This is in response to my earlier posting, Those Who Can, in which the question was posed for determining whose way is right. What I’ve found is there is no “right” way. I don’t mean that in some existential form. I don’t mean that there is no right in the universe and that we are all cursed to a meaningless, indifferent, and unexplainable existence. Instead, I mean there is no universally “right” way. I mean that every situation has its own unique “right” way.
I learned this a number of years ago from operating a small business. I didn’t grow up as a manager. When I was forced into it to grow my company past one employee, I never could figure out why it was so difficult to get anyone to do things “right”. Eventually I realized that people weren’t doing the “right” thing because their “right” and my “right” were two different things. And it all clicked. It wasn’t that they were bad employees but rather that they had different values.
If I believed in efficiency and effectiveness and one of my employees believed in product quality, we’re going to approach the same situation in different ways. I may be willing to settle for a product that has more defects because fixing those defects would not be an efficient and effective use of resources. My employee, in the same situation, may commit significantly more resources than I would to the problem because a high quality product is the goal.
When I first realized that clashes in values were the culprit of undesirable decision making, I tried to solve it in the most obvious way: make others accept and profess my values. Well darn it, that just doesn’t work. Forcing my values on others never has a happy ending.
Values are abstract. They’re one step removed from action. Values help determine action but there is a step in the conversion process that often gets lost. Why did that employee spend three days fixing a product defect that only effects 1% of our customers? Because product quality is his number one value. This example of the conversion of values to actions is missing one key component: the objective. Values applied to an objective create action.
The objective is often left unspoken. When the objective is unspoken, the assumed objective is, “Do the right thing.” This is a trap. An objective of doing the right thing is the same as having no objective at all. It’s left up to the discretion of the individual(s) involved and the more people involved, the more objectives there will be.
“We should save the whales.”
“No, we should kill the whales to feed the children.”
Whose way is right? The problem is that there is no shared objective and so the implied objective is the finicky, “Do the right thing.” Both actions are correct with the implied objective.
A better approach is to nail down the objective first. Before talking about values, the “right” way to do things, or what “should” be done, define the common goal. This removes the implied goal of doing the right thing and allows each individual to contribute to the goal in a way that adheres to their own value system.
Nothing gets done in a group without a singular commitment to a shared objective. If you are a member of a group that is running around in circles, debating the “right” way to do things, you can help everyone involved by becoming the champion for defining the goal.
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My thoughts on this subject derive primarily from the article Managing for Breakthroughs in Productivity (cached version) by Allan Scherr which states that creating an environment conducive for innovation requires only two ingredients: 1) a singular commitment to an objective and 2) an aggressive, historically improbable deadline.