You Are The System
The fallacy of hierarchies in a complex world
A friend described the following problem at his late-stage startup:
“The challenge for us is to get our CEO to want to make changes. Our CEO is not operationally inclined, and as such we have some work to get him to ‘care’ about this.”
This situation illustrates the fallacy of hierarchies: It’s unreasonable to expect most decisions to be made from the top. The problem isn’t that executives aren’t good decision makers — it’s that they are unlikely to even make a decision about your issue. Hierarchies are increasingly bad decision systems for the complex world in which we operate. We should expect less from hierarchies and do more ourselves — and here’s why.
Information takes the long way around.
Sending questions up one silo to go down another creates a cascade of delays. We send them up for the better perspective a boss may have. However, these gains from perspective are erased by the delay. The boss is opining on an out-of-date situation. Retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal describes the benefit of bypassing the hierarchy in his latest book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World:
“We had decentralized on the belief that the 70 percent solution today would be better than the 90 percent solution tomorrow. But we found our estimates were backward — we were getting the 90 percent solution today instead of the 70 percent solution tomorrow.”
Information is blocked.
Hierarchies are bottlenecks at the top. As a hierarchy grows, the connector at the top does not. A CEO has only 24 hours in the day regardless of whether she or he is running a 50-person company or a 500-person company. The chances are far greater than not that the CEO is not thinking about your issue.
There is limited dialogue.
Over lunch yesterday a lead engineer told me, “It’s embarrassing, but I don’t even know who reads these status reports we write.” When reports disappear into the ether and come back packaged as company meetings, that’s not dialogue. It’s only sharing. Without dialogue, we can’t fully understand the material. So we rely on other conversations to figure out what’s going on.
Expecting less of hierarchies requires us to expect more of ourselves. We must seek out the information we need in order to make good decisions and share results. There’s no system to know and decide for us: We are the system.
This is not new behavior for us. We’ve been doing it since we were kids. When we play soccer, we scan the field, move ourselves into position and signal with teammates. We do it naturally and we do it well. Here are three ways to build the same dynamic at work.
1. Be transparent.
Keep your boss in the loop. Share your progress across silos. Learn how to translate between engineering and sales, or between marketing and customer service, so that your progress drives theirs. This is how we create the right dialogues.
2. Use good judgment.
Instead of an employee handbook, Nordstrom tells its employees to simply “use good judgment in all situations.” This is intentionally ambiguous because what is good varies by situation. “Good” customer service may be a quick answer, or it may be a detailed one. You won’t know until you ask. Good judgment requires active listening. McChrystal delivers a blunter directive on this topic: People must “take their brains out of the footlocker” and put them back in their heads.
3. Have a bias to act.
Action produces information: It generates early results and signals real intent. When you start doing something, I assume you’ll keep doing it — and I am now more likely to help. If you wait to act, I’m more likely to assume nothing is happening — and so I’ll focus my efforts elsewhere. Hesitation leads to stagnation. If you want change, find small steps to get started. Show how it’s done. Act.
Hierarchies aren’t completely useless, but we use them as a crutch, particularly in decision making. This crutch is fatal when it prevents us from adapting to a fast-moving world. Once we realize that someone else isn’t cranking out decisions for us, we can get on with making them ourselves. After all, that’s what we’re getting paid for, isn’t it?
Tom Huntington is the Co-Founder and CEO of Windshield, a collaboration tool for visualizing strategy. Tom is passionate about operational excellence. Follow Tom on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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