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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Camping season is starting (except for native Minnesotans, who have been known to go “winter camping,” probably because it’s the only time they can sleep outdoors without swarms of mosquitoes … but never mind them). So get close to the fire, and Scoutmaster Ray Todd Stevens will tell you a scary story:

I worked for a national retail chain. The official policy on credit cards was that you tried to find fraud. There was even a bonus for every fraud you found. But that was not the actual policy. The actual policy, which was well drilled into you by your manager, was that ‘… we never notice anything we don’t have to officially notice.’ I found two forged cards and one stolen one while there. Each time got me a conversation with the manager about why I noticed the inconsistencies. Also I got docked twice the bonus in commissions the pay periods of the bonuses for finding these cards.

The problem was that the sales counted toward commission and the manager’s bonus regardless of if they were fraudulent or not.

Is this the tale of a greedy manager trying to maximize commissions at the expense of the poor, longsuffering employer?

Probably not. No question, some individuals will do whatever they can to maximize their total income. They’re relatively rare, often in sales, and motivated more by money than by anything else.

What motivates most employees is achievement, approval, or a sense of belonging to an exclusive group that’s doing something important. The money is nice, but not their primary driver.

Not that they ignore what they’re paid. Quite the opposite — they give it their closest attention. That’s because a company’s compensation system is the loudest, clearest, and most emphatic communications channel it has for explaining to employees what it considers important.

The classic example, used in every introductory seminar on Total Quality Management ever given, is the company that decided it wanted quality. It preached quality, taught quality techniques, and measured quality improvement. The result, month after month, was a total lack of improvement in its defect rate. Why? The factory manager’s bonus depended on how many widgets rolled off the production line every month.

Pay for quantity, beg for quality, and quantity will win every time. What you pay for explains your priorities far better than your company newsletter.

Bring it home to IT. Many CIOs want to establish a more process-oriented perspective in their organizations, to get (all together now!) Repeatable, Predictable Results. Whether it’s an ITIL initiative or an attempt to rise to higher levels in the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model, they want the IT staff to “plan the work and work the plan” instead of coming to work every day as if the world had just been created fresh and new.

Good for them. These are important goals for many IT organizations. So if you’re one of them, go ahead and want process, teach process techniques, and measure process results. And then …

A project team finds itself under time pressure. The project manager rallies the troops, who work a succession of twenty-four hour days and seven-day weeks. Gasping for breath, exhausted but exhilarated, they meet their deadline with minutes to spare.

Impressed, you give them all bonuses for going the extra mile.

Outstanding. Except …

Another project team doesn’t find itself under time pressure. Every week, every team member meets every milestone. The project manager spots risks and issues early and deals with them. If one team member gets into trouble, the rest help out immediately so the schedule is never in jeopardy. The deadline rolls around, they put the software into production, and go home to spend the weekend with their families.

Boring. Why would you give them a bonus? They didn’t go an extra block, let alone an extra mile. All they did was the work in front of them.

Making process happen in IT is hard. If you pay extra for heroics while ignoring those who do their work by the numbers, you’re preaching process in a whisper while shouting, in the loudest voice you can, that you really don’t care for it all that much.

As with any good process, the results are predictable, and have been repeated so many times you’d think we’d have caught on by now.

You get what you pay for. If you want process, start paying for it, instead of its opposite.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Blink is a 265 page explanation of why snap judgments are superior to 265 page explanations. My snap judgment of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell, 2005) was that its premise was worthless and it wasn’t worth taking the time to read.

Blink!

The book begins with the case of a statue — a Greek kouros — which all scientific analysis suggested was genuine, but which many authorities on ancient art felt, immediately upon seeing it, was a forgery. The author’s admiration for the authorities and disdain for those who failed with careful, scientific analysis is clear. (If, you, in an un-Blink-like way, are wondering how many art forgeries fooled the art experts until the scientists got involved, the question goes unanswered.)

Following the kouros case are several other examples of snap judgments that outperformed careful analysis. Attention spans being what they are these days, most readers will arrive at the same conclusion they’d have reached by reading nothing more than the dust jacket — they’d be persuaded, because “thinking without thinking” is far easier, and therefore more appealing, than the hard work of thinking with thinking.

Blink!

As I don’t accept Blink‘s premise, I figured I’d better read the whole book before reaching a conclusion. If you also decide to evaluate Blink, not by blinking but by careful reading, don’t start at the beginning. Instead, begin with the chapter titled “The Warren Harding Syndrome.” It’s where the book’s important but rarely mentioned message begins: That snap judgments get you into trouble more often than they get you out of it.

Warren Harding looked more presidential than just about anyone else ever did, with the possible exceptions of George Washington and John F. Kennedy. Tall, good looking, broad-shouldered and with a deep, powerful voice, he was the epitome of the presidential image. Voters took one look, heard a word or two, and swooned.

Warren Harding was, you’ll recall, one of the worst presidents in American history.

Blink!

There’s the case of Abbie Conant, who, auditioning behind a screen, became lead trombonist for the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. Until, that is, she finished playing and walked out from behind the screen, at which point the orchestra’s music director realized he’d made a horrible mistake: Women, he and everyone else knew, couldn’t play the trombone well.

In 1963, George Wallace saw Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood and — Blink! — knew they didn’t belong in the University of Alabama. Neither you (I presume) nor I share Wallace’s overt bias. But Gladwell presents hard-to-explain-away scientific evidence that demonstrates, disconcertingly, how much most of us, regardless of our self-described race, hold and act on unconscious but hard-to-overcome negative associations about black Americans.

Then there’s height. The average CEOs is, for example, three inches taller than the average American male. More generally, economic research demonstrates that every inch of height is worth $789 per year in compensation.

Even your taste buds are vulnerable. Blink documents consumer research in which the shape of the bottle or the coloring on the can changes how consumers describe what they taste.

Blink!

Most CIOs already recognize at least one example of the dangers of Blink — executives who see a software demo and immediately decide that this is the exact solution to all their problems. But these same CIOs often make Blink decisions when hiring, where all of their biases and unconscious associations have maximum influence.

27% of Blink presents the evidence in favor of “fast cognition.” The rest, for the relatively few readers who penetrate that far, presents the evidence of how it usually misfires. The inescapable conclusion, should you decide to not first blink, is that the increasingly popular trend toward trusting your gut is, put simply, a very bad idea.

Unless …

There are those cases in which snap judgment did outperform careful analysis. How should we understand them? The author does, in the end, provide some excellent advice about this. Fast cognition works for experts in their areas of expertise, who have accumulated a great deal of hard-won experience, who are acutely aware of what can bias their judgment, and who take care to structure the way they experience events so as to give them the best chance of reaching the right decision.

Which is to say, Blinking is like luck. As Louis Pasteur explained, it favors the prepared mind.

Blink!

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