Remember the greatest challenge you faced in your professional career… Remember the last time your 14-year old child came back from school with this absolutely impossible mathematics exercise to solve… Remember the last time you went for a peaceful family walk when a snake suddenly came across your way and blocked the path you were following with your young children…
And think about these events again now, knowing how you made your way out of them…
Don’t you believe the perception of the problem, at the time when it surfaced, was probably hundred times worse than the problem itself? I am pretty sure you honestly do believe so. Yet, is it what you think when a new problem turns up? Is your immediate reaction something like: “Hold on a minute – is my perception of the problem neutral and truly in line with the size of the problem?”, or is it rather: “Gosh, how am I going to get out of this?”… ?
Reality distortion
Reacting at first by emphasizing the problem is human. Every one of us naturally looks for stability, and dreads new problems. As a result, when an unknown situation turns up, our natural reaction is to see the problems bigger than they are. I would even go further: our natural reaction sometimes consists in seeing a problem when there is none. Or our natural reaction is sometimes to think problems are new – hence complex to resolve – because, even though they have been in front of our eyes for years, we have learnt to hide them and to live with them, and as such unconsciously buried them deep behind our daily habits. All of this due to the fact that our human nature makes us find comfort in stability and peace.
This is what I call reality distortion: if we were to be truly honest to ourselves, we would of course acknowledge the actual size of the problems. But because we don’t want to see the issues as they are, our brains either choose to ignore them for a while until their perception becomes too big to continue ignoring them, or our brains immediately decide to trigger the red alert without the true need to get alarmed.
Consequences
So what? Why is reality distortion a problem in the end? I see three types of nasty consequences to this reality distortion field that is imposed to us by our human brains.
The first consequence is to launch immediate and inappropriate actions to resolve problems: taking a hammer to kill a mosquito, or calling a carpenter to fix the bath tub. Eventually, a lot of money is going to be spent and the problems are very unlikely be properly resolved. That results in frustrations, lack of trust, lack of confidence in your ability to fix problems. Confidence might not be lost before a couple of times, but someone falling too often into that trap is unlikely to have trust and budget for long, and such a person is unlikely to be or become a strong leader in our competitive corporate world.
The second consequence of reality distortion comes when the focus is kept on the immediate issues lying in front of our noses – ie the symptoms of the problems – rather than objectively assessing if and why the problems prevent us from reaching our broader goals. This scenario typically happens when mid or senior managers focus on the symptoms of the problems of their own departments only, rather than relating them to the bigger picture of their organization, and searching for resolving their causes. The result is constant fire-fighting, without ever building a strategy on the mid to long term, and often even burying the problems a bit deeper while they grow. In such cases, the teams are so focused on fixing micro-issues in their day-to-day that they never spend a minute thinking beyond the day after tomorrow. They only think about getting out of where they are now. As if thinking a bit ahead was something you would only do in the future… Come on, we only live and act in the present! Without a bit of planning today, and efforts to stick to executing the plan now, when are you going to start acting on your future?… Certainly never for someone constantly and exclusively fixing the issues here and now, and not even spending a couple of hours in a week to think about what is going to come next.
The third consequence of reality distortion is demotivation. Your own reality distortion results in a different vision than mine and that the ones of every single of your colleagues. Therefore, when the manager makes a decision skewed by his or her own reality distortion, the decision is unlikely to be fully understood by everybody in the teams, since they don’t see the problems the same way you or I would do. And so, the team as a whole is going to lose any momentum they may have created on their own when facing the problem and trying to resolve it their own way. A manager who lets himself be the slave of his own reality distortion very quickly loses the energy of his team: the people obey and follow his or her orders because they most likely do not have a choice, but do not convincingly work for such a manager; hence they will never give their best and at the first opportunity, they will try to leave the team to move on to something else, as this might eventually be an easier way out of the problems.
To add up to the seriousness of the situation – i.e. reality distortion taking over when decisions are being made – these three consequences are not mutually exclusive. And most of us are usually subject to the three of them at the same time, entering into a vicious circle whereby we want to start big actions to resolve the issues quickly without a proper strategic plan, therefore we concentrate on the micro issues rather than the big picture, and therefore our people are demotivated by the lack of transparency on the rationale of the tasks they are asked to do and by the lack of a long term vision for them and for their team. And because there is no strategy, you have no choice but launching disconnected and discrete actions to resolve individual problems… Break the circle, or your days are already counted.
So, now, I am sure you are convinced that being able to resist this subjectivity more or less imposed to us by our human brains is critical to act freely and appropriately as an effective, trusted and respected leader. This requires a proactive attitude as it means to go against our natural tendency. I am now going to share my 3-step approach to avoid falling into that reality distortion trap.
Define, Understand, Resolve
Define-Understand-Resolve is my solution to any problem, which proves especially effective against reality distortion.
Always start by defining the problem in an accurate and specific manner, eventually validated by the people you are working with. Building a transparent problem statement, in written, is the only way to avoid reality distortion. Until then, the discussions you may have with the teams will only be based on perceptions of the problems, assumptions and quiproquos. And trust me: you will be surprised. Next time you face a real painful problem, start asking around you: what is the problem, why is it a problem. I am pretty sure you will get as many answers as the number of people you are questioning. And your own answer is also likely to be slightly different. Think about it: how often have you been in a meeting aiming at finding a solution to a problem, but people in the room constantly coming back to: “No, I think the true problem is…”, or “to me, the most important thing to do now is…” Until everybody has the same neutral vision of the problem, how can you dare hoping to find a sustainable solution?! And how can you be certain that your own vision of the problem and the solution you tend to impose to a group are the right ones?!
Once the problem is defined in a way accepted by everybody facing the problem on a day to day basis, it is then time to understand the problem. Understanding a problem means to be able to explain its root causes in a simple and well-articulated manner. This should start by measuring the size of the gap between current and target, and then explaining why such a gap exists. Now look at the perception for the people working with you: with this approach you have moved away from a situation where they have to fix serious issues, to a scenario where there are going to reduce the gaps between a currently not ideal baseline to a target that consensually looks good to everybody. Isn’t that much more motivating for the people to come into the office in the morning? Seeing the “good” that they are contributing to reach, rather than seeing the “bad” that they never truly fix?…
The last step is to resolve the problem. Be it the last step, make sure you keep it for the end… that seems obvious, but how often, under the pressure of your own management, are you tempted to shape a solution before you have a neutral and clear definition of the problem?… Resist the temptation to jump to the end game from the start if you want to resolve problems once and for all. And in the resolution phase, also think about the people who work daily on implementing the solution. If you were one of them, would you feel more encouraged and motivated by fixing some your breaks that will anyway never truly disappear, or by moving towards the good target that has been set? In other words, stop continuously fixing issues: this will make you and your people only see never ending problems; start working on managing the variances between where you are and where you want to be: this will give a boost of Positive Energy to the people working with you, and so to you at the same time.
If you are looking for a detailed step-by-step guide through the Define-Understand-Resolve approach to problem solving, with tools and tips and the pitfalls to avoid along the way, here is one thing you can do now: read Lean Six Sigma: Coach me if you can. You will find a structured methodology to resolve any problem in no more than 22 weeks.
In conclusion, the perception of what we do ends up being what we do and who we are. Therefore, if you concentrate on fixing your defects, resolving your breaks, fire-fighting day-to-day issues, your life is going to be absorbed by these issues for ever; you are going to remain so focused on problems that problems will never disappear from you mental representation of the reality, and you will end up more and more frustrated every day. On the contrary, if you invest a relatively short amount of time in defining and understanding your problems, setting a target and then, working hard on reducing the variances between where you stand and your target, you are going to enable you and your teams to reach apparently unreachable goals, opening up horizons nobody would have dared to imagine. The difference? Not much in the contents of what you do: one way or the other, you will end up fixing the day-to-day issues. But the difference is huge with regards to the perception of what you do. One way you end up depressed and seeing issues and only issues that will never disappear; the other way you elevate your targets and move towards them, whatever is coming on the way, to build a long term vision for your organization. Which way do you prefer? You choose !
The Process Excellence String of Ariadne 