of time” (as if time were a stakeholder that needed representation in the meeting). We each try to call the precise time when it will be said (for example, 6 minutes to go, 3 minutes to go). Time spent in discussion and debate is cut short because there's another meeting to go to. We almost never hear someone say, “This is a really important topic and I know we all have other meetings, but let's spend more time on this.” Discussions are snuffed out.
This is particularly problematic for our most senior leaders. Their days are filled with meetings, travel, and meals with not a lot of time for themselves or to think. As Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria wrote in Harvard Business Review, “CEOs are always on, and there is always more to be done. The leaders in our study worked 9.7 hours per weekday, on average. They also conducted business on 79% of weekend days, putting in an average of 3.9 hours daily, and on 70% of vacation days, averaging 2.4 hours daily. As these figures show, the CEO's job is relentless.”6 As a result, they rarely have sufficient time to think about the future and the challenges their businesses might face in the future. Too many organizations are governed by the tyranny of the urgent.
Escalation of commitment tendencies. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the status quo bias is the tendency to increase the level of commitment to a choice despite increasingly negative outcomes. The classic business example of this is the now infamous choice by Blockbuster Video to declare that it was in the “store” business versus the DVD-to-home business, even in the face of increasing evidence that customers preferred the emerging model of DVD-to-home. An even more costly escalation of commitment can happen in military conflicts; once military action is taken, it is difficult to de-escalate until one side is defeated.
Organizational politeness and desire for full consensus. Another organizational tendency is that people can be overly polite in groups, not willing to have “sharp elbows” or embarrass anyone during meetings. This is perhaps the flipside of the don't-be-embarrassed phenomenon. But there are in fact bad ideas. There are also ideas that, although not bad per se, are knowingly impractical. However, we observe that rather than be honest with the person about why the idea is bad or why it is impractical, the group suggests that it can be investigated further to be polite. This has the unintended consequence of delaying action on the critical path and wasting resources on ideas that are not fundamentally valuable.
Naturally, this begs the question: How can you tell the difference between a bad idea and important, well-intentioned dissent, a critical feature of great management decisions and innovation? And how do you make sure people feel empowered to raise ideas that might be a source of important correction or inspiration?
We'll examine this further in Chapter 4, but it's critical to understand the underlying rationale for the perspective, not just its existence. Our preferred method of addressing this challenge (which is far superior to avoiding conflict by “taking it offline” or agreeing to do more work unnecessarily) is to play a game of HBD … and we don't mean Happy Birthday. HBD stands for hunch, bias, or data. Lest we cause some confusion, in this game, the meaning of bias does not refer to the cognitive kind, but rather a personal tendency (e.g., Geoff's bias is to get stuff off his plate and never touch it again; Steve's bias is to talk things through … and through).
In this game, you ask the person floating the idea to share their logic and whether their idea is a hunch, a bias, or based on data. If it's a bias (for instance, they just prefer to study things more) or a hunch without compelling logic (“It just feels that way to me”), then it's fair to let the group know that, given a broad consensus otherwise, the group should move forward. But if the logic is compelling and based on real observations or data, then the group should give it stronger consideration. Although perhaps not a perfect antidote, this should help solve the difficult challenge of wanting to invite dissent, especially from diverse voices who may not feel as comfortable speaking up without compelling the group to run down every idea. Over time, groups must demonstrate that they value ideas with terrific logic.
Structural dismantling of organizational curiosity. Our final fatal flaw is the tendency by many organizations to underfund – or completely cut – exploratory learning budgets when push comes to shove. It happens so frequently it's almost cliche: at the start of budget season, everyone says it's important to go and learn about customers and their environments … but by the end of the season, someone points out that this spending can't directly tie to revenue next year, so it gets eliminated. No leader would say they aren't curious about the customers and markets they serve, but most organizations behave as if they aren't. You can't claim curiosity that you don't follow through on. And if you aren't actively looking, you won't see the new and important trends on the horizon in time to DO SOMETHING valuable about them.
When all of this is taken together, what do we end up with? We have people in organizations who are biased against even seeing possible impactful trends in the marketplace, just by the nature of being human – not because they are incompetent or evil. If they do identify a trend, they are biased against seeing it as important to their business and tend to discount it entirely. And if a trend does get raised, there are considerable organizational impediments to taking any meaningful action against it.
In other words, the dynamic interaction of human tendencies with organizational dysfunction produces systematic blindness that decreases the potential playing field for organizations. Failure to see possibilities makes it increasingly likely that organizations end up pursuing an implicit “wind-down firm” strategy on a slope to irrelevancy, following a shrinking market to its very bottom.
But we think there are ways for companies to pursue strategies that have them adapt and thrive. We'll explore some basic tactics for how to address systemic individual blindness in the next chapter before turning our attention to more advanced provocation strategies in Part II.
NOTES
1 1. M. Ross and F. Sicoly, “Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 3 (1979): 322–336.
2 2. R. B. Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” American Psychologist 35, no. 2 (1980): 151–175.
3 3. S. Eidelman and C. S. Crandall, “A Psychological Advantage for the Status Quo,” in J. T. Jost, A. C. Kay, and H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 85–105.
4 4. Gerry Pallier, Rebecca Wilkinson, Vanessa Danthiir, Sabina Kleitman, Goran Knezevic, Lazar Stankov, and Richard D. Roberts, “The Role of Individual Differences in the Accuracy of Confidence Judgments,” The Journal of General Psychology 129, no. 3 (2002): 257–299.
5 5. Luigi Mittone and Lucia Savadori, “The Scarcity Bias,” Applied Psychology 58, no. 3 (July 2009): 453–468.
6 6. Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria, “How CEOs Manage Time,” Harvard Business Review, July 2018.
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