“Once Upon a Time … and Then They Lived Happily Ever After”

Organizations are like individuals. Both want to be optimistic. They may or not be optimistic at any given time, depending on lots of reasons, but most sane ones want (or hope) the future to be better than the past. I seldom run into business plans or job descriptions that have a fundamental objective to be pessimistic and say “We plan to be better losers next year.” In fact, job descriptions and the subsequent interviewing processes overwhelmingly have an optimistic, positive tone and expectation. So, at the expense of oversimplification, organizations look to be “better to best” at winning. I believe that we focus so much on the optimistic slant that we may under prepare to become better losers. That sounds a bit strong, but the issue is the blinders we build into decision making that filter out or diminish a hard look at the eventuality (not just the probability) that things will go wrong.

Things will go wrong. We are prepared for some, unprepared for others (although we thought they were possible) and clueless (or ignorant) to others. We can see these behaviors in virtually every scenario where we make planning or execution decisions.

• Military conquest strategies with missing or inadequate occupation strategies. Add to that the missing exit strategies.
• Spend and investment decisions with heavy financial analysis and modeling but with anemic or missing execution risk due diligence. A frequent problem is how weather and environment affect capital projects (inside or outside). We treat risks that are driven by the laws of physics with decisions framed in the laws of economics.
• The imbalance of attention between big and small spending decisions. Often we take on far greater downstream risks from a group of smaller spend decisions that received a fraction of the attention a big one did. In fact, the chance of failure is lots higher, and without risk analysis, the impacts of those failures are not incorporated into execution controls.
• Assumptions of a linear world deciding the execution for a more complex, multivariate playing field. Add to that, the belief that models are true predictors of the future.
• Teams that focus on reaching a destination (mountain climbers have paid dearly here) with a dominant bias towards getting there and less thought about getting back.
• Industrial facilities built with a high bias for construction and operational economies that virtually ignore the end of life and decommissioning challenges and costs.
• Travelers who pack their essential medications and documents in checked baggage.
• The universal blind spot that “someone else must worry about that” is a bit like two baseball outfielders watching as a catchable ball drops between them. The interagency behaviors leading to the 9-11-2001 disaster serves as a reminder.
• Trusting downstream inspections to correct upstream errors.
• We could add a scarier list when we include the meltdown precipitated by the mortgage backed derivatives and the “trees will grow to the sky” investment frenzy.

Why?

• Do we impose artificially convenient decision horizons and take complex decisions to too low a denominator?
• Do we seek comfort in optimistic simplicity and convenience?  
• Do we diminish the voices of alternative futures to the point of dismissal? We can see this in virtually every business, social, economic, political, and military environment.
• Do we blame the functional silos? Are we those silos?
• Do we allow euphoria to be a strong player at the table?
• Is safety something we think about at work, but not elsewhere?
• Is it scary to ask?

Did the German military of WWII expect a shorter or milder Russian winter than the one Napoleon’s army vacationed in?

Off I go, but first I need to find my umbrella.