Is Trust an alternative to Transparency ?

As a leader of leaders you always are out of detailed insights on all work streams / initiatives  / projects within your organization yourself and you lean on your next level leaders to take care of things. However, as a review mechanism to ensure the team is headed in the right direction and has the right level of support, we time to time review the progress, ask of details, challenge things etc. One of the things i have struggled at times is teams / leaders being offended to be introspected, asked for details and pushed to retrospect;  

A common element in all of this has come in my two decades of experience, i.e. "Demand for Transparency is perceived as a sign of Distrust"; I have asked this question to myself multiple times when i have experienced this and today i have this question for you, Is Trust an alternative to Transparency ?

So, is really trust an alternative to transparency and if you trust your team, you should not ask questions and audit things; Well i don't think really trust can be a alternative to transparency, rather transparency is a road which will leads you to build trust; And this works both ways, there are some common pitfalls leaders themselves fall into where their teams find themselves not trusted -

Observing and managing closely multiple leaders now, i have found some  common mistakes made by leaders when they ask for information which leads to be perceived by their leaders as distrust -

• Not building enough context of why details are asked, which also partly is because of not having clear expectation setting 
• Asking question more from a position of authority rather than a position of curiosity
• "Pretending" to be out of ground reality; At times leaders know the reality of why things are the way they are, but still chose to ask the "right" question;  
• Blaming team / leaders if things don't look clear are not progressing as expected
• Not spending enough time to help the team fix for transparency. Let them know what is really needed; Setting clear expectations;

Over 20 years of experience and with last 10 years managing leaders, i have found leaders who embrace transparency and proactive about sharing info even when things might entail tough conversations being trusted a lot more than leaders who believe in only indexing on an update of the end result; So if you are leader of a team and / or manage a large org, be comfortable sharing information; Create processes which gives top leadership, partner teams self serve ways to always be able to review things and suggest changes; The more you do, the more you would be valued as a leader and trusted;

Premortems - New Generation Mantra to Success

Premortems - New Generation "Mantra" to Success

With time as leaders, we have all become "experts" in learning from our mistakes. That's the classic question we ask anyone "What did you learn from your failure ?" & as long as we think we have learned from our failures we believe we have done our part and have better chances to succeed in future.  But does that happen, not for me yet :). The hard reality of a dynamic and everyday changing landscape around us is that neither the problems would be the same nor would the mistakes , so graduating from a school of failures is not anymore alone a recipe to success in future. 

So what do we do, stop learning from our mistakes :), definitely not ! We will continue to make mistakes and get better always learning from them, however in the generation which I call as the "Working Backward Era" your failures has to be Informed failures. You really should be able to predict your failure objectively and be able to plan ahead to avoid and/or manage the failure.  It's like doing a pre-mortem rather than a postmortem to diagnose a disease rather than curing the disease.

Your new "Key" to success 

Doing a pre-mortem of a business strategy, an architecture choice, a change request or an organizational decision is your new mantra to predict failure and as part of the discovery device checkpoints / mitigation steps to minimize chances to failure. In next section we will talk about how to do a pre-mortem -

Doing a Pre-Mortem

Pre-mortem is about fore playing disaster well before it happens, think about worst case and all possible ways in which things could go wrong. Learning back from my Amazon days, we use to do what we call as COE (Cause Of Error) documents for all business impacting incidence, and ask five WHY's,  the idea is to keep narrowing down on the root cause until you get to the root of it. If i take the same analogy to the concept of pre-mortems, its about answering the five HOW's, which is ask your self "How this plan could fail ?" "How could this decision go wrong? " and keep doing it multiple times which will force you to think of all critical reasons where the decision could get wrong.  

I have been practicing this as an important framework for a few years now for all of my critical decision making and i was impressed with the critical thinking and increased deep dive in embraced with my teams. We got lot better !! 

The Bandwagon Fallacy

 The Bandwagon Fallacy

One of my favorite topics and the most commonly experienced fallacy, The Bandwagon Fallacy. While before we get there, lets differentiate between Biases and Fallacy. A lot of people understand them the same or at least think Biases lead to Fallacy, which is actually not true. Being Aware of both helps you make better decision, but there is a clear difference between them; Fallacies are mistakes of reasoning, as opposed to making mistakes that are factual in nature, however Biases are persistent and widespread psychological tendencies that can be detrimental to objectivity to a decision.

I am going to talk through this Fallacy more in context of leadership roles which involves making critical decisions and how we get trapped in one of the most common fallacy at times. 

Let me start with some questions for you,

# How many times you got this argument to make a decision, "Everyone does it this way, so we should do the same"? Or

# Everyone did it X way, looks a popular way of doing things, must be the right way ! 

Picking the popular choice does not always mean, that you picked the right one :)  

Bandwagon comes from the idea in old times where people use to hop on to the Wagon when they found anything trendy. People would have blinders to reason aspects leading to make right decision and instead use popularity or commonness of a decision to chose on. 

As leaders we develop our brands overtime and one of the key contributors to the brand value we build for ourselves is based on the decision we make. Your decision reflect your ability to deep dive, your courage to make right decisions and your ability to own your decisions. It is really about you being at leadership position vs you being a leader. 

A lot of times when making decisions we know we are not making the right decisions but still we intentionally lean to choose the poplar one, any guesses why we do that (lets bring some real and discomforting answers) -

• The popular choices would have the minimum resistance, so its a easy battle to win. No one challenges you.
• We shy away from taking courageous accountability of the decisions we make, when choosing the  popular one, we can always blame the unknown for the popular choice not proving right :)
• We are in a hurry to get rewarded for our decisions. Time to know the uncommon decision proved right would be long, so one has to wait for the reward for the decision to realize unlike for popular choices reward could come in advance as well ! 

Ah, so many problems with trying to make "right" decisions and no real upside, so why should I take so  much pain ? 

Well the choice is yours, you want to be in control of your destiny or let the popular choice decide your destiny. Its also the mark you as a leader you want to create for yourself. As a true leader the biggest contribution you could make  for your team/organization, is to help make the right decisions. So if i think as a leader myself, i don't have an option and cant afford to have my team & organization suffer of me making a wrong decision.

So how do I avoid getting trapped in The Bandwagon Fallacy ?

Well its not that hard, few simple things can help you avoid the trap and make the right decision -

Be Aware - Being aware is the first and the foremost thing. One should be cautious of not being trapped in the fallacy and challenge the decision making process. 

Remove Blinders -  Often a times you or your team would have blinders in the decision making process.  Subconsciously our mind tries to find easy way out and when it finds a popular choices available it will try to put blinders around you to ignore facts. As a leader remove any blinders you/your team has and bring out facts which are key to decision making.

Focus on Input metric - One simple litmus test to find out you being trapped in the Bandwagon Fallacy is you focusing mostly on the output metric. People trapped in this setup would spend disproportionate time talking of the solution and very little to actually no time talking of the problem the solution was found for :)

Do A Pre-Mortem - One of the best way to break cognitive traps is to play "Disaster". Visualize the decision going wrong and try to work backward from it. Find out reasons why would the decision fail which will in turn help with things which you missed considering while making the decision. 

Remember DECISION making is the ultimate power you get as a leader and not being able to use your power right is the biggest failure. Decisions can prove "right" or "wrong", but the way you make decisions leads you to "success/failure" vs "Disaster" ! 

Choice is yours, put on your Thinking Cap !