Working or Gaming The System?

Obtaining senior executive approval for a new project or initiative is never easy. Skilled practitioners in the art of persuasion will devote many hours honing their pitch to the preferences, biases and foibles of their intended audience. Taking their cue from the ancient Greek philosophers they will select the presenter with the status or authority to make the pitch (ethos), ensure the argument is logical and easily understood (logos) and craft the message so the need for action is compelling and urgent (pathos).

In large organisations you will find executives who position themselves in roles as the power-whisperers, acting as intermediaries because they 'know how to pitch to Bob' or claim that 'Alice wants new proposals to come through me'.

This tailoring of the message is a natural part of effective human communication. Knowing the background and skillset of your intended audience enables your pitch to be effective and more efficient. It's easier for all concerned if the language used is familiar and concepts introduced in a way that the recipient can readily relate to. However sometimes this careful message shaping can spill over from optimising how the facts are presented to manipulating or even altering the facts to fit the audience.

Common examples of this behaviour include unjustified precision where costs or timeframes are quoted to an unwarranted level of exactness because it's known that the decision maker is of the view that round-value estimates are an indicator of a lack of proper planning. Presenters have also been known to deliberately introduce inconsequential mistakes at prominent points in a proposal so that senior reviewers 'have something to find' to justify their position. For executives who are known to judge quality by the weight of the document, or the number of slides (perceived as an indicator of rigour in the absence of expertise), additional material is added to pad out the pitch even though its unlikely to be read.

These subtle techniques might be thought harmless, and some might argue the end justifies the means. However when this adjustment process becomes a more consequential misrepresentation of how conclusions were arrived at, or recommendations derived, then this manipulation becomes more serious. One common example is the invention, or manipulation, of a product, or vendor, scoring matrix to produce a winner that was already predetermined by other means, encouraging a misplaced confidence in a structured assessment process. Another more serious adjustment is to omit contrary viewpoints to give the appearance of consensus, or seek to deny those with a different perspective the opportunity to present their view. Hierarchical grade-based organisations can easily fall foul of this trap as expert voices with contrary opinions are excluded from the critical meeting, not because they don't have useful expertise to contribute, but simply because they aren't sufficiently managerially senior.

For those of us in decision making positions we have a duty to be open and transparent about how best we absorb information (I like diagrams, for example) and that we actively want to hear both sides of the story from the experts to make an informed judgement. For those making a pitch there is a responsibility to tailor the message to the audience but not to step over the line into misrepresenting the facts.

(Views in this article are my own)