The curious corporate affair with admiring the problem

Organizations are using a lot of airtime on the things that don’t work, or are wrong, or they are poor at. It comes naturally. Problems come with their statements: ′Our leaders don’t listen′, ′our employees are lazy′, ′departments are not communicating′. It’s a colossal Diagnostic Machine. Daily organizational life lives on diagnosis. The company is then conceived as a machinery of solving problems, as opposed to building futures. But, of course, a good diagnosis comes first.

The company is conceived as a machinery of solving problems, as opposed to building futures.

People get very defensive when this diagnosis obsession is pointed out, and soon the idea of a serious alternative is dismissed.? How could we not address these things, trying to solve the problems? Are you suggesting we ignore them? We don’t look at what is going on? Hard to argue.

No, but I suggest that if you spend your life visiting Radiologists, you’ll have no time to visit the doctor for the prescription.

Corporate Radiologists (Big Consulting has battalions) are in abundance.?

For every minute that we actually do something, there are ten we are play ping pong with each other on diagnostic statements. Airtime is consumed with talking about the diagnosis, as opposed to doing something (in testing mode perhaps).

We often see an excruciating ping pong to exhibit cleverness (not that hard actually), sometimes in the form of ‘verdicts’: ‘Sales are inefficient’, ‘Marketing is slow’, ‘R&D is not productive’, ‘our processes suck’. ?The Radiologists again.

If you spend your life visiting Radiologists, you’ll have no time to visit the doctor for the prescription.

Incidentally, we also have the variant that I call the ?‘We Have To division’. People there always contribute with: we should do, we could look into, we have to do, we have to recognise, we need to understand, we need to look at.

Not arguing against diagnosis but they come on constant reiterations and versions of the same. At some point we need to exit the Radiology Department, but staying there seems to be extreme cosy, and doesn’t cost a lot. It’s quite clean.

Action is dirty.

A qualifier for this: I am not suggesting jumping into action with no reflection. Far from it. In his magnificent book ‘How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration’, Bent Flyvbjerg suggests the formula ‘Think slow, act fast’, as opposed to ‘Think fast, act slow’. But the ‘think slow’ that he proposes (with Pixar as an example’) is real thinking and exploration, not the diagnostic ping pong in our organizations.

‘Think slow, act fast’, but the ‘think slow’ that Flyvbjerg proposes is real thinking and exploration, not the diagnostic ping pong in our organizations.

We seem to have adopted a kind of ‘act fast because looks cool and also think fast because it looks clever’. The alterative to that seems to be ‘admire and rejoice’.

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