The one reason initiatives fail… and what to do about it

NOTE! The views presented herein are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent my affiliations in any fashion whatsoever.

Initiatives often fail to deliver as envisioned, and the reason is the same; failed leadership. Only very rarely does the market change in dramatic and unpredictable ways, so it is as Rear Admiral William Pratt wrote in his book Leadership published in 1934;

Everything starts and ends with leadership.

You know you witness a failure when the leaders appoint staff people to lead major initiatives. Staff people are very useful, and many of them are fully able to lead whatever, but that is not the point. They do not have the position required to make the difficult choices that invariably will come. So, at the difficult crossroads they will have to obtain support from the leaders with the full accountability for profit & loss whether we talk about investments, make different operational choices, dealing with counterproductive people or basically do differently things that have some level of economic impact. This is where things often go wrong. How can leaders that do not understand a concept make the right choices concerning its implementation?  

The irony is that some of the leaders that understand the least are the most certain of their choices. We can also see this at the corporate level too. The corporations that have the best performance are most eager to improve whereas those that struggle the most are very self-assure and do definitively not want any help either. This comes down to common biases we all struggle with to various degrees. 

Yet, while this might sound strange at first, it is in fact very logic even when we ignore biases. It takes some level of knowledge to understand that we do not know. Once we have gained the understanding that we need help, then everything is relatively easy in comparison to those cases where leaders do not know and fail to understand that they do not know. Since everything starts and ends with leadership, that means that many corporations are in a situation where they cannot significantly improve because of the people at the top. Depending in the attitudes of the people at the top there are three avenues out of this.

The best way is if the people at the top get some sort of epiphany and really pursues whatever it takes to learn enough to make the right basic choices. The risk here is that they may believe that have learned enough too early. This is common about lean initiatives, for example. They have read a book, picked up some phrases at a conference or something like that and there they go… they hire a lean manager and relies on that person. A lean manager can be useful to help out with practicalities, but that person is not in the position to make the difficult choices concerning shipment quality, people, customers and so on. If leaders do not start to act differently when making these choices then they have not learned enough. 

This brings us to the next way – the way world-famous Shin-Gijutsu with Yoshiki Iwata (one of the founders) applied at Porsche (after being asked 3 times). He initially put top management to clear the shopfloor. This was not the purpose in itself, of course, but he wanted to test their commitment to make changes, and to make the tough choices that will come. Not to mention that he insisted that employees were to receive 20% of the profits gained by the initiatives. This approach relies on discipline and through discipline understanding will come – eventually. It goes with the story that Porsche had a new CEO that was positive to lean and asked (to say the least) the consultants for their help. However, he was humble enough, but also knowledgeable enough, to realize he did not understand how to do it – so he hired the best and took their advice wholeheartedly. Impressive. 

There are two types of people that really impress me – those that really know, and those that really know they do not know and take the consequences thereof. Both types are fundamentally speaking similar – they just happen to have different domains of knowledge. As Daniel J. Boorstin said;

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

This was also the way of the ancients, but unfortunately a forgotten approach in many quarters. We believe that if people are given a good explanation they will understand. This approach is based on the assumption that whatever we want to understand does not require a change before we understand it. This is, of course, not true. If we talk about truly significant initiatives, they require a change of mind/heart before they can be understood. Saul did not become Paul on the road to Damascus by himself, but through an epiphany/revelation. This is where many initiatives fail as well… top management pursues what they do not understand with means not adjusted to its success. 

The third approach is to replace management, and it is an extension of the second. This is the only workable approach if management has the fundamentally wrong attitudes – attitudes hostile to learning and discipline; it is hard to fill up a cup that is already full. However, it comes at a short-term cost… new management lacks a lot of context and requires time to get up to speed. If the new people comes into a corporation at a middle rung they may also end up becoming like the ones they were supposed to replace unless real systemic changes are made. This is because, as Deming said;

As we shall see, apparent differences between people arise almost entirely from the action of the system they work in, not from people themselves.

The system in a corporation always win. This system comprises of the financial system and the political system, in particular. The financial system tells you who are the winners and who are not, financially speaking. The other tells you how this information, and inter-relational issues, are dealt with. 

So, if a corporation wants to succeed with new initiatives, particularly those that require significant rethinking, such as lean initiatives, it must start at the top. Three approaches, relevant to the cases where the top is inadequate at handling the challenges ahead, are presented here – one relying on top management curing itself as it were, one relying on discipline following masters and the third being replacement. It is like we read about in The Book of Balance and Harmony;

Change and movement have their times; safety and danger are in oneself. Calamity and fortune, gain and loss, all starts from oneself. Therefore, those who master change are those who address themselves to the time. For those who address themselves to the time, even danger is safe; for those who master change, even disturbance is orderly.

Which of the three approaches that are most reliable is hard to say, and in good times terrible performance can be masked by sheer good fortune in the market. Thus, many corporations fail to make the necessary changes until hard time comes – also when it concerns leadership. Like another Chinese saying goes;

It is only when the cold season comes that we know the pine and cypress to be evergreens.

But making successful changes only in ‘the cold season’ is an expensive approach.  Thus, discipline is probably the most reliable approach as suggested by the ancients.  This will not only create results relatively fast, but also help separating the evergreens from the rest early on so that if top management must be replaced it should be replaced by the evergreens.