ARE STORIES BETTER THAN TRUTH?

*The power of a good story.

We all like a good story. But what if the story is more convincing than the facts? What if, even knowing that the facts suggest otherwise, we still find it easier to believe the story? It seems implausible.

A campaigner who tried to prosecute Boris Johnson over his claim that the UK sends £350 million a week to the EU has lost a bid to take the fight to the Supreme Court. The judge previously said the ‘problem of false statements in the course of political campaigning is not new’ but, she added, there are already laws in place to deal with political statements that cross the threshold into ‘illegal practice.’

In his book WTF? by Robert Peston, it is noted that the £350 million Brexit Bus fallacy was in fact the single most persuasive story. More powerful then even the Cambridge Analytics style manipulation of social media. This story was simple, plausible, memorable, believed..... and untrue.

Goebbels said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

We may readily accept that the above is all true, there is plenty of history, science and evidence to show this and many more expert people than me have said it. So what?

*The implications for business and strategy.

The power of a good narrative is unquestionable and its persuasive force unstoppable. Business Leaders do well to follow this and the concept of authenticity and trust is substantially based on character and we all like a story with interesting characters.

Stories with the hero, victim and villain are simple to follow and understand. Stories of good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers, are great at galvanising teams into action and unifying them against a common foe, shared concern, or mutual interest.

So business and strategy based on the customer story, the employee experience, the supplier journey and their scrapes and escapades, explanations and justifications are all likely to be more easily believed than boring data.

As an example Tom Peter's book In Search of Excellence told a great story of excellence and success. It was really convincing. A best seller.

Within 2 years after publication it was apparent, to certain analysts, that the book's choice of companies was poor to indifferent. Rick Chapman titled his book on high-tech marketing fiascoes, In Search of Stupidity, as a nod to Peters's book and the disasters that befell many of the companies it profiled.

*The need for a reality check

Like the boy who saw the emperor had no clothes we also need to be cautious of stories without substance: It is important to avoid the rhetoric so many leaders rely upon to put on a good show and sound great.

Trust, but verify is a Russian proverb. The phrase became internationally when used by President Ronald Reagan on several occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament.

So whilst narrative is a powerful tool we need to be much more savvy and hard working with our analytical and critical thinking.


FEEDBACK

I am interested in your thoughts and experiences. Maybe you agree. Maybe you do not. Maybe you can recommend some other books, blogs or videos. Do not hesitate to get in touch, and if you are in Jersey I will happily buy you a coffee if you would like to talk about your experience.

LINKS

https://metro.co.uk/2019/08/14/campaigner-loses-bid-take-350-million-brexit-bus-claim-supreme-court-10571302/?ito=cbshare


RELATED READING

WTF? by Robert Peston
Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot

AUTHOR

@TimHJRogers +447797762051
https://www.linkedin.com/in/timhjrogers/
http://www.timhjrogers.com
MBA (Management Consulting) Projects & Change Practitioner,
TEDx & Jersey Policy Forum, Public Accounts Committee,

HASHTAG
#STORY #STRATEGY #LEADERSHIP

SHOULD WE ABANDON IT REQUIREMENTS AND FOCUS ON CURRENT NEEDS

The problem with REQUIREMENTS is that they represent what we think might be useful some time in the future and are written in anticipation of needs rather than on the basis of lived experience.

When we add up all those REQUIREMENTS the project becomes large, costly and time consuming. Inevitably delivery (which may take years) often reveals that what we thought we wanted and what we actually need are different.

Maybe we anticipated wrong, or maybe circumstances changed, or maybe new better ideas emerged. 

The solution is to ADD to the project scope, cost and time with CHANGES.

CHANGE is not a bad thing. It is learning. There is no point in slavishly delivering the original requirements if they are out-of-date or not fit-for-purpose.

The problem however is that it often takes until the project is almost finished to actually see the gap between what we thought we wanted and what we actually need.

Perhaps a better way is to abandon the long wish list of REQUIREMENTS and focus on CURRENT NEEDS and just deliver those. One at a time, not as part of a long project (a marathon), but as part of short experiment (a sprint).

The advantage is that the accumulation of sprints may well deliver a marathon outcome, but each and every effort is short, focused and flexible to a change in direction, change of tools or change of approach.

This is not new to anyone familiar with Agile, LEAN or DevOps. But how do we persuade the Board or the Exec Team that abandoning their marathon goal, significant time-table and huge budget is a good idea. How do we stop huge, expensive, Digital Transformations in favour of building an Enterprise Asset of incremental improvements in people, process and technology.

Perhaps the answer lies outside the IT Team. Sales and Marketing for example do something every day that advances the cause of the organisation. And it does this as a revenue cost. Sometimes campaigns will be successful. Sometimes not. But all the experience is learning and none is so large that it puts the organisation at risk.

What if we run IT like Sales and Marketing?

What if IT improvements were like short campaigns with incremental improvements to people, process and technology which could be measured in reduced costs or increased revenues at the end of each campaign.

FEEDBACK

I am interested in your thoughts and experiences. Maybe you agree. Maybe you do not. Maybe you can recommend some other books, blogs or videos. Do not hesitate to get in touch, and if you are in Jersey I will happily buy you a coffee if you would like to talk about your experience.

RELATED READING

War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age By: Mark Schwartz
A Seat at the Table IT Leadership in the Age of Agility By: Mark Schwartz
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence Through Leadership Development
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Critical Chain: Project Management and the Theory of Constraints
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win 5th


AUTHOR

@TimHJRogers +447797762051
https://www.linkedin.com/in/timhjrogers/
http://www.timhjrogers.com
MBA (Management Consulting) Projects & Change Practitioner,
TEDx & Jersey Policy Forum, Public Accounts Committee,

CULTURE OR DATA – WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT?

CULTURE OR DATA – WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT?

In a previous posting I noted that the book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable the author argues that data is better than narrative. This is because we can always create a story to account for the data but in fact the explanation may not be correct. We are better accepting the data than explaining it because the explanation smooths over the rough edges and exceptions which may turn out to be really important.

I also noted that we are overly influenced by people, characters and charisma because of a bias toward trust which Malcolm Gladwell notes may expose us to risk, but perhaps is a necessary price for a workable society.

The Black Swan concludes that we should not predict but prepare.

The book A Seat at the Table argues that Chief Information Officers CIO should abandon the old [1] command and control,[2] customer service and [3] waterfall approaches to technology delivery which [a] create well intended but unhelpful barriers and boundaries, [b] focus on technology being a servant of the business rather than a leader or enabler and [c] focus too heavily on projects which plan too far ahead and inevitably fail to hit the moving target of business needs.

Here too the emphasis appears to be on ditching the adherence to plans which seek to predict and slavish commitment to requirements that are ill defined, out of date and short on vision. Instead we should be more agile and prepared to embrace small, frequent rapid and incremental change in the face of uncertainty.

It is great when theories align and compliment each-other because it gives confidence that they might be right.

The old Mission and Command and Control of 1950’s is as dead as Central Moscow planning and yet Business Planning and IT Strategies still feel obliged to talk with the certainties that offer exact budgets, delivery dates and outputs somehow ignoring that the objective is not spend but value, not a delivery date but a capability, not an output but an outcome.

A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz pretty much turns IT on its head and is a compelling read, especially if you believe in LEAN, Agile and perhaps have read either The Goal, or The Phoenix Project, or if you are really serious about IT and business transformation all of these!

However…..at this point the tide appears to turn.

As soon as we abandon foolish and optimistic plans and embrace uncertainty with experimentation we move from the concept of Intelligent Design to Evolution and the latter seems more about connections, randomness, culture and back to being about circumstances and character than precision or data.

In the book A Seat at the Table it is noted that code paring, working together, sometimes literally with one programmer at the shoulder of another, instead of doubling the cost of delivery will reduce errors and increase productivity by 30%.

In the book The Culture Code it is noted that putting a difficult, lazy or negative person in a four person team will cause the whole team to under-perform by 30%. But that having someone enthusiastic and collegiate brings trust and social cohesion that can reverse the effect. This is not about the person being inspirational or a great leader. To have an effect the positive person only has to smile and listen. This is about social and emotional safety bringing trust that Malcolm Gladwell notes as being essential for a workable society.

So maybe data is great for history, markets, economies and government but culture and connection is vital for the sub-structures of people, process and technology that underpin these.

Gladwell in his boot Outliers notes the importance of connectors and connections to be the catalyst of change and notes both the Dunbar Number (that most people can only really maintain about 150 relationships ) and those rare Outliers who like the six Degrees of Kevin Bacon seem to be able to be both a super connector and use that to be a catalyst for community and change.

These communities for change whether Open Source evangelists or part of an Arab Spring seem to defy data and achieve the impossible though connection and cohesion, pairing and splitting, evolving and learning.

The company Valve literally put wheels on desks and abandon hierarchy to allow people to move to the projects and people they most believe in. In the book A Seat at the Table, reference is made to the Allen Curve suggesting that connection, communication and potentially culture breaks when you are more than 8 meters away from your colleagues.

Let’s bring all this together and consider the implications.

It appears good to measure data because explanation is generally self-serving. One can often seek to offer an explanation that is more comforting than correct. This can result in group-think, error and wilful blindness. (I recommend Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious by Margaret Heffernan)

Put more simply: It is good to measure data to really see with evidence the position or the situation at hand, rather than allowing people justify the situation to their liking.

However working in groups appears essential to getting anything done. There is more allegiance and cohesion to a colleague or partner than a plan. Anyone training for a marathon knows your training buddy is more likely to get you out on a cold and windy night than the schedule pinned to the fridge.

It should be noted that well aligned teams very often outperform more skilled teams who do not work together well.

Increasingly we need to give-up the 5 year plan and focus on 5 weekly improvement and that requires a combination of character, connection, colleagues and culture, but also some impartial, objective, challenging and possibly confusing data.

Long term plans can be a waste of time, but we have to have clear objectives in mind from which we develop potential paths for achieving them. Remember The Black Swan concludes that we should not predict but prepare.

We need to embrace uncertainty and rather than trot out a revised Gantt chart or updated budget accept that we are not there to serve solutions to an expectant CEO or demanding customer but instead become a trusted partner who delivers benefit by intelligent experimentation, feedback, learning and growth.

Perhaps we should not be measured by delivery on-time, on-budget, to-specification but instead by rapid response, adding value and delivering outcomes, whilst all the time learning and improving at all these things through dynamic teams rather than static department.

Ultimately, if a department or individuals do not add business value they become waste.


FEEDBACK

I am interested in your thoughts and experiences. Maybe you agree. Maybe you do not. Maybe you can recommend some other books, blogs or videos. Do not hesitate to get in touch, and if you are in Jersey I will happily buy you a coffee if you would like to talk about your experience.

BOOKS

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
A Seat at the Table: It Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox, et al.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about It, Devops, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious by Margaret Heffernan

LINKS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_curve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink


AUTHOR

@TimHJRogers +447797762051
https://www.linkedin.com/in/timhjrogers/
http://www.timhjrogers.com
MBA (Management Consulting) Projects & Change Practitioner,
TEDx & Jersey Policy Forum, Public Accounts Committee,

DATA IS HOW YOU MAKE DECISIONS, CULTURE IS HOW YOU DELIVER THEM
#DATA #DECISIONS #BOOKS #BUSINESS #CULTURE #TEAMS #CHANGE
https://timhjrogers.blogspot.com/