It’s being heralded as the worst call in Super Bowl history. Maybe in the history of football.

If you don’t follow American football, this moment of utter disbelief is mostly meaningless. But when you’re inches away from the biggest prize in American sports, with one of the strongest running backs in your arsenal, it seems incomprehensible to call a pass play.

That gets intercepted.

That snatches a repeat Super Bowl victory from your grasp.

It’s like a soccer player being gifted a penalty kick in front of a goal without a keeper. Then the coach telling him to aim for the upper ninety. And the player misses wide.

There’s no shortage of criticism of coach Pete Carroll and his offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell. From players on Twitter to pundits on sports channels to average fans on Facebook, the decision to pass is widely considered not just bad—but perhaps the worst ever.

Leaders and Decision-Making

Coaches call plays. Players make innumerable decisions as they try to execute a game plan. Whether on the field of play or in the office today, leaders face countless decisions.

Thankfully for most of us, we don’t have millions of viewers looking over our shoulder. But let’s be clear. If you lead people or projects, you’re going to make some bad calls. In some cases, you’re going to make some really bad calls. Your bosses will make bad decisions. It’s just part of the game.

History is littered with bad decisions, from the field of play to business. In some cases it’s stupid people making irresponsible decisions. But in their Harvard Business Review article “Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions”, the authors present insights from neurobiology and psychology that consistently show “important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are sometimes hopelessly flawed.”

When Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions

Whether it’s on the sidelines or the boardroom, when you see decisions that leave you scratching your head, try to remember the following:

• “Optimism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.” The next time you find yourself railing on why your government leader or a senior manager in your organization (or the coach of your favorite sports team) made a lousy decision, try to remember this quote from British novelist John Galsworthy. It’s easier to call it stupid the further we are from having to make the decision. I’m as apt as the next guy to complain about a referee’s call (or lack thereof) when I’m on the sidelines watching my child’s soccer game. It wasn’t until I was volunteered to be an assistant referee on the sidelines that I truly appreciated how fast games move and decisions aren’t quite as easy when I’m holding the flag. Social media makes it easy to lob missiles from the cheap seats. Everyone is a pundit. Galsworthy reminds us that calling the plays of a Super Bowl game may not be as straightforward if you’re on the field with the headset on and clock ticking. It’s the same in the workplace. This doesn’t mean a decision is a good one. It just offers some humility in our processing of it.
• Remember the leader attribution error. In my conversation with renowned management expert Henry Mintzberg, we talked about myths related to leaders. The leader attribution error finds that leaders get too much credit when things go right and too much blame when things go awry. When the economy is steaming along, your governmental leaders probably get more credit than they deserve. And when the pass gets intercepted, the coach probably gets more blame than is justified. This often rubs people wrong because it seems to remove some amount of accountability. But what if receiver Ricardo Lockette would have been more aggressive going for the pass? What if quarterback Russell Wilson would have read the defender better and just threw the ball away? What if the pass was caught, scoring a game-winning touchdown? Brilliant call, coach! You can see it on the other side of the field as well. Tom Brady walked away from Super Bowl XLIX as the Most Valuable Player. Yet if his undrafted rookie teammate Malcolm Butler wouldn’t have made his brilliant interception, Brady’s own performance would have been called into question. If I’m Tom Brady, I’m throwing the keys to my new Chevy truck (the award given to the MVP) to Mr. Butler!
• You have to own it. When (not if) we make a bad decision, we have to take responsibility for it. Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll did just that after the game. He didn’t wait to craft a carefully worded press release. He owned it. “There’s really nobody to blame but me, and I told them (the players) that clearly. And I don’t want them to think anything other than that. They busted their tails and did everything they needed to do to put us in position, and unfortunately it didn’t work out. A very, very hard lesson. I hate to learn the hard way, but there’s no other way to look at it right now.” Contrast that to what you see from too many political and business leaders. You get far more grace when you admit the bad decision instead of seek to find excuses and scapegoats.

My brother-in-law lives in Seattle. About an hour after the game he texted me, “Last year I felt differently at this point in the night.” It’s not fun to lose, whether on a football field or a project team.

But we’re going to make bad decisions. And bad decisions will be made by others. Chances are they won’t be the worst decisions in the history of your company. But they will happen.

May we respond more like Pete Carroll when it’s our call that goes bad. And may we seek some perspective when the call is made by others.

What’s a lesson you’ve learned about dealing with bad decisions? What do you agree with in this assessment of the Seahawk’s loss? Disagree with? Join the discussion with your comments below.

(Photo credit:The Weather Company (http://www.theweathercompany.com/newsroom/2015/01/26/winter-storm-juno-historic-blizzard)

The headlines included words like epic and historic. Worst ever. Crippling. Snowmageddon.

The forecast was dire. States banned travel. Airlines pre-emptively cancelled 7,500 flights, which left countless people stranded or redirected (including my family trying to return from a vacation in Italy).

By now, you know what happened. Winter Storm Juno is being mocked with hashtags, such as #SnowFail and #Snowperbole. It’s the epic storm that wasn’t.

In the days after failures, it becomes a parlor game to assign blame. A CNN report suggests people were trying to out-drama each other. Following Rahm Emmanuel’s point about never letting a crisis go to waste, both sides of the climate change debate leveraged the forecast to champion their viewpoint. Some have suggested The Weather Channel over-hyped the event for ratings.

The Real Problem

However, I refuse to blame the National Weather Service, politicians, or news anchors. They may have over-zealously stirred the pot to make things worse, but here’s the real problem that project managers need to be reminded of: we stink at predicting the future.

A host of cognitive biases works against our ability to see the future. The affect heuristic can cause us to fall in love with an idea or approach. It would be easy for a news channel to get emotionally invested in an impending crisis while struggling to see disconfirming data. The confirmation bias is similar—we choose the data or model that confirms our view of the future. The saliency bias overly weights past memorable events in our predictions. If there’s political punishment for an elected official being under-prepared for a past disaster, you can bet they’ll over-do it next time.

Whether it’s the direction of financial markets, global temperatures in 25 years, or the expected project delivery date, we are notoriously bad at predicting what’s going to happen. Our sight is more impaired than we realize. Yet despite our fails, we love trying to predict what’s going to happen. And since bad predictions often end up not being punished, there’s little incentive to change.

How Can Leaders Respond?

Project managers and leaders face a conundrum. Our organizations aren’t asking for weather forecasts, but they do demand estimates for tasks, delivery dates, budgets, and resource needs. Though it’s tempting to fall in love with the #NoEstimates movement, I find it’s the rare manager who’s ready to embrace that mindset.

So what are we to do? Here are three ideas:

• Anticipate instead of Predict. Rob-Jan de Jong recently published an intriguing book entitled Anticipate: The Art of Leading by Looking Ahead. In my discussion with Rob, he recommends we should focus more on anticipating than predicting. The latter can assume we know more than we do. The former acknowledges uncertainty and causes us to identify multiple futures, allowing us to come up with various plans depending on how the future plays out. Rob developed a process called FuturePriming which, when combined with Scenario Planning, helps us anticipate the future and connect the dots to develop plans for the scenarios.
• Break the Work Into Smaller Pieces. In The Procrastination Equation, author Piers Steel takes a scientific (and entertaining) look at why we delay in taking action. The longer the task, the more we drag our feet (sometimes referred to as Student Syndrome). He recommends breaking the work down into smaller pieces, which provides incremental opportunity for the Student Syndrome to work for you. Classic project management instructs us to break work down into more manageable chunks (also known as a work breakdown structure). When you need to forecast the future, break the work down into smaller units of work (I recommend a week or less). Estimating smaller tasks can be more accurate.
• Set Tripwires. In their excellent book Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work, Chip and Dan Heath’s decision-making process ends with a step entitled, “Prepare to be Wrong.” They suggest setting a tripwire to avoid letting a bad decision become even worse. Let’s say someone on your team is responsible to deliver a critical path task estimated to take 2 weeks. Instead of waiting until the due date to check on progress, set some tripwires along the way for early warnings of problems. When asked to anticipate future events, consider setting some key milestones as tripwires to provide more informed updates.

Here’s to Your Future

Was it better to be safe than sorry? Perhaps the biggest danger of Winter Storm Juno morphing into a joke is that we’ll discount future storm forecasts. If you leave town enough times because of hurricanes that don’t show up, you’re more likely to stay put. In business, if our estimates become a joke we inevitably lose credibility, and credibility is currency.

There’s no foolproof way to predict the future. But a sure-fire way to set ourselves up for failure is to assume our predictions are accurate. That approach might just earn us a mocking hashtag in our honor!

You’re invited to join the conversation! What’s your take on what led to the epic storm that wasn’t? How do you try to account for uncertainty when you need to anticipate the future? Please share your comments below.

“I can’t believe they think that’s a good decision.”

Have you been in that position—when your senior management makes a decision that, from your perspective, makes no sense?

One situation, in particular, turned out to be a significant teachable moment for me.

I was leading a team of truly talented software developers. We were good and we knew it. There were some organizational changes decreed from on high that didn't make sense to us. In my youthful ignorance, I set up a meeting with a leader about three levels above me. He accepted the invitation.

In the discussion, I boldly explained how his recent announcements were upsetting people in the department. I went so far as to say, “Bob, you’re not making the ‘What’s in it for me’” clear.

Bob was quiet at first. Then he responded with a statement I’ll never forget. “Andy, sometimes it’s not about you. It’s about ‘what’s in it for us.’”

Check. Mate.

Explaining the Why

I walked out of his office—humbled—learning a critical lesson.

Yes, explaining the The What’s In It for Me (WIIFM) is important when we communicate our plans. When we make project decisions or deliver announcements, our team members arelikely filtering our messages through self-interested lenses. They want to know what this means to them. To their promotional opportunities. To their mortgage payment.

In Robert Cialdini’s classic Influence: The Power of Persuasion, he explains how the word ‘because’ is critical when trying to influence someone. Too often, we as leaders wrestle with options to solve a problem and then render a decision. But when we communicate it to our teams, we fail to get their buy-in because we neglect to explain the reasons behind the decision.

Sometimes we fail because we spend too much time talking about the How: the process we followed to come to our conclusion. That's not the same as the Why. As Scott Elbin explains in The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, focusing too much on how you came to your conclusion risks "getting labeled as someone who, when asked for the time, explains how to build a watch."

Cialdini asserts “because” is the most influential word in the English language. Further, the “because” doesn’t even have to be that persuasive!

But the magic isn’t in the word. It’s in the explaining. Cialdini states, “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”

Make the WIIFM clear when you can.

When The Personal Benefit Is Not as Clear

But sometimes it’s not about what’s in it for one particular person or team. An announcement about layoffs? The outsourcing of work to service providers? A reorganization that leaves people with yet another new boss?

As the executive rightly explained to me, some decisions are more about the What’s In It for Us. Maybe it’s the value to our organization as a whole. Or our customers. Or another part of our company.

One leader told me “this is the first company I've worked at where one department would be willing to give up a dollar of budget if another would benefit by more than that.” You may not work at such a company, but if that’s the reason behind a decision, explain it.

Asking About the Why

Perhaps you’re not the person communicating the Why. Rather, you’re on the receiving end, as I was years ago. You’re scratching your head in disbelief. What’s the lesson for us?

You could schedule a meeting with the leader three levels up. A large helping of humility might be a good breakfast choice, if you do. Even if you just ask your boss or project sponsor, it’s worth seeking out the Why behind their decision.

As an example, I later had a boss who previewed an upcoming reorganization with his direct reports. I asked him, “What are the primary benefits of this reorg, from your perspective?” Interestingly, he struggled with the answer. It illuminated the fact that before announcing the restructuring, we had better sharpen up the message or reconsider the wisdom of the change.

It started with a Why question.

If the Why isn’t clear, seek it out. There’s probably a reason. Remember that it may not satisfy your need to know What’s In It for You, so be prepared to accept What’s In It for Us.

Practicing What We Preach

As I look back on that humbling discussion with the executive years ago, there’s one last lesson I’d like to share. I left his office that day benefiting from a teachable moment.

But I wonder if he did.

My point? It’s easy (now) to argue that he had made a good decision. There was a reasonably compelling What’s In It For Us as an organization.

But he didn’t follow his own wisdom.

For all my complaining about the lack of WIIFM and his wisdom about WIIFU, his earlier announcements didn't live up to his advice. He had not even come close to communicating the Why behind his decisions.

We need to remember:

• It’s not just what we decide. Success also depends on how we roll it out. It’s completely possible to ruin a good decision.
• When we find ourselves thinking we've dispersed highly valuable wisdom to someone on our team, let’s make sure we don’t miss any leftover lessons for ourselves.

Don’t screw up a perfectly good decision. Learn from my teachable moment—and his.

What mistakes have you seen when it comes to communicating decisions? What have you learned about getting buy-in? Please share your perspectives in the comment. Thank you!

I recently sat with a CEO who just lost an administrative assistant. The assistant had aced an arduous interview process. She was hired with great anticipation.

Then quit after only two days on the job.

The CEO didn’t blame the newly departed hire. His assessment: “We didn’t onboard her. We waterboarded her!”

Though it’s a stretch to compare an enhanced interrogation technique to bringing a new employee into a company, management consultant Liz Kislik suggests that onboarding, from a new employee’s perspective, can feel like torture.

The CEO told me they had accelerated the normal onboarding process with this hire. They skipped some steps because of deadlines and someone else’s transition. It’s a fast-moving place and he certainly sets the pace. It wouldn't be an easy job for most and being thrown into the water without swimming lessons for this culture would be a challenge for the strongest of hires.

Which is why she quit. And why it stands as a good lesson for us all.

The Challenge of Perspective

Dan Pink told me in an interview about his book To Sell is Human there’s an inverse relationship between power and perspective. The more responsibility you get, the more challenging it is to remember what it’s like to be the rookie.

The longer a politician is in office, the more they forget what it’s like to be an ordinary citizen. The higher you get in an organization, the easier it is to forget the struggle to make a rent payment.

(Early in my career an executive was answering questions during a town hall meeting. An employee was complaining about all the deductions in their paycheck, such as FICA--the social security deduction in the United States. The executive replied, "Um, isn't that the deduction that's only there for, like, one or two pay periods?" Perhaps that's true when your salary is the GDP of a small country! He had clearly lost the perspective of the rank and file!)

More to the point of this discussion, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to be the new person. Whether it’s a new hire to your company this year or just someone new to your team, don’t under-estimate the effort required to learn your team culture.

Diving into a New Culture

Dr. Ed Schein is the esteemed MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Emeritus. Ed is widely regarded as the guy who coined the term corporate culture. He told me in an interview that culture is much more complex than most people appreciate. In short, it’s how things get done. It’s what has always worked. And much of what makes up culture is unstated, what Ed calls tacit assumptions.

Do you think your onboarding process has all of these assumptions covered? Ed might suggest you think again.

• Don’t minimize the time and effort to get the new team member up-to-speed.
• Assume there are acronyms and terms that are unclear to the new person.
• Make it safe to ask questions.
• Help them understand both the written and unwritten rules of the team.
• Don’t baby them, for sure, but also don’t expect they’ll be at full stride on day 2 (or it might be their last)!

How The New Hire Can Help You

Here’s one last idea: their new eyes on your team might just be a gift. Often they will see things that have become invisible to you and the team.

Andy Stanley suggests in his leadership podcast that you intentionally ask people for their feedback. Andy suggests a formal feedback process at three months and twelve months after joining the team.

Ask them questions, such as:

• What has surprised you the most about being on our team?
• What is your biggest frustration?
• What do we do that doesn't make sense or seems to be off-purpose?
• Do you have the tools you need to do your job?

Gary Klein, author of Seeing What Others Don’t, reinforces this notion that tapping into these fresh perspectives can draw attention to our blindspots.

Turning a Loss into a Win

We could argue that losing someone after two days on the job is better than losing them at two months. However, in both cases, it’s a sign of a problem. Here’s to better onboarding and less waterboarding for you and your team this year.

Please add your voice to this discussion. What mistakes have you seen when it comes to integrating someone new into a team or organization? How do you try to help new team members? I look forward to hearing from you!

“Can you manage a project without planning?”

I ask this question to participants in our project management workshops around the world. Regardless of where I’m teaching, participants typically respond as follows:

Multiple people will say, “No!”  Then someone will say, “Well….” Then another person will admit, “We do it all the time!”

I suppose it could depend on how we define the term manage. And since the question starts with the word Can, I suppose one could try to manage a project without planning.

So let’s re-frame the question. Let’s say Project A was insufficiently planned. It really needed more.  Project B was sufficiently planned. It wasn’t over-planned, but there was enough of a plan to manage it. What are some of the possible consequences for Project A—the insufficiently planned project?

Often people suggest the consequences of a poorly planned project include:

• Missed deadlines
• Cost over-runs
• Frustrated team members
• Scope changes
• Missed expectations with scope
• Quality problems

Those seem reasonable, but let me ask this: could the sufficiently planned project miss some deadlines? Spend more than budgeted? Leave some team members a bit frustrated?

Sure.

So Why Plan?

I once sat through a presentation where the speaker said, “Follow this process and you will be successful. I've never seen a project fail that followed this process.” Thinking he was perhaps using hyperbole to provoke discussion, I went up and talked with him after the session. He was adamant that his process guaranteed success.

Hogwash.

What a Plan Gives You

In their book Decisive, authors Chip and Dan Heath talk about the value of having a process for making decisions. They suggest a process provides confidence. “Not cocky overconfidence that comes from collecting biased information and ignoring uncertainties, but the real confidence that comes from knowing you’ve made the best decision that you could. Using a process for decision making doesn’t mean that your choices will always be easy, or that they will always turn out brilliantly, but it does mean you can quiet your mind. You can quit asking, ‘What am I missing?’ You can stop the cycle of agonizing.”

The same can be said for project planning. We don’t plan because it removes all chances of failure. But a good plan increases our confidence that a project can meet its objectives. It’s a game of odds. We can agonize less because we’ve considered the project more thoughtfully, including what we think might go wrong.

The Payback for Planning

I’ve seen all kinds of numbers touting the payback for planning. One such finding suggested that one hour of planning will save 20-200 hours in later corrective activity. My first reaction to that was, “Wow! That’s a lot of savings!” However, my second reaction was, “Hmm, that’s a big range! It’s like predicting the high temperature in my hometown of Chicago will be between 10-100 degrees! It doesn’t help me know how to dress!”

I got in touch with Dr. Barry Boehm to get his perspective. He reinforced what we learn in quality training: finding a problem sooner is less expensive than finding it later. If a plan can weed out problems now, we can save many hours of re-work later on. The longer it takes to find the problems, the more expensive it is to fix (both in time and cost).

Let’s say the 20-200 hour range is wildly optimistic. What if the payback was only 2 hours of savings for every hour invested in planning? Would you take those odds at a casino? Put 1,000 Euros into a slot machine and get 2,000 in return? If you gambled, you’d play those odds all night!

It’s important to keep this in perspective. Don’t react with, “Let’s plan for the next 3 years! Think how much time we’ll save!”

However, what if you took an extra 15 minutes to think more thoroughly about the people who will be impacted by your project? Or took a couple days to vet out the success criteria with your sponsor and key stakeholders? Or spent an extra hour identifying risks and coming up with mitigation plans? Is it reasonable it could save you time later in the project?

Decades of personal anecdotal experience suggests that Boehm is onto something. The cliché is “We don’t have time to do it right but we always seem to find the time to do it over.”

Why Don’t We Spend More Time Planning?

So if planning saves us time, why don’t we spend more time planning? I’ve found it’s not usually a philosophical objection to planning. Rather, it’s an issue of time! We don’t take the time because it seems we don’t have it.

Have you ever noticed that you can be penalized in the workplace when you get your act together, so to speak? A couple years back I taught my sons how to juggle. Rookie jugglers normally start with one or two balls. Once they are able to handle that, what happens?

They’re thrown another ball. Then another. It can be like that in the workplace. “Sharon doesn’t look too stressed out… Give her more work!”

Many of us are juggling so many projects it becomes a question of “which ball am I willing to drop in order to plan it out more?” The reality of many work environments is that we don’t seem to have the time necessary to plan our projects. So we just revert to a Ready-Fire-Aim mentality: just keep shooting—we’re bound to hit something! Just keeping working—hopefully it will all work out!

Just Enough

I am not suggesting you drop all projects and plan them out in extreme detail. If you’ve ever worked in a project environment that suffered from analysis paralysis, you are keenly aware of how that suffocates successful delivery. My goal is to help you best use the limited time that you have.

In future posts I’ll suggest some key questions that can help you plan just enough. Though that’s a subjective way to think about it, the goal is just enough documentation. Just enough design. Just enough meetings. 

Just enough planning.

So, can you manage a project without planning? Sure. But by planning a little better now, you can help reduce the agonizing hours of re-work later. That’s a wager you can bet on.

P.S. I'd love to hear your thoughts! What gets in the way of you planning more than you do? How do you manage the space between over- and under-planning?