Everyone bites the dust

a fable

Here’s Marble Inc., headquartered in Popup city at Ballon Catchers, near Rootabaga. It manufactures and sells round coloured marbles.

Check the org chart above.

It’s a small but very successful company with 2 digit YoY sales growth for the past decade.

Excellent product quality, beyond delight customer service, lean and mean streamlined operations are its edge.

Rugor is the boss and sees himself as the mighty ruler of the company, that he runs like a principality.

Bipbip is the VP of Sales & Marketing and sees himself as noble night, fighting the marble wars along with his troops. At times he also sees himself as a rainmaker.

Then there’s Opie, a plebeian, VP of Operations, Production and IT. Despite his humble lineage, he secretly knows he and his furnace keeping servants, that dwell below deck, have everyone else grabbed by the balls; they’re the ones with the hand on the plug.

Finally, there’s Harriet. She takes care of HR, accounting, legal, audit, and the boss. She’s like the clergy. Unlike her mates, she almost always sees stuff clearly, either beyond Bipbip’s Blahs (Business level abstractions of a healthy strategy)[1] or Opie’s charcoal dust but, sometimes, she also gets hit by the FLAW (Fundamental Law of Administrative Workings)[2].

Bipbip is always looking for the next big thing that will pop out of his head, with which to disrupt the marble market; the quintessential marble.

Opie, on the other hand, believes the company already produces the best marbles there are and, by continuously kaizening them, they’re getting better and cheaper to produce by the day. Bipbip can have them any colour he likes, and that would be it.

Harriet doesn’t care much about Bipbip and Opie’s dispute, she just wants the workforce to be happy and the double-entry books to even by the cent, and she dreads litigation.

And that’s about it on worldviews.

Now, we’re in the middle of one of those crises. Bipbip came up with an idea for an elliptical marble, one that will disrupt the market, and his blahs blahs already made it to Rugor, who’s also very excited about it.

Opie is not happy, to say the least, but he is serene. Neither the production line nor current IT systems can handle elliptical marbles production. Why can’t this guy be settled with round marbles, now that we even can manufacture them in any colour he likes? Opie thought to himself.

The time has come to make a decision to move forward. Bipbip’s marketing guys are all set with their whole shebang: canvas, customer journeys, advertising, you name it. Cornered, Opie pointed out that such marbles probably still lack proper user testing, namely regarding safety, and softly reminds everyone of the rugged marbles. Then he asked if anyone knew what happens if one of those elliptic marbles is swallowed by accident. Harriet jumped slightly from her chair.

The rugged marbles, a famous Bipbip flagship product that went sour because right after product launch it was discovered the highest paying customers had the oddest habit of rubbing the marbles in their buttocks. Go figure. You can guess what happened when they did that with the rugged ones. Plenty of complaints, even litigation. With all the Big Data solutions we provided you guys with, how come you didn’t know about this? Opie remembers having barked at the time, with his foot on Bipbip’s neck, figuratively.

Harriet is shaking her head now. That’s a DoA (Dead on Arrival), Opie thought. Bipbip is turning green. Rugor stepped up and said: “Let’s shelve it, at least for now. Good job Bipbip.”

Must get together with the guys in product development, and IT also, to figure out how to make and manage these things, Opie thought. There’s merit in Bipbip’s idea, after all, if only he had come to me first, instead of going straight to the boss, showing off, Opie kept thinking.

epilogue

Who actually has the power to say no?

Who are the few who can say yes?

What are the worldviews of the people involved?

What is the worldview of the core group?

What do initiatives that get undertaken have in common?

Where the decisions go to die?

These are some of the poignant questions to be asked about organizational change and decision making.[3]

I came up with this little story to illustrate my humble take on the subject.

I must say I find this depiction a fairly common situation, even pretty much benign as there’s a commonality of purpose that’s mutually recognised. They’re just like swimming on separate, parallel lanes, and as such, prone to such situations.

Besides, as in most cases, there’s plenty of slack to go around, either to try and fail or to rethink.[4]

It’s not like they only communicate through the boss, as one would infer from the org chart, but on issues related to decision making, that tends to happen most of the time, or the conversations that really count are those that go through the so-called proper channels.

In real life, such typical situations tend to be much less benign. In this fable Opie is there for Bipbip, he’d just been kept out of the loop until things got so far ahead. He wasn’t pleased with the way things turned out, so he’s taking the initiative of looking into it from a feasibility perspective so that he may have a more constructive say on the matter, without the need to plant some FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt).

Projects don’t die on Opie’s lap, he just nips them.

So, what's needed here? Some call it psychological safety, others radical transparency; it goes by many names, but the devil (pun intended) is in the details. Going through a leap of faith (another pun) in trust, lowering communication barriers, and transitioning from an internal competition mindset to a cooperative one could make it better.

Even when you think you know the right answer, the way to get at it in a group setting is always elusive - too many moving parts - and you might be wrong too. Self-awareness extreme, up to the point of OBE would also come in handy.

Well, cut the crap, state your vision, there’s no right or wrong attitude towards it, only attitudes, address them, promote dissent, avoid the consensus trap and herd behaviour, disagree and commit.

I believe we’re closer to it than we were in the past but still a bit far off, and the curse of faking it keeps setting us back.

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[1] Got this from Simon Wardley, watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlNYYy8pzB4&feature=youtu.be. You can also check his maps here: https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec or here: https://www.wardleymaps.com/.

[2] Gall, John (2002). The Systems Bible. General Systemantics Press. Walker, MN.

[3] www.altmba.com

[4] Hirschman, Albert O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England.