SAST Wingees

A $200,000 Good Samaritan

As they say in Tamil, its because of people like Carlos G. Rojas, it rains in this world. Read this heart-warming story Via Madville.

Dealing with the Devil’s Advocate

This topic has been churning in my head for a few months now, since I read an interesting article by Michael Schrage on how innovation gets killed by resistance. 

Then I came across an extract from Tom Kelley’s latest book – The Ten Faces of Innovation, where Tom captures the essence of the problem with his description of the Devil’s Advocate gambit:

“The pivotal meeting where you push forward a new idea or proposal you’re passionate about. A fast-paced discussion leads to an upwelling of support that seems about to reach critical mass. And then, in one disastrous moment, your hopes are dashed when someone weighs in with those fateful words: “Let me just play Devil’s Advocate for a minute…”

Having invoked the awesome protective power of that seemingly innocuous phrase, the speaker now feels entirely free to take pot shots at your idea, and does so with complete impunity. “

How many times have you been in meetings where the Devil’s Advocate decimated your idea or your colleague’s idea.

The other big problem with the group meeting is a variant of groupthink – when your idea is modified by the group to such an extent that it loses its entire meaning. Headrush wrote an interesting post on how to keep the sharp edges and avoiding groupthink.

Coming back to the Devil’s Advocate – how do we deal with him/her?

Kris Bordessa wrote a brilliant post titled “Banishing Negativity”  where she describes a very interesting technique  – don’t allow anyone to play devil’s advocate, but instead ask them to finagle the idea to solve the problem that he/she was going to point out in the idea.

One of my colleagues uses this technique in group meetings and it works extremely well. When someone tries to shoot down an idea with some objection, my colleague asks them to submit a counter-proposal which modifies the idea suggested by the other person. Aside from solving the Devil’s Advocate problem, it accomplishes another bigger thing – that of ending the meeting with an idea that is actionable for the entire group with assigned action items. Without this technique, at the end of the meeting you typically go out with no action plans because all the time was spent by the devil’s advocates squashing someone’s idea killing the productivity of the group not to speak of the morale.

The same technique was voiced recently by Renata Guizzardi (Via Mathemagenic):

There are two distinct ways to collaborate with someone one their research work: the ‘and’ way and the ‘but’ way. In the ‘and’ way, one focuses on the positive aspects of the ideas being presented, adding new insights on top of them. Conversely, in the ‘but’ way, one identifies the limitations of the proposed ideas, focusing solely on negative aspects. Although both ways are valid, there is a risk in taking the ‘but’ strategy, since looking at the obstacles before an idea is sufficiently mature may lead to a creativity block.

Let us seek the “And” way and let innovation blaze new trails.

Update: Dave of Communication Nation links to this post and per him a discussion developeth on his blog. Thanks Dave. Ganesh’s Constructive Contrarian in our blog and Riyaz’s Silent Dissenter are two new terms added to the discussion. Enjoy. Patrix of Desipundit linked to this post as well. Thanks Patrix.

 References:

1. Headrush also carried a Devil’s Advocate post which advocated Tom Kelley’s multiple persona approach to deal with it. While that approach may work, I think it is a bit complicated for it to be practical for everyone.

2. Abiline Paradox – another variant of groupthink where the group acts in a way that is a direct opposite of their individual preferences!

3. Gary Neilson+Bruce Pasternack+Karen Van Nuys’s description of a Passive-Aggressive Organization in the HBR –  where meetings are very cordial, everyone agrees with everyone else, but nothing actually happens.

Umberto Eco

This guy simply amazes me. I picked up Baudolino last month and finished the whole thing in one sitting. Beautifully written and perfect story telling. Highly recommended.

On my trip back from India, picked up another book from the airport – Mouse or Rat : Translation as Negotiation. Not disappointed at all again – another piece of wit from the master. I should recommend this to my collegues working on a major ‘internationalization’ project.

Bootom line is that I’ve read almost all the works of Eco and none of them disappointed me – It is high time he is given the Nobel for literature.

On India

I had the fortune of visiting India on a short duration and couldnt help observing the increasing westernization and the pace in which it is influencing all the people.

Specifically, the work pressure on IT professionals has significantly increased over the last few years (since I left the place). There is increased competition for all kind of resources, and increased demand both in quantity and quality. No wonder Robin Sharma is selling so well there. It is an irony that this is the same place from which all the fundemental techniques for peace and wholesome life comes from, and now the same Indians need self help books to discover it.

Any decision better than no decision?

More and more I am beginning to believe that “a wrong decision taken in time is better than no decision taken at all, or sometimes even a good decision taken later”. Of course, no one makes a wrong decision conciously, however the degree of confidence on a decision yielding results could sometimes be less. In such situations, do we simply postpone making the decision, waiting for more inputs that would help us make a better ‘informed’ decision, or should we go ahead with what we information we have? Of course, the simple answer is – it depends!!. Depends on the enormity of the decision and the timeframe within which new information will be forthcoming. However, organizations that stay in this prolonged state of ‘indecision freeze’ leads to a general lack of trust on management and loss of productivity and degeneration of morale. So, irrespective of the enormity of the decision, there is an absolute cut-off before which a decision MUST be made. I wish there was some kind of magic formula that lets you derive this timeframe based on certain inputs? I found the following quote from this article very relevant to decision making – “Do not measure whether a decision is correct by the outcome because we cannot control the consequences, we can only control how well we look at the problem or opportunity”