The ‘soil sample’ technique as an alternative to firehose drinking
Leaders are responsible for having situational awareness to support the quality of their decisions. Whether it’s decisions about what the business is doing in the market or internal decisions affecting team members, possessing enough information to make a good decision is vital.
The challenge is that even a small organisation can have an overwhelming amount of information for a leader to stay up to date with. As an organisation grows, the challenge this presents increases.
A leader cannot entirely delegate the responsibility for understanding the current state.
As the organisation grows, the size of the team the leader is responsible for is also likely to increase. There are more people, more activity to be aware of, more potential points of interaction, and more surface area to cover.
The team members start to take on more responsibility, and the distance between the leader and decisions gets wider.
In response, the leader establishes ways for this information to flow in tune with the risks and opportunities they are managing. Such mechanisms are, of course, imperfect.
For example, some information may be reported to the leader by managers who report to them. Hopefully, they have hired well and are getting objective information about the person’s performance and how well they are supporting the team they are responsible for.
Of course, we have all experienced scenarios where that is not happening, and the manager is underperforming and creating an unsafe work environment.
I have observed many leaders (most especially inexperienced ones) try to stay across everything in terms of first-hand experience to try to account for this challenge. It very quickly becomes unsustainable and carries the traits of micromanagement.
Another approach is to establish second-hand sources of information such as regular reporting, metrics, qualitative feedback, and other breadthwise information collection methods. When thresholds of healthy and unhealthy are established, this can help identify when further investigation is needed. As the size of the organisation grows and the scope of responsibility increases, some degree of this approach is inevitable, so it’s part of a solution.
However, it can’t be the whole solution because it opens up blind spots that could leave people in the leader’s charge at risk or some other unacceptable risk for the organisation.
So what can we do if we can’t responsibly drink from the firehose and monitor from afar all the time?
The ‘soil sample’ technique
The alternative is to selectively go in-depth and see the situation for yourself first-hand. I liken my approach to taking a soil sample. It’s localised and collects samples at different strata points of comparison that can be cross-checked to see if they gel with other information.
The importance of first-hand information is essential. A concept I came across almost two decades ago is Genchi Genbutsu:
Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物) literally translates “real location, real thing”(meaning “the situation onsite”) and it is a key principle of the Toyota Production System. The principle is sometimes referred to as “go and see.” It suggests that in order to truly understand a situation one needs to observe what is happening at the site where work actually takes place: the (現場). One definition is that it is “collecting facts and data at the actual site of the work or problem.”
By ‘selectively go in-depth,’ I mean I use a mix of cadences around areas with the largest risks. For instance, people’s risks are significant to me as part of having a safe workplace. Other times, it may be in response to some event, such as feedback from regular anonymous surveys or a disconnect between data points that suggests something else may be awry.
I will talk to managers, people working directly in the area of interest, and their peers and document notes about the situation and other sources of information to form my impression of what is happening. When engaging people, it’s essential to cultivate a safe space for communication. As a leader, this is very challenging as people will always enter into conversation with you with some thought to the ramifications of a discussion with anyone who has authority.
In South East Asia, this was particularly true. We can cover concepts such as power distance and approaches that can be taken that are mindful of cultural differences in another post. Regardless, these are just differences of degrees and whether acknowledged or not, these dynamics exist to some degree in all cultures.
At the end of the day, as a leader, you must apply judgment. To do that, you need information. Responsible leadership does not involve monitoring everything happening in an organisation. Still, it requires engaging proactively in areas with a risk or when second-hand information seems skewed.
Join the Discord community! How do you stay informed about the area for which you are responsible? Share your approaches and experiences in the comments.
Originally published at https://wioota.substack.com.
