Hack:
Upgrading Your Software? Think First About the Software Inside Your Own Head
October 24, 2011 at 4:29am
Moonshots
Summary
The problem is not that we are thinking about management challenges with concepts that are decades out of date, but that we are thinking about them with brains that are millenia out of date. This hack gives an example of a very common cognitive bias which often trips us up, but can be overcome once we understand it.
Problem
Let's start with an example. A software company was having great difficulty collecting accounts receivable from customers. The problem had been chronic for years. The chief executive was adamant that the fault was with the finance staff; not enough aggression, not enough activity, not enough calls.
Examining the situation, I found that the outstanding amounts almost all arose from one of three reasons:
- Software didn't perform in accordance with documentation - "the OMGEO gadget doesn't interface properly with the FX widget";
- Professional services had been poorly performed - "Yes Fred was on site for 20 days but he only did 10 days useful work and that is all I will pay for"
- Maintenance charges were unclear - "I can't reconciile the invoice you sent with the five contracts we have."
None of these could be resolved by finance staff; they needed the technical knowledge of development, professional services and legal respectively.
Once this had been recognised, and the finance staff given permission to call on others for help in resolving issues, the problem went away and did not recur.
Solution
This problem illustrates a phenomenon which has been well known to social scientists for decades, but little recognised outside that field. It is called the Fundamental Attribution Error. What it means is that, when we see people underperforming or doing things we don't approve of, we have a powerful natural bias to explain it along the lines of "that's just the way they are...lazy, don't care stupid..." rather than "that is what you would expect, given the organisation they work in, the information they are given or the incentives they have. "
In the primitive world, this was a useful, practical and economic way of working out what was wrong. In a world of complex tasks and large organisations, it often leads us to wrong conclusions.
There are several ways of overcoming this bias:
- Look at what the majority of people do in the situation (in the example, we had about ten people in five different locations, all performing poorly).
- Ask what you yourself would do in that situation, given the structure of the organisation, the incentives and the information available to you (in the example, the finance people did not have permission to insist on others helping them to resolve prolems);
- Look for less-obvious causes.
Practical Impact
Dealing with this bias can, as in the example, enable us to make dramatic progress on previously intractable problems.
First Steps
The next time you get annoyed at people performing badly and find yourself blaming them, challenge that explanation. Ask the three questions. Search for larger, systemic causes which will give you greated leverage for change.
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