Thoughtfulness in management
There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, of the manager who enters the office to see all his reports diligently bent over their work with the exception of one; who is staring into space. “What are you doing?” demands the manager “thinking” replies the hapless worker. “Well stop it and get on with some work; you’re not being paid to think!” declares the manager with finality. This Dilbert style story tends to raise a laugh because it resonates with many peoples’ experience. But how close to reality is it?
Recently we found ourselves musing on the scarcity, and potential value, of reflecting on and setting strategic direction. This had emerged from one of the surveys conducted amongst a group of, predominantly PMO specialist, project and programme practitioners at a CITI centres of excellence club (CofEe Club) meeting. One of the other surveys from the same meeting strongly reinforces the view that some of our management responses may be lacking in thoughtfulness; one wonders how much better we might be if more time were devoted to thinking and less to simply reacting.
Here is an example; a group of people are asked a similar question twice. Which is the primary area of focus in your current environment? In the first instance the question related to support of management and in the second support of workers. Clearly one would expect the ‘primary’ area of focus to be one or the other. Interesting then to find that both questions received a response in excess of 60% being their primary area of focus. Either a significant number of the respondents are schizophrenic, don’t understand what primary meant, or they didn’t think through the consequence of answering the same way to two diametrically opposed questions.
Of course it would be wrong to draw any hard and fast conclusions from a couple of questions in an informal workshop; but then this isn’t an isolated incident. Some of the other questions within the survey were answered in an ‘interesting’ way; for example over 50% of the respondents said that the PMO was responsible for developing capability whilst 90% said that the PMO kept little or no record of capability. OK, these conditions are not mutually exclusive; you could clearly provide development without measuring or assessing its effectiveness. The question is – would you? And how good, as an example of management practice, would be not doing so? It is these questions and what give rise to them that should interest us.
Please don’t misunderstand us; this is not intended to be an indictment of the participants in some CofEe Club survey, there is a more general point underpinning this. If a group of subject matter experts, for whatever reason, cheerfully suspend judgement in favour of simply ‘answering the question’ we ought to understand why. We also ought to try and understand whether this signals a greater risk that this is a prevalent behaviour in the workplace in general; don’t think about things, just do things. But in a world where there is more choice of things to do than resources or time to do them simply electing to do the things that sound ‘good’ or ‘appealing’ cannot be the right answer – rational choice, predicated on some organiser or model must be a better route for management to adopt.
Thinking tools, such as models, theories and hypotheses all have a role to play in effective management decision making. Experience should not be ruled out and neither should ‘gut feel’. However these are just a framework to facilitate the exercise of thought. What should definitely be ruled out is the impulsion to action, mistaking quick and thoughtless decision-making for sound, thoughtful, judgement-based decision-making.
If you’d like to explore a range of change delivery related thinking and strategic planning tools please speak to us – 01980 283600 or Richard Bateman rbateman@citi.co.uk.
PAshton
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