Comments on: Cognitively complex? Or emotionally difficult? The germ of an idea.

By: When Common Sense is a Startling Revelation « Egghead Marketing

When Common Sense is a Startling Revelation « Egghead Marketing — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:28:43 +0000

[...] know these principles? And why aren’t our businesses built to practice them? Do we lack knowledge of the right thing to do? Or do we simply lack the courage and empowerment to do the right thing? [...]

By: Tim Walker

Tim Walker — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:33:34 +0000

Nan — Yes, yes, YES.

Keep it simple. Try out new things. When they don’t work, fix them, improve them, learn from them. And keep moving forward. DON’T get bogged down in trying to be perfect or faultless or brilliant or, above all, prescient.

Very often, with the very best ideas, you WON’T know until you try. So, go try. And if you’re a manager or company leader, make sure your people have room — and organizational safety — to go try.

By: nan

nan — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:22:51 +0000

I think one of the challenges is the common misinterpretation of accountability as “blame”. In an environment where making a mistake or trying something new and failing is seen as something “punishable”, people will continue to hide their mistakes, find someone else to blame or being afraid to try anything new. This includes creating the illusion of intellectual complexity so “no one can blame you that it failed- look how complex and hard it was”.

The smartest lesson I was ever handed is that while successes feel great and are wonderful achievements, you do not learn anything from them. You only really learn from failure.
When we get to a point that corporate cultures are willing to allow people to fail, and to assist them in learning from that failure, then people will stop being so afraid and creating lots of complexity to hide that failure.

By: Marilyn Pratt

Marilyn Pratt — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:44:41 +0000

Interesting how quickly the cognitive complexity vs. emotionally difficult conversation you’ve triggered has moved to one about accountability and transparency.
Being able to say “my bad” takes adultness and it is usually an adult who can distinguish what it means to be accountable and clear. But I often have the distinct impression that under the guise of our adult personae in our daily business transactions, a four-year old self is running the show for us unbeknownst to us and quite uninvited. What I mean is our sensibilities are often informed by powerful childhood triggers that render us less than powerful in our adult dealings. Waving to and acknowledging that four year old self, setting him/her gently aside and proceeding to distinguish our emotional responses formed by our childish selves can help give us, and others the space to examine the business process improvement activity or business challenge or project implementation goals minus *some* of the childish baggage. I know it sounds overly simplistic, but when I take stock that it is the tantrum child having a fit over the deadline and not the adult, I begin to have more space to examine what is material. I can’t think well with all the noise of my screaming 4 year old self distracting me. So I often find myself saying “ok, thanks for sharing”, now let’s my 56 year old self take back control. Recognizing other 4 year olds in a room also helps to diffuse non-productive situations.

By: Tim Walker

Tim Walker — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:18:31 +0000

Amen, JohnD! What you’ve said is a great argument for sustained *clarity* and *accountability*.

In football, they have a stat called “missed assignment.” Players need this kind of feedback so they’ll *know*, “Okay, I missed that block. That’s my job. That’s why that play didn’t work.”

In actual fact, football plays are very complex as they unfold and they can still fail even though everybody does what they’re supposed to do — but knowing who had a “missed assignment” on which play is at least the *beginning* of wisdom for doing things better next time.

I think that in the working world we tend to emphasize an avoidance of mistakes rather than the pursuit of objectives. This leads to LACK of accountability and clarity, since people tend to engage in finger-pointing and other CYA activities instead of just saying, “You know what, that was my bad. I’ll have to fix that.”

By: johnd

johnd — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:34:16 +0000

Yes, I think you’re on to something. I’d add that there’s another relationship between complexity and emotional difficulty: the amount of ambient complexity creates a lot of hiding places (scapegoats) for emotional difficulty. I’m interested in thinking about how we can remove the hiding places.

For example, after a certain number of people are involved in a big project, we throw up our hands and just wait to see what will happen. But if everyone could EASILY see who’s doing what, what has to happen next, etc., we could expose the sticking points and confront them out in the open. A similar argument could be made for sunshine laws in politics.