Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about the psychology of error. It’s interesting that quite a few journalists are publishing books that amount to little more than a summary of the psychological research. A pretty good summary of the very basics are provided in Joseph Hallinan’s Why We Make Mistakes (change blindness, preference for additional layers of explanation, confirmation bias, memory distortion to reduce cognitive dissonance, framing & schemas, quite a bit more).
Yesterday, I read a book which helped me connect the dots between the psychology and the business application. The book, Simplicity, was published a decade ago advocating for a new “simpler” organizational style. By “simplicity,” they meant the practice of focusing on the important stuff and ignoring the unimportant stuff.
The premise (though unstated) was simple: people make mistakes. To reduce the number of mistakes people make, reduce the number of choices they have. Fewer choices – simplicity – leads to greater clarity, effectiveness, organizational speed, etc.
Another book I read yesterday, The Art of Woo, took a related approach. Because people are bad at making reasonable decisions – in fact, of the five factors people use to make decisions, one is “rationality” – you can, through a strategic application of psychology, persuade people.
And – much more importantly – through a failure to work with human psychology, people can fail to make good decisions. They cite a substantial number of examples of companies failing to shift in response to the market because the people advocating for the shifts simply couldn’t manage the “soft” or “non-rational” aspects – the persuasion.
The take-away is pretty simple: the more you ask people to do (particularly when what they should be doing is unclear, they don’t have enough time to understand the issues, the incentive scheme rewards a byproduct of good performance and not actual good performance, etc), the more they make mistakes.
The biggest casualties are executives, who are asked to navigate an unstructured environment, accomplish a great deal with relatively little guidance, and have a vast array of options of what to do – with little indication with is better until after the fact. Worse still, they are typically promoted or moved away before the long-term consequences of the changes they made impact the organization; making it impossible for them to really learn what works and what doesn’t. (It’s no wonder so much business knowledge seems to reduce to simplistic analogies with little indication of how applicable they are to the current situation).
The shift in my thinking is simple: the focus should not be on making the organization do more. It should be focused on making the people do less – to do a few things very well, and not get bogged down in useless details and meetings which increase the probability that people will make mistakes. The damage from someone making a serious mistake is almost certainly larger than the benefit a company could get from said person doing 10% more.
Or: how do you make the organization people-proof? How do you make it easy for people to work, easy for them to learn what is successful, give them accurate feedback, etc? How do you get people to concentrate on the really important things, and ignore the unimportant things?
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