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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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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

It’s called “solution selection.”

There are those who grouse that we should stop the doublespeak and call it software selection.

Not me. We engage in this sort of thing because we have a problem that needs solving, after all (or, in happier circumstances, an opportunity that needs chasing). A software product by itself is, as logicians might put it, necessary but not sufficient for solving (or chasing) it.

The fundamentals for going about solution selection are, by now, well understood: When comparing the alternatives, evaluators should dig into: (1) Features and functionality — does the solution do what you need it to do? (2) Internal construction — is it built well? (3) Terms and Conditions — what will it cost, and beyond cost is contract and licensing language acceptable? (4) Vendor characteristics — is the seller financially viable and, almost as important, easy to work with?

The fundamentals are well understood, and yet the results, more often than not, are disappointing.

What goes wrong? What follows is just a starting list. I hope you and your fellow members of the KJR community will add to it in the Comments so we can, as the saying goes, all be smarter than any of us are.

So with that in mind, here’s my shortlist of hard-to-avoid solution selection gotchas:

Wrong selection: The selection is always wrong and has to be. No matter the depth of due diligence, some warts only appear when you implement. So you’ll see the awful reality of the selected solution. Everything else exists in the glorious world of brochureware. It’s a case of the grass always being greener under someone else’s GrowLux.

Each requirement vs all requirements: I’ve seen this a few times — a supplier’s products can handle every requirement the solution selection team has identified. Sadly, no one of the supplier’s products can handle them all, and the ones you need to cover everything aren’t integrated.

Feature scaling: A vendor can usually get its software to do what you need it to do. It can make it do something else you need it to do, too. But there’s often a limit on how many different something-else-you-need-it-to-do-toos their software can do at the same time, because really, what they’ll have to do to get their software do each of those things is a one-off. Doing them all makes it a kludge.

SaaS means not having to worry about the internals: Wrong! Saying that a software product’s internal engineering doesn’t matter because it’s SaaS is a lot like saying an airplane’s engineering doesn’t matter because someone else is flying it.

There’s a limit to how much of a solution’s internal engineering a provider will share. In the case of software what you probably care about the most is the data model. Explain what you need to know about each type of stuff the software will manage, and ask where that data gets stashed.

Terms, conditions, conditions about conditions, and conditions about conditions about conditions. Some software vendors still hide terms and conditions inside linked documents, inside documents linked to the linked documents, and so on ad infinitum. I guess it makes sense that if good software design means that modules invoke modules that invoke modules, that good software license design would be similar.

Regardless, some T&Cs can place unfortunate limits on what you can do with what you’re licensing. This is why you need lawyers.

Vendor from where? In Greek mythology, Prometheus was the good guy, stealing fire from the gods for humans to use. In Christian mythology, Lucifer (light-bringer) was guilty of pretty much the same crime, assuming you’re willing to overlook that little war-on-heaven peccadillo.

Some software vendors are more Lucifer than Prometheus (you were wondering where this was going, weren’t you?).

What can you do to anticipate this? References won’t get you there. Even the worst vendor will have a few customers who like it. The best you can do is ask around and hope a few people you trust have had experience with the vendors you’re considering.

What else can go wrong? Lots else can go wrong. As I said at the beginning of this column, this list is just for starters, and it doesn’t include any of the mistakes customers make while implementing the solution they’ve so painfully selected (for example, thinking they’re implementing the software and not changing the business).

So now it’s your turn. Jump to the Comments and share your insights as to what can go wrong while choosing the right solution.

The KJR community awaits your wisdom!

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