Know What You Don't Know How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen

by Roberto, Michael A.

• ISBN13: 9780131568150
• ISBN10: 0131568159
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-29
• Publisher: Ft Pr

Summary

Uncover Your Company's Emerging Problems-and Solve Them Before They Explode into Disaster bull; How to become a world-class problem-hunter...and why you must bull; 'Connect the dots': Uncover the hidden patterns that could mean big trouble bull; By the best-selling author of Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer Tired of 'fighting fires'? Start 'detecting smoke'-so you can fix your company's problems before they erupt into crisis! Face it: Your most dangerous problems are the ones you don't even know about. Know What You Don't Know will help you hunt down those hidden, festering issues: the ones that could destroy your organization if you don't discover them soon. Michael A. Roberto teaches the seven skill sets you need to become a world-class 'problem hunter.' Roberto shows leaders how to get past dangerous information 'filtering'...watch how people behave, not just what they say...pick meaningful patterns out of raw data...encourage smarter risk-taking and 'useful failures'...build a culture that welcomes challenges to conventional wisdom...draw crucial lessons from your organization's 'game film'...and get your team to act on what you've learned. There are plenty of books about problem solving. But you can't solve a problem until you know it exists. Read Know What You Don't Know, and you will.

Author Biography

Michael A. Roberto is the Trustee Professor of Management at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, after six years as a faculty member at Harvard Business School. His research, teaching, and consulting focus on strategic decision-making processes and senior management teams. He is the author of Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer (Wharton School Publishing, 2005).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xii
About the Author	p. xv
Preface	p. xvi
From Problem-Solving to Problem-Finding	p. 1
Embrace Problems	p. 6
Why Problems Hide	p. 9
Cultures of Fear	p. 9
Organizational Complexity	p. 11
Gatekeepers	p. 13
Dismissing Intuition	p. 14
Lack of Training	p. 15
Making Tradeoffs	p. 17
Becoming an Effective Problem-Finder	p. 18
The Isolation Trap	p. 20
Circumvent the Gatekeepers	p. 27
Why Filtering Takes Place	p. 31
Efficiency Concerns	p. 31
Pressures for Conformity	p. 32
Confirmation Bias	p. 33
Advocacy	p. 34
Circumventing the Filters	p. 35
Listen with Your Own Ears	p. 36
Seek Different Voices	p. 39
Connect with Young People	p. 41
Go to the Periphery	p. 43
Talk to the Nons	p. 45
A Most Prescient Leader	p. 46
Become an Ethnographer	p. 53
Why Don't People Do What They Say?	p. 57
Leading Questions	p. 58
Group Dynamics	p. 59
The Unconscious Mind	p. 61
Honing Your Powers of Observation	p. 62
A Few Words of Caution	p. 66
Hunt for Patterns	p. 73
What Is Intuition?	p. 75
Faulty Analogies	p. 77
Solutions in Search of Problems	p. 80
Building Your Pattern-Recognition Capabilities	p. 84
Better Analogies	p. 84
Mentoring	p. 87
Mining the Data	p. 89
What Do You Learn at Business School?	p. 90
Connect the Dots	p. 95
The CIA in Kuala Lumpur	p. 97
The Phoenix Memo	p. 98
The Minneapolis Field Office Investigation	p. 99
The 9/11 Attacks	p. 100
Why Not Share Information?	p. 102
Information Sharing in Small Groups	p. 104
How to Facilitate Information Sharing	p. 106
Leading Teams	p. 107
Leading Organizations	p. 109
Mindset Matters	p. 112
Encourage Useful Failures	p. 119
Why Tolerate Failure?	p. 121
Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Failures	p. 125
Before the Failure	p. 126
During the Failure	p. 127
After the Failure	p. 130
Useful, Low-Cost Failures	p. 132
Teach How to Talk and Listen	p. 139
Crew Resource Management Training	p. 143
Communication Errors	p. 145
Improving Interpersonal Communication	p. 147
Briefings	p. 147
Handoffs	p. 149
Speaking Up Effectively	p. 151
Listening	p. 155
Train Teams, Not Individuals	p. 156
Watch the Game Film	p. 161
After-Action Reviews: Promise and Peril	p. 166
Competitor Intelligence: Promise and Peril	p. 173
Deliberate Practice	p. 176
Looking in the Mirror	p. 180
The Mindset of a Problem-Finder	p. 185
Three Dimensions of a New Mindset	p. 189
Intellectual Curiosity	p. 189
Systemic Thinking	p. 191
Healthy Paranoia	p. 192
Index	p. 195
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface Preface In the spring of 2005, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to speak to my students. At the time, I served on the faculty at Harvard Business School. My colleague Jan Rivkin and I invited McNamara to answer our MBA students' questions about his years in the Defense Department as well as his time at Ford Motor Company and the World Bank. My students had studied the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. We examined those case studies as part of a course focused on how to improve managerial decision-making. Most class sessions focused on typical business case studies, but students found these examples from the American presidency to be particularly fascinating. We had analyzed the decision-making processes employed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their senior advisers. Now, we had an opportunity to hear directly from one of the key players during these momentous events of the 1960s. McNamara came and answered the students' questions, which included some tough queries regarding the mistakes that were made during the Vietnam War as well as the Bay of Pigs debacle. McNamara had not visited the Harvard Business School in many years. However, he recalled his days at the school quite fondly. McNamara graduated from the MBA program in 1939 and returned a year later to join the faculty at just twenty-four years of age. The students expressed amazement that he had been on the faculty sixty-five years prior to his visit that day in the spring of 2005. Before the class session began, McNamara asked me about my research. I told him about a new book I had written, set to come out two months later, regarding the way leaders make decisions. Then McNamara asked about teaching at the school, inquiring as to whether we still employed the case method of instruction. When I indicated that the case method still reigned supreme in our classrooms, he expressed his approval. He recalled how much he enjoyed learning and teaching by the case method. McNamara then affirmed a long-standing belief about this experiential learning technique. He explained that the case method provided students good training in the subject matter I researched and taughtnamely, problem-solving and decision-making. After all, most cases put students in the shoes of a business executive and make them grapple with a difficult decision facing the firm. McNamara then surprised me when he mentioned that this approach to teaching and learning did have a major deficiency. He argued that the case method typically presents the problem to the student. It describes the situation facing a firm and then frames the decision that must be made. In real life, according to McNamara, the leader first must discover the problem. He or she must figure out what problem needs to be solved before beginning to make decisions. McNamara explained that identifying the true problem facing an organization often proved to be the most difficult challenge that leaders face. In many instances leaders do not spot a threat until far too late. At times, leaders set out to solve the wrong problem. Now here I stood, quite pleased that I had just completed my first book on the subject of decision-making. I anticipated its release in just a matter of weeks. I had built a solid course on the subject as well. McNamara seemed to be telling me that I had missed the boat! I needed to be helping managers and students learn how to find problems, rather than focusing so much attention on problem-solving. I wrestled with this thought over the next six months, and then in the winter of 2006, I set out to write a new book. This time, I would write about the process of problem-finding, rather than problem-solving and decision-making. Two and a half years later, I have completed that book. The Central Message In this book, I argue that leaders at all levels must hone their skills as problem-finders. In so doing, they can preempt the threats that could lead to disaster for their organizations. Keep in mind that organizational breakdowns and collapses do not occur in a flash; they evolve over time. They begin with a series of small problems, a chain of errors that often stretches back many months or even years. As time passes, the small problems balloon into larger ones. Mistakes tend to compound over time; one small error triggers another. Once set in motion, the chain of events can be stopped. However, the more time that passes, and the more momentum that builds, once-seemingly minor issues can spiral out of control. Many leaders at all levels tell their people that they hate surprises. They encourage their people to tell them the bad news, rather than providing only a rosy picture of the business. They hold town-hall meetings with their employees, tour various company locations, and remind everyone that their door is always open. Still, problems often remain concealed in organizations for many reasons. Unlike cream, bad news does not tend to rise to the top. In this book, I argue that leaders need to become hunters who venture out in search of the problems that might lead to disaster for their firms. They cannot wait for the problems to come to them. Time becomes the critical factor. The sooner leaders can identify and surface problems, the more likely they can prevent a major catastrophe. If leaders spot the threats early, they have more time to take corrective action. They can interrupt a chain of events before it spirals out of control. Through my research, I have identified seven sets of skills and capabilities that leaders must master if they want to become effective problem-finders. First, you must recognize that people around you filter information, often with good intentions. They hope to conserve your precious time. Sometimes, though, they filter out the bad news. Problem-finders learn how to circumvent these filters. Second, you must learn to behave like an anthropologist who observes groups of people in natural settings. You cannot simply ask people questions; you must watch how they behave. After all, people often say one thing and do another. Third, the most effective problem-finders become adept at searching for and identifying patterns. They learn how to mine past experience, both personal and organizational, so that they can recognize problems more quickly. Fourth, you must refine your ability to "connect the dots" among seemingly disparate pieces of information. Threats do not come to us in neat little packages. They often remain maddeningly diffuse. Only by putting together many small bits of information can we spot the problem facing the organization. Fifth, effective problem-finders learn how to encourage people to take risks and learn from their mistakes. They recognize that some failures can be quite useful, because they provide opportunities for learning and improvement. You must distinguish between excusable and inexcusable mistakes, though, lest you erode accountability in the organization. Sixth, you must refine your own and your organization's communication skills. You have to train people how to speak up more effectively and teach leaders at all levels how to respond appropriately to someone who surfaces a concern, points out a problem, or challenges the conventional wisdom. Finally, the best problem-finders become like great coaches who watch film of past performances and glean important lessons about their team's problems as well as those of their principal rivals. You must become adept at review and reflection, as well as how to practice new behaviors effectively. The outline of this book is straightforward. The book begins with a chapter describing the overall concept of problem-finding. Why is it important, and what does it mean? Then, each of the following seven chapters describes one of the critical problem-fi