There's a famous quote (and the only attribution I can find right now is from Robert Fothergill's play Public Lies, written in 1993, but I doubt that's the original appearance) that says something like: "There's only one way to get it right, but there are an infinite number of ways to get it wrong." While I've always believed this was basically true, it's occurred to me this week that, in fact, when things go wrong, there are actually only a few areas in which the problems can occur.
Part of my thinking on this is influenced by reading Marshall McLuhan lately. McLuhan posits that everything is basically media, that "media" is any extension of the human form. If this is, in fact, true, then we can look at building a building and writing this article as both actions to create media. In other words, they're both part of a very similar creative process.
So what is this process, and where do things break down? Well, I've noticed at work that I'm often blaming either strategy, or communications, or leadership for basically anything that goes wrong. For example, the Enron and Arthur Andersen collapses were both failures of leadership, because leadership is responsible for injecting a vision, a mission, ethics, and style into any creative process. And in the case of those two companies, clearly, who ever was keeping their eye on the ethics was clearly out to lunch.
Communications are at fault a lot of the time--we've all seen that. One of my favorite communications snafus is when somebody uses a pronoun in a sentence (such as "It is really important to me.") and the person listening to the message things the pronoun ("it") is referring to something totally different, like say, getting home at a decent hour, when actually the person is talking about keeping Roe v. Wade from getting overturned or something.
When strategy breaks down, it's usually because somebody hasn't thought things through, or there isn't agreement among decision makers. A great example here is the AOL-Time Warner merger. Did anybody have a plan there? Or, of course, more topically, the Iraq War. Did anybody who actually knew anything about Iraq actually think this would be easy? Was anybody who knew anything about Iraq actually consulted? If they were consulted, did the decision-makers actually listen to them, or did they just barrel ahead, following their mission, without regard for reality.
So, generally, things go wrong when either leadership is absent to provide vision, mission, ethics, and style, or when a strategy is based on incorrect assumptions, or when the strategy is not communicated clearly. But there's one other place where things can get messed up: knowledge. A leader needs to look around and see the world as it is, and gather information. Then, that information must be viewed with perspective to transform it into knowledge. One of the great failings of any leader is not acknowledging that which you do not know. If you don't know what you don't know, you have a serious blind spot, and you are doomed to fail. This is certainly part of what happened in Iraq (but I believe the strategic failure was far greater than the failure due to lack of knowledge).
I created a little sketch to illustrate what I'm talking about here--that any process is driven by perspective and information, and follows a process of gathering knowledge, creating strategy, and developing communication--all informed by leadership. Here it is:
I've got an 11x17 of this hanging above my desk, and I'm thinking about it and trying to continue to develop it as a model for thinking about leadership and action. (PDF File here.) Let me know what you think!
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