Mindful visits to the death valley of excuses and explanations

In my last article (”In the garden of ideas”), I talked about the garden of ideas and described how to make your journey through this garden productive. In this article, I will discuss another, darker place that is unfortunately easy to reach from the garden of ideas: the dead valley of excuses and explanations. Sorry, this will be a dark post today. In a great many posts, feeds, articles, books and in all management literature, it is repeatedly pointed out that one should not dwell on excuses and explanations. One should look for solutions. The explanation seems obvious because in most cases the past is about the past, cannot be changed and I lose energy in order to shape the here and now and the future. But here we have a contradiction. How can learning take place if I don't look at the past? How can I find improvement? If I don't look at what I did wrong in the past? Don't I run the risk that if I only look for solutions, I am doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again because learning doesn't take place?

Two short anecdotes to illustrate the field of tension: When I was young, I tried to develop an algorithm to analyze X-ray images. Again and again, I searched for explanations, solutions, why it didn't work. My boss and colleagues must have suffered a lot, because all wheels came to a halt when the stupid code wanted it and the complicated explanations about Bayesian probabilities, false alarm and detection rates and the parameterization of feature extraction filters – helped me more than my colleagues. Fortunately, the end wasn't that far, I found a solution.

Another time, I was a member of an innovation team. We were supposed to develop a new product and a new business model. But we didn't make any progress. Every time we sat down together, we started telling each other why the project didn't make sense. Why we had no way of finding a suitable business model. Why this! Why that! Twice a week for two hours and everyone was frustrated in the end. It happened as it had to. At some point, a manager was standing in our meeting and told us - first of all, he clarified with us - that we should stop collecting excuses and explanations and just get started. He left the room and we remained in the valley of excuses and explanations and collected mountains of new explanations and new excuses for another month.

Both stories are similar and yet somehow different. In one case, the search for explanation (and excuse?) was productive and in the other case it was deadly. So there seem to be topics where the search for explanations is good and things where the search for explanations only wastes energy. We have to realize that both incidents draw on the same source of strength that we have as humans: namely, we can absorb information. We can structure it and we can derive things from it. That's how we are wired, and scientists, engineers and developers are wired that way too. We have practiced this skill over years.

But in the world of technology and science, this technique is used to find a generally valid explanation. I analyze time series, measurements, and experiments to derive a behavior that I can use to improve future events. The search for explanation and excuse is an important element here (the term excuse is perhaps inappropriate in the case of a non-functioning algorithm, because an algorithm cannot have “guilt” and if it had this “guilt”, then no one can take it away from it. You can only “fix” it).

In my opinion, the problem arises when I make explanations and analyses without dealing constructively with these insights. We could have acted differently in our project group. We could have made a large whiteboard and written down all the things that occurred to us on the wall and said, “these are all reasons why this project won't work.” And then in the second step, we could have added: “These are the mechanisms that, in our view, prevent it from working.” And then in the last step, we would only have had to ask ourselves: ‘Which of these obstacles can we bypass, destroy or resolve, tackle or ignore?’ And from this analysis, we could have gained strength, energy and clarity. And this is precisely where we come to the crucial point. Active engagement is crucial and if you or your colleagues or myself are in a constant state of making excuses, if we have simply lost ourselves in the depths of the valley of excuses, then this is often just a sign that we have not understood the problem or the mechanisms involved, or do not yet want to tackle them.

In such situations, it is of little help if someone stands at the entrance to the valley and says, “Hey guys, get out of the valley! I want you to look ahead and work creatively.” No, in such situations, you need guidance out of the valley. Alone, through third parties, whatever. The beautiful and at the same time dangerous thing is that the valley of excuses has many entrances to the garden of ideas. We can use them to collect new excuses and reasons (as the project group did back then). But we can also use them to find a solution (as I did with the algorithms). The paths are branched and sometimes a bit thorny. But the sweetest fruits are only for those who stretch.

Here are my personal recommendations: Instead of unconsciously going into the valley, consciously go into it. Be attentive and gather all the information you can get. Always take a compass with you and don't stay in this valley for too long. When you're out again, use the strength and techniques you've learned and refined over the years, analyze, interpret, structure, always focused on the future. Communication Tip: While you are going down into the valley and while you are still looking depressed at the experiences and results, you should know that you have a communication bias. You tell too many crazy, unsorted details (which confuse everyone) or you tell dark stories with emotionally charged reports (which only upset everyone). Just say: “We are currently undertaking an intensive lessons learned in order to better understand the systemic mechanisms and to analyze which issues and disturbances are preventing us from increasing our maximum output. The data is very granular and diverse, but our team is working hard to maintain a clear view.”