To Ponder: Is Speed Enough?
As a Change Leader, you make a multitude of decisions everyday. But how often do you consider the effectiveness of your decision making?
In an analysis conducted in 2005, human decision making was considered against several mathematical decision models on six criteria:
Transparency,
Consistency,
Accuracy,
Improvement,
Adaptability, and
Speed.
The end result: Human decision-making beat mathematical decision models in just one of the six areas:
Speed.
For any of you that have read Thinking Fast and Slow, this aligns with Kahneman’s classic ‘System 1’ fast thinking model.
The question you for you to consider this week is as a Change Leader:
Is Speed enough to drive success in your organisation?
If not, how can you build in decision supports to make up for your very human abilities?
To Reflect: Small Things, Big Mess
My 18 month old daughter has an uncanny ability to create wonder.
…In particular, she often has my wife and I wondering how in the world she makes such large messes with so little input. I give her just a few ml of water and all of a sudden it seems like a pool has been emptied on our rug.
But as Change Leaders this is so often our brief. Make a mess, with little input… oh and then clean it back up.
To Action: Admitting Fallibility
Over the last few weeks LinkedIn has been serving me up a Telstra Small Business NBN ad. (The jury is still out on whether LinkedIn is aware of the regular dropouts I’ve been experiencing in my rural home office... )
The ad looks something like this:
Here’s the issue.
The ad is so laughably out of touch with the reality of their customers. As you would expect, the comments on the ad have been brutal. The reality for many (including myself a few years back) is a Telstra NBN connection that is well under advertised speeds, with spotty connection reliability and underwhelming customer service.
“All Good” doesn’t come close to the reality for many of their customers. Let alone the idea of a proactive customer service agent checking up on the connection.
The ad shows an amazing lack of self-awareness and refusal to acknowledge reality. Pretending something is so, doesn’t magically create it from the void.
And so this week’s ‘To Action’ is both a lesson in what not to do, and a challenge to be bolder with your own humanity.
As a Change Leader, if things aren’t how they should be, it’s ok to say so.
Can you imagine how different the impact of this ad would be if it was telling a different story: one of redemption rather than perfection?
Where’s Brendon Now? - The Everyday PM Podcast on Nov 1st.
This week I had an awesome discussion with Ann Campea on the The Everyday PM Podcast. We covered the key traps that PMOs fall into, and how to break out of them. We then ventured into what underpins learning organisations and how to embed learning loops that aren’t boring and dry.
The episode releases 1st November 2021, so keep an eye out for it.
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Have a fabulous weekend. See you next week.
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