It’s a rare skill to achieve a marked improvement in something people have been doing for six thousand years. Impressively, the invention that Sven-Olof Ridder and Lars Bergström created was not based on any advances in technology or manufacturing capability. They just created a better solution. But in accomplishing this, they distracted more sailors into uncontrolled spinouts than anybody in history.
Their ‘WINDEX’, a simple arrow on a low friction rod, placed on top of the mast with two fixed wires for reference, allowed for instant and accurate wind direction indication at all points of sail. It was quickly purchased by millions of sailors. Today one expects to see a version atop the mast of almost every sailboat in the world.1
The Problem, Though?
It is too easy to use. As an indicator, it tells you exactly what you want to know, and does so precisely. This results in wanting to look at it too often, for too long. Almost every new sailor has had the experience of looking up and discovering they need to make a minor adjustment at the helm, and while doing so, finding their long gaze at Lars and Sven’s indicator abruptly interrupted by an uncontrolled 180-degree spinout of the boat. They overcorrected.
The first third of the turn happens so slowly you don’t notice. The next two-thirds, like trying to carry a poster board on a windy day, gets away from you surprisingly fast. When you focus on trying to get the indicator to where it should be for your point of sail, you begin to sail the boat to the indicator and not to the world around it missing the environmental cues that alert you to your pending error in advance. In response, you quickly develop the habit of simply glancing at the indicator and translating what it just told you back into the landscape as you keep your eyes out and navigate.
At work, how many times have you seen one team’s focus on their indicators take the whole ship off course?
It is easy to excuse these shortsighted (Pyrrhic) victories under a broad accusation of poor goal management. However, upon closer examination, even among the most conscientious goal managers, there seems to be a magnetic pull to secure the inevitability of their metrics first, then address possible conflicts second. To say it’s as if it’s hardwired in our nature might not be an exaggeration. After all, the phenomenon has been so consistent over the ages to economists it has been dubbed Goodhart’s law:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Like the sirens’ song, measures seduce our attention by the clarity and serenity they offer. The more we attend to them the narrower our perception becomes, transmogrifying once-useful indicators into myopic targets.
As it turns out, this should always be expected.
From a physiological vantage, you have two parallel ways of attending to the world, right and left.2 To be successful in any complex endeavor, both are required, but like a traffic intersection with a stoplight, the prioritized flow of one requires the necessary stopping of the other. Indicators and their measures are primarily processed by the left hemisphere. This left mode dominance occurs when you are attending to something you know and understand. Providing you with the ability to single it out and analyze it effectively. allows you to manipulate and predict how it will respond. Operating effectively on something in this mode gets developed over years of experience. However, only in the right mode are you capable of perceiving anything unexpected. This is where the right hemisphere takes a leading role and is required to attend to the whole landscape. This way of attending does not separate everything into its components; instead, it allows you to recognize and make sense of the entire picture. Successful navigation of complexity requires oscillating between modes.3
The Dilemma?
The more you ask people to attend to the left mode, such as report and be held accountable for a set of indicators, the more they necessarily turn on their red light to the right mode and stop attending to the whole. Becoming blind to the high-level objective you set up the measure to help you progress.
One True Question:
How might we cultivate the habit of glancing at the indicator but making sense of it in the context of the whole in everyday management?
References: 1 THE WINDEX STORY at windexdevelopment.com/about/ | 2 McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. | 3 Bonus for an exemplar of navigating real-time between the two modes, see the Q&A of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s press briefing on February 27, 1991.
Comentários