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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

What’s best about beating your head against a brick wall is how good you feel when you stop.

As discussed here last week and the week before, businesses beat their heads against brick walls all the time, the walls being ideas they keep on trying, over and over again. They never feel good because they never stop, no matter how often the ideas don’t work.

We’ve already discussed a number of reasons this happens. There’s one more we haven’t talked about yet, and it’s a big one: More often than not, in the world of business, changing your mind about an idea isn’t safe.

I realize this revelation is less than shocking. Quite the opposite — it’s part of most managers’ day-to-day lives, an inevitable consequence of the we-have-to-hold-people-accountable philosophy that paralyzes an organization’s ability to make tough decisions.

Given that companies should want every manager and executive to cheerfully abandon ideas that aren’t working, it’s worth asking how they change the situation, so that putting a bullet in an idea that isn’t working out is a career-enhancing move rather than a career-limiting one.

It’s an easily stated goal, which is quite different from it being an easily achieved one.

The solution (or, at least, a solution) starts with the recognition that we’ve been asking the wrong question. What we ought to be asking is how businesses should go about exploring promising-sounding concepts. If we understand that, we’ll understand how they will go about terminating the ones that don’t pan out, as a standard and well-understood step in the practice.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves — that’s the last step, not the first, which is:

Analysis: Of course. The starting point for any concept is to do enough analysis to be sure it’s worth pursuing. Volumes have been written on this topic. For our purposes, what matters most is making sure you have a list of the key assumptions on which the idea depends. Once you have the list, replace as many as possible with research. For the rest, figure out how you’ll test them to determine whether they’re valid or not.

And if you aren’t sure you’ve identified them all, conduct a “pre-mortem” analysis — an excellent way to explore this topic.

Pilot/Prototype/Proof of Concept: Analysis matters, so don’t allow the impatient to intimidate the rest of the organization with premature accusations of “analysis paralysis.” On the other hand, endless analysis is an easy trap to fall into. There comes a time when performing a few experiments makes more sense than continuing to theorize. That’s when pilot projects, prototypes, and proofs of concept come into play.

And you do want to do at least one, and probably several of these. What you don’t want to do is what organizations usually do, which is to conduct a “proof of concept” on the easiest test case they can identify, and, when it succeeds, decide the concept has been proven.

Remember that list of key assumptions? While it makes excellent sense for your first pilot to be built around the easiest test case you can identify, that doesn’t mean its success proves the concept. You need to iterate your test cases, making sure each successive one tests additional assumptions from your list, until you’ve either validated or modified all of them.

Review: It isn’t enough to look at the results of a test project to decide whether it’s succeeded or failed. Because in the end, what matters isn’t its success or failure — it’s what you’ve learned by conducting it.

Every test should have a completion date — their duration shouldn’t be indefinite. And when they’re done, everyone involved in the test should be involved in answering the question, “What do we now know about the subject that we didn’t know before?”

By the time the organization has finished and reviewed enough test projects to have tested all of the assumptions and assessed all of the results, everyone involved should be convinced … by the data … of whether the idea is sound, and of what competent execution looks like.

Which still doesn’t answer the question of what to do about ideas that are already institutionalized, even though they don’t seem to work.

The answer isn’t to finally figure out, once and for all, that it’s the idea and not the execution. If that was going to happen, it would have already happened.

Here’s what can happen: Someone (you, for example) can identify a competing idea, and test that. If it works better that what the business has been doing, the business can adopt it without worrying about why the older idea wasn’t working.

Or about who has to be held accountable for it.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Why does the world of business persist in trying to make concepts work after they’ve repeatedly failed?

As pointed out last week, this seems to be a pattern. Whether the repeatedly failed idea is incentive pay, recruiting, performance appraisals, outsourcing, or waterfall software development, plausibility appears to trump the evidence, over and over again.

We need to know why. Otherwise we’ll just do it all over again with the next idea. There isn’t just one reason the world of business throws lots of good money after bad, either — there are quite a few. To get you started:

The Edison Ratio

Last week’s column mentioned this: One reason businesses persist in trying to make failed concepts work is that they should. As Edison pointed out, genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, so the odds that failures are the result of flawed execution are high.

Also, few ideas are either purely good or purely bad, and in fact, you’d do yourself a service by eliminating “good” and “bad” from your business vocabulary altogether. Some ideas are better than others; that’s about all you can say about such things. It’s a very rare idea that’s so good it will survive hapless execution. Almost as rare are ideas so bad that they’re doomed to fail even when executed with immense skill.

The close but no stogie syndrome

The first automobiles weren’t practical forms of transportation — they were for hobbyists and tinkerers, but were in all respects inferior to the horse when you wanted to get around, even when the driver had paved roads available.

The first personal computers weren’t useful for very much, either — they were also for hobbyists and tinkerers. They needed lots of improvements before they were ready for prime time.

The take-home lesson: Many ideas that fail can, with the right refinements, become spectacular successes.

It worked once, in limited circumstances

“What do you mean, incentive pay has never worked? Companies have paid commissions since time began, and it seems to motivate the sales force pretty well.”

Yup. Commissions do motivate sales representatives — so much so that the profession has gained something of an unsavory reputation for doing anything … anything … to close a deal.

Commissions work to motivate sales professionals so long as all that matters is making a sale. As companies start to care about customer retention and long-term customer relationships, commission structures either become more complex or start to actively interfere with the company’s strategic goals.

Lots of ideas work in specific circumstances. Mathematicians haven’t invented numbers small enough to describe how many work in all circumstances. Which is why very often, the right answer isn’t to either stay with an idea or to give it up. It’s to figure out where it fits and where it doesn’t.

Flock mentality

Ever hear a flock of parrots wake up in the jungle? The way it works is that one wakes up and squawks. That wakes up some more parrots, who repeat the squawk, waking up others until they’re all squawking.

That doesn’t make the original squawk a blinding insight that must be true. You’re just hearing a bunch of parrots, repeating what each other are saying.

Sometimes, in business, all that’s happened is that someone said (or wrote) something with a lot of confidence — enough so that someone else decided to repeat it. Pretty soon, enough companies are outsourcing IT to India and manufacturing to China (with whoever is promoting the idea publishing lots of books and articles explaining how great it’s going to be) that all the rest figure they’re missing the boat and start making their own plans, too.

This is especially likely when the idea being promoted creates a pleasing narrative — a story that reinforces a decision-maker’s biases.

IT outsourcing, for example, fits right into a commonplace executive bias that IT is a pain in the neck to oversee; outsource it and it becomes Someone Else’s Problem. That this doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny at all doesn’t matter, because very few people scrutinize ideas that fit into narratives that please them.

The best part of this is that when whatever-it-is doesn’t work the problem has to be with the execution. All the CEO has to do is fire someone (sorry, “hold someone accountable”) and the board of directors will be happy as can be.

Now comes the hard part: Everything you just read is about you. And me. It’s about them, too, but they don’t matter. You and I are completely vulnerable to all of the above. Which leads to this uncomfortable question:

What are you going to do about it?

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