Week 8: Institutionalizing Dissent

Once, I was told by a previous manager that I needed to learn to play better with others.

Let me explain…

I like clarity and specificity. I don’t know if that’s an innate quality or one I’ve developed over time, but I can’t help it. Until an idea or request is clear to me, I have to ask more questions. Apparently, this is not appreciated by all 🙂

There were several similar situations that led to my manager giving me this feedback. The basic structure of those situations was as follows:

Someone asks for my help with something.

I agree and ask some clarifying questions about their request or need.

They provide a less than helpful response that seems to be an effort to hide the fact that they don’t actually have command over their program or customer needs.

I seek additional clarity.

They get frustrated, stop responding and complain that I’m not a team player.

Sigh.

I was disappointed in the feedback that I got from my manager. Despite that, I wasn’t surprised. It was completely consistent with the overall culture of the organization that seemed to value pleasantries over real results. Any attempts at dissent or presenting a different perspective was dismissed and discouraged.

The result was that people rarely felt uncomfortable but the business struggled — poor decisions were made, costly mistakes resulted, preventable risks came to fruition, etc.

In our week 5 lesson, we learned that there are times where we should actually introduce friction into our process to help us check our egos and make the best decisions. The authors of Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years calls this institutionalizing dissent. In this week’s lesson, we learned nine methods for doing so.

We will know better so we will do better 🎉

The nine methods presented in Chapter 10 of this book are as follows:

1. Grant license to the devil’s advocate.
2. Smooth out management ruts.
3. First, decide how to decide.
4. Find history that fits.
5. Bet on it.
6. Stare into the abyss.
7. Construct alarm systems.
8. Always have escalation mechanisms.
9. Hold second-chance meetings.

“These methods are designed to tease out and harness the knowledge and insight already accessible to the organization. Utilized well, these safeguards encourage dialogue and go a long way to raising important questions that need to be considered…”

Each of these methods are effective in their own right. The choices you would employ would likely depend on multiple factors surrounding your change effort. For the purposes of this blog post, I’d like to focus on just two of them.

Method 1 - Grant license to the devil's advocate

The grant license to the devil’s advocate method seems like one of the most practical and easy to implement. Intuitively, this approach deliberately seeks out the opposing view. The book calls out two potential approaches for this:

1. have one person play the role on a continuing basis, therefore learning over time how to be more effective.
2. rotate the role among a group, perhaps based on the topic in question, so that no one person becomes tarred as a naysayer.

It is at this point in my post that I’m going to apologize to you. I have yet to provide you with an introduction to CliftonStrengths. As a result, I am not able to highlight a third approach that the book does not call out but that I know to be extremely effective in institutionalizing dissent.

As a compromise, I’ll give you this brief overview.

The CliftonStrengths assessment ranks our talents out of 34 options. Those ranked highest (1-10) are those talents that are innate to us and that which we use most often and, usually, unconsciously. Understanding our talents as a result of this assessment helps us discern drive and motivation. Since observed behavior hardly ever betrays one’s motivation, it is important to understand that while our actions may seem obvious to us, they may be misinterpreted by others.

In my experience as a CliftonStrengths coach, there are several of the 34 talents that we may find in good candidates for playing the devil’s advocate role: Strategic and Restorative. People who have these themes high can often see different perspectives.

Method 2 - First, decide how to decide

The first, decide how to decide method was that which I found most insightful. The book shares a recurring pattern:

The CEO or some other senior executive perceives a strategic problem that the rest of the organization does not yet acknowledge.

The CEO has a strong sense of the looming problem but knows that he has to sell his board of directors, other senior managers, and ultimately, the rest of the organization.

At the same time, he also has to demonstrate that he has a solution so he develops a plan of attack.

Unfortunately, this is a recipe for disaster and is rarely successful. “That’s because the process of developing the right strategy gets tangled up with mobilizing the organization to face the problem.”

Well, damn…

Nothing would be as disrespectful as someone calling a strategy I developed flimsy.

Ouch!

This method seems so powerful and it almost seems like this should be the preliminary step before embarking on any change effort. Upon more reflection, I think this method should be employed as near to the start of the forming of any new company. Being able to determine a how to decide plan without a pressing decision to make seems like the smartest thing we could ever do.

Each of the methods are useful and I encourage you to check out the full book/chapter at some point. I’m excited about what I’ve learned this week but maybe even more excited about how many unfamiliar books were referenced in this chapter that are now going on my future reading list. I’ll share here so you can check them out as well. Thank you for reading!

Books referenced in this chapter

• The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley (I actually HAVE heard of this and have read about half of it in the past.)
• The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker (I have also heard of this but haven’t read it - I will now!)
• The Essence of Strategic Decision Making by Charles Schwenk
• Growth Gamble by Andrew Campbell and Robert Park
• Thinking in Time Richard Neustadt and Ernest May
• The Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story by Peter Wyden
• Why Smart Executives Fail by Sydney Finkelstein
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Groupthink by Irving Janis