Jamie Flinchbaugh 0:00
Jeff, you've been promoted a couple of times, you find yourself making more and more decisions, but you are still making decisions that you used to make long ago. Does that sound like the right strategy?
Jeff Grimshaw 0:14
I mean, that sounds pretty great. But actually, we've seen over and over again that when people cling to decision making authority, sometimes it ends in tears, or at least not in very good results. And that's the kind of thing we're going to talk about here in Episode Two of Happy Heuristics, shock resistant leader routines and rules of thumb for a complex world.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 0:41
Yeah, so our podcast here on Happy Heuristics is all about the fact that the world is increasingly complex, and moves fast. And we have to be efficient and effective in making decisions each and every day. And so we're trying to develop heuristics or share them or borrow them or learn them from others that help us navigate and operate in that world.
Jeff Grimshaw 1:08
Yeah, I think so many leaders today are struggling with all this complexity and wanting to apply their brain power, you know, their smarts, to all these complex decisions, but it's paralyzing. And the reality is, is that as awesome as we are as humans, we are biologically constrained, our brain power is biologically constrained. We don't have the capacity to process all these decisions the way that we would like. So the only substitute really is for us to have reliable heuristics or rules of thumb. And so that's the goal of the podcast is to offer some reliable, not perfect, but reliable heuristics and to help make good decisions, and today, we're actually going to be talking about how the possibility might be that your heuristic is actually to not make the decisions but to put the decisions, put decision making somewhere else is one of the things that you can do that's a reliable way to lead in uncertainty.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 2:17
Yeah, so we each have a heuristic related to where you make decisions in the organization as a decision making rule. So mine is going to be pushing decisions closest to the point of activity. And we'll go through that one first, but what's your is going to be?
Jeff Grimshaw 2:35
Yeah, mine is do only what you can do, and delegate the rest.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 2:41
Okay, so I think, as we explore these, and we'll see, they might be very similar, I think the last one, they were similar, but in different contexts. Yours was broader, I think these might be a little more similar. So I'm going to talk through first pushing decisions closest to the point of activity, as a heuristic for where decisions get made. And this actually comes from the world of lean thinking, where I spend a lot of my time. In some ways, you could look at this as what's called the inverted pyramid, right, where you draw the org chart upside down, and everybody is there to support those at the front line doing the value added work. And that's a broad premise. But more specifically, this comes from work done by Kent Bowen and Steve Spear, there's an article, it came out in 1999, called Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. And in it they had a rule that their own rule, their rule of thumb, that they started talking about making improvements, it wasn't just decisions, but making improvements. And the words they used were at the lowest level possible. And that that was appealing, but didn't seem quite right to me. And, you know, sort of tested that a bit. And what I noticed and the inverted pyramid has sometimes the same effect, is that managers at all sorts of different levels thought in the name of lean, they abdicated decisions, and we kind of go "Okay, well, it's, we're here to serve the frontline, they're gonna make all decisions." But when I noticed, you know, the person on the front line, wherever that might be isn't closest to a supplier or connection, or isn't closest to the customer, or isn't closest to a strategy related to an expansion. And so I've kind of rewritten it of at closest to the point of activity, right? We all do work, right? Whether it's strategic, operational, human resources, customer related, product related, we all do work. We're all closest to some bit of activity. That's the right place to make decisions related to that activity. So that's essentially the role is, you know, push decisions closest to the point of activity, whatever that activity is, decisions related to it, get it as close to that activity as possible.
Jeff Grimshaw 5:16
Okay, so is the assumption, I mean, one of the things we know about good heuristics is that a heuristic is reliable if it works, and we don't necessarily have to know why it works. But in this case, I mean, you know, what's the idea? Is it that they are, you know, that in terms of the empirical reality, that you've got people there who may not have like, you know, expertise, and, you know, both learning or MBAs, but they actually have the practical, real world experience with empirical reality where, or actually they probably got their own heuristics that are based on real world living as opposed to, you know, a theoretical background that actually, that you should rely on.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 6:05
Yeah, I think that's the main point of this particular rule of thumb is that the empirical evidence of doing the task of being involved in the task is, oh, when it's human, that button sticks. Or when you use these words with a customer, they fly off the handle, or when you, you know, read a resume, and skip over these parts first, you get to stuff that relates better to eventual hires, but whatever it is, right, you go through so many repetitions of a task, and see and incorporate all the experience of those empirical outcomes, problems, successes, that you may not have built all of that into the complexity of a standard work instruction, but they still exist in you. And so that empirical evidence helps you navigate, you know, hey, let's change this. Well, yeah. But if you do that this is going to happen, doesn't feel right to me. I may not even have the words to articulate it. But I have the evidence to suggest why it's still not a great idea.
Jeff Grimshaw 7:20
Right, right. Okay. Well, this idea of pushing decision making close to the point of activity resonates with some of my recent experience, you know, working with a lot of utility companies and other large organizations where there's a lot of surveys, and you know, and a lot of cases, the survey, the idea of a survey is for employees to have a voice in shaping decisions. But I think what happens a lot is basically it's a, people weigh in, and then when you don't do what they said, then, you know, they're butthurt about it. And you create this resentment when the reality is, you know, I think a good heuristic is, you know, most organizational surveys should actually stop happening. And if you stop doing that and thinking that we have to make the decisions and occasionally we let employees weigh in on them, and more about what are the opportunities to actually, in a way that we can trust, in a way that's reliable, actually let them make the decisions based on the assumption that they have insights and a vested interest, that that's actually where some magic can happen. But it's easier to say than it is to do.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 8:42
It's much easier to say than it is to do. And there are some ingredients that make it important and successful. You know, the other factor about this is simply the volume of decisions, right? You don't have all day to make every decision in the organization. And so a lot of things get left undone if you have to move quickly. So this simply allows you to move faster with more decision makers. Again, as long as you can have the trust that that's there. And so I think there's a couple of key ingredients. One is that there's enough stability in the workforce, that the people actually have some empirical evidence around what works and what doesn't.
Jeff Grimshaw 9:27
Yeah, fair, right, right, right, you know, yeah.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 9:28
So if you're hiring a summer workforce every year, and it's a brand new brand new team of people, and it's going to take by August, they will have it figured out and then they're gone. And then there's a new set, probably not going to work as well.
Jeff Grimshaw 9:44
Insane, right, it would be insane.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 9:46
Yeah, it would be insane. So the more stability you have, and I don't think there's a magic number, I think you could probably work on the science of how complex is the task and how much duration is needed. One of my favorite questions to ask organizations is, how long does it take to become competent at that job? Well, whatever that guess is, because it's always a guess, is perhaps evidence of how much stability you do think you need before you hand over a lot of this decision making. So I think that's a factor. I think another factor is the criteria, the stability of the environment, not just the people, but the environment itself, including what matters what's important. That starts entering in people's experience and ability to learn how to make consistent decisions over time. So, you know, I think where this starts to break down fastest is when there is massive change in short periods of time. So, you know, March 2020, when we send half of the workforce to work from home, and put very clear protocols into place, those weren't, "hey, you know, make whatever decision you want." That was, that decision making was concentrated, it was done rapidly, still lack certainty, right? But it wasn't pushed to the closest point of activity, it was concentrated and pulled away. Because even what's the criteria to make that decision wasn't something that everybody could get on the same page around. So those periods of instability had diminished the opportunity to make this rule work. So whether it's workforce stability or contextual situational stability, the more stability you have, the more this rule really starts to work.
Jeff Grimshaw 11:42
Okay, the other thing I'm wondering about is, you know, if I think about Nassim Taleb and his work on antifragility and talking about how centralized systems, centralized forms of decision making are divorced from the consequences of those decisions. And so I think the other thing, and so you know, it's about put decision making where there's skin in the game. So I think the other thing, I guess is a consideration here, I would suggest, is also understanding where there's skin in the game, you know, and especially, I guess one more reason to push decision making close to the point of activity, is if you feel like those people have skin in the game, for how those decisions play out. And recognizing that fragility in big complex organizations of the bad stuff that can happen when you centralize decision making and have decision makers who get divorced from the input from the practical implications of their decisions.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 12:51
Yeah, and so fundamentally, you know, we talked a lot in episode one about learning, right, and learning through experience, learning through experimentation. And the more a decision is removed from, in time and space, right? So both where the outcome happens and when the outcome happens, the harder it is for learning to happen naturally. And so that's the skin in the game, it's not just, do I have to live with the decision, because, you know, employees are there to do a job. And at every level of the organization, and it's not to be self serving it's to serve the customer, or the mission, the strategy, whatever that might be. So it's not just about self defined consequences. But it is about the ability to learn, the ability to see, well, if I make this decision, this is the shockwave that happens. And we'll see this often where, you know, an executive makes a decision, and it generates 1000s of hours of work for the organization that they never hear about, because they just assumed it was a well informed decision. It creates disruptions for customers, it creates disruptions to the workforce, and again, removed from time and space, so the feedback loop does, you know, ceases to work. And so I think the skin in the game, it's not just about caring about the consequences, I think it's about being able to learn from, evaluate, and accommodate those consequences. Again, both time and space, and we have to consider both of those from a learning standpoint.
Jeff Grimshaw 14:22
Okay. All right. Sounds good.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 14:25
So that's a that's a rule of thumb, a heuristic.
Jeff Grimshaw 14:28
Yeah, it's a good one for sure.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 14:29
Yours is pretty, pretty similar, I think, and w`e'll examine it. So tell me about yours.
Jeff Grimshaw 14:34
Yeah, okay. So again, it's do what only you can do, and delegate the rest. And I mean, it's pretty straightforward, but it's hard for people. In fact, I have been coaching a lot of leaders recently who got to where they are, because they're tendency is to just be high controlling, autocratic, and probably arrogant, and perfectionist, and what that means is that they have been, they got to where they are because they took control, they made decisions and you know-
Jamie Flinchbaugh 15:15
And good ones.
Jeff Grimshaw 15:16
And good ones. Right, right. And you know that's a problem. In fact, you know, the Buddhist parable that I always share with them is, you know, the travelers on important journey comes to raging river, can't get across, wonders what to do, seems to be stopped, sees this rickety wooden raft over in the brush, says "I have no choice," pushes it out of the water and to try to get across. What else are you going to do? And son of a gun, it actually works. Now they're on the other side. Now they're on the other side, and they can continue on the important journey. And they say, "gosh, I wonder if I'm going to come to other raking rivers, I better take this raft with me," and put it on their back. They come across other travelers are like, "Dude, what's up with the raft?". And they say, "well, you don't understand, if it wasn't for this raft, I wouldn't be where I am today." And they're right. They're right, if it wasn't for the raft, they wouldn't be where they are today. And what's also true, if they don't put down the damn raft, they're not going to get where they're going. And so that high control for many, many, many leaders who have been successful, that high control, including high control of decision making, which is really mostly what it's about. And doing things my way, is the raft, and it gets them to where they are. And if they don't put down the damn raft, they're not going to get where they want to go. They can't do it all in complex organizations. And also, it doesn't, you know, that's not the sort of thing that tends to attract or retain A players, right? So part of the reason this one is so challenging, is because you know, a lot of leaders have to put down a raft in order to get, in order to actually play the heuristic, in order to use the heuristic of delegating everything that they absolutely do not have to do.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 17:11
Yeah, and, you know, and on the raft, they're carrying all the other things that got them there too. And they put down all of it, or they put down some of it, you know, and it's not just, you know, I think it's organizationally, right, if they get promoted, what works in the last job isn't going to work going forward. And I think there are certain points in your promotional path that that is even more true, right? Your first managerial job from an individual contributor, huge leap. Moving from division General Manager to a CEO, huge leap, right, being a manager of managers of managers, I think hugely, but also time, right? What worked in 19, you know, in 1995, doesn't work in 2020. It doesn't work in 2030. And so there's multiple reasons why what worked in the past isn't going to work in the future. And if we, the longer we hang on to it blindly, the less likely we are to continue our journey.
Jeff Grimshaw 18:11
Yeah. So the, 100%, and the good news is, there is a framework, and I think this is a subsidiary, or a, you know, add on heuristic for how to do that. So I'll tell you what it is, but just a little backstory, you know, from a Buddhist parable to military history. In the 80s, there was a Prussian general and I wrote it down because I cannot, I get these mixed up. Carl von Clausewitz. And what he talked about is there are things like weather, things like pandemics, imperfect information, or even good information that is imperfectly transmitted, all combine to create the fog of war. So you know, first of all, just as a quick pause, we talk about vuca: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, like, boy, we are, you know, we are in the age of it now, and this is like a new phenomenon, right? But, you know, he was, you know, 150 years ago, was writing about the fog of war. And so, this is not a brand new phenomenon. But so what do, you how do you operate in the fog of war? Another Prussian general's name was Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. That one I definitely have to reference because that's a, you know, that is really a mouthful. He's the guy, I've heard this attributed to Eisenhower, bright other people, but he was the guy who actually said, "no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy." And so what do you do with that? It's about saying that you can't actually control everything, you actually have to give people a framework for what to do, whether that is, you know, soldiers in the field of battle, amidst the fog of war or whether that is in a very much non-military setting, in a organization, any organizational setting where you are in a vuca environment. There is a more recent phenomenon that comes out of the US Army called commander's intent. And I think this is really a great framework. And I've seen that be very successful for leaders who are high controlling, and are figuring out how to actually operationalize that heuristic of do only what you can do and delegate the rest. Because, you know, everything is about the judgment of well, what is it that only I can do, right? And so this, we apply commander's intent, it expands the range of what fits into the rest versus what only you can do, right. So here's what commander's intent is. And, you know, this, but the idea is, and from the US military, it's about describing the end state of an operation. So it could be, you know, take the hill, this is what success looks like. It's about defining success, and then offering some guardrails or constraints, you know. In a military setting could be take the hill, stick within the constraints of the Geneva Convention, or not. I mean, but you know, there's... provide the guardrails and then let them figure out how to get there. Right, right. Delegate the how, right? And so in an organizational setting, same principle applies, which is provide the end state, define success, here's what success looks like, provide some guardrails, you know, nobody can get hurt, you do have budget or you don't have budget, you can change headcount, or you can't change headcount, you know, you cannot put the company material at risk, you know, there's no obvious risk to a reputational harm, those kinds of things. But otherwise, II'm going to let you, the team, whoever figure out how to get there. And what's really great is, so it works. It works, but then the other thing is, it's also really great when it actually provides a stretching opportunity, when it becomes a leadership development opportunity. So that it's not about torturing people. But it is about saying, it's not about throwing in the, you know, the summer intern into something that a summer intern can't do and calling it commander's intent thinking we're enlightened. But it is about saying, "Okay, well, I think that after this person has this under their belt, it's going to push them a little bit, it's going to put them a little outside of their comfort zone. And think about the skills they're going to develop and think about the competence it's going to give them when they have successfully done that versus me micromanaging it," that that's the magic of commander's intent.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 22:54
And so when you hear this, this role of do only what you can do and delegate the rest, you know, when you if you just put it on a bumper sticker, you might think it's about efficiency, right? So it's delegating to be efficient. And don't put too much on your plate. It is really about strategic execution, right? And the ability for an organization to be successful, right, hence von Clausewitz who many considered the father of strategy, it's, you have commander's intent, strategic intent, right. I look at the difference between strategic planning and strategic intent. Like, well, strategic intent is, in many ways, much more useful, because your strategic plan is going to fall apart, just like your battle plan.
Jeff Grimshaw 23:38
Absolutely.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 23:38
Right. And so you're arming people with the tools to make decisions when facing the enemy, the customer, the market, the dynamic, each other, whatever it might be, whatever they're going to face
Jeff Grimshaw 23:50
And fog of war, vuca, whatever.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 23:52
And all of the uncertainty and complexity that comes with it. Yeah, so that's pretty interesting. So, you know, as I talked about mine, we talked about how in sort of concentrated inflection points, where there's lotsm high rates of change, maybe my rule is less useful. Does that apply here as well? Or is this as useful as a rule in rapid change versus broad change?
Jeff Grimshaw 24:25
Yeah, that's a good question. And I'd love to hear where you think. I mean, I guess what where I was thinking about the limitations of that heuristic of doing what only you can do and delegating the rest, is that sometimes the, you know, sometimes in crisis sometimes, you know, it's, you don't have the luxury of delegating anything. I mean, you know, there are times, there are situations where survival is on the line, where you actually have to get in there, and, you know, the situation calls for high control versus delegation. I think the tricky part of that, and the reason it's the, you got to think of it as the exception rather than the rule is, you know, I think you and I both work with a lot of leaders who, whether they are willing to admit or not, are adrenaline junkies, and they care more about the heroics of firefighting versus fire prevention, if you will. They hate their broken processes, but they kind of love their broken processes because it creates opportunities for their heroism. So that's a long way around the block to say that while there are times and there are limits to the value of the heuristic, when leaders start looking for excuses to not use that heuristic, they will often find them and rationalize why they need to, going back to the original metaphor, where they need to continue to carry that raft around. Because if you are in a adrenaline junkie environment, if you're in a constant firefighting environment, then you know, then you will always find reasons why you have to maintain control.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 26:16
Yeah, yeah. And I think, so my point around high rates of change, I think it's only one variable, but it does relate to exactly that, where you need that control because of the risks and the speed and the coordination. Right, so even using, you know, the war analogies since this came up, you know, a blitzkrieg strategy required a lot more coordination, over high rates of speed. I don't know if it was a lot about how it was executed. But I imagine a lot more centralized control because of that condensed time. And I would look at, you know, the rules put in place, you know, March 2020, as everybody was trying to figure out how to be safe, work from home, safety protocols, prevent spread, etc. Those probably required much more concentration. Right now, I see people working on back to work strategies and their long term employment plans and working plans. And I see them trying to make those decisions in the same way. Right, same process, we're going to judt make all those decisions instead of set some guardrails, provide some commander's intent, say, here's what we're looking to do. Here's what matters in making those decisions, and then allowing for perhaps a little more variation and local contextuality, for making those decisions. And that, whether it's not recognizing the difference of the two situations, or it's the adrenaline of being able to make some pretty big decisions, or it's a combination of those, hard to say.
Jeff Grimshaw 27:48
Right, right right. All right.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 27:50
So couple good couple good heuristics. I think those work in a in a broad range of situations, similar, but perhaps a different context. And as we've said, a couple of times around for folks, you know, we're sharing these as offers. We've learned these from other people. But we hope that people make them their own, they combine them with their own experiences. Ultimately, you have to be the master of your own operating system, right that's your own set of heuristics. So we hope that these make people smarter about designing and determining their own heuristics, and maybe they just plug and play some of the ones we're sharing.
Jeff Grimshaw 28:32
Yeah. Cool. All right. So wrap up here. Let's invite folks to give us, to follow the podcast, rate us, review us, share what you think, love it, hate it, whatever. Is it useful? Does it help do any of these heuristics you know actually help you with your cognitive overload and give you less things to have to chew on? Because less things to chew on and you know when you've got already too many things to chew on, do these heuristics help, you know, free up your biologically constrained computational power in your brain for the complex topics and initiatives that require it most, that's what we're going for. You can let us know if we're hitting it, and folks can follow us at jflinch.com/happy heuristics, or mgstrat.com/happyheuristics
Jamie Flinchbaugh 29:33
Yep. And we always like to end with a little bonus heuristic. Just for fun. These are ones that I'm sure most people have heard, but I think helps them understand how heuristics work. So we actually used this in the context of the last episode, but it is a pretty good core bonus heuristic which is measure twice and cut once.
Jeff Grimshaw 29:56
Almost always applicable.
Jamie Flinchbaugh 29:57
Almost always. Excellent.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai