We don’t have written records, but I’m imagining that groups of cavemen made decisions around the fire in largely the same way we run sophisticated organizations today.
About a hundred years ago, three disciplines helped create the modern world:
Scientific management used a stopwatch and the assembly line to relentlessly improve the productivity of the industrial age.
Scientific advertising brought measurement and rigor to the work of creating ads and buying media.
And engineering brought physics and the scientific method to everything we build. Bridges don’t fall down, computer chips get faster and cheaper and the things we make rarely break.
But the bosses still do what they always did. They place comfort and convenience over effectiveness. If the hard-working people in any other part of the organization approached their work the way they do, it wouldn’t last.
One estimate is that the direct labor cost of time spent in meetings at a Fortune 500 company is over a quarter of a billion dollars a year. Per company.
And yet, meetings occur regularly, with no measurable outputs. Few people do the reading or prep, and many show up late or uninformed. The room isn’t designed for the purpose it’s being used for, and no one is taking notes or sending out follow-up action requests.
There’s rarely an interlocutor–a neutral moderator who asks questions, guides the conversation and leads the group to a decision. People are rarely given feedback on their meeting productivity, and aren’t encouraged to get training or improve their skills.
You’ve probably been to a thousand meetings. How many can you remember that achieved what could have happened with that much time and talent invested?
In my experience at large organizations, the physical dynamic in the room is often left to the facilities person who ran the AV cart in high school or the office supply vendor who was asked to fill a square room with furniture that would serve many purposes. That’s not how we invest in an assembly line or a semiconductor fab…
And many decisions, if implemented, remain unexamined. There’s little time or focus invested in learning from what came before, and no one is keeping track of whether the loud voices are usually right. Famous CEOs shoot from the hip, and seem to think that wrong action fast is better than thoughtfully doing the right thing tomorrow.
Corporate culture usually pushes people to avoid speaking up, to prize comfort over progress, and to support the status quo unless there’s an emergency. We either invite too many or not enough people into group decisions, and end up using superficial or extraneous information to make choices.
We reject a job applicant because they had parsley in their teeth, didn’t go to a famous college or they don’t look like us. Deniability often seems more important than progress. We use easy proxies and measures instead of the ones that really matter. And we repeat patterns that worked with the old systems, but make no sense with the new ones.
*The job of the Chief Decision Officer, then, isn’t to make decisions. It’s to create the conditions for the organization to do a better job of it. Not only at a Fortune 500 company, but at a thriving non-profit, a government agency or a small start-up.
Surgeons scrub before entering the OR. It’s hygienic, but also a ritual. It reminds them that this place is special, it has a purpose, rules and outcomes. Don’t come in if you’re not prepared to do your part.
The CDO ought to establish the same approach for the way we make decisions and take action on those decisions.
