Keeping a Strategic Dialogue Moving, page 4
ACT III: Changing Course
"We're at a critical juncture. External factors are forcing us to change. Although the industry's got fewer players, no real capacity has been eliminated. So there's intense pressure on what we can get for our product in the marketplace. And thatis not going to change."
"The number one issue for us is to understand what it is we want to do, what we want to be, and what our direction ought to be. Everyone has their own interpretation of what that ought to be, and as a result, the organization is going in a lot of different directions."
- - Two executives at Elite
The executives at Elite aren't asleep at the wheel. They understand that their world is changing; they see their competitors passing on the high and low ends. But because they are begging fundamental questions of direction, they now find themselves stuck in the middle, trying to be everything to everyone. 15 As one executive says: "It's like: 'Well, here's a product we can shove through our distribution. Boy, I hope somebody wants to buy this stuff.' We lack a focus that's clear about who we're going to go after and how they behave. It's more like everybody is our customer." Elite's deteriorating performance is the painful penalty the whole firm pays for not asking and answering the tough questions of strategy. What's more, they all know it -- each and every one of them. The problem is they don't know what to do about it, and they're not alone in their bewilderment. It is one thing to see something's wrong or to even see why it persists; it is quite another to change what you see.
Changing the course of a strategic dialogue.Changing the course of a strategic dialogue presents a daunting challenge. First, you need to be able to spot patterns of dialogue that harm the way choices are explored, understood, and made. Second, you need be able to understand the mechanisms that guide those patterns and lead them to recur. Third -- and herein lies the rub -- you need to spot, understand, and change those patterns and the mechanisms underlying them while simultaneously making headway on highly controversial questions that are urgently pressing for resolution.
Small wonder people find it difficult. It simply isn't possible to pay attention to everything at once. But it is possible to sequence your attention. How? By combining and sequencing three intervention options so that you can make progress while altering the conditions that make progress difficult. The first option is to focus exclusively on the strategic questions by interrupting and bypassing patterns of dialogue that would jeopardize the quality of the inquiry. The second option is to spot and name those patterns while keeping the group's focus on the strategic issues. And the third option is to engage the patterns, surfacing and focusing on the mechanisms underlying them so everyone can see, understand, and change them. Which option you choose at any point depends on the issue, the purpose, and the context at hand (see Figure 3: An Intervention Continuum). You can best see what each option looks like and how it works by looking at each one in the context of the dialogue that took place at Elite:
- Bypassing: You can significantly improve the quality of a dialogue by adding in a form of inquiry that is almost always missing. This particular kind of inquiry requires an ear for the logic behind views and an eye for spotting the limits to them. With this in mind, you can form an inquiry that gently nudges the dialogue beyond those limits, either broadening or deepening people's understanding of the issues and how others view them. 16 Here are some examples:
To Broaden the Understanding To Deepen the Understanding Let me check with others:
How would others characterize the current strategy and the thinking behind it?
To what extent do others think we've articulated a competitive advantage in the core business?
How would others characterize our competitive advantage in relation to today's market? How sustainable do people think it is?
What ideas do others have on how we might sustain an advantage in the high end segment?
How do others see the possibility of pursuing the low or middle segments in new ways?
What ideas do others have on how we might go after other segments?
What other ways might we segment the market?
What concerns or hopes do others have about shifting course or staying on it?
Let me check with Frank:
Those growth projections strike me as important. On what assumptions and data were they based?
What specifically about the strategy leads you to think it won't pay off?
When you hear Ian say the strategy hasn't paid off yet, what -- if anything -- would make that possibility compelling to you? What would you need to see or hear to have confidence in the strategy?
Let me check with Ian:
What kinds of things make you confident the investment will pay off?
What kinds of things might lead you to reconsider or to doubt whether it will pay off? What would you need to see or hear?
When you say these decisions are informed by things other than facts, I think that's right. Can you or others reflect on the concerns or preferences that might figure into your thinking about where to focus?
By building in the inquiries on the left, you not only broaden the range of concerns, views, and data on the table, you also open up more productive lines of inquiry, interrupt the vicious cycle between Frank and Ian, and alter the unresponsive bystander pattern that helps keep it in place. By building in the inquiries on the right, you get a deeper understanding of different views and what leads them to diverge. This way you can either resolve the divergence with greater confidence or identify the data and concerns that need to be addressed to develop that confidence. I call this option "bypassing," because it reduces the impact of patterns while leaving them intact.
- Naming: Sometimes issues are so explosive and patterns so intractable that bypassing proves insufficient for making headway. At this point, you need to draw attention to the dialogue by naming its limits and signaling a way out. This means you can't just say: "You people are jerks for treating one another like jerks." The challenge is to name the limits in a way that pulls the dialogue beyond them.
To Broaden the Understanding To Deepen the Understanding I've noticed Frank and Ian going back and forth now for a few minutes while others of us are quiet. I thought it would help us understand the issues better if we also learned more about how others see them. So, if it's not a problem to switch, I'd like to ask: What are others' views on the strategy and the implications of reconsidering it?(You can then follow up with other broadening or deepening inquiries like those under bypassing). I've noticed the two of you go back and forth for a while. I now think I see where you each end up but I don't yet see -- and I doubt others see -- how you each got there. So if it's not a problem from your point of view, can each of you say a bit more about the thinking, or the concerns, or the data that lead to your views?(You can then follow up with other deepening or broadening inquiries like those under bypassing). Whether naming is aimed at broadening or deepening the understanding of your group, it begins by identifying the pattern and by signaling a general way out. It then ends by forming a question that focuses the inquiry so that the pattern is less likely to repeat when the question is answered. I call this option "naming" because it labels a pattern that might otherwise go unnoticed or undiscussed. At the same time, it leaves intact the mechanisms that make it recur, and so it probably will recur.
- Engaging: Just as bypassing can prove insufficient when faced with especially explosive issues and intractable patterns, so can naming. Sometimes it's necessary to inquire into the patterns themselves so that you can surface and explore the mechanisms that make them so intractable.
To Broaden the Understanding To Deepen the Understanding (If the group is pressed for time, start with something like): I have a question for the group that we may or may not want to pursue now. I'd like to say what it is so that we can decide whether to pursue it now or later. (The question): As I listen to our conversation, it strikes me that the questions Frank and Ian raised a while ago are absolutely critical, because they are so central to what we will decide to do. Assuming others agree, I'm trying to figure out: What's leading me and others to sit back and watch the two of them get stuck, and when they get stuck, to switch the subject and let the issues drop? (If the group is pressed for time, start with something like): Can I interrupt for a moment? I have a question that we may or may not want to pursue now. I'd like to say what it is so that we can decide whether to pursue it now or later.(The question): As I listen to the two of you, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that we are going to need the best answers possible to the questions you are raising, because they're so central to what we will decide to do. Assuming you'd agree, I'm trying to figure out: what's preventing each of you from testing your views or inquiring of others to see if you might each be missing something important? These inquiries up the ante, because they bring to everyone's attention the structures that keep the dialogue stuck. So, unlike bypassing or naming, these inquiries are likely to surface interpersonal tensions that make everyone uncomfortable, or to uncover contradictions between what people do and the values they hold most dear, or to reveal embarrassing gaps in people's thinking, or to call into question cultural assumptions that most everyone takes for granted. And once this happens, the dialogue will move in a direction that's both rare and difficult to navigate.
This difficulty has three sources. The first is that these inquiries ask people to look at themselves. Not only is this counter-cultural and emotionally daunting, it is also difficult from a cognitive perspective. It's much easier to see what someone else is doing and to note his or her impact on you than it is to see what you are doing and to know what impact you are having on them. It's like riding a bike. Once skilled at it, you no longer have to watch your legs push the peddles or look at your hands steer the wheel. All that becomes automatic, and so you are free to concentrate on the road ahead and on the motorists around you, consciously trying to steer clear of pot holes and bad drivers. Similarly, when acting in the social arena, you are much more aware of the situation around you, what others are saying or doing, what their impact is on you, and what you are consciously trying to do in response to it all. This is one reason you hear yourself and others say things like: "I was just trying to do x, y, or z....Look what I was up against....The reason I did that is because you did this...." These responses are not purely defensive; they also reflect a pervasive, although alterable, blind spot of the mind. 17
The second difficulty revolves around scrutinizing tensions that lie below the surface. When you look at already delicate relationships or at the cultural assumptions upon which a firm's identity is based, people understandably worry that these structures might not withstand the weight of close scrutiny. They fear that the tensions embedded in these structures might erupt, shaking and perhaps shifting the very ground upon which they live their organizational lives. To expect people to prance merrily down this path is unrealistic at best. Even the most open-minded need some reasonable degree of confidence that it will be better to go down this unfamiliar path than to stay where they are.
The third difficulty is a product of the first two. Because people in organizations rarely go down this path, everyone is unpracticed at it. So when questions like these are broached, people get tripped up by their own blind spots and end up handling the situation in ways that either fail to have a lasting effect or actually make matters worse. This only confirms their worst fears, leading them to view these kinds of conversations as a waste of time or downright destructive. As a result, they quickly retreat to familiar ground -- once again keeping these questions at bay and making it impossible to ever develop the confidence or competence necessary to pursue them well.
While engaging patterns might be necessary for altering the mechanisms that produce poor choices and that steer organizations into trouble, it also poses a dilemma: the very structures that require change make change difficult. Examining how you think and act might be a good idea, but your mind is designed to make you blind to both your thought processes and your actions. Changing certain cultural structures might be a good idea, but the ones you usually want to change are the very ones that discourage scrutiny. Transforming the vicious cycle in a defensive relationship might be a good idea, but its very defensive, cyclical nature makes it difficult.
This dilemma leads most organizations to focus on formal structures, systems, and processes. Relative to cultural and interpersonal structures, they are much easier to change. The problem is that changes in formal structures are necessary but insufficient for organizational change to take hold. When formal changes are unaccompanied by changes in cultural and interpersonal structures, these latter structures will pull formal changes back toward their norm, either compromising or completely unraveling the changes. This raises the thorniest question of all: How can you address all three structures and the dilemmas they raise so that you can successfully change the course of the firm?
Changing the course of the firm.In our work at firms like Elite, Roger Martin and I are discovering that changing the course of a firm requires a dual focus. To negotiate the dilemmas of change, one eye must stay on the strategic questions, while the other must stay on the structures that determine how well those questions are explored, understood, and answered. This doesn't mean that you have to answer every strategic question or change every structure all at once. Instead, it means keeping an eye on all of them and thinking through how changes in one structure, or answers to one question, might affect others.
Obviously this makes for a lot of complexity. One way to manage this complexity is to think about change as a process that unfolds in cyclical stages that repeat throughout the life of a firm. From this perspective, what's most important is to start a process of sustainable change -- one that is more likely to spiral upward, rather than downward, gradually enhancing the firm's capacity to engage in strategic learning and change (Figure 4: Staging Change ). To illustrate, here's a brief account of how you can stage change so that it is more likely to take hold and to continue over time. 18
- Stage 1: Surfacing Structures and Strategies. The first stage is to surface both the thinking behind the current strategy and the structures that guide and maintain that thinking. While the first is necessary if you are going to change the mind of the firm, 19 the second is necessary if you are going to translate that change of mind into action. You can surface the thinking behind the current strategy by reverse engineering the choices that produced the strategy and reconstructing the logic behind those choices. 20 At the same time, you can surface the cultural, interpersonal, and formal structures that maintain that logic by conducting a series of facilitated dialogues aimed at exploring all three structures. To focus these dialogues, we create a "collage" that juxtaposes different perspectives on key themes, using anonymous quotes taken from interviews to illustrate them. 21 We find that by contrasting views in this way and by including "engaging" questions, you can start to loosen how tightly people hold their views, and you can more easily draw attention to what they do or do not do to contribute to the difficulties they experience.
To ensure sustainable change, it helps to integrate education into this process right from the start. At this stage, education should be designed to help the decision-making group create a shared language and a shared way of thinking about both strategic questions and common impediments to answering them. This first stage culminates successfully when decision-makers can demonstrate a shared understanding of the thinking behind the current strategy and a shared awareness of the mechanisms that could prevent them from reconsidering and changing it. At this point, the group moves into a second stage of change -- more aware but not yet able to change what they see. - Stage 2: Transforming Structures and Strategies. The second stage is to transform both the thinking behind the current strategy and the structures that guide and maintain that thinking. Once again, the first is necessary if you are going to change the mind of the firm, while the second is necessary if you are going to translate that change of mind into action. You can transform the thinking behind the current strategy by jointly designing an inquiry that: (1) formulates views so that they are testable;
(2) gets those data, and only those data, necessary to test views and to create confidence sufficient for changing minds and making choices; and (3) reaches a mutual understanding of what those data mean and what choices make the most sense.
While you undertake this inquiry, you can spot and surface those structures that need to be transformed for the steps to be undertaken well. Which structures you target will vary depending on whether interpersonal, cultural, or formal structures are slowing progress. For example, at one point, you might find that you need to redesign the cost system, because otherwise you won't get the data you need to make good choices now or in the future. At other times, you might find that cultural norms are making it difficult to explore different interpretations of the data. And at still other times, you might find that relationships across functions or levels are impeding progress. As each such obstacle comes to the fore, you can focus on exploring, understanding, and changing it.
To ensure sustainable change, you can also integrate education into this stage. This education should be geared toward increasing people's competence, because the awareness produced in the first stage is insufficient for making difficult changes. The transforming stage culminates successfully when decision-makers demonstrate an ability to discuss their toughest issues openly and a willingness to make their toughest choices. At this point, the group moves into a third stage of change -- more competent than before, but not yet able to ensure that the changes will stick. - Stage 3: Integrating Structures and Strategies. The third stage is to integrate structural and strategic changes into the firm so that the firm can take new and better actions. You can do this most effectively by anticipating this stage from the start and holding every executive accountable for creating cycles of learning within and across their units. This way change is continually informed by, and understood by, those at other levels. Without this, integration becomes a process of buy-in driven from the top and imposed on the bottom, sowing the seeds for later stuckness as you stifle the learning necessary for future strategic change. This stage will naturally produce the need for future changes as you see more clearly how choices are linked and how these linkages affect the way the firm should be structured. When this happens, you will surface the need to make further changes which, in turn, will stimulate a new cycle of change targeted at one or another aspect of structure.
Just as you can weave education into the previous stages, you can weave education into this stage as well. Here education should be geared toward developing the competence necessary for making and sustaining change among as wide a group of people as possible. Otherwise a dependence on the top of the organization will persist, limiting the organization's capacity to re-examine and redesign its strategy in a timely way. This integrating stage of change culminates successfully when those charged with implementing the strategy demonstrate an actionable understanding of the new strategy, and when you can observe new organizational actions producing new and better results. After several cycles of this kind of change, you should also observe an increased ability throughout the organization to discuss tough issues openly and to make tough choices. At this point, the firm will be able to sustain change over time as and when needed.
While the first and second stages shake an organization loose, the third stage punctuates change with a period of consolidation or integration that eventually surfaces the need for new changes of different magnitude.
Dilemmas and traps. No change process is easy. Every moment will pose challenges that tax everyone's energy and enthusiasm. While these are unavoidable, two dilemmas lie at the heart of many of these troubles, setting traps that invite you to make matters worse rather than better.
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The over- and under-responsibility trap. For change to take, it must be understood and supported by those charged with implementing it. When CEOs, senior executives, or consultants make choices on their own in a kind of analytically-sealed vacuum, they become over-responsible and make it difficult for others to understand or support the choices. Yet they also face a dilemma: Other executives in the organization sometimes act as if they lack either the willingness or the ability to make tough choices on their own. So simply leaving the choices in their hands is often under-responsible.
This responsibility dilemma sets a trap that can lure you into making one of two mistakes. The first is to create an overly exclusionary process that produces dependence and breeds resistance, whereas the second is to create an overly inclusionary process that wastes precious resources and breeds resentment. To avoid falling into either trap, you need to make some hard choices right from the start about whom to include and whom to exclude from direct participation in the choice process. This means creating multiple vehicles for participation and including in each one the appropriate people. If you discover that some of the people on any list lack the competence to contribute productively, then you should address that up front, building their competence when possible, including them in other vehicles when appropriate, or replacing them when necessary. Figuring out which course of action makes the most sense is tricky, because it is easy to fool yourself about the cause of the problem and therefore the solution -- which brings us to the second dilemma and trap. - The wishful thinking trap. Because interpersonal and cultural structures are so hard to change at present, people wish these changes could be avoided. Eventually they convince themselves that problems stemming from interpersonal and cultural structures can be altered by firing people, by transferring people, by redesigning formal structures, by going around people's backs, and so on and so on. You know the routine. Not only do these maneuvers often fail, they also waste precious time and prevent us from learning how to make significant change easier. That is, because people avoid asking fundamental questions, they are rarely pursued, and people continue to be unpracticed at answering them. This stalemate is what led me to invent different ways of pursuing critical questions and different ways of staging fundamental change so that it could unfold over time. While the initial investment will always be great, the pay-off will be far more lasting.
The symphony of dysfunction recorded in this article can be heard everyday in 20th century corporations. That's why companies today get away with the costs it incurs. But some day not long from now, a company in an industry here and another company in an industry there is going to invest in making a different kind of sound. And when they do, they will leave all other firms behind and take the lead in the 21st century.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the many people at Elite who opened their hearts and minds to me and helped me develop the ideas here. I also want to thank four colleagues whose thinking has greatly shaped my own: Roger Martin, Donald Schon, David Kantor, and Chris Argyris. Finally, I want to thank those who helped me on this article: Alan Kantrow for his helpful coaching, Bruce Patton for significantly improving the clarity of my account, and Margo Grossberg for her editing.
Footnotes
1 Eugene O'Neill, A Long Day's Journey into Night. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955, pp.26-27, 30, 31.
2 I am indebted to Donald Schon for shaping the ideas in this section. His work on how practitioners and policy-makers frame controversial issues informs much of my thinking here. For his work on the subject, see Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books, 1983. See Donald Schon, Educating the Reflective Practitioner . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987. And see Martin Rein and Donald Schon, Frame Reflection. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
3 This is an intentional ambiguity. I mean asking more of others in the sense of holding them accountable for articulating their views, and asking more of others in the sense of learning what their thinking is.
4 Karl Popper warns: "For though we should seek for absolutely right or valid proposals, we should never persuade ourselves that we have definitely found them...." Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 385-386.
5 Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 42.
6 My thanks to Alan Kantrow of Monitor Company for the phrase "symphony of dysfunction."
7 It is more appropriate to call these structures "structuring processes" to emphasize their dynamic quality. These dynamic processes take place within the boundaries of the status quo, making organizational structuring an instance of what Don Schon calls dynamic conservativism. See Donald Schon, Beyond the Stable State. New York: Random House, 1971. For an account of how structures continuously evolve, see Henry Mintzberg, The Structuring of Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1979. For a view of structure which goes beyond formal structures, see Stewart Ranson , Bob Hinings, and Royston Greenwood, "The Structuring of Organizational Structures" in Administrative Science Quarterly. Volume 25, March 1980, pp. 1-17.
8 My thanks to Roger Martin for offering the term "steering mechanisms" -- a term he coined in his article "Changing the Mind of the Corporation," Harvard Business Review, November-December, 1993. The meeting at Elite, described in this article, marks the beginning of our joint efforts to understand and alter impediments to informed and actionable strategic choice. We are now in the process of writing a series of articles that describe in more detail how informed and actionable choices can be made while developing an organization's capacity to make better choices. This work will be build on the third section of this article.
9 Henry Mintzberg makes a more detailed argument for how strategies emerge over time in "Crafting Strategy" in Harvard Business Review, 1987, 65, pp. 66-75. His idea is that purely deliberate strategies, conceived at the top, will always take a new shape once in the hands and minds of those at local levels. This article focuses on deliberate attempts by executives at setting direction. Roger Martin and I will address how deliberate and emergent processes affect one another. For a recent edited volume on strategy as a process, see John Hendry et al, Strategic Thinking: Leadership and the Management of Change. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1993.
10 This experience at Elite happens everywhere anytime an organization increases the capacity of its formal-technical infrastructure while leaving its human infrastructure intact, i.e., its cultural and interpersonal structures. Most changes at the formal level today are designed to increase the flow of information and the number of perspectives on that information. Whether it be a new cost accounting system, a new information system, a new e-mail system, a new cross-functional team, or a new work redesign program -- all are designed to maximize the flow of information and the speed of learning. In a turbulent world, this is considered an unalloyed good, because organizations need to adapt quickly to rapidly changing circumstances. A problem arises when the capacity of the human infrastructure to process more information and more perspectives productively has not increased. When this happens, a gap emerges between what formal changes require and what people can do. Left unaddressed, this gap eventually pulls the changes back toward the capacities of the people implementing them.
11 Martin Parker argues that because culture is something an organization is and not something it has, it is not "a piece to be slotted into the systems jigsaw" (see Martin Parker, "Working together, working apart: Management culture in a manufacturing firm" in The Sociological Review. Volume 43, No. 3, August 1995, p. 519). While I agree that organizations are cultures, I see benefit in looking at how a culture shapes and is shaped by the people who make them up and the formal structures and systems they design. For this and other reasons I address in more detail in another article in progress, I treat culture as if it were a piece of a systems jigsaw. The account of culture offered in this article is cursory. For a richer account of culture and some of the controversies surrounding how it should be understood, see P. J. Frost et al., Reframing Organizational Culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991. See John Van Maanen and Edgar Shein, "Toward a theory of organizational socialization" in
B. Staw and L.L. Cummings, Research in Organization Behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, volume 1209-269. See Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.
12 This is an allusion to two classic studies in social psychology -- one on authority relations by Stanley Milgram called Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper Colophon, 1969) and the other on the innocent bystander phenomenon by Bibb Latane and John M. Darley called The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? (Englewood Cliffs,New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970). Their laboratory experiments identify some of the social conditions that produce these phenomena. We also need to design "live" experiments to see if we can alter our responses to those conditions. For a well-developed argument for such experimentation, see Chris Argyris, Inner Contradictions of Rigorous Research. New York: Academic Press, 1980. And see Chris Argyris, Robert Putnam, and Diana M. Smith, Action Science. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.
13 These different sensibilities -- and the ways in which they shape what Frank and Ian see -- suggest that Kenneth Andrews was right when he observed: "... there is no way to divorce (strategy) from the personal values of those who make the choice. Executives in charge of a company do not look exclusively at what a company might do and can do. In apparent disregard for the second of these considerations, they sometimes seem heavily influenced by what they personally want to do [italics original]" in Kenneth Andrews, The Concept of Strategy. Homewood, Illinois: Irwin, 1987, p. 53.
14 In 1843, John Stewart Mill first pointed to this bias when he wrote about "the prejudice that a phenomenon cannot have more than one cause" (cited in Nisbett and Ross, 1980, p. 127). Since then, cognitive research has confirmed that this is a pervasive inferential error made by people in everyday life. As Nisbett and Ross summarize the error: "Although people sometimes acknowledge the existence of multiple causes, it is clear that they frequently act in ways far more consistent with beliefs in unitary causation. In a sense, they behave as if causation were "hydraulic" or as if causal candidates competed with one another in a zero-sum game [italics original]." The one cause people see is the one most salient to them -- salience being determined by other cognitive heuristics that can also lead us to make erroneous inferences. For an exceptionally comprehensive review of everyday cognitive errors see Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980, p. 128. Also, scholars in organizational behavior like Gareth Morgan in Images of Organization . Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1986) and Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal in Reframing Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991) argue that we all hold different images or frames of organizations and that these lead us to understand organizations in particular ways. I suspect that these implicit images or frames lead managers and executives to focus on one or two causes to the disregard of other equally important causes.
15 Is this Michael Porter's notion?
16 See the first section of this article for an example of paraphrasing the logic behind views and identifying the missing steps, pp. 6-11.
17 Research in social cognition suggests that when we are acting, we focus on situational causes, yet when observing other people's actions, we focus on dispositional causes. This is called the actor-observer bias (see Nisbett and Ross, 1980). Once you understand this blind spot, you can reduce its effect by helping others see what they might have said or done to contribute to any difficulties and by inquiring into what you yourself might have said or done. While the first addresses the other's blind spot, the second addresses yours. This suggests that the problem isn't the blind spot but our unawareness of the blind spot. That is, once aware of it, you can act to reduce its impact.
18 --this footnote blank
19 This is Roger Martin's argument in Changing the Mind of the Corporation.
20 Ibid.
21 These collages are based on transcripts of interviews in which executives identify the two or three most critical business issues facing their firm and describe what makes it easier or harder to make progress on them. Representative but anonymous quotes are then organized along thematic lines, grouped according to the structures they illuminate, and accompanied by "engaging" questions designed to loosen how tightly people hold their perspectives.
Copyright Diana McLain Smith ©1995
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