderstand what they’re reading.

Which is why, if you have an idea you want to propose, your first step should be to think it through according to the proposal process guidelines, but your second step should be to find one decision-maker … just one … to propose it to first.

That will maximize the chance that your idea will survive the meatgrinder of proposal evaluation intact, minimizing the extent to which the politics of innovation shape-shifts it into a form even you, its originator, won’t recognize.

Bob’s sales pitch: In CIO’s upcoming Future of Work Summit I debate Isaac Sacolick on the business readiness of machine learning, with IDG’s Editor in Chief, Eric Knorr moderating the back-and-forth. The Summit takes place February 15th through February 17th, and looks to have a lot of valuable sessions. Our debate is scheduled for Wednesday, February 16th, at 2:50pm CST. Mark your calendar.

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