Aug
13
Another key reason why clusterfucks appear is because somebody with the authority wants them to appear.
Stalin is said to have purposely given his cabinet conflicting portfolios to paralyze them: essentially giving him a free hand to denounce them and go about doing what we wanted to anyway. We have all observed similar situations where very brilliant people will purposely ask a team of people, none of whom have the authority to make any lasting decisions, to execute some task. Even if communication is good and trust exists among the participants, the very nature of the power vacuum is bound to cause a clusterfuck unless the team anoints an interim leviathan. It’s exceedingly rare.
It is entirely possible that some people don’t know that they go about creating such power vaccuums, but it’s hard to believe that they continue going through life without picking up on why they can’t get anything done.
Aug
12
Sometimes even when people trust each other, information can still get garbled through faults in communication.
Very frequently, professionals in a given field will begin using a very specific jargon. For instance, the term “unique” means something very different to a web analyst than it does to a fashion designer. These shortcuts in language serve a really important purpose within a profession, and the specificity and unity on that jargon is a key feature of any given culture.
When two professions need to work together, in an inter-disciplenary way, it is very easy to miscommunicate important findings, purely through mistakes in language. Sometimes, something as simple as messing up the difference between ‘pageviews’, ‘visits’, ‘visitors’ and ‘unique visitors’ can have massive impacts on perceptions.
At the root of many clusterfucks is not the unwillingness to communicate, but rather, the relative diffuculty that is involved in communicating.
A good general practice, when presenting anything, is to take the time to ensure that people understand what you’re about to say and why it’s important.
Aug
11
One of the core reasons for organizational clusterfucks is a lack of trust among the participants or groups of participants.
Generally speaking, if there is no trust, there is limited communication (because, of course, refusing to talk to somebody can be a form of limited communication – right?). Even if two respective hierarchies mandate communication, if there is no trust, people on either side will be very crafty in interpreting rules so stringently so as to limit communication. Worse, distrust over years can become pervasive and infectious, like a plaque that builds up. We saw this in the years leading to Air India.
Sometimes there is a legitimate incentivization for distrust. I won’t share competitive information with competitors out of distrust. Sometimes there are just people who have a very different valuation of trust. Trust is like pesos instead of Euros. In environments where trust is so utterly devalued, it would be easy to forecast a high volume of clusterfucks. The difference in exchange rates might make a transaction impossible.
There’s a counter to that, of course - ‘professionalism’. It sets the expectation that because two people belong to the same overarching institution, regardless if the two individuals trust each other, they trust the overarching institution to actually enforce the rules if one of them cheats. In most cases though, such a leviathan can’t be everywhere all the time, so really, the strengths of such institutions builds up over repeated successes and the rare instances where an executive punishes somebody for breaking the rules.
I suppose just as a country with weak legal institutions really can’t hope to become rich, I wouldn’t expect a company with weak professional institutions to become rich, either.
In sum, trust can be considered a form of social capital and a key factor in preventing a clusterfuck. Where there isn’t any trust, you’ll probably find a clusterfuck.
Aug
10
I watched a wonderful Nature last night on PBS. It was about a bunch of baboons on the Serengeti. It was a pretty brutal hour and instructive.
People in their own way are complex and they form complex systems with complex relationships and complex rituals. How hierarchies form and persist is something a few of us within the Toronto innovation community has been struggling with – especially around this relationship between ‘networks’ and ‘hierarchies’.
Every so often – people can’t or won’t get a long, expectations aren’t communicated or registered, and our complex systems break down.
The specific question is: “What causes clusterfucks”?
That’s the central question of the week.
Aug
06
Six key steps in facilitation when you’re trying to heard a group through a problem:
Opening: State why you’ve called the meeting, where we’ve come from before, what’s the goal of today’s discussion, and where you hope to go to next.
Objective Questions: Ask about the facts and get them on the table. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.
Reflective Questions: Ask what people are experiencing. Questions like: What ____________ are you experiencing when that happens? Everybody is entitled to feel how they want to feel.
Interpretive Questions: The analytical portion of the discussion. Is X >Y? If so why, if not, why not?
Decisions Questions: Which ones are high priority? Which are not high priority? So, what’s the decision here?
Closing: Great. Thanks. Next steps.