Decision-Making

Don’t Demonize Employees Who Raise Problems

October 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of the traps of successful leadership is being surrounded with “yes men.” Your team could hesitate to challenge your decisions, no matter how bad or mistaken they may be.

Hearing what others rally think can give you a valuable perspective. Nevertheless, it’s not really in human nature to invite others to inform you how—and why—you’re wrong. Human nature is such that we all want to hear nice things about ourselves and be reassured that we’re on the right track.

“When in doubt, keep your mouth shut,” indeed

Employees are terrified to speak up owing to the need for self-preservation. The apparent risks of speaking up are very personal and immediate, especially in comparison to some potential benefits to your organization someday. Employees impulsively play it safe.

Even if your employees are more knowledgeable, they may think twice before giving you candid feedback, especially if you’ve demonstrated tendencies of being vindictive, penalizing—even reprimanding publicly or sacking—anybody with a dissenting view.

Disciplining employees who raise problems only exacerbates the problematical frame of mind around a successful leader. It promotes the toxic culture of unquestioned power. As the American general and diplomat Colin Powell reminded in a famous speech at Sears headquarters, “The day your people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either is a failure of leadership.”

Idea for Impact: Cultivate a culture in which psychological safety thrives.

Create a work environment where your employees aren’t afraid to speak up and express their concerns. People will stick their neck out only if they sense a low psychological threat level.

Compartmentalize and Get More Done

September 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One way you can achieve “living in the moment” is by putting your emotional issues into “compartments” within your head and your heart. You can deal with those feelings on your own when you need to.

Many aspects of life can get you sidetracked and distraught. Finding a place to retreat within yourself can be challenging. By compartmentalizing, you can put your feelings where they belong, and you can earmark one challenge to tackle another challenge.

You can focus on the one task at hand and deal with the rest when appropriate.

Mental compartmentalization has a darker side, however. Psychologists identify extreme compartmentalization as a major defense mechanism by which some evade the acute anxiety that can spring from the clash of contradictory values or conflicting emotions. (A very pious scientist, for instance, could hold opposing beliefs about the Judeo-Christian and scientific notions of life’s origins. Compartmentalizing, she may live different value sets depending on whether she’s at church or her laboratory.) Some individuals also fall back on compartmentalization to cope with the lingering trauma of childhood abuse, neglect, and other emotional conflicts.

The day-to-day compartmentalization I’m talking about isn’t denial or avoidance. It isn’t evading conflicts and sidestepping problems—instead, it’s putting things out of the way for the moment and not letting them impede the rest of your life.

You can’t just ignore your issues and expect them to go away, but obsessing on them won’t help either.

Idea for Impact: Compartmentalize and get more done. Putting away the things that hurt or upset you, even if just for a short time, can also help you gain valuable perspective on dealing with them.

The Solution to a Problem Often Depends on How You State It

August 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consider a family with four drivers and one car. Being a one-car family isn’t always convenient or even pleasant. Creative solutions can’t emerge if the family asks, “How could we make the car available to everybody who needs it when they need it?” If, instead, they ask, “How can we each meet our needs without using the car?” Mom can join a carpool to work. Dad can combine his trips when he runs errands once a week. The kids can ride their bikes whenever the weather favors. If the family needs to be in two places at the same time, somebody can Uber. Coordinating can be annoying, but with a bit of flexibility and communication, getting by with one car can easily be pulled off.

Defining a problem narrowly (“How can we create a better mousetrap?”) will only get you restricted answers. When you define the issue more broadly (“How can we get rid of mice?,”) you open up a whole range of possibilities.

Idea for Impact: Revisit and redefine the problem if you can’t get through the tensions inherent in conflicting expectations. The fresh perspective can open your mind to alternative interpretations.

Many Hard Leadership Lessons in the Boeing 737 MAX Debacle

August 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The U.S. House committee’s report on Boeing’s 737 MAX disaster makes interesting reading on contemporary leadership, particularly the pressures of rapid product development.

The rush to market and a culture of contributory negligence and concealment conspired to ensure that a not-yet-airworthy plane carried passengers into service, resulting in two fatal accidents and a long grounding.

Boeing’s design and development of the 737 MAX was marred by technical design failures, a lack of transparency with both regulators and customers, and efforts to downplay or disregard concerns about the operation of the aircraft.

Of particular importance are the “management failures,” “inherent conflicts of interest,” and “grossly insufficient oversight” at both Boeing and its regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) Boeing failed to offset the design limitations and cost- and schedule-pressures in favor of attention to customer safety. Leadership was fixated on fending off the runaway success of the Airbus A320neo program.

The company relied on too many technical assumptions—and they couldn’t make themselves the space and time to be reasonable about any of this. Boeing’s “culture of concealment” and an “unwillingness to share technical details” are the report’s most damning indictment. Employees spoke but went unheard; indeed, their voices were suppressed.

Lessons from David Dao Incident: Watch Out for the Availability Bias!

August 23, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In the weeks and months after the United Airlines’David Dao incident and the ensuing customer service debacle, news of all kinds of disruptive airline incidents, coldblooded managers, and inconsiderate airline staff showed up everywhere.

The United incident raised everyone’s awareness of airline incidents. Expectedly, the media started drawing attention to all sorts of airline incidents—fights on airplanes, confusion and airports, seats taken from small children, insects in inflight meals, snakes on the plane—affecting every airline, large and small. However, such unpleasant incidents rarely happen, with thousands of flights every day experiencing nothing of the sort.

Parenthetically, the underlying problem that led to the David Dao incident wasn’t unique to United. The incident could have happened at other airlines. All airlines had similar policies regarding involuntary-denied boarding and prioritizing crew repositioning. Every other airline, I’m sure, felt lucky the David Dao incident didn’t happen on their airline.

In the aftermath of the incident, many people vowed to boycott United. Little by little, that negative consumer sentiment faded away while the backlash—and media coverage—over the incident diminished.

Availability bias occurs when we make decisions based on easy or incomplete ideas.

The David Dao incident’s media coverage is an archetypal case of the Availability Bias (or Availability Heuristic) in force. Humans are inclined to disproportionately assess how likely something will happen by how easy it is to summon up comparable–and recent–examples. Moreover, examples that carry a fierce emotional weight tend to come to mind quickly.

The availability heuristic warps our perception of real risks. Therefore, if we’re assessing whether something is likely to happen and a similar event has occurred recently, we’re much more liable to expect the future possibility to occur.

What we remember is shaped by many things, including our beliefs, emotions, and things like intensity and frequency of exposure, particularly in mass media. When rare events occur, as was the case with the David Dao incident, they become evident. Suppose you’re in a car accident involving a Chevy, you are likely to rate the odds of getting into another car accident in a Chevy much higher than base rates would suggest.

If you are aware of the availability bias and begin to look for it, you will be surprised how often it shows up in all kinds of situations. As with many other biases, we can’t remove this natural tendency. Still, we can let our rational minds account for this bias in making better decisions by being aware of the availability bias.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be disproportionately swayed by what you remember. Don’t underestimate or overestimate a risk or choosing to focus on the wrong risks. Don’t overreact to the recent facts.

If You’re Looking for Bad Luck, You’ll Soon Find It

August 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consider a woman who complained that her neighborhood dry cleaner ruined her expensive slacks. “Last month, he spoiled my wool blazer. Last Christmas, he … . It always happens,” she grumbled.

This woman knew she was taking chances with this dry cleaner. She allowed it to happen.

Luck is sometimes the result of taking appropriate action. And, bad luck is sometimes the result of tempting fate.

Say, you’ve been planning for weeks for your next big trip. You got an incredible deal on the day’s very last flight to your destination. On the day of departure, your late-night flight gets canceled. Sure, you’re a victim of back luck—but you invited it. Think about it. Odds are, you’re more likely to have a flight delay or cancellation later in the day because airlines schedule their rosters tightly to maximize aircraft and flight crew utilization. Delays and disruptions from earlier in the day propagate onward to the late flights.

Often, luck has nothing to do with bad luck. “The fault,” as Shakespeare wrote, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. Don’t self-sabotage yourself by tempting fate.

Idea for Impact: Bad choices beget bad luck

You have to be lucky to get lucky. You have no control over many outcomes in life, but you can always increase the odds of getting lucky by taking appropriate action. More importantly, you can minimize the chance of bad luck by decreasing its odds.

Remember, a good mathematics student never buys a lottery ticket, and if he does, he never grumbles about not winning the jackpot!

Best/Worst Analysis: A Mental Model for Risk Aversion

August 2, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Dr. Ben Carson, who was part of the Trump Cabinet, established his reputation as a groundbreaking neurosurgeon in the Johns Hopkins medical system. In Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk (2009,) Carson reflects on fear, hesitation, and facing the risks he took for himself and his patients:

You don’t go into a field that requires cracking people’s heads open or operating on something as delicate as the spinal cord unless you are comfortable with taking risks.

Every day I make critical, split-second decisions that affect the longevity and the quality of other people’s lives. Taking such risks gives me pause. It forces me to think about my own life and the risks I face. Those experiences enable me to move forward and avoid becoming paralyzed by fear. As a result, I probably do a lot of things that more cautious people would never attempt.

Next time you’re fretting over how to proceed in a dicey situation, Carson suggests using a mental model he calls the ‘Best/Worst Risk Analysis.’

Putting on the optimist/pessimist hats and imagining the best-case/worst-case scenarios, ask yourself these questions:

What’s the best thing that can happen if I do it?
What’s the worst thing that can happen if I do it?
What’s the best thing that can happen if I don’t do it?
What’s the worst that can happen if I don’t do it?

It’s a variation of Ben Franklin’s humble “pro et contra” (“for and against”) system for decision-making.

Research has shown that this Best/Worst Risk Analysis mental model promotes shared decision-making. In the surgical environment, it helps surgeons organize challenging treatment dialogs to support patients and their families. This mental model helps surgeons communicate by turning the refocus of decision-making conversations from a surgical problem’s uncertainties to discussing treatment alternatives and potential outcomes.

More Data Isn’t Always Better

July 23, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The hype around so-called ‘big data’ seems to have convinced many that unless the data and analytics are ‘big,’ they won’t have a big impact.

In reality, though, your organization can generate tons of value from the prudent use of smallish data.

Furthermore, you just don’t need big data tools such as Hadoop to solve every data analytics challenge you’ll face. In many cases, humble Microsoft Excel is all you’ll want.

More Data Isn't Always Better - Big Data. Often the missing gap isn’t in big data technologies but in data science skills. The rapid rise in your ability to collect data needs to be seconded by your ability to support, manage, filter, and interpret the data.

Idea for Impact: With data, more isn’t necessarily better. Small data can still have a significant impact. Rather than collecting data for the sake of it, identify why you need data and then go get the most meaningful data that can answer the questions you have.

Focus not on whether the data is small or big but on the problem you’re trying to solve.

More from Less // Book Summary of Richard Koch’s ’80/20 Principle’

May 10, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) recorded a “maldistribution” between causes and effects in economic statistics. It’s an observable fact that a minority of reasons—nominally around 20%—tends to produce a majority—80%—of the results.

Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

More than a century later, the Romanian-American quality control pioneer Joseph Juran (1904–2008) embraced Pareto’s notion and demonstrated that 80% of all manufacturing quality defects are caused by 20% of reasons. Juran urged managers to identify and address the “vital few” or the “critical few “—the small fraction of elements that account for this disproportionally large fraction of the effect.

This Pareto Law, 80/20 Rule of Thumb, Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort, Juran’s Law of the Vital Few, 80-20 Thinking—call it what you want—permeates every aspect of business and life. Now that you know about it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

A fifth of your customers accounts for four-fifths of your sales. 20% of your employees are responsible for the majority of your firm’s productivity. 20% of your stocks will be responsible for 80% of your future gains. You tend to favor 20% of your clothes and wear them 80% of the time. You spend 80% of your socializing time with 20% of your friends. 20% of the decisions you’ve made during your life have shaped 80% of your current life. 80 percent of the wealth tends to be concentrated with 20 percent of the families.

The Pareto principle is a state of nature (the way things happen) and a process (a way of thinking about problems.) The 20% are the sources of the most significant potential impact.

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less (1999) elaborates on using this seminal prioritization principle. “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. … The winners in any field have … found ways to make 20% of effort yield 80% of results.”

Koch explains ad nauseam that most of us work much too hard and produce much less in relation to what could be produced. If trying harder hasn’t worked, perhaps it’s time to try less.

Invest your time and effort more wisely. Don’t address the less significant elements. “Most things always appear more important than the few things that are actually more important.” Examine what you do of low value. In other words, eliminate or reduce the 80% of efforts that produce less-significant results.
Know when to stop. Once you’ve solved the 20% of the issue to deliver 80% of the impact, any further effort can only achieve diminishing returns.

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

Recommendation: Speed-read Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle. It’s an excellent reminder that not all effort is equal, so it pays to focus on what matters most.

Embrace the “80-20” frame of mind in everything you do—at work and home. Unless you want to spend every waking hour working, it’s essential to learn how to focus your efforts on the most promising, impactful aspects of what needs to be done.

Realize that few things really matter in life, but they count a tremendous amount. These vital things may be challenging to discover and realize, but once you find these things that really matter, they give you immense power—the power that gives you more from less. Spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy making sure these decisions are made well, and you put yourself in the best position you can in the process.
If you want to improve your effectiveness at anything, focus only on what matters most. Be extraordinarily selective—spend time resourcefully on the few essentials that matter the most and little or no time on the massive trivia that engulfs most of your time.

Don’t Ruminate Endlessly

May 6, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Say you’re in the market for a laptop but just can’t bring yourself to pick out the right model. You’ve spent countless hours comparing different models, visiting various websites, reading reviews, exploring stores, and researching all the available features, even though you’re unlikely to use most of them. Draining indeed!

Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Choice may be a great “problem” to have. Books such as Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice (2004) and Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing (2011) have exposed how increased choice may be bad for you.

Sometimes, the only thing worse than never having a choice is always having to choose.

Overthinking can trip you up. You can get confused when you have too much information or overthink about what you should be doing. Behavioral scientists such as Schwartz and Iyengar call this phenomenon “choice paralysis.”

Combat your indecisive nature by limiting your search, say, by establishing a cut-off time. Tell yourself that you’ll look around for two hours and then you’ll buy the best laptop you’ve come across in that time.

Use opportunity cost as a filter. Don’t poke around the internet for a better deal on an airfare or follow an eBay auction if you’re saving less than, say, $15 per hour spent deal-hunting.

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

Overthinking everything can make everyday life a challenge. Unnecessary analysis costs time and money and causes psychological wear.

The benefits of forgoing further rumination and acting on available information often offset the from needing to do everything perfectly.

Choosing when to choose is important. Rethink which choices in your life really matter and focus your time and effort there. Life is all about values and priorities.
In decision-making, simple beats complex. Reject complexity and accept that you’ll be sure that you’ve made the right choice. Make a decision, and then change course if it ends up being horribly wrong. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has written in his 2016 letter to shareholders, “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think.”

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Decision-Making

“When in doubt, keep your mouth shut,” indeed

Idea for Impact: Cultivate a culture in which psychological safety thrives.

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Availability bias occurs when we make decisions based on easy or incomplete ideas.

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Idea for Impact: Bad choices beget bad luck

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Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

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Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

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