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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

What do self-driving cars have to do with IT governance?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

Start with (self-promotion alert #1) the phrase “IT governance.” As long-time (and, I hope, short-time) readers know, in KJR-land there’s no such thing as an IT project — an idea so important Dave Kaiser and I named our soon-to-be-available book after it.

You’d give a perfect self-driving car your destination and let it figure out whether the best solution is to drive you there, to fly … at which point it would book your tickets and drop you at the airport … or make some other arrangements. Self-driving car governance should be transportation governance, just as IT governance should be business change governance.

More important than even this is how badly many designers of all forms of corporate governance ignore one of the most basic elements of delegation.

The element in question is the difference between delegating goals and delegating tasks. You’ll find (self-promotion alert #2!) what you need on this subject in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World. Put simply, the most effective leaders only delegate tasks when they can’t trust the person they’re delegating to enough to delegate the goal and leave the details to the delegate.

Look at it from the perspective of a self-driving car’s owner, who, even if the current state of the art doesn’t include booking tickets for some other mode of transportation, should be able to enter the destination and let the car handle the rest.

Except that no self-driving car is reliable and adaptable enough to handle all the details without human supervision. Humans metaphorically delegate driving tasks to the car but … and this is the essential point … can’t trust the car to handle the job without oversight.

Take a look at business governance as usually practiced and you’ll find distrust is baked into the heart of it. Governance is all about controls. Some controls are useful — they make sure processes are … well … in control.

They’re fine. But then there’s the other kind — approvals, to make sure those who have a job to do lack the authority to screw it up by just doing it, by requiring one or more signatures first.

This doesn’t mean organizations should become free-for-alls. No, organizations should prescribe their processes and practices clearly enough, and educate their managers and supervisors enough that those responsible for doing stuff know when there’s a corporate recipe in place because, for example, legal and regulatory requirements don’t leave room for creativity.

They should prescribe processes and practices in detail when the company’s systems and process management would be messed up if everyone accomplished similar goals in radically different ways.

That’s all fine. What isn’t so fine is when what’s prescribed is, in self-driving car terms, turn-by-turn directions, each turn of which requires someone’s signature.

Because that’s what controls end up looking like — the need for outside approval of each step managers, supervisors, and employees need to take to get their jobs done.

Governance by controls, which is what we’re talking about, has three major disadvantages. The first: it slows things down, because each approval takes actual time, which incurs delays.

The second: It adds to the workload of already up-to-their-eyeballs-in-more-important-matters executives. This doesn’t have to be overly onerous, so long as the executives in question are willing to just rubber-stamp the decisions in question. But if they rubber-stamp everything, what’s point of requiring their signature?

The third disadvantage? It’s demoralizing. I worked with a company a number of years ago that wanted to revamp its capital approval process. Something my team learned along the way was that the smallest decisions required the most signatures (six), and each signatory except the last resented being second-guessed.

What we heard, over and over again, was the same complaint: “If the company doesn’t trust me to make a decision like this, why did they hire me?”

Which might (and, I hope, did) lead you to ask, if governance isn’t to operate through controls, what’s the superior alternative?

The self-promotion-opportunity #3 answer: As Scott Lee and I point out in The Cognitive Enterprise, culture is (or should be) the new governance.

That is, for self-driving cars, culture provides, metaphorically, the lane markers. Controls are the guardrails, something self-driving cars that stay in their lanes will never make contact with.

The parallel? Governance bodies should spend most of their time instituting a culture that makes most controls unnecessary.

Oh, and I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings by comparing you to a car.

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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

I always liked Mr. Spock.

This was in spite of his profoundly stupid ongoing arguments with Dr. McCoy about the value of emotions in daily life.

[If you’re lost, you never watched Star Trek. I can’t help you. You’ll just have to pick it up from context.]

It’s our emotions that cause us to want. Decisions are about people getting what they want. If Mr. Spock has no emotions he doesn’t want. No wants, no decisions.

And not only people: A flatworm in a T-maze has to decide whether to turn left or right. It does so based on whether, in past trials, it encountered food or electric shocks in one or the other direction. It “wants” food and also wants to not experience another electric shock, and it makes its decision based on those wants, although, as we haven’t yet achieved telepathic rapport with planaria, of necessity we’re using “want” fairly loosely.

One could, were one an argumentative sort, counter that we haven’t yet achieved telepathic rapport with each other, either. We each might know what we want, and, for that matter, that we want, but we can only infer the same about each other.

When Scott Lee and I wrote The Cognitive Enterprise we wrestled with the challenge of building organizations that act with purpose — that make similar or complementary sorts of decisions no matter where in the organization each decision is made.

Or, avoiding the passive voice, no matter who in the organization makes each decision.

One of the challenges: Comparing humans to planarians, while we’re undoubtedly more sophisticated than flatworms in understanding what we want, we’re alike in the fundamentals, like wanting food when we’re hungry and wanting to avoid pain when something might hurt.

Organizations? Not so much, and in fact the more we stare at an organization the more our heads hurt trying to infer what “want” might mean.

The naïve among us might imagine that, narrowing our focus to for-profit businesses, what they want is more profits.

That view lasts only as long as it takes to recognize that business decisions are made by individuals and committees.

Imagine you’re one of those individuals. Now imagine you’re in the organizational equivalent of a T-maze. Turn left and the business makes more profits, but, it does so in part by defenestrating you. Turn right and profits diminish but you survive the experience and get a bonus.

Multiply by the number of decision-makers and you realize, there’s no reason to think the aggregate of all business decisions will be to increase profits. It will be to maximize the personal survival rates and compensation of those in a position to influence them.

But we’re straying from our focus, which isn’t the nature of the decisions made by an organization. Our focus is on whether an organization can and does “want” the way humans (and flatworms) want.

The answer, I think, is a resounding no. Humans and all other biological decision-makers want in the sense of an emotional need. Emotions are what set the targets for our decisions, which is why Mr. Spock’s emphasis on logic was misplaced: Without emotion, we can’t want anything and neither could he.

Logic is how some people (and most Vulcans) sometimes go about making decisions that get us what we want.

So ignore phrases like “corporate greed” and similarly meaningless formulations. There’s nothing about how an organization is constructed that would let us imagine it experiences anything that corresponds to greed or any other emotion.

The closest counterparts are its governance and its culture.

Its governance is the set of rules, guidelines, and organizational sub-structures … committees and councils … that its board of directors and management establish to encourage consistency in an organization’s decision-making.

Governance starts by assigning the authority to make decisions, typically includes prescriptions for how those authorities are supposed to make them, and somewhere along the way also defines what want means: The organization might want more profits, mission achievement, or the recently demoted increase in shareholder value.

In a cognitive enterprise, as you know if you read the book, culture is the new governance. Culture is how we do things around here. It’s the sum, substance, and consequence of the assumptions — conscious and unconscious — and other mental habits shared throughout the organization.

A cognitive enterprise — one where culture is the primary form of governance — might not want in the human sense.

But it has at least a chance of acting as if it did.

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