The Devil is in the Definitions

My wife, Suzy, often tells people that most of what I do seems to be asking?people to define their terms. There is a degree of truth in this due to a hard-won lesson that has led me to argue that the devil is not in the details. Rather, ?

The Devil is in the Definitions.?

One of the ugliest episodes in my career started with an innocent enough assertion.??

“That word doesn’t mean what you think it means.” ?

The scene was a familiar one; the?weekly management meeting. The head of QA and I had just projected the first slide on our agenda?topic, “Holistic Resource Management” We?hadn’t even begun presenting before the interruption.?

“What word?” said I, wholly taken aback.?

“Holistic,” a colleague?responded.?

“You mean treating the parts as an interconnected whole?” says I.?

“That’s not what holistic means,” they replied.?

The head of our Architecture team, always the voice of reason, read off their?phone, “The Oxford dictionary says it means considering a whole thing or being to be more than a collection of parts. ”?

To our surprise this was the spark for a white-hot firestorm that started with an unfortunate tirade, the shelving of the topic, a couple of ugly follow-up meetings, several epic logical fallacies being deployed, and?difficult conversations in the CIO’s office. Even worse, this sideshow delayed the implementation of a long overdue overhaul of our resource management practices. The irony of it all was that the only thing?changed from that initial presentation and the operational practice I went on to run. The offending word was scrubbed from the deck.?

Ruthlessly Eliminate Ambiguity?

At the time this seemed pragmatic. With Epimethean hindsight,?I now see it differently. Scrubbing the word meant we never got to the root cause of the conflict. As the organizational scientist Karl Weick said, “Ambiguity allows people to maintain the perception that there is agreement when, in fact, there is not.”?

In the years since I have found that the key to driving change in organizations starts with the ruthless elimination of ambiguity. This is as important today as it has ever been. As we deal with the ongoing impact of the technological revolution in our real word organization words like Digital, Agile, Smart Cities, and more have been weaponized in the pursuit of profit. Leaders looking to make smart decisions and investments need to ensure that definitions of these words are precise and common as they embark on contracts and engagements. ?

The Downside of Definition?

It is easy to see how ambiguity can seem attractive. A recent incident led me to crack open Bolman and Deal’s Reframing Organizations yesterday. They address the question of ambiguity from an organizational angle. In their model, Politics is a natural frame to view an organization though as people compete for limited resources. They also go on to show that in the absence of a common set of well-defined Symbols, politics is seldom healthy. I have seen this lead to definitions becoming the?proverbial hill that people stand on in the organizational games. They can also trigger the next?round of political infighting, become a tool to undermine perceived competitors, and worse. For organizations that have embarked on a transformation such as Digital and Agile, this is particularly true. There is no Oxford definition that will inform the outcome, and no shortage of competing definitions to confuse the issue.?

How to Create Better Definitions out of Ambiguity?

My daughter likes to say, “When you have an idea, and I have an idea, we can put them together to create a better idea.” This is particularly true with topics where?there is no canonical definition to draw upon. We need to avoid a single person inflicting a definition for ambiguous topics like Digital on an organization, particularly if that definition excludes the perspectives of others with different or competing needs. Better definitions must be Mutually Exclusive and Comprehensively Exhaustive, or MECE, an acronym McKinsey alumnus Barbara Minto coined as shorthand for?an Aristotelean concept. The requirement is simple; the definition must embrace every aspect of the term in the concept of your organization, and do so in a way that removes overlaps ambiguity to ensure clarity. ?

If you don’t, the devil, in the form of organizational dysfunction, politics, and infighting, will be in the definitions indeed.?

What do you think??

#Leadership #Digital #Agile #Transformation