By Stephen Balzac
Oct. 7, 2010
My first jujitsu sensei liked to frequently remind us that if you wanted to go from San Francisco to LA, you didn’t go by way of Portland, Oregon. Naturally, the wise-guys in the class, which included me, would make cracks about the airline schedules. I don’t know if there actually were flights that went from San Francisco to LA via Portland, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest!
Of course, the point my sensei was trying to make was that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. While this is certainly true in normal mathematics, fans of “A Wrinkle in Time,” might recall that a tesseract is the shortest distance between two points. While traveling via tesseract is purely science fiction, the fact remains that sometimes the direct route, that is, the straight line, is not the most rapid means of getting to your destination. Sometimes, you’re better off with a metaphorical tesseract. This is true in business and, as it happens, also in jujitsu (although that’s a separate topic). As a case in point, let’s look at the increasingly popular Results Oriented Work Environments (ROWE).
On the surface, the concept of a ROWE makes a great deal of sense. If you only focus on results and let employees figure out how best to get there, the theory is that you should increase productivity and employee happiness. There’s only one problem: the more you focus exclusively on results, the less likely you actually are to obtain those results.
“What?!” I hear you cry. “How can focusing on results possibly mean that we won’t obtain those results?”
I’m glad you asked.
I used to be a competitive fencer. There’s a phenomenon that happens in sports: athletes who focus on winning, that is to say, the results, demonstrate several interesting characteristics: they are less likely to develop a wide repertoire of strategies, they start avoiding challenges, losses lead to justification not improvement, and they are more likely to burn out and abandon their sport.
Athletes who focus less on winning and focus more on strategy and skill development tend to be more creative, develop more imaginative and effective strategies, seek constantly increasing challenges, and are considerably more motivated and less likely to experience burnout than their victory minded colleagues.
The process focused athletes also win more, and they tend to win more difficult competitions.
The same thing happens in a business environment. This is likely to be surprising only if you didn’t realize that athletes and business people are both human.
In businesses that focus exclusively on results, several things happen: motivation, creativity and innovation all decrease. The business focuses more and more on “safe” strategies, not necessarily the best strategies. Experimentation declines, though, making it hard to develop other strategies. Relying on a few, time-tested, strategies can work just fine for a while, but when the competitive landscape changes, the business can be caught completely flat-footed. When that happens, suddenly the efforts of the employees go into demonstrating that they accomplished their results, so someone else must be to blame for things going south.
This blame mentality further cripples problem solving and innovation. Rather than trying to fix the problem, they make it worse. This is much like our victory focused athlete, who responds to defeat by seeking easier competitions and fires any coach who doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear.
On the other hand, our more process focused athletes view defeat in a very different way. Defeat is simply a data point, albeit sometimes a painful one. It tells the athlete that something didn’t work out as expected: the question is what? The athlete sits down with her coach and figures it out: was the strategy inherently flawed? Was the strategy correct, but executed improperly? Was the training or physical conditioning insufficient? Did the opponent develop an effective counter-strategy that she didn’t recognize in time? By going through this process of analysis, experimentation, revision and testing, the athlete is made stronger by defeat instead of weaker.
When a business views results as a form of feedback on its processes for getting things done, it experiences a cycle similar to that of the second athlete. A defeat is no longer about success or failure, but a data point: what went wrong and how can it be avoided in the future? What happened to cause that particular result to occur at that particular time? Rather than struggling to avoid blame for failing to produce a result, employees are presented with the opportunity to engage in creative problem solving. The business becomes stronger, more nimble and more able to adjust to unexpected market conditions or a surprise move from a competitor.
That focus on strategy, skills and process is your tesseract. It really is the shortest way to accomplishing results.
Stephen Balzac is a consultant and professional speaker. He is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses to increase revenue and build their client base. Steve is a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play,” and the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” due out from McGraw-Hill in Fall 2010. Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.