In The Bug in Our Thinking, Dr. Hugh Willbourn laments the spread of literacy. You might wonder how the spread of literacy can be seen as a bad thing, so I should explain that it is because it has led to the abstraction of information from its context. This in turn leads to problems being “solved” by people who are detached from the problem and oblivious of its context. That’s all I will say about the book; to attempt a summary would clumsily trample its elegant wisdom.
The Bug led me to recall committee-designed “solutions” I have experienced, which led to aggravation and failure. They failed because the committee misunderstood the problem, were ignorant of the context, and often saw any attempt by those “on the ground” trying to correct them as illegitimate push back. Such committees favoured the abstractions of the real world, on powerpoint slides and in written reports, to the real world itself. They forgot that abstractions should always be subservient to reality. I have witnessed at least one train-crash-in-slow-motion corporate failure largely because abstractions trumped reality.
Well-designed solutions consider the problem in its entirety as well as the people, place and context of the solution (what Willbourn calls the “head, heart and hips”).
The best example that I have experienced of a solution that clearly understood the problem and its context occurred a few years ago, when I worked for an Australian subsidiary of a large American multi-national. The parent company had been plunged into financial difficulties when accounting errors were discovered with the fact that its earnings had been greatly overstated. The crisis became worse when the CEO under whom this had happened was killed in an accident mere days later.
A successor was appointed to extinguish the corporate “burning platform”.
The nature of the business meant that client entertainment was a major expense and he had to cut wastage quickly and effectively. One way to do this would be to revamp the guidelines for client entertainment and impose a new regime that would be policed closely. Not only was there too little time, but also the policing would be too costly. Instead the CEO introduced “The Magnificent Seven”.
Under this scheme, the new CEO affirmed his trust that each employee (over 10,000 worldwide) was spending corporate money prudently, particularly the account managers entertaining clients. Just to be sure, each month the “Magnificent Seven,” in other words the seven employees who had incurred the highest expenditure, would be rewarded with an “all expenses paid trip to New York” (in quotation marks so you can add the enticing tone in which it was expressed) “where you will have a meeting with me and we will go through your receipts, one by one”.
A catchy name and catchy consequences.
The CEO understood the nature and context of the problem he was trying to solve. I never met one of the magnificent seven, not heard what happened to them on their trip, but I understand that the scheme was very effective with little additional effort.
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