Unity #8: Norms and Defaults

AN URGENT TIMETABLE FOR INSTALLING SPECIFIC BEHAVIORAL NORMS

“People asked me over the years, “Bill, when you became head coach and general manager of the 49ers, did you have a timetable for winning the Super Bowl?” My answer is succinct: “No.”

Things were in such bad shape when I arrived that talk of a Super Bowl championship for San Francisco would have sounded delusional; people would have thought I was crazy. […]

In the two years before I joined San Francisco, my predecessor as 49ers general manager, Joe Thomas, had basically gutted the 49er organization, forcing out head coach Monte Clark, whose 8–6 record had been the 49ers’ first winning season in four years; hiring and firing three head coaches in twelve months; impetuously and vindicating firing — humiliating — players in front of the team; trading away or releasing quality talent, including quarterback Jim Plunkett to the Oakland Raiders, whom he would soon take to two Super Bowl Championships; and removing all “success” memorabilia from previous years (including trophies for three divisional championships, banners, plaques, game programs, photographs of the team, and even MVP awards).

Perhaps the highlight of Thomas’s mismanagement was his acquisition of O.J. Simpson from the Buffalo Bills when the superstar was at the end of his career — overweight, arthritic, and out of gas. Thomas had concluded that Simpson would attract fans just because he was a local kid from San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.

Fans thought otherwise and decided that seeing Simpson sitting bored on the bench with a bag of ice on his knee was not worth the price of admission. The cost to the organization was extreme: Thomas gave Buffalo draft picks that included first-, second- (two of them), third-, and fourth-round choices over three years and appeared to have mortgaged away the future of the franchise. All of the above was part of his plan to start “a new era of 49er football.” It certainly was.

What remained was a demoralized, chaotic, and near-mutinous organizational culture of failure that was epitomized by a team that produced a 2–14 record [2 wins, 14 losses] the year prior to my arrival (and was even worse than that record suggests). One writer declared that the San Francisco 49ers was the worst franchise in all of professional sports. Not just football — all of professional sports.

Joe Thomas was summary fired; I was hired.

That’s what I faced on my first day of work — an organization in turmoil, a team whose roster of talent was paper-thin and tattered; a future that seemed dismal, in part because in spite of that 2–14 season the year before I arrived, I didn’t even have a first-round draft pick.

Emblematic of the organizational dysfunction were the organization’s substandard headquarters and training facility. There wasn’t enough space for a regulation-sized football field, so the team used two “semifields” in Redwood City, California. The weight room was sparsely furnished with rusting weights, the showers ran cold if somebody flushed a toilet, and our offices were worn, sparse, and cramped.

Consequently, I approached building the 49er organization with an agenda that didn’t include a timetable for a championship or even a winning season. Instead, I arrived with an urgent timetable for installing an agenda of specific behavioral norms — actions and attitudes — that applied to every single person on the payroll.

To put it bluntly, I would teach each person in the organization what to do and how to think. The short-term results would contribute both symbolically and functionally to a new and productive self-image and environment and become the foundation upon which we could launch our longer-term goal, namely, the resurrection of a football franchise.”

— Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care Of Itself, 2009

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TSR’S SERIES ON UNITY, ISSUE #8: NORMS AND DEFAULTS

Unity often seems downright magical to behold externally — often seemingly emerging from nowhere, a group of people will work in great harmony and hold themselves to the highest possible standards, and accomplish things that were seemingly impossible.

To the question of where success comes from, I have my answer — it’s typically the result of doing dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of individual actions correctly.

Thousands of correct actions? This seems daunting.

It is daunting.

But it is doable — or at least, it has been done in the past.

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GUIDANCE: AIMING FOR PERFECTION

The first and largest hurdle to clear in terms of exceptional performance is getting the team to buy into the idea of aiming for perfection.

Years later, Walsh’s quarterback Joe Montana would reflect —

“That was the thing about [Bill Walsh’s] perspective: Being really good wasn’t enough. He taught us to want to be perfect and instilled in the team a hunger for improvement, a drive to get better and better. We saw his own hunger for perfection, and it was contagious.”

Elite teams do not come together by accident, and teams that become elite do not become so by accident; sustained runs of exceptional performance, as a rule, do not happen by accident.

While it’s easy enough to write, and easy enough to read, genuinely aiming for perfection is an elusive thing in the world.

On a personal note, I believe that the best possible life comes from doing the right thing every single minute of one’s life. Ever and always, every minute, do the right thing.

Whenever I bring this up —which is rarely — I hear some objections. “But surely, we must rest and take leisure occasionally…”

Of course — in those cases, taking leisure is the right thing to do. Ideally you take the most maximally recharging and healthful leisure.

“But what if I want to engage in some mindless distraction?”

Well, if it’s the right thing to do, then do it. If it’s not, do not do it. If you do do it, ideally you take the most enjoyable or interesting or otherwise beneficial mindless distraction.

“But it’s impossible to be perfect all the time.”

To be sure — it’s a standard to aim for, that’s never quite reached.

It involves an immense amount of hardship and striving. It leads to a harder life, no doubt. Not everyone would want that type of life — hence, the need for Selection Procedures and getting people with the right Default Inclinations and Instincts for the team.

But for the people who it’s mentally a fit for, it unlocks doing seemingly impossible and magical things. It’s something that can never be quite reached, but getting anywhere near it leads to a very difficult but maximally thriving life.

Joe Montana put it like this —

“[Walsh] said that if you aim for perfection and miss, you’re still pretty good, but if you aim for mediocre and miss? Well, he didn’t allow us to think like that.”

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GUIDANCE: DEFAULT BEHAVIOR

Walsh —

“Beyond the mechanical elements of doing jobs correctly, I assisted coaches, players, staff, and others in assimilating the values within my Standard of Performance, including what I believed regarding personal accountability among the organization and its personnel. This is consistent with my conviction that an organization is not just a tool like a shovel, but an organic entity that has a code of conduct, a set of applied principles that go beyond a company mission statement that’s tacked on the wall and forgotten. In fact, we had no mission statement on the wall. My mission statement was implanted in the minds of our people through teaching.

Great teams in business, in sports, or elsewhere have a conscience. At its best, an organization — your team — bespeaks values and a way of doing things that emanate from a source; that source is you — the leader. Thus, the dictates of your personal beliefs should ultimately become characteristics of your team.

You must know what needs to be done and possess the capabilities and conviction to get it done. Several factors affect this, but none is more important than the dictates of your own personal beliefs. Collectively, they compromise your philosophy. A philosophy is the aggregate of your attitudes toward fundamental matters and is derived from a process of consciously thinking about critical issues and developing rational reasons for holding one particular belief or position rather than another. […]

My Standard of Performance — the values and beliefs within it — guided everything I did in my work at San Francisco and are defined as follows: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter; show self-control, especially where it counts most — under pressure; demonstrate and prize loyalty; use positive language and have a positive attitude; take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the results of that effort; be willing to go the extra distance for the organization; deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation (don’t go crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); seek poise in myself and those I lead; maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark. […]

Make no mistake about it; my first commitment was to nurture an organizational conscience with this very high internal code of ethics, ideals, and attitudes. Concurrently, I was committed to identifying and hiring the best people I could find and teaching them what I deemed necessary to achieve the required levels of performance.

If you were lucky enough to receive a 49er paycheck, it meant you were part of an organization that had high expectations of itself and of you, whether you were a superstar or a secretary, manager or maintenance man, athlete, executive, or head coach. Those expectations, of course, went beyond ethics and attitude to specific performance standards and actions.”

You could — and perhaps should — study the individual specific points Walsh mentions that he sought to install in the dysfunctional organization he took over.

Take, for instance — “honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter” — there’s a lot going on there. That little phrase could certainly be meditated on for at least a half hour alone, could potentially prompt some journaling and reflection on what that means and how it plays out.

Note well — Walsh is not yet talking about any tactical details.

Rather, he’s talking about broad strokes of the default behavior the organization should follow.

There’s infinitely many and varied situations that come up. Some of them can be repeatedly practiced, like how a quarterback throws a pass to a receiver or how a offensive lineman blocks when the defense blitzes.

But other situations can not necessarily be anticipated in advance — if playing an away game and the fans of the other team get rowdy and starting throwing beer or snacks at the 49er players, how should they respond?

These types of things can’t always be anticipated, but cultural norms and defaults can be installed. There’s no real shortcuts to eliteness, but establishing general attitudes and general behavioral standards — Walsh calls it “the conscience of the organization” — well, that comes as close to a shortcut as possible in making the right decision in all situations.

As much as possible, then, thriving organizations are built on Universal Principles that go beyond any specific actions or tactics, and those principles become deeply embedded and prompt default norms and standards of behavior over time.

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GUIDANCE: OBJECTIVE STANDARDS FOR ALL INVOLVED

In the American National Football League, there are 53 players on each team. The typical NFL team will have a head coach and around 15 assistant coaches with duties like strength and conditioning, working with specific position players, coordinators for both the offense and defense, etc.

There might be another few dozen executives and assistants in the front office responsible for trades, scouting, drafting, budgeting, and administration, and then some hundreds of front-line staff involve in roles like security, ticketing, groundskeeping, concessions, etc.

Unsurprisingly, Bill Walsh set very precise standards for all of the core 53 players on the team —

“… our coaching staff was meticulous and tenacious in analyzing and then teaching the requirements of each player’s position — much more so than on any other team I knew of. Here’s one very small example: After careful analysis, they identified thirty specific and separate physical skills — actions — that every offensive lineman needed to master in order to do his job at the highest level, everything from tackling to evasion, footwork to arm movement. Our coaches then created multiple drills for each one of those individual skills, which were then practiced relentlessly until their execution at the highest level was automatic — routine “perfection.””

Perhaps more surprisingly and counterintuitively, Walsh also set obsessive standards for all of the hundreds of people in the organization —

“My Standard of Performance applied to marketing, office personnel, and everyone else with the details applicable to their jobs, even to the extent of including specific instructions for receptionists on how to answer our telephones professionally. All of this increasingly demonstrated to others and to ourselves that we were on top of things, neither sloppy nor inattentive, and contributed to a greatly heighted sense of “this is who we are,” even though a strong case could have been made that “who we are” wasn’t much based on the initial won-lost records during my first two seasons: 2–14 and 6–10. Of course, this part of my challenge — turning the self-image of the organization on its head, from toxic to top-notch.”

Walsh goes into great detail in the book about how the groundskeepers cultivated the Candlestick Park field into one of the highest-quality playing fields in the NFL, and how everyone from parking lot attendants to ticket takers were expected to the best in the business.

Excellence might be elusive, but thankfully, it’s often contagious. Walsh set and cultivated objective standards for every routine role and having every personnel member — from the most front-and-center role like the quarterback all the way down to people taking tickets at the stadium on game day.

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GUIDANCE: TRAINING

We touched on training in Unity #2: Unit Cohesion. It’s an essential topic and we’ll almost certainly do an entire TSR series on training in the future.

For now, it’s worth considering that the best organizations often spend immensely more time on training, in more precise training, and on more rigorous training than other organizations.

Walsh described it,

“Our practices were organized to the minute — like a musical score for an orchestra that shows every musician what to play and when to play it. Our coaches then drilled the team so they could “play it” better and better. The specificity of detail and bombardment of information involved in doing this are mind-numbing to the casual observer — perhaps like the specifics of your own profession to an outsider.”

This seems to be a universal phenomenon in elite, high-unity teams.

In Unity #4: Selection Procedures, we discussed how the elite U.S. Army counterterrorist force Delta Force had one of the most rigorous selection processes for potential members.

Later in the book Inside Delta Force by Sergeant Eric Haney, they discussed how they went about their training —

“There’s an old saying in the Army that you should “train the way you fight.” For the most part, the Army ignores it. That’s why regular Army units almost always get their asses kicked in their initial battles, unless they have a long train-up period before their first taste of combat. Under those conditions, units will develop training programs that actually prepare men for combat. But for some strange reason, the generals and senior officers see to it that peacetime training has little resemblance to reality.

But in Delta, the only unit in the entire Army on continual war footing, we didn’t have the luxury of wasted training time. When the bell rings, we have to come out of the corner not just swinging but landing killing blows. You have to look at your enemy and hit him — right where you want to hit him. Kill him and take him out of the fight before he can cause any harm. If you’re in a deadly fight in a room or the cabin of an airplane, you can’t afford to do anything else.

Initially we fired one round at a time. When we could consistently hit the spot we were looking at, we increased the distance. When we had that distance down, we moved close to the target again and practiced slapping double-taps — two very fast shots — in the same spot. The intention with the double-tap is to create a terrible wound that’s sure to be fatal.

We did it over and over and over. Soon the fun went out of it, and it became work. […]

Shoot we did. Eight hours a day, thousands of rounds down-range. We shot till our targets were destroyed and then we put up new ones. When we had the technique down standing in one position, the instructors taught us turning movements left and right. When we mastered that, we learned to turn our backs to the targets, face about, and shoot on command.

Then we learned to walk and shoot…”

Haney continues for a very long time in that vein — talking about building all the skills needed to run counterterrorist operations effectively. Moving and shooting in teams, shooting when there’s “good guy” targets mixed in with the bad guys, shooting on the run, dealing with gun jams and malfunctions, working in multiple teams, and so on. Months and months of meticulous training.

Most people don’t train enough. Why?

“We did it over and over and over. Soon the fun went out of it, and it became work.”

Such is the price of excellence.

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GUIDANCE: EMPRICISM AND EVOLUTION

Haney —

“By studying all the terrorist hijackings in the last decade, we determined that there were very few occasions when snipers alone could resolve a situation. But one obstacle for the snipers turned out to be not as large as anticipated.

The leader of a hijacking force usually would position himself in the cockpit of a plane. After all, that’s the control center. Often enough, other members of the terrorist force would gravitate to the cockpit as well. If the snipers could kill any terrorists located in the cockpit when the assault was initiated, it would greatly enhance the mission’s chance of success. But there was a problem.

Most sniper units believed that a bullet fired through the extremely thick glass of an airplane cockpit would be deflected enough to cause a miss — or worse — veer off path and hit one of the airline’s crew members. The FBI and Secret Service snipers thought so, too, but no one had made any empirical studies of the problem until we came along.

We got a truckload of cockpit glass from many different types of aircraft, mounted it in metal frames, and started shooting. Our snipers determined there wasn’t much of a problem at all. The deflection was so slight that, within the confines of an airplane’s cockpit, it made little difference to the accuracy of the shot. They could hit and kill the terrorists and still leave any crew members in the cockpit unscathed. It even turned out that any glass shattered by the bullet, and flying around inside the cockpit, had the consistency of sand and presented little danger to the crew.”

Again, this seems the hallmark of elite teams — not taking for granted any past assumptions, and not doing things “the way they’ve always been done.”

Bill Walsh’s son, Craig, noted one instance among many where his father went against common wisdom of the day —

“In [the old] days, one method of “toughening up” players was to prohibit them from drinking any water while they were on the field during practice. Bill Walsh allowed it, because he saw no gain from the policy. In fact, he felt that depriving players of water during practice was counterproductive; it lowered performance. The “toughening up” approach, however, was the one owners felt comfortable with because it had been around since the start. In this and many other ways big and small, nobody had ever done it like Bill Walsh did it.”

There were similar examples — during the NFL playing season, Walsh would have less intense practices than most teams. He felt, especially as the season wore on, keeping the players healthy and recovering was more important than “toughening up” — they often had practices with no pads and no contact on, working lightly on specific skills instead of working on full-contact drills that would hamper recovery ability and potentially lead to injury.

We all inherit a default set of assumptions about what’s “normal” in a domain — and many of those are in fact correct. But it seems that elite teams often build a culture of empiricism — they actually study and test all the assumptions, even long-held “common wisdom.”

This inevitably leads to many small and large ways of doing things better, which can be integrated into the standards of an organization and its training, and which leads to advantages and more success.

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GUIDANCE: PRIDE AND SMALL DETAILS

My friend Greg Nance, CEO of Dyad.com and regular ultramarathon runner, has an expression that permeates everything he does —

“Small things, all things.”

He picked it up when he was doing intense mountaineering and mountain-climbing when he was younger. When you’re scaling a mountain, getting even a small detail wrong can be debilitating or fatal.

I remember speaking to him after he’d run a 100-mile race (161 km) in the Philippines. The first things he said when describing the race wasn’t the beauty of the countryside or the joy of performance or any such thing, but two points — being slightly more careful about nutrition timing before a race, and ensuring that he had slightly better traction on his shoes and trekking poles for navigating muddy conditions.

This is true in both practical matters related to gear, training, training facilities, job descriptions, and excellent execution at work — but over and above that, building a focus on small details cultivates pride and self-regard and unity within a team.

Bill Walsh described one of his standards that might seem very small, but which I think actually points at something very large and important —

“… to encourage positive thinking, pride, and self-esteem, I insisted that specific equipment carrying the emblem of the San Francisco 49ers be treated with respect. For example, players were told their practice helmets, which carried our emblem, should never be tossed around, sat on, or thrown in the bottom of their lockers: “Wear it, hold it, or put it on the shelf in your locker.” The same applied to their game helmets, of course.

The San Francisco 49er emblem, and the helmet it was affixed to, signified that they were members of an organization with pride and high behavioral expectations. It was similar to saluting the American flag: Show it respect, because it represents who you are and what you value.”

We can see traces here of what we described in Unity #5: Moral Authority, where the 49ers emblem went from being the sign of a dysfunctional joke of a franchise, into being a respected banner of the cause — and carrying such emblem itself became a reinforcing signal of eliteness, exceptional performance, high standards, and the quest for perfection.

A small thing, maybe — but as Nance says,

Small things, all things.

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GUIDANCE SMALL AND LARGE

Well, there’s certainly a lot to chew on here.

In this issue, we’ve explored seven ideas covering one broad theme.

The seven ideas —

1. Aim for perfection: The most elite teams usually seem to aim for perfection. Most people do not do this, and this is perhaps the largest challenge and first hurdle to clear in building really elite performance. You need people who genuinely want to perform at the highest standard — and that, frankly, isn’t everyone — and then create a culture where the pursuit of perfection is just the way things are done, day-in and day-out.

2. Default behavior and norms: Literally thousands of small decisions and actions go into the entirety of building a team and the team performing well. Since not all of these can be planned for, strong default behaviors and norms are essential. These are often fundamental but overlooked — things like great communications, constantly striving for process improvements, loyalty, a positive attitude, and so on. If you can build the defaults in the culture of the organization — something we explored heavily in Background Ops #7: Universal Principles — then a lot of best practices will be more likely to happen more-or-less automatically.

3. Objective standards: As routine work and jobs became known, it’s important to codify them into objective standards of performance. There are, thankfully, a great many people who want to be excellent — but it’s hard to be excellent if you don’t know what excellence looks like. Codifying best practices gives people an initial standard to hit and then improve upon.

4. Everyone involved: Excellence is contagious — so too is mediocrity. Bill Walsh didn’t just focus on the core members of the team, but insisted on excellence from everyone even tangentially involved in the organization. Haney noted that Delta Force did similarly: “The very best people in the Army within their respective disciplines filled Delta Force’s nonoperational functions. Operators always knew they were backed up and supported by the absolute masters of their professions, no matter what their specialty — parachute riggers, administrative or finance clerks, cooks, supply personnel, communications specialists, or gunsmiths. You name the job, Delta folks were the best at it.” Do stop and think on this! It’s easy to read and write those words, but I’ve personally seen the difference between growing companies with exceptional attorneys as contrasted against companies with merely adequate attorneys. Ideally, everyone who interfaces with your organization is the best at what they do — the virtuous cycle of morale and competence from this is much larger than most people anticipate.

5. Training: You need to train more than you think you do, more often, harder, and more rigorously. Most people don’t train enough. We’ll explore this in greater detail later, but stop and reflect for a moment on current training standards — unless you’re already performing at the highest level, it’s unlikely you’re training enough.

6. Empiricism and evolution: Another easier said than done, it’s not enough to merely mimic other organizations in the field — once basic standards are set, it’s important to question everything and look for better ways of doing things, to integrate within the organization.

7. Pride and small details: Navigating all the small details and handling them professionally winds up saving time and leads to an accumulation of small advantages. But more importantly, it leads to a genuine pride and confidence in team members.

On a final note, then, I’d like to say I think this applies to one’s personal life as much as work and organizational life.

It might sound trivial and you might think I’m exaggerating, but one of the most beneficial lessons for me in my early 20’s was to always wash a plate in the sink immediately after using it — no dirty dishes, ever.

Even if you’re not currently part of any team at all — let alone an elite team — you can start to establish default norms and behaviors for yourself, your work, and your environment that leads to you being a more universally thriving individual.

In one of the most famous commencement speeches of all time at UT Austin, Admiral William McRaven put it like this —

“If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”

Default behaviors and norms are powerful — and the question for perfection and exceptional performance and unity often comes down to the smallest things.

Or, as Nance put it —

Small things, all things.

Until next time, yours,

Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net

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If you like this type of thing, you’ll probably like our free event on this coming Saturday, 24 March — we’re doing a round of Work Cycles. It’s free and very much conducive to productivity. I dare say that the majority of people there are the type of perfection-seeking, excellence-cultivating type of person who is really a joy to be around.