For decades, one of the most familiar explanations for persistent poverty in America began with the timing of childbirth.
Have a child too young, the story went, and education becomes harder, work becomes less stable, marriage becomes less likely, and poverty becomes more difficult to escape. Delay parenthood, finish school, find work, and the odds should improve.
Then Edin adds the sentence that should unsettle the entire causal story: the young adults are not doing well.
The long-term verdict is not yet in. The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study is collecting its age-27 wave during 2026. But the evidence already presents a challenge. If people change the behavior that was supposed to explain the outcome, and the outcome does not improve proportionally, the explanation was incomplete.
Teen parenthood can make an already difficult path harder. That is not in doubt. What deserves more scrutiny is the leap from “this event increases risk” to “this event explains the system.”
A better statistic can be a genuine achievement while still concealing an unstable life.
We changed the sequence, not the odds
The appeal of a behavioral explanation is that it offers both a cause and a remedy.
If early childbirth causes poverty, reducing early childbirth becomes an anti-poverty strategy. If dropping out causes poverty, increasing enrollment becomes an anti-poverty strategy. If unemployment causes poverty, moving people into jobs becomes an anti-poverty strategy.
Each proposition contains truth. None is sufficient.
A sequence of milestones can describe the lives of people who became economically secure without identifying what made those milestones valuable. Education pays when the credential is credible, the institution is affordable, and the labor market rewards it. Work pays when hours are dependable, wages exceed the cost of showing up, and one sick child does not end the job. Delayed parenthood creates options when the intervening years contain real opportunities to build a life.
Otherwise, the sequence becomes a set of instructions for waiting.
A policy can change the sequence of a life without changing the odds that govern it.
Annual income erases time
Edin’s most important distinction may not be between poverty and prosperity. It may be between low income and instability.
Annual income compresses twelve months into one number. Two households can report the same income while living in different economic worlds. One receives a predictable paycheck every other Friday. The other moves through full weeks, shortened weeks, canceled shifts, emergency expenses, and months when earnings and bills arrive in the wrong order.
The Federal Reserve’s 2024 household survey found that 29 percent of adults experienced at least occasional month-to-month income variation. Eleven percent said that variation made it difficult to pay bills. Among adults with family income below $25,000, 19 percent struggled with bills because their income varied.
The damage is not limited to the missing dollars. Volatility creates secondary costs.
A late rent payment becomes a fee and then an eviction filing.
An unreliable car causes a missed shift, which reduces the next paycheck.
A temporary move changes a child’s school and a parent’s commute.
A short workweek makes a training payment unaffordable, turning an unfinished credential into debt.
Averages treat these events as fluctuations around a mean. Families experience them as a sequence in which one disruption changes what becomes possible next.
Poverty is not only a shortage of resources. It is a shortage of planning horizon.
Welfare reform strengthened work and weakened the floor
The honest account of welfare reform is neither triumph nor catastrophe.
At the same time, the replacement of Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families removed the guarantee of cash assistance and gave states much wider discretion over the funds.
A Congressional Research Service analysis estimated that 79 percent of people eligible for family cash assistance received it in 1994. By 2018, 26 percent did. A more recent CRS review notes that the number of families receiving assistance fell from 5.1 million in 1994 to about 1 million in 2024. It also explains that caseload reduction itself helped states meet federal work standards, whether or not the families outside the program were employed.
That is a measurement problem disguised as an administrative success.
A smaller caseload may mean fewer families need help. It may mean fewer eligible families receive it. It may mean the application process is harder, the benefit is less useful, or the state spent the money elsewhere. The number cannot tell us which story is true.
A safety net has not succeeded because fewer people touch it. It has succeeded when fewer ordinary shocks become catastrophes.
The success sequence assumes a success structure
The young adults in Edin’s cohort have absorbed the message. They are delaying children, trying to finish school, and trying to establish themselves in the labor market.
But the institutions supporting that sequence are uneven.
College is not one experience. A student who attends full time with family support is not following the same path as a student moving in and out of courses around changing work schedules. Starting college is not finishing. Finishing is not necessarily obtaining a credential with labor-market value. Edin describes young adults trying to follow the script in fits and starts, including some who attended for-profit trade schools and were left with credentials that did little for them.
The safety net introduces another paradox. Much of it is organized around dependent children. Several major benefits are available only, or far more substantially, to households raising children. Young adults who delay parenthood may therefore spend precisely the years when they are trying to build stability with less support than they would receive after having a child.
This is not an argument for early parenthood. It is an argument against a system that tells people to postpone a milestone and then withholds much of its support during the postponement.
The success sequence is usually presented as personal discipline. Its results depend on public and economic structure: stable work, useful education, affordable housing, transportation, health coverage, and enough cash continuity to survive a setback without abandoning the plan.
The success sequence assumes a success structure.
Meaning is not a luxury good
Edin complicates the story further when she describes what motherhood meant to the women she interviewed.
Many did not treat a child as a casual decision or marriage as unimportant. They often held marriage to an extraordinarily high standard and saw motherhood as one of the few available roles through which they could create meaning, identity, and a contribution that mattered.
That finding is easy to mishandle. It does not make the economic demands of early parenthood disappear. It does reveal an assumption embedded in middle-class advice: people can defer meaning because institutions will provide other credible sources of progress while they wait.
A good job offers more than wages. It offers mastery, relationships, identity, and a future a person can imagine inhabiting. Education can do the same when it provides belonging and visible progress rather than repeated administrative friction. Communities do it by giving people places to gather, contribute, and be known.
When those institutions fail, postponement is not experienced as patient investment. It can feel like life has been placed on hold without a reliable date for its return.
Social infrastructure belongs in the mobility equation
Near the end of the episode, the conversation moves from income and family formation to bowling alleys, libraries, cafés, religious congregations, nonprofits, and the places where people repeatedly encounter one another.
These can sound like amenities beside the seriousness of wages and housing. They are part of the economic system.
A room containing different kinds of people is not yet a relationship. A program that makes people interact once is not yet social infrastructure. Trust is built through repeated contact, shared work, and enough time for people to become more than categories to one another.
Those relationships can carry information, references, transportation, childcare, expectations, and the quiet confidence that someone will answer when a plan goes wrong. They extend the planning horizon.
Measure whether a life can absorb a shock
The decline in teen births is real progress. The mistake would be treating it as proof that the original theory of poverty was correct.
A more serious evaluation would ask what happened after the statistic improved:
How often does a household fall below a minimum cash floor during the year?
How predictable are work hours thirty days in advance?
How long does recovery take after a car repair, illness, or missed paycheck?
Does starting education lead to completion, and does completion lead to earnings?
How many moves, school changes, and job losses follow one income interruption?
Does a young adult have dependable relationships beyond the household?
Can a person make a six-month commitment with reasonable confidence about next month?
Those measures are less tidy than a birth rate, poverty line, enrollment count, or welfare caseload. They are closer to the thing policy is supposed to improve.
A stable life is not one in which nothing goes wrong. It is one in which ordinary problems remain ordinary.
Edin’s work asks us to look past the apparent solution and investigate the life that followed. Young women changed. The statistic changed. If the promised mobility does not follow, the next question is not what else is wrong with them.
A project misses its deadline. A customer leaves. A machine fails. A campaign spends the budget and produces almost nothing.
The review begins with a reasonable question: What happened?
But the question rarely remains open for long. Someone was careless. Someone did not communicate. Someone lacked urgency. Someone should have known better.
Once the organization has a name, it also has a remedy. Give feedback. Add training. Put a note in the performance review. Replace the person if the failure was serious enough. The meeting ends with the satisfying feeling that accountability has occurred.
Then a different person encounters the same incentives, the same missing information, the same overloaded process, and the same failure happens again.
The organization did not solve the problem. It purchased narrative closure at the cost of understanding.
In her episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Factor.AI co-founder Lindsay McGregor describes what she calls the blame bias: our tendency to explain poor performance through the character of the person closest to the outcome, even when the surrounding system did more to produce it.
That insight is often softened into a pleasant leadership slogan: blame the system, not the person. But the implication is more demanding than the slogan. System thinking does not remove accountability. It expands accountability beyond the person with the least power to change the conditions.
Blame is what organizations use when they want the appearance of accountability without the work of learning.
Blame compresses the causal field
Every meaningful organizational outcome has more causes than can fit comfortably into a meeting.
A missed deadline may involve a poor individual decision. It may also involve an unrealistic estimate, a sales promise made without delivery input, shifting priorities, a dependency no one owned, incentives that rewarded saying yes, and a reporting process that made trouble visible only after recovery was impossible.
Blame compresses that causal field into a person. It converts a difficult investigation into a familiar moral story: a responsible person would have produced a different result.
Social psychologist Lee Ross gave the fundamental attribution error its name in 1977. We tend to overestimate stable traits when explaining another person’s behavior and underestimate the situation in which the behavior occurred. In ordinary language, we see what someone did and quickly decide what kind of person would do it.
Distance makes the story easier. An executive sees a careless operator. A person standing beside the machine sees the awkward control, the rushed handoff, the warning light everyone has learned to ignore, and the production target that makes stopping the line feel dangerous.
The executive may have more authority and more data. The operator often has more causal knowledge.
Blame gives an organization a culprit. Accountability gives it a next action.
The same people can produce a different organization
McGregor illustrates the power of context through NUMMI, the automobile plant General Motors and Toyota operated together in California.
The plant’s previous workforce had been described as unreliable, antagonistic, and nearly impossible to manage. Toyota reopened the facility with many of the same workers but a different operating system. Employees were trained to identify problems, stop production, suggest improvements, test ideas, and treat quality as something they helped create rather than something management inspected after the fact.
The people did not receive new personalities. The work gave different behaviors a reason to emerge.
A California Management Review study of NUMMI describes how broad job classifications, teamwork, job rotation, employee involvement, and continuous improvement replaced direct supervision as the primary mechanism for performance. The point was not simply to be nicer to workers. It was to make their judgment part of the production system.
W. Edwards Deming estimated from his experience that 94 percent of troubles and possibilities for improvement belonged to the system and were therefore management’s responsibility. The number should not be treated as a universal law. Its distribution of responsibility is the more important point.
The higher a person sits in the organization, the more power that person usually has to shape goals, incentives, workload, information flow, staffing, tools, decision rights, and consequences. Yet performance conversations often place the greatest explanatory burden on the people with the least authority over those conditions.
A system explanation does not say nobody is responsible. It asks whether responsibility has been assigned in proportion to power.
The system is not an alibi
There is an obvious objection. Some people lie, neglect their obligations, mistreat colleagues, or knowingly violate an important rule. A leader who explains every action through context can become as unserious as one who explains everything through character.
System thinking should not erase agency. It should improve diagnosis.
Four questions belong in the same review:
What choice did the person make?
What conditions made that choice more likely, more rational, or harder to detect?
Who had the authority to change those conditions before the event?
What individual and system changes will make recurrence less likely?
An employee can be responsible for deception while a manager is responsible for a target that rewarded it. A manager can be responsible for ignoring a warning while an executive team is responsible for a culture in which delivering bad news ends careers. These responsibilities do not cancel one another.
A system explanation does not erase individual responsibility. It reveals who had the power to prevent recurrence.
Designing for the exception changes everyone’s work
Bad actors create another system problem: they are memorable.
McGregor describes the remote employee discovered to be working two full-time jobs. The violation is real. The leader’s anger is understandable. The danger comes next, when the organization redesigns work as though every employee were waiting for a chance to cheat.
More monitoring appears. Decision rights narrow. Work becomes visible through activity rather than results. Approval steps multiply. The system may catch another offender. It also teaches conscientious employees that their judgment is not trusted and that appearing busy is safer than experimenting with a better way to work.
Control is not free. It consumes attention, delays decisions, encourages performance theater, and transfers discretion away from the people closest to the problem.
Research by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci on self-determination theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as conditions that support intrinsic motivation and healthy self-regulation. A control added for one exceptional case can weaken those conditions for everyone else.
The design question is not whether to trust people blindly. It is how to contain misconduct without making the misconduct the model of human behavior on which the entire organization is built.
When leaders design for the worst employee they can imagine, they often create the worst workplace everyone else has experienced.
Blame destroys evidence
The deepest cost of blame is not hurt feelings. It is lost information.
James Reason distinguished the person and system approaches to error in a foundational article on human error. The person approach treats errors as products of inattention, carelessness, poor motivation, or moral weakness. Its remedies include retraining, new procedures, discipline, and shame. The system approach begins with the fact that people are fallible and asks how working conditions can prevent an error or limit its consequences.
A blame-oriented review teaches employees to manage exposure. They disclose less, describe uncertainty more carefully, and wait until a problem is undeniable before attaching their names to it. The organization receives cleaner reports and worse knowledge.
Amy Edmondson’s study of psychological safety and learning behavior found that teams where people felt safe taking interpersonal risks engaged more in behaviors such as discussing errors, seeking feedback, and experimenting. Learning behavior, in turn, helped explain performance.
This does not mean every mistake should feel comfortable. It means the organization must be able to hear an accurate account before it decides what the account requires.
A good metric can look like bad performance
Systems also determine what counts as evidence.
In the Toyota system McGregor describes, pulling the andon cord made a problem visible and could stop production. A manager optimizing only for short-term output might see fewer cord pulls as improvement. A manager responsible for learning might worry that fewer pulls meant employees had stopped surfacing problems.
The same number can therefore describe two different organizations. One has fewer problems. The other has fewer reported problems.
Most performance systems are much better at counting completed work than adaptive work. They measure units, calls, revenue, utilization, deadlines, and hours. They rarely measure useful questions, early warnings, experiments, prevented errors, or ideas that improved the process.
When the visible score rewards output and the invisible score contains learning, people rationally protect output. Then leadership interprets the resulting silence as evidence that the system works.
Accountability should end with a changed system
A learning review should not begin by assuming innocence. It should not begin by assuming guilt either. It should begin by preserving the size of the question.
Useful reviews ask:
What did the person know at the time, and what could that person reasonably have known?
What made the action seem sensible, necessary, or safe in that moment?
Would a capable peer in the same conditions have been likely to act differently?
Which target, workload, handoff, tool, incentive, or norm increased the probability of failure?
Where could an earlier signal have changed the outcome?
What individual choice requires correction?
What system change will make the better choice easier, earlier, or more visible?
Who owns that change, and how will the organization know it worked?
If the review ends only with feedback for the employee, the organization has probably stopped one level too soon. If it ends only with a vague promise to improve the culture, it has stopped several levels too early.
Accountability becomes real when it creates an obligation to repair. The employee may need to change a behavior. The manager may need to change the work. The executive may need to change the incentive that made the behavior predictable. Each owner should leave with an action proportionate to the power that owner had over the conditions.
Learning requires a longer explanation
Blame survives because it is emotionally efficient. It turns ambiguity into certainty, causation into character, and management failure into an employee problem.
Learning is slower. It asks leaders to understand work they may have only seen through dashboards. It makes them examine controls they approved, incentives they praised, and constraints they never personally experienced. It may reveal that the person who made the visible mistake was adapting to a less visible mistake in the design.
That is not softness. It is a more exacting form of accountability because it refuses to confuse punishment with prevention.
Blame asks who deserves the pain. Accountability asks who owns the repair.
A leadership team asks for a strategy. What it really wants is a guarantee.
The executives want to know which campaign will produce the forecasted revenue, which technology will create the promised efficiency, which market will grow, and which reorganization will solve the problem without creating another one. The strategist can provide research, models, experience, and a recommendation. What the room wants is certainty.
So everyone participates in a familiar performance. Assumptions become projections. Projections become targets. Targets become commitments. The presentation grows more precise as the underlying situation remains stubbornly unpredictable.
If the plan works, its authors were prescient. If it fails, they can point to the data, the methodology, the consultant, or the industry standard. Every decision was defensible. No one quite decided.
This is not strategy. It is responsibility laundering.
In his episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, strategist Steve Kozel describes strategy as a series of nested choices. At any altitude, he argues, strategy requires multiple feasible options, an understanding of the situation, a desired effect, and a choice among the alternatives.
That definition carries a consequence organizations often try to avoid: if the alternatives are genuinely feasible and the future is genuinely uncertain, the choice can be wrong.
A strategy that cannot fail is not a strategy. It is either an operating procedure, a foregone conclusion, or a story told to make uncertainty feel controllable.
Strategy begins where prediction ends
There are decisions for which certainty is a reasonable expectation. Payroll should run. An invoice should calculate correctly. A proven manufacturing process should stay within tolerance. When cause and effect are stable and repeatable, leaders should demand reliability.
Strategy is different because it concerns choices whose value depends on reactions that have not happened yet. Competitors respond. Customers reinterpret what they want. Employees change the plan while implementing it. Technology alters the economics. The choice itself changes the environment in which its success will be judged.
Frank Knight drew a useful distinction in Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Risk describes situations in which probabilities can be estimated. Uncertainty describes situations in which the probabilities themselves are not reliably knowable.
Most organizations are comfortable managing risk. They create ranges, reserves, scenarios, and controls. They struggle when uncertainty cannot be converted into a percentage. The absence of a reliable probability feels like the absence of management.
But uncertainty is not a temporary defect in the strategy process. It is the condition that makes strategy necessary. If the correct action and its outcome were already known, the organization would not need a strategist. It would need an operator.
A plan becomes strategy only when it contains a consequential choice and accepts the possibility of being wrong.
Certainty has a job inside the organization
The demand for certainty is not simply a reasoning error. It serves an organizational purpose.
A confident forecast lets a project receive funding. A familiar methodology reassures procurement. A famous consultancy gives an executive cover. A dashboard suggests control. A best practice allows everyone to say the decision met the accepted standard.
These things reduce personal exposure even when they do not reduce uncertainty. That difference matters.
Kozel calls the deeper pattern “Fear OS,” an unspoken operating system in which people are expected to maintain control, avoid failure, produce positive metrics, and explain the world as though it were more rational than it is. Under those conditions, the safest decision is often the one whose failure will be easiest to defend.
This helps explain why a company can be filled with intelligent people and still repeat choices no one strongly believes in. Each participant is responding rationally to a local incentive. The analyst avoids an unsupported recommendation. The manager protects the quarterly number. The executive selects the respectable vendor. The board receives a forecast with enough detail to feel governed.
The organization has not eliminated uncertainty. It has distributed responsibility so thoroughly that the eventual result will seem to belong to no one.
Best practice cannot create strategic advantage
Best practices are valuable when the goal is dependable execution of a known activity. I want the people operating an airplane, administering medication, or securing financial data to use procedures that have survived serious scrutiny.
The problem begins when leaders ask best practice to answer a strategic question.
Michael Porter’s explanation of strategy centers on a unique position, trade-offs, and fit among activities. Strategy requires choosing what not to do. An organization that copies the accepted practices of its category may become more competent. It does not become meaningfully different.
This is the contradiction Kozel surfaces in the episode. Organizations want a proven solution and an advantage. They want evidence without experiments. They want innovation without the waste, ambiguity, and failed attempts through which new knowledge is produced.
If every competitor follows the same research, hires the same experts, adopts the same technology, and optimizes against the same benchmark, best practice becomes a convergence mechanism. It improves the category while compressing the differences within it.
Best practice can improve execution. It cannot explain why the company should win.
An experiment is not an excuse
None of this means leaders should become casual about evidence or celebrate failure as a cultural virtue.
“We are experimenting” can become its own form of responsibility laundering. Teams can use the language of learning to excuse poor preparation, unclear goals, oversized bets, and projects that continue long after the original hypothesis has collapsed.
A real experiment is more demanding than a confident plan because it must say what is not known and how the organization intends to learn it.
Amy Edmondson describes an intelligent failure as an undesired result in new territory. The attempt should pursue a meaningful goal, rest on an informed hypothesis, and be no larger than necessary to produce the needed knowledge.
Those constraints turn experimentation from a slogan into a management discipline.
What specific assumption are we testing?
What evidence would increase or reduce our confidence?
What is the smallest credible action that can produce that evidence?
What downside are we exposing, and who has agreed to it?
When will we stop, expand, or change direction?
Where will the learning alter a decision, budget, process, or belief?
The purpose of an experiment is not to make failure harmless. It is to buy information at a price the organization can afford.
Learning must reach the assumptions
Organizations often claim to learn while protecting the belief that produced the disappointing result.
A campaign misses its target, so the team changes the creative. A product struggles, so marketing receives a larger lead goal. A transformation stalls, so managers schedule more training. The response corrects activity without reconsidering the governing assumption.
Chris Argyris distinguished this kind of correction from deeper learning. Single-loop learning asks how to perform the existing approach more effectively. Double-loop learning asks whether the underlying goals, rules, and assumptions still deserve to govern the work.
In his work on defensive reasoning, Argyris argued that capable professionals often respond to difficulty by avoiding examination of their own contribution to it. Expertise can make the defense more articulate without making it less defensive.
This is why adding more data does not necessarily make an organization more empirical. Data can test a claim. It can also decorate a conclusion the organization is unwilling to reconsider.
Double-loop learning creates a more uncomfortable review:
Did the execution fail, or was the strategic premise wrong?
Are we improving the offer, or only improving the way we promote it?
Does the metric represent value, or is it merely easy to make rise?
Are we asking a team to solve a problem whose cause sits above its authority?
What would we stop believing if we took this result seriously?
If every review ends with a better way to execute the same idea, the organization is not learning strategically. It is becoming more efficient at defending the past.
Exploitation wins the quarterly argument
Even leaders who understand this problem face a structural disadvantage.
James March’s classic paper on exploration and exploitation in organizational learning describes the tension between refining what an organization already knows and searching for new possibilities. Exploitation produces clearer, nearer, and more predictable returns. Exploration is uncertain, delayed, and frequently disappointing.
That asymmetry gives the known approach an advantage in every budgeting cycle. The established product has revenue. The existing channel has benchmarks. The familiar process has owners. The new option has a hypothesis.
March warned that adaptive processes can become effective in the short run and self-destructive in the long run because organizations refine exploitation faster than exploration. The company becomes increasingly competent at a world that is becoming less relevant.
This is another reason certainty can be dangerous. It does not merely misdescribe the future. It systematically moves resources toward whatever already has a history.
The most dangerous experiment is the one an organization is already running while pretending the outcome is guaranteed.
What honest strategy sounds like
An honest strategy does not replace confidence with vagueness. It makes confidence proportional to evidence.
It names the choice. It explains why this option is preferable to other feasible options. It distinguishes what is known from what is assumed. It defines the risk the organization is accepting. It makes clear who owns the decision. It identifies the earliest evidence that would justify changing course.
It also separates commitments from predictions.
A leader can commit to allocating resources, protecting an experiment, reviewing evidence, and changing direction when the premise no longer holds. A leader cannot honestly commit that customers, competitors, employees, regulators, and technology will behave according to the forecast.
This kind of strategy can sound less impressive in the room. It replaces false precision with boundaries, hypotheses, and decision rules. It admits that expertise improves a choice without making the future obedient.
That is not weaker leadership. It is leadership willing to remain responsible after the illusion of control has been removed.
The choice comes before the certainty
Organizations do not need more comfort with failure in the abstract. They need a more precise relationship with uncertainty.
Preventable mistakes should be prevented. Known processes should be reliable. Large irreversible choices deserve more scrutiny than small reversible ones. Evidence should shape judgment wherever evidence exists.
But strategy cannot wait until the uncertainty has disappeared. By then, the choice may be obvious, the advantage may be gone, or the organization may have spent years perfecting the wrong thing.
The discipline is to decide without pretending to know, act without becoming reckless, and learn without protecting the assumptions that made the action possible.
Strategy is not a promise that the future will obey. It is a commitment to choose, learn, and remain accountable before certainty arrives.
In May 2025, leaders from across the home healthcare industry gathered to wrestle with a difficult question:
What will home healthcare look like in 2035?
And more urgently, what does that mean for us right now?
We used structured scenario planning to explore not one, but three radically different futures:
Growth: Care improves through investment, collaboration, and tech used wisely.
Decline: Care collapses under lawsuits, policy gridlock, and workforce erosion.
Transformation: A crisis forces radical reinvention—driven by tech and demographic shock.
But these weren’t just theoretical exercises. These futures were backcasted step-by-step from real signals we’re seeing today and from the hard truths industry leaders are already living.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s inside the report:
What happens when CMS is forced to pivot to fully automated care not out of ambition, but because there’s no human labor left.
How political proximity (or the lack of it) is making care invisible until it’s too late.
Why even the most optimistic path still faces a rising mental health crisis among both caregivers and patients.
The result is not a prediction.
It’s a strategic tool: a way to think more clearly, act more confidently, and avoid solving tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s logic.
Who is this for?
If you’re a leader, innovator, or decision-maker in:
A home care agency or provider org
A tech company building tools for care delivery
A funding, policy, or workforce development group in healthcare
Or you’re just trying to prepare your own team, product, or strategy for what’s ahead…
This report was built for you.
Request the Report: “Home Healthcare 2035”
We’ve compiled the full findings—including visuals, strategic takeaways, and recommendations—into a concise report.
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In today’s fast-paced, content-rich, distraction-laden world, leaders often struggle to make clear decisions under pressure. Many feel they’re constantly reacting, without ever stepping back to assess the bigger picture. But there’s an often-overlooked solution to this: mindfulness.
Why mindfulness matters for decision-making In a world full of distractions and constant demands, it’s easy for leaders to lose focus and make reactive decisions. Our colleagues, families, and friends depend on us to make sound decisions, especially if we hold positions of power or influence. To be effective decision-makers, we must focus our attention on the most important issues.
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. – William James, writing in 1890
As leaders, the decisions we make shape the direction and success of our teams and organizations. Effective decision-making is critical because it impacts every aspect of our roles, from setting strategic goals to managing daily operations and responding to unexpected challenges. This need has grown with the rise of knowledge workers and the increasing role of AI in handling routine tasks. As routine tasks become automated, the value of human decision-making increases, making our ability to make sound decisions even more crucial. Many leaders face significant obstacles that hinder their decision-making abilities, such as stress, emotional reactivity, information overload, or plain old distraction. These challenges can lead to suboptimal decisions, affecting not only our performance but also the well-being of our teams.
This is where mindfulness comes in. While mindfulness is often associated with relaxation and stress reduction, its benefits extend far beyond that. Mindfulness is about being fully present and aware in the moment, thereby enhancing our ability to make clear, balanced, and informed decisions. When you are practicing mindfulness, you are not cutting out something. You are instead bringing to the forefront of your consciousness what the mind is already doing, noticing and processing innumerable things. When you are being mindful, you can more effectively choose when and what to focus on instead of being distracted and then wrapped up in one thought or feeling, one shiny object or another, one phone or computer notification, one question or appeal for attention from another person…and another and another seemingly unendingly.
Mindlessness
Mindfulness
Reacting without thinking
Pausing to consider options
Easily distracted by thoughts
Focused on the present moment
Impulsive decisions
Thoughtful, intentional decisions
Operating on autopilot
Conscious awareness and control
Mindlessness vs. Mindfulness
Most people are rarely mindful—in fact, many operate on autopilot. It’s similar to dreaming. Think of a time when you were dreaming: you had no control over what thought came next, and you were fully absorbed. This is how many of us go through daily life.
Mindlessness Psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s research on attention shows that our ability to focus depends on factors like mental fatigue and distraction. The more tired or distracted we are, the harder it becomes to focus on anything. Mindfulness will help you make clearer, faster decisions, even in high-pressure situations. By reducing the experience of distraction, it allows you to focus on what truly matters, improving your ability to lead your team effectively and reducing costly mistakes.
A 2020 study found that the average person has over 6,000 thoughts per day—about one every 9 seconds. With so many thoughts constantly flowing through our minds, it’s no wonder that staying focused can be such a challenge. Mindfulness helps us manage this overwhelming influx by training our attention on what matters most, so we’re less likely to get swept away by the next thought that arises.
Think about yourself for a moment. How long can you truly focus on writing an email or listening to a colleague before another thought interrupts—even if just for a second? While you may maintain focus longer in some situations, as Kahneman’s research shows, attention is clearly a bigger challenge today than ever before. This constant flitting from one thought to another impacts our ability to maintain focus on tasks, which in turn affects our decision-making. When we’re not fully present for the appropriate amount of time to do a specific job, our decisions can become fragmented and less effective.
The goal of mindfulness isn’t to stop your thoughts but to become aware of them. Like the earlier metaphor of dreaming, the aim isn’t to stop the dream but to become conscious of what’s happening around you, so you’re not swept away by one thought while missing the bigger picture. By noticing when our minds wander, we can train ourselves to refocus on the task at hand, which improves our ability to make thoughtful, clear decisions.
Try this 60-second mindfulness exercise. I’d like you to try a simple mindfulness exercise:
Get into a comfortable position, sit up straight, and close your eyes.
Take a slow, deep breath in and out.
Focus your attention on your breath.
Notice where you feel it most prominently—whether it’s at the tip of your nose, the surface of your lips, or the rise and fall of your chest or stomach.
Set a timer, and for the next 60 seconds, try to keep your focus solely on your breath. Cover it with all your attention. While you might have thoughts about other things, gently bring your focus back to your breath whenever you notice your mind has wandered. It’s perfectly normal for thoughts to arise. The key is to recognize them and then return your attention to your breathing.
After your exercise: How was that experience for you? Did you notice your mind wandering and then successfully bring your focus back to your breath?
This simple exercise is the foundation for sharpening your decision-making during high-stakes meetings, negotiations, or when managing competing priorities. With regular practice, you’ll find that you can stay calm, focused, and intentional even in the most difficult situations.
Overcoming flooding University of Washington professor John Gottman has researched what his institute calls “emotional flooding.” This happens when someone is so overwhelmed by their emotions that their decision-making skills are overpowered. Emotional flooding happens more often than you might think—it’s not just limited to heated arguments or intense grief. It can occur even in people who seem emotionally reserved.
Research from the Gottman Institute shows that pausing for just two seconds between a stimulus and a response can significantly improve performance. This applies to everything from answering simple questions to handling complex, high-stakes conversations.
As a leader, you’re constantly required to make quick decisions, prioritize tasks, and navigate high-pressure situations. Mindfulness gives you the mental space to pause, process, and respond thoughtfully, allowing you to stay calm and clear-headed, no matter the challenges you face. When we’re mindful, we are less likely to react impulsively and more likely to provide thoughtful, well-considered responses—both qualitatively and quantitatively better.
Consider a scenario where a colleague asks you a challenging question. By pausing for a couple of seconds before responding, you give yourself the opportunity to process the question more thoroughly and provide a better, more thoughtful answer. If pausing remains at the level of a hack or trick though, you will inevitably forget about it and revert to your old, very common habits. This is why you need to practice mindfulness. So that when you have a decision to make, you do so with awareness, intention, and the ability to stay focused on the task at hand, thereby actually doing your job better.
As a leader, your ability to manage distractions and focus on what truly matters is key to success. Mindfulness helps you control your thoughts, keeping you focused on strategic priorities and reducing the risk of making reactive, impulsive decisions that can harm your team or organization. By practicing mindfulness regularly, you’ll sharpen your focus and decision-making abilities, allowing you to handle complex leadership challenges with greater ease. You’ll be able to think more strategically, make quicker decisions, and guide your team more confidently.
The rider and the elephant In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains that the mind consists of two parts: the elephant (the impulsive, unconscious mind) and the rider (the rational, conscious mind). While the rider can guide the elephant, it’s only possible if the elephant allows it. When the elephant becomes scared, angry, or agitated, it takes control, leaving the rider merely along for the ride. The elephant is in control when you’re on autopilot—like when you pull into your driveway and realize you don’t remember the drive or when you impulsively yell at someone and later regret it.
Most likely, your rider was distracted and didn’t even bother to try to direct the elephant or was over-powered and simply could not direct the elephant. The elephant, your unconscious mind, just did what it believed was best, which was kept you on the road and got you to your destination. It’s the elephant that’s in command when a hockey goalie launches at the puck before ever consciously knowing or seeing where it was going, when a musician plays an incredibly fast riff on a guitar or piano, when you burn or cut your finger and are pulling your hand back almost before you even realize it. It’s the elephant that’s in control when you’re emotionally flooded, and more often, it’s the elephant that’s in control when your phone buzzes and you reflexively look at it or a colleague asks you a question and you just start speaking.
Our unconscious mind often dictates our actions and decisions, sometimes without our conscious awareness. As Haidt says in his book, to make better decisions, we need to:
Ensure that our conscious mind is clear and focused on specific goals.
Motivate our unconscious mind by finding emotional connections to our goals.
Shape our environment to minimize distractions for the unconscious mind.
“You” are simply not as smart as you think you are. It’s difficult to equate human thoughts to bits in a computer because the human brain does not function like a computer, but we can use this analogy for illustration purposes.
While our minds process up to 11 million bits of information per second according to some estimates, our conscious brain can handle only a fraction of that—about 50 to 400 bits (depending on who is doing the comparison and exactly how they’re making it). This gap explains why so many of our decisions happen on autopilot. Mindfulness helps bridge this divide, increasing our capacity (Kahneman) and our ability to consciously act upon our goals (Haidt).
This disparity in conscious and unconscious bandwidth means there’s a lot going on under the surface that we simply are not conscious of. We know our heart beating, much of our breathing, reaction times, and many other functions are handled unconsciously, but so is a lot of everything else that we do. You can notice this when you’re talking to someone. In most cases, the words come out of your mouth before you consciously think them. It’s almost as if it’s not you choosing the words, but you know it’s you. It’s just not the same “you” that deliberates over a decision and then makes a choice. It’s the elephant, the unconscious you that processes millions of bits of information and then decides what to say before the conscious you, the rider that only processes 50 bits per second, has time to catch up. It’s the elephant turning right or left before the rider even realizes they’ve come to a fork in the path.
Understanding how much happens in our unconscious mind—and how often we let the elephant guide our choices—helps us see why it’s so easy to go on autopilot, reacting instead of thinking. By becoming more aware of our thoughts, we can better manage our responses and make more intentional and better decisions that our colleagues need to be able to rely upon us for.
Your mind as water I suggest you try this exercise by reading a single paragraph and following the directions before moving on to follow the directions in the next paragraph. If you are using a timer, give yourself at least a minute to test out the directions in each paragraph. If you are not using a timer, follow the directions in each paragraph for as long as you feel that you’re having to work at it, but not so long that you have a feeling of not being able to stick to it successfully anymore.
Exercise 1 Close your eyes and imagine your consciousness as a giant lake that you are looking down on from a high vantage point. This lake is vast, with no edges in sight. Everything within your view is water. This represents the space where all your thoughts and feelings arise. If you can see anything on or above the surface, you are aware of it. It’s in your consciousness. Now, we know there’s a lot below that surface as there is in any sufficiently large body of water. Sadly, we just can’t see past the surface.
Exercise 2 Now imagine a spot on the water with ripples radiating out, like when a fish breaks the surface of a still lake. These ripples represent your thoughts. Something rises from your unconscious mind, breaks the surface, and you’re suddenly aware of it. These could be thoughts about your breathing, the sounds around you, your sweaty hands, or a memory from work.
Exercise 3 As you visualize these ripples, notice how your mind jumps from one thought to another without you deciding to do so. One moment you’re picturing the lake, the next you’re thinking about an itchy foot, then suddenly you’re wondering why the neighbor is talking so loudly. Often, we get so caught up in one set of ripples that we forget about the rest of the lake—the other thoughts and ideas floating around.
If the average person has just over 6,000 thoughts per waking day and struggles to focus on a single thought for long, what often happens is similar in this visualization to zooming in and getting caught up in one set of ripples, then another, and another. This can happen in meetings, conversations, or while working on tasks, leading us to lose sight of our broader goals. One of the problems with this is that we rarely feel distracted or unable to focus. We’re simply doing what we do all the time. We’re thinking and doing. But, isn’t that also what happens while we’re dreaming? We’re certainly thinking, and as far as we experience it in the moment, we’re doing something–even if not physically. As far as we’re concerned when we are wrapped up in a dream, we are doing something, but as I’ve stated, we move from thought to thought unintentionally, effectively becoming the recipients, or victims, of whatever thoughts we receive and become wrapped up in rather than the intentional directors of our thoughts and actions.
What’s the problem with watching a TV show and having a memory pop up about high school, then focusing on the show again only to pull out our phones and google the cast, then deciding that we should check our work and personal email while we have our phones out, then checking social media only to end up doom scrolling for the next 10 minutes? We don’t notice that this aspect of our minds is such a problem because we get our tasks done–we answer that colleague’s question, we finish the email we’re writing, we sit through and participate in the meeting. What we’re rarely doing though is intentionally focusing. More often than not, what we’re actually doing is allowing ourselves to get distracted and just returning over and over and over to the same task–sending that email response to a colleague but not giving it our best thought because our mind has just come from the show we’re watching to the email and is flitting back and forth while we type for example.
The goal of mindfulness is to be aware of all these ripples on our mental lake—our thoughts and feelings—without getting caught up in them. For example, being aware of the motivation to pull out our phones or think about that old memory without being drawn in unintentionally. By being aware, by being conscious, we can choose where to direct our focus, rather than being constantly pulled from one distraction to another.
Let’s see an example of how the mind focuses Let’s take the concepts I’ve discussed and get a more visual experience of this. For this exercise, I’ve noted in [bolded brackets] when I would spend some time on what has just been described and how much time I would put toward that.
Exercise 1 Sit or stand as if you were going to repeat one of the last exercises, but this time keep your eyes open and pointed at something simple. Don’t look at your device or anything that is moving or has intricate patterns, shapes, colors, or writing. Focus on something like a chair, a spot on the wall or the carpet in front of you, or a simple decoration. [30-ish seconds]
Exercise 2 Now, while you keep your eyes pointed there, let the focus of your attention move around your visual field to take in other things you can see. For example, if I were in my office, I might look at the carpet in front of me or the puff guard on my mic and then, keeping my eyes on that spot, consciously notice the items behind or off to the side. To give myself a better chance of really focusing my mental attention, I might then ask myself: What are those things? What are the colors and shapes? What are the objects? Keeping my eyes in the same spot, I can then shift my attention to things closer to me on my desk, such as my keyboard and some papers. [1-3 minutes]
Exercise 3 Now, if you haven’t done it already, keep your eyes in the same spot and consciously back out your mental focus. Try to just be aware of all the shapes, colors, and patterns in your visual field. You can’t visually zero in on more than one thing, but you can be aware of everything. You’re trying to not get lost in the thing you’re staring at and stop noticing everything around it in your visual field. [1-3 minutes]
Mindfulness is somewhat akin to this exercise. All of those objects are there, and if you think about it, you can take all of them in at varying levels of detail. The closer some object is to the point you’re focusing on, the more detail you get. The further out toward the periphery, the less detail your mind can pull in from your eyes.
You can point your eyes at a single thing, and even though you can tell yourself right now that you know everything else is there, that’s not generally how we experience life. When you’re at your desk typing, you’re mostly looking at one spot on the screen and maybe thinking about what your fingers are doing. You’re more than likely oblivious to all the other things in your visual field, the feeling of sitting in your chair, or anything else. You’re mentally wrapped up in that typing until a notification pops up to the side, and suddenly, your attention is pulled there, and your train of thought for your typing quickly evaporates into nothingness.
The more you practice mindfulness, the easier it will become to be aware of all the thoughts and feelings that occur to you, even though you cannot really take in more than one very deeply at any one time. When you’re in a state of mindfulness, you have a better chance to choose what to focus on rather than just reacting and getting lost in a thought.
To bring this explicitly back to decision-making, you cannot control when, for example, a colleague walks into your office or calls you on Teams. But once engaged in that conversation, you can be aware of all the thoughts and feelings popping up on the surface of your mental lake. This awareness allows you to choose to focus on the task at hand rather than letting your mind wander, which can result in lack of engagement, poor decision making, and potentially hurt feelings if the other person notices you’re not paying attention.
Pattern matching makes mindfulness hard. Our brains are notorious resource hogs. Despite being relatively small and lightweight, they consume a significant amount of our body’s energy. This is not true for many other species because they lack or have very simple versions of many of the structures that make our brains so powerful, such as the prefrontal cortex. As humans evolved, our brain’s intense energy consumption needed to be optimized. More energy used by any part of the body means more energy must either be consumed through eating or drinking or taken from some other part of the body. And since food has often been scarce and predators common through human history, our brains having the ability to do more was great, but not if it meant that we lacked the calories needed to power that brain for the time periods needed or if that energy consumption from our brains meant that we lacked the energy to run from a predator. To conserve energy, our brains developed ways to reduce unnecessary mental effort.
This is where pattern matching comes into play. Rather than processing every detail, our brains look for familiar patterns and quickly categorize them. This conserves energy for novel or unexpected situations that might require immediate attention. In doing this, we are effectively taking what the rider could have done with its low number of bits that it can process at any one time and turning it over to the elephant that has much more processing bandwidth, but also makes decisions to for example ignore, react, or take some other action before our rider realizes that for example we didn’t pay attention to anything our colleague said in the last 5 minutes.
Imagine walking into a new conference room for the first time and seeing chairs around the table. Your rider does not spend time examining each one to see how it is unique. Instead, your elephant recognizes the pattern, a seat with four legs and a backrest, and says, “Rider, nothing to pay attention to here.” This pattern matching helps you save mental energy and conscious bandwidth so that you can focus on the things that have historically been more important, thinking about the unfamiliar things in our environment: people we do not know, objects that are foreign, sounds from the darkness around us in the forest, and so on.
However, this same mechanism can lead to issues, especially in leadership. Imagine a colleague who frequently complains but rarely takes action. You might start to pattern-match their behavior, tuning them out before you’ve gathered enough information to know if this encounter will be different. Alternatively, an employee known for being reliable might have an off day, but you might miss the signs because you’ve categorized them as always dependable. And again, why do you do this? It’s easier to let the elephant set the direction so that the rider doesn’t have to expend any more energy than necessary.
Pattern matching means saved time and energy, but also missed opportunities and bad decisions. Pattern matching can cause us to overlook important details and make assumptions that aren’t always accurate. This can lead to missed opportunities, poor decision-making, and strained relationships within our teams. I know that we’ve all been in situations, where we’ve felt that someone wasn’t giving us their full attention, but how about this for another possible situation of pattern matching? Whether you’re male, female, black, white, straight, gay, or whatever, have you ever felt like you were getting the “All ______ people are like that” treatment?
For example, I’m an American that has lived in Germany twice and Sweden once. And, I’ve done a fair amount of traveling in my life. Even if I make allowances for some sense of insecurity or simply just misunderstanding on my part, I can tell you without a doubt that I have been pattern matched to “All Americans are like that” numerous times. In most cases, this is harmless. In some, it’s not, but regardless of whether harm is done or not, it certainly doesn’t feel good for me, and it leads those doing the pattern matching to not engage with and appreciate me in the ways that make me unique from the pattern they match me to. And yet, our brains are built to do this so that we can put our energy toward the things that we perceive as being new or novel and not the things that we think we already understand well. If “all Americans are like that” or “all women are like that” for example, I consciously or unconsciously believe I can focus on something else.
As leaders, it’s crucial to be aware of this tendency and consciously challenge our assumptions. Mindfulness can help us stay present, notice these patterns, and make more intentional decisions.
So, how do you make better decisions with mindfulness? Next time you have a chance to make a decision, you can do something as simple as take a moment to become aware of your thoughts and feelings. You can visualize your mental lake. You can take a breath before responding. Or, you can do what I like to do, which is to ask myself, “What am I doing? (I might for example not truly be paying attention to the task in front of me.) And, what do I think about this?” This can help to break out of pattern matching. And sometimes, whatever it is that just came to mind is worth your attention, but you taking a second to ask yourself what you think about it gives you the opportunity to weigh it against everything else you have going on and say for example, “I’ll get to that later,” rather than just getting distracted by something new.
Practical uses of mindfulness for better decision making One of the simplest metaphors for focus and decision-making is to think of the mind as a muscle. While we could talk about different mental “muscles”—like empathy or critical thinking—let’s keep it simple. Most of us struggle with focus. Our minds jump from notifications to memories, emails, grocery lists, and more, often without us realizing that we’re not giving full, uninterrupted attention to any one thing. Imagine training your ability to focus and make decisions just like you would train your body for running or weightlifting.
The simplest way to improve the strength of your mental focusing and decision-making muscles is to:
Dedicate a small amount of time every day to practice.
Isolate and use those muscles when appropriate.
Daily practice What you make time for daily has the biggest impact on your life. We all make time to eat, sleep, work, talk to our families, scroll through social media, or check the news. Some of these activities help, while others harm. But what we do every day has a greater impact than, say, the weightlifting we might do once a week.
To incorporate mindfulness into your daily routine:
Spend 10 minutes a day practicing mindfulness meditation.
Choose a focus area—such as general mindfulness, attention to your breath, or empathy for that person you’re having a hard time appreciating right now.
Set a quiet alarm to help you stay on track.
Close your eyes, take deep breaths, and focus solely on your chosen intention.
I think of this as roughly equivalent to physical training. If I’m doing a general mindfulness meditation, it’s somewhat similar to doing a general workout like a walk, run, or bike. Focusing on something specific, like your breath, is similar to working a specific muscle group, like doing a back or biceps workout. Consistency and structure are just as important for training your mental muscles as they are for anything else in life.
It’s difficult to set aside time for daily practice. If you don’t exercise a muscle though, it’s much more difficult to use it well when needed. If you never walk or jog, it’s hard to sprint for the airplane as the gate is closing. If you never do pushups or pullups, it’s harder to push your kids on a swing or lift them up as much as you and they might like. The same is true of your mind. If you don’t practice mindfulness, it will be harder to focus and make the high-value and critical decisions you’re likely being paid good money to make.
Daily use There’s no trick or hack that will work in the long run. Sure, you can follow a 5-step process or a 3-question decision tree. But the most reliable way to use mindfulness daily for better decision-making (after practicing regularly) is to recognize when mindfulness would be most especially valuable. Then, ask yourself a few simple questions or direct your mental energy toward what matters, and use those mental muscles.
Many of us have found ourselves in situations where we realize we could put down our phones and pay attention to our child or close our laptops and focus on a meeting. But switching your focus isn’t always the right move. It’s simply another set of ripples on the surface of your mental lake.
To evaluate competitors for your attention and intentionally put your focus on one, ask yourself two questions:
“What am I doing right now?” Are you writing an email while half-heartedly nodding to your child or colleagues? Are you watching TV while doom scrolling on your phone? First, figure out where your attention is going and where it is not. For example, a colleague calls me on Teams while I’m in the middle of writing a strategy document. I greet them and engage minimally until they request a response because my mind mostly just keeps going on the task I was focused on before their call. What am I doing here? What am I paying attention to?
“What do I think about this?” Taking a few seconds to acknowledge the new set of ripples on your mental lake can be more than enough time to simultaneously allow you to determine whether this new thing is worth devoting your attention to, if it’s worth attempting to multi-task alongside something else, or if it should be shelved for later. Often for me, this will result in me making a note to come back to whatever the new thing is. For example, I’m in the middle of a meeting, I remember I need to order something for my daughter’s birthday, and I make a digital note rather than going to order the thing, which would only take my mental focus away from the meeting for longer. This seems obvious, but honestly, how often do you think of something during a meeting and start working on that thing almost immediately?
Now, I want to say that–for the mindfulness Puritans–focusing on one thing at a time is not explicitly mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness is seeing all of those ripples on your mental lake, being aware of everything in your consciousness. For most of us, mindfulness is a means to a greater end. By practicing mindfulness, you gain the ability to focus intentionally on what matters, so you can give your full mental power to the task at hand.
Conclusion No matter who you are—whether you’re a critical thinker, emotionally volatile, or something else—you and the people who depend on you will benefit from better decision-making. This might mean improving the quality of your decisions while increasing the speed at which you make them or being more focused and mentally present in your life.
Imagine facing a sudden crisis at work: a client is upset, the team is stressed, and decisions need to be made quickly. Instead of reacting impulsively, you take a moment to center yourself, refocus, and address the situation calmly. This mindful pause allows you to make thoughtful decisions that are best for your team and your client
In today’s fast-paced world, mastering mindfulness is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. By becoming more present and intentional in your decisions, you’ll not only improve your leadership but also experience greater clarity and calm in both your personal and professional life.
To unlock the full potential of your leadership, I encourage you to start practicing mindfulness today. Even small, daily exercises can help you make clearer, more intentional decisions and improve your focus over time.
I’m going to take you on a longer-than-necessary journey here, but please stick with me. It will be worthwhile.
The Industrial Revolution
Prior to the industrial revolution, nearly every business had 2 types of workers: Owners and employees. In most organizations, that was it.
Due to most everything having to be done by hand, there was a low limit on how large a business could get. There was only so much people could work on and so much value that could be produced. Part of this restriction was due to errors. Manually performed work is inherently error prone. Think for example of the so called Wicked Bible that omitted the word Not making the commandment, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
When work had to be performed manually, you were going to run into problems. If your work product has high error rates, people don’t want to pay a lot for fear they might get a lemon. Until the industrial revolution, this hesitation led people to not purchase things or to pay less than they otherwise might have.
Additionally, management systems simply were not developed enough for a person to be able to add value to the work of a large set of people with whom they could not immediately and frequently interact. Think of for example Scrooge and Marley’s money lending business with Scrooge sitting in the corner watching Cratchit do his job. Without the benefits of an adding machine, calculator, electric lights, a time management system, and so on, Scrooge’s ability to add value only stretched so far, which could be one of the reasons he is portrayed as such a terrible manager. He was micro-managing, being a tyrant, etc, and Cratchit’s ability to produce value was limited due to having to do everything by hand. No calculators, computers, or anything else. If this were not the case, Scrooge could have had a whole building of Cratchit’s working away, whose shoulders he did not have to look over in order to ensure that their work product was error free.
Gracia Pratum
With the industrial revolution though came the ability to increase both quality and quantity of work. If I have a machine stamping the soles of shoes, I know that–once I get the machine set up correctly–it will do the job the same way every time. Humans naturally deviate. As this revolution occurred, employers were able to hire more employees to either work the machines or be treated like machines in that they only did a single task in an assembly line or division of labor scenario, which is less error prone than when a single person handles multiple tasks. At some point in this revolution and growth of the size of businesses, people like Scrooge simply did not have enough time or ability to add value to the work of all of those employees.
The widespread adoption of the assembly line greatly accelerated this shift toward more workers and less owners. Because while the assembly line–and variations of it–had been in use as far back as the Venetian Arsenal in the 12th century and even Ancient China, it was not until the industrial revolution when it began to be used to produce more than just a few items.
With the introduction of division of labor and machinery to automate work, you not only had an increase in the number of workers you could hire due to the amount of revenue you could generate, you also had higher quality products you could charge more for and specialized skillsets in your workforce that the owner-manager did not possess.
Enter the managerial class
For the first time in history, large numbers of businesses became stratified into–not a two-tier Owner-Employee organization but rather–a three-tier Owner-Manager-Employee organization. In this new structure, the owner’s responsibility was to the vision for and financial viability of the company with value adding oversight duties being shunted off to the managers. This was new and unusual, because until this time, the only people that could generally be trusted to shepherd the well-being of the company were people with an ownership stake. This new managerial class had no ownership, but still had to exercise responsibility.
While this shift was occurring, a man by the name of Frederick Winslow Taylor revolutionized business with his 1909 book The Principles of Scientific Management, which built on a long evolution of business and efficiency thinking to espouse the viewpoint essentially that humans and their processes should be molded to machines rather than the other way around.
With the advent of scientific management came systems of control and communication that are highly efficient, but somewhat dehumanizing. All in the span of 100-200 years (less in some places), workers went from being craftspeople that knew how to do everything related to a job and who had a direct relationship with their employers and customers to people that worked on only a single piece of a job (for example only installing car fenders rather than building the whole car) and who had no relationship with their employers or customers.
I cannot find the exact quote, but in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith said something like:
Man will become the minimum his environment requires.
Paraphrasing Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
And in this case, man’s environment had removed the understanding of the whole product or process and replaced it with an understanding only of installing the watch face, attaching the wiper blades, and so on, which is far more boring and less fulfilling than actually building something yourself and seeing people use it. This robbed the worker of the intellectual understanding of–and attachment to–the achievement that comes from really producing something because you never actually got to see your final product, and when you did, you had only done a small part.
As a result, it became ever more important to motivate workers externally. No longer was it just enough to do a good job because you couldn’t see the good job you had done playing out in the world. Scientific management espoused incentives and methods of control that treated employees like animals or machines. This created an environment in which management had to compel workers to work harder, better, faster even when they felt it was not worthwhile. And when their shifts were done, they were dismissed with something completely unrelated to the accomplishment of a job and instead something that fit the needs of the machine, a whistle or a bell.
Is it any wonder then that–come to today–so many people that work inside of machine-like businesses are dissatisfied with their jobs? For example, 90% of clergy express high satisfaction, while 39% of dry-cleaning workers do. Clergy own most or all of the process from beginning to end of their work and interact with their “customers”, seeing the outcomes of their efforts. Dry-cleaning workers conversely often do not interact with customers, work on a whole process from beginning to end, or see the outcomes of their efforts. The same is true of many industries and specialties.
Schools and industrialization
Many people have made the point that schools are like factories, so for the most part, I will not rehash that here. However, I will point out that–when you design a high throughput system–you cannot deal with edge cases very well. When you have an assembly line building clocks, you cannot accommodate a worker with slightly worse vision or a slower swing of the hammer. The worker fits or they don’t, and if they don’t, they are out.
The same is true of the product as well. You cannot accommodate production of a product that has variation to it. You produce the same thing over and over, and if a product has any variance, you get rid of it.
The same is true of schools. This is where so many children fall through the cracks. Whether you think of them as workers or products, if they don’t fit, they’re out.
If you have children, you’ve likely seen that they are at times well ahead or behind their peers, but generally not in everything. Rather, they might be behind in math for six months while ahead in reading, and then, it switches. If you’re a teacher though with 20, 30, or more students, it is difficult to slow down to help kids that are behind because that takes away from everyone else, and you’re on a schedule, and you have standardized tests coming up, and on and on and on. Too many demands, too many students, too little time.
If a kid is ahead, that might seem great, but instead of capitalizing on their skill or success, the teacher typically has to have them wait on everyone else. And if that student is like I was (and like a lot of kids generally are), they’re not going to sit still and just wait. They’re going to put their energy into something. This is where you might get kids that could be good at something falling out of the educational factory not because they are lazy or stupid or anything else, but because they don’t fit the mold the school requires. They have “too much energy”, “cannot focus”, etc. Much of it likely due to the fact that they are bored as a result of having to wait.
Gracia Pratum
Our school system trains children to be unaccountable workers because schools are filled with children that are being pumped through the system regardless of whether they care about a specific topic, if they are ahead or behind, and more. This introduces from an early age in children resignation that they are not in school to satisfy themselves, but rather to satisfy the desire of others. Ask many children why they go to school, and a sadly, large percentage of them will say because they “have to”, “mom/dad make me”, or some variation rather than because “I get to learn” or “I enjoy it”. They go because something outside of them (people that hold power over them) tells them to do it, and once they are there, other powerholders tell them what to do.
When you’ve gone through 12 years of compulsory education, learning that what you want is less important than what some authority figure wants, you’ve received a lot of reinforcement that it’s only worth doing something when someone, who has power over you, tells you to do it. You learn to just do what others tell you to do because they hold power over you. Passion, skill, understanding, and anything else be damned.
And, no matter where you’re at in your studies, you get told to pass on to the next thing by what? The ringing of a bell or whistle just like in a factory.
What happens at work?
What we see in the work world is a lot of workers that have been habituated to only doing things that someone, who has power over them, tells them to do. Additionally, we see a lack of ownership of the duties they’re given, because honestly, it is harder to take responsibility for something that you might not be enthused about doing, but have been told to do, is it not?
Cruelly, we see some of these workers become managers and learn by example from their teachers, school administrators, and eventually managers that the way to manage people is to treat them like bigger children that should be passed through the factory system with little regard for their unique skillsets, desires, or abilities. Instead, they should be made to fit the mold of every other worker. And, if they don’t fit, they’re out of the company.
This creates an environment in too many companies in which people are there because they have to be. They need to pay the rent, college loans, and more. They’re not there because they want to be. And then while there, they’re treated like what they care about–or are good at–does not matter unless they just happen to be lucky and care about–or are good at–their jobs, or they are in a culture and/or have a boss that does not treat them like they are part of an assembly line.
Gracia Pratum
The outcome of this is that too many organizations are less successful or productive than they could be. You have managers that other-ize their workforces. Believe me, I hear it all the time. “Why won’t these people just do their jobs?” or “I’ve given them everything they need, and they’re still underperforming/won’t do what I say/act like children/whatever.” You have employees that are disengaged, not looking for new or innovative solutions, and worse believe that every job is like this.
Worse still, you also have employees that are at the end of the day wiped out from doing work that does not energize or excite them. And, instead of bringing light and joy to those around them after an invigorating day of doing something they love, they instead bring their frustrations home with them.
Where it works
There are people and organizations that do not fit this mold. Some were lucky to have parents or go to schools that did not treat them like they were passing through a factory. Others did, but they found something they were passionate about and were able to succeed at that thing. Some managers actually add value rather than just bossing people around or wielding power over them. And, some companies actually have cultures that encourage people to bring some of their uniqueness to bear in the service of shared goals.
I wish it were as simple as saying that everyone should just “follow their passion”. The reality of it though, I believe, is that most of us have to work. We have bills to pay. We can avoid community groups (church, neighbors, whatever) that make us uncomfortable. We can not talk to the other folks in the gym or when we’re out walking our dogs. We can skip joining that soccer or bowling team or taking that dance class or getting that drink with some acquaintances after work. But, we generally do have to work, and it’s even part of our development that we most often want to work because work gives us the opportunity to feel productive and have our time and efforts be valued. And, work is the place where we can actually experience that the right way to do things is not to treat each other like non-humans or pieces of a machine, but rather as contributors to a greater good.
If you are a leader, you can work to establish a culture that strips away all of that factory training your staff has taken on and instead help them to realize that true motivation does not come from a powerholder telling them what to do, but rather from connecting what you are good at and care about to a shared goal and understanding that your work matters. When you do this, you’ll see more job satisfaction, more productivity, and more new and innovative solutions in place of what used to just be people taking orders.
My proposal is that there are 4 levels of alignment around culture in an organization:
Level 1 – At this Leadership level, leaders must not just be fully aligned with each other and the company. They must also be aware of things that the remainder of the organization is not, such as basic assumptions described in my other post.
Level 2 – At this Integrated level, employees must be fully integrated into the culture such that they align with the values and have had enough experience with the situations that those values should apply to that they feel (even if they do not overtly recognize) the underlying basic assumptions.
Level 3 – At this Learning level, employees are getting their repetitions in. They are beginning to experience what others have experienced before and will move eventually to either Level 2 or Level 4.
Level 4 – At this Misaligned level, employees either are simply not aligned around espoused beliefs and values or they are, but due to misalignment around basic assumptions, their behavior, performance, and/or satisfaction do not show that they have integrated into the culture.
Level 1 – Leadership
As discussed in my other post, employees can afford to not be explicitly aware of the culture’s underlying basic assumptions because they are only required to act in accordance with the culture. Leadership on the other hand has to guide the organization and help to shape its culture.
When organizations encounter new and novel circumstances for which there is no prior experience or knowledge, leadership needs to advocate for a specific type of response (an artifact) and potentially even a value. For example, “I believe we should do this…” Espoused values and beliefs are always open to debate, but those that are supported by underlying basic assumptions are much less likely to be argued with because those beliefs and values are simply statements about the way the world works.
New beliefs and values though will typically be seen as something coming from another party. When we encounter a new situation and the CEO says that we should handle it a certain way, I as an employee might not see that as the natural solution, but rather as the CEO’s value or belief. I will not internalize it until my experience confirms that his solution is just the way that those situations should be handled. In this way, leadership guides the ongoing evolution of the organization’s culture.
Once new beliefs, values, or basic assumptions are set and felt by the employees though, they begin to limit the ability of leadership to deal with circumstances in any other way because a departure from an existing belief, value, or basic assumption would demonstrate misalignment to the employees and contribute to the stress or underperformance mentioned in my other post.
Level 2 – Integrated
In the most common scenario, you have employees at this level that have been around the bend with you so many times that they have experienced certain solutions that just work or are simply the preferred way of doing things in your situation. These are the people that understand whom to call, how to respond, how to manage projects, etc when specific situations arise. They have been there done that so to speak and learned that the way the organization has responded works.
One of my clients has what they call The Woodard Way. They instill The Woodard Way in their staff through a 3-month training program that everyone goes through and then repeated reminders for how everything they do comes back to a specific approach and why it works.
Culture is a process of social learning. It is not something you do alone. And, culture is also learning from the mistakes of others without having to pay the dues, which is what you want from all of your employees. Ideally, they do not have to make all of the mistakes in order to learn the same lessons, but rather can learn from others what the organization has experienced works or does not.
Level 3 – Learning
Generally, people do not spend a significant amount of time at this level, and the better job you do hiring for cultural fit and onboarding your people, the less time they will spend here. My company for example is small so we do not have a robust onboarding process. We do however work in organizational culture and alignment, so we are much more sensitive to instilling in new coworkers our values and preferred behaviors than other organizations our size might be.
Fundamentally, when you ask yourself how long it will be before a new hire can fly on their own, the answer is for the most part the amount of time they remain at the learning level. After that point, if not before, you should be able to clearly see progress toward level 2 or that they are slipping down to level 4.
Level 4 – Misaligned
This is largely the level I described in my other post. I know I have been there more than once, so I’m guessing you have been there at least once. I hope that you at least liked your colleagues and felt like you’re one of them. Often, misaligned people do feel lonely and isolated though unfortunately.
At this level, performance is likely an issue. The person delivers work that is not what was expected and/or handles situations in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s norms. They and those around them have likely expressed at least some level of dissatisfaction, and as much as you might wish to work on it, you are likely better off parting ways.
As unfortunate as it is, when there is misalignment, it is not often due to an issue with espoused beliefs or values. Most values are idealistic and things that the majority of people would support–truth, love, and the American Way sort of things. The problem comes in the manifestation of those values, and that is generally determined by the underlying basic assumptions.
For example, the company and I both say we value truth. Due to my experience though, truth is best communicated one on one because I have an underlying basic assumption that growth is hampered by embarrassment, and pointing out a problem with truth in front of a group would embarrass the person having the problem. The organization however has come to learn that truth is best arrived at through open debate. What we might see in this scenario is that I appear to shy away from stating the truth and do not seem to be living the value. I know though that I’m just waiting to have the hard conversation one on one. And what I appear to see is that I just work with a bunch of jerks that are more interested in arguing and being mean to each other than they are in actually living the truth value.
Level Management
One of the most interesting things about culture is something that I’ve already stated. Leadership helps to establish culture, but once it is established, culture limits the leadership’s options. As a result, it is incredibly important to be deliberate about hiring and onboarding, to be as consistent and aligned as possible when dealing with new circumstances, and to be as proactive and sensitive as possible about identifying and acting on misalignment.
I once took a job at a company with a lot of great people and customers, but from the start, something wasn’t right. Looking back on it, it was obvious that there was a cultural alignment issue. At the time though, what I could see was a lot of baffling behavior on the part of others, and I experienced a lot of confusion on the part of others about my behavior.
I would work hard on something and actually do a good job, but my effort would not be valued. I would be asked to work on things that simply made no sense to me. And no matter how much talking we did, it seemed like we were never on the same page when it got time to deliver.
After trying to make it work for 2 years, I finally admitted to myself that it was a bad fit and decided to move on. And, don’t get me wrong. It was a hard decision, I did not enjoy the journey, and I had a hard time not just blaming the other party/parties, but the rational part of me knew then–and knows now–that the issue was not that either party was bad or at fault per se. It was a bad cultural fit.
Unfortunately, I worked with people there that experienced the same thing and took it harder. For the sake of privacy, I won’t get into details except to say that I’m about as low anxiety of a person as you can get. On the Big 5 personality trait of Neuroticism, I’m 14th percentile, and I’m 1st percentile in Withdrawal, so I typically experience little anticipatory anxiety and rarely have a long lasting negative emotional state. It wasn’t like that for others though unfortunately.
The Impact of Stress
Think of a seesaw. When one side is down, your stress level is low, and your non-stress level is high. I’m calling it non-stress here because there are a lot of things that are the opposite of stress.
For all people, even people like me, there are times of stress. Like happiness, sadness, etc, stress comes and goes. It’s like weather. The personality traits I mentioned above are more like climate. Despite the fact that my climate might have a naturally low balance of stress response, storms do blow through.
When you get into a stressful situation, many things occur. Your body shuts down nearly everything that you do not need to survive right now, so for example, your kidneys stop processing fluid, and your body actually begins breaking down your immune mechanisms. Who needs an immune response that might keep you from getting a cold when you might not live beyond today?
In ideal circumstances, you get into a stressful situation, you deal with it, and it passes after a reasonable amount of time. Some people hold onto their stress response longer than others, but in the ideal circumstances, this is periodic, and they are able to move on.
Highly stressful situations though create stronger stress responses though, and therefore, the swings between non-stress and stress are larger.
The more often you swing between stress and non-stress, the more wear and tear it puts on your body to adjust. In our visual, it’s a fulcrum. In your body, it’s all of the mechanisms that flood hormones into your blood to stop or restart activity, turn on or off organs, and so on. The more this happens, the more difficult it becomes to switch, and you find yourself simply staying in stress for longer, taking longer to come down when something has stressed you out. It’s like your climate-level balance of stress has gone up.
When you get into stress response, your body shuts down what it does not immediately need and even goes so far as to break down your immune response mechanisms. Imagine a baby on the end of a very high seesaw with mom underneath doing everything she can to protect that baby if it falls off, but not really being able to do anything because she’s too far away. Nonetheless, her attention is still 100% focused on something she cannot do anything about.
When you have frequent stressful situations though and that fulcrum begins to wear out, so that you find yourself staying in stress for longer (with a higher climate balance of stress as I’ve put it), your body does not just recruit mom to watch the baby. Your body recruits everybody in the neighborhood.
Now, everyone that should be doing a job, earning some money, participating in the neighborhood watch, mowing their lawns, and more are instead doing anything they can to get you out of danger instead of doing their jobs.
This is one way that stress contributes to illness. Your body is so focused on dealing with the stress, and its ability to do so has gotten so worn down by repeated bouts of stress that it’s less and less effective despite throwing more and more at it. And while your body is focused on fighting the stress, viruses are getting through the cracks, plaques are building up in your arteries, and more.
Company Cultures and Stress
When you work in a situation like I was in, you will experience stress more often. You will be working hard, in that non-stress position, turn something in, get a reaction you were not expecting, and go into stress response. The more often you are misaligned, the more often this is going to happen. Hopefully, you get along with your coworkers, but more than likely, the misalignment also contributes to there being THEM and YOU, so not only might you be having work problems, you’re also alone.
And, as studies have shown, lonely and isolated people also have lower immune response.
If you read my post about levels of culture, you will see that this is all the more likely to happen when you take a job in a new/different kind of culture, but you believe you’re aligned on values. You will think that–based on X value–you will know what to expect, but due to underlying basic assumptions that no one talks about and few people (certainly not you due to you being new) understand explicitly, you will run into situations in which it appears that your colleagues are not acting in alignment with the values.
This creates that stress response. To you, the values say A + B = C. You experienced A + B = D. And now, you’ve run into a challenge.
The more that you deal with this, the harder it will become to deal with the stress, and the more likely it is that you get to a point where these occurrences contribute to a lower overall level of both health and satisfaction. And, all because you took a job where you are misaligned with the company.
Company Culture, Stress, and Leadership
Ask any leader and they will say that they want a strong culture, everyone aligned around values, etc. Look at how most of them act though. Many people have said some version of:
Don’t pay attention to what people say. Pay attention to what they do. Behavior never lies.
Even if leaders say they want a strong culture, alignment, and more:
It’s hard to do and rarely something that pays the bills today.
They might have no idea or true intention to actually work on it.
Even if only for financial reasons though, it is in leadership’s best interests to ensure organizational culture is strong. The last time I saw these numbers, the cost of healthcare added $1,500 to the price of every car sold in the United States. That means, if you buy a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, you’re paying around 10% just for the healthcare expenses of the employees that worked on the car. As a consumer, I certainly would like to pay a bit less for products if I could, and healthcare expenses are a major contributor to prices.
In the United States, these are currently the top 4 chronic healthcare conditions:
Heart disease.
Cancer.
Diabetes.
Stroke.
All of those have proven ties to stress.
With the cost of healthcare being a major expense for employers and sickness being a major reason that someone might either not come to work or not be able to do their job well, it is in employers’ best interests to improve their employees’ health as much as possible. And, stress is a major contributor to health that leadership can have influence on through things like ensuring that you hire people aligned with–and cultivate people aligned around–your culture.
To not do so risks significant pain for the individual employee and lower overall success for the organization…although you might not realize why if you don’t bother to focus on these things.
Decades ago, Sloan School of Management professor Edgar Schein developed a model for understanding and analyzing organizational culture. His model divided an organization’s culture into three levels:
Artifacts are the things you can see–behavior, office layout, work product, etc. Artifacts are easy to see and hard to understand. The Egyptians built pyramids (artifacts). Those are easy to see. Why they built them though is harder to understand.
Espoused beliefs & values are what you say you stand for. Values theoretically prescribe how people act.
Basic assumptions are the foundation of culture. They are the beliefs that are so deeply embedded that most people don’t even know they are there. They are just taken for granted because essentially “this is the way the world works” or “this is just the way it is”. As long as values are not simply aspirational, they arise because of basic assumptions. Values come to be because you have encountered a certain situation enough times to eventually recognize that X or Y behavior in that situation is important to the group. Basic assumptions only appear as espoused beliefs or values when they have been recognized, but they always show up in artifacts as behavior. When that occurs, it is not always easy for outsiders to understand the behavior because they cannot see and certainly have never felt the basic assumption that led to the behavior.
Encountering culture
When you first encounter a culture, you are presented with the artifacts and have almost no ability to understand them. For example, if you visit your partner’s family for dinner for the first time and find that they fight constantly throughout the meal despite the fact you were told they are a very loving group, you likely cannot understand how fighting and being loving go together if you come from a family that perhaps did not argue through meals.
At the level of value, the idea of being a loving family sounds the same, but because of your experience, you define loving through the behavior of not arguing. The reason for this might be a basic assumption that your family has that is that you can demonstrate your love for a person by being concerned about their mental well-being in the immediate moment. Does your family ever talk about that though? Probably not. They more than likely avoid arguing because “that is just what you do” or “that is the way it is.”
This group though might have a basic assumption around love that runs more like, “You demonstrate love by focusing on the long-term outcomes.” So for example, if you’re about to make the wrong decision, I need to tell you so, and if you won’t listen, I need to make you listen. That is love in my world.
Understanding culture
In order to understand artifacts, you cannot just understand the values. You have to have enough experience with the culture to feel (if even you do not recognize) the basic assumptions.
Having moved numerous times in my life, I have encountered this many times. I would move to a new place, see someone do something that would not be a typical response where I’m from, and wonder more or less “what is with these people”. The thing is that–when you’re from a city in the west and you move to the south for example–you might find that the average person generally lacks the ability to deal with a disagreement head on and instead will just think or say to themselves “bless their heart”.
To you, it looks like they’re just avoiding conflict. When in reality, it might be that for example people in Seattle or New York or whatever other city have learned that you don’t get anywhere avoiding confrontations. And, people in Atlanta have learned that you don’t get anything out of most confrontations. They might value the same things–such as getting their jobs done or working toward a better future for their communities–but their experiences have taught them that their way of getting to those end goals is better than the alternative.
Hiring and culture
When you hire someone, they might very well align with your organization on values, and the artifacts you and they see might appear to align. For example, your company–like mine–values diversity of behavior and thought, and your candidate says, “That’s so cool. I’ve worked with some really valuable people that weren’t like everyone else in the company, but we never really got anywhere with them because our management treated everyone like a cog in a machine. So, those different people just didn’t fit in.” On the surface, all good, but once the person starts, you find that something is not working. This is where basic assumptions rear their ugly heads.
It turns out that–while your company values diversity of behavior and thought–it has an underlying assumption that it’s okay to go down a lot of unsuccessful paths on projects because those multiple failed attempts will result in arriving at the best possible outcome. Coming from the cog-and-machine environment though, your new hire might very well have learned through experience that you arrive at the best possible outcome when you limit all of the brainstorming or trying new things and instead stick to schedules and best practices. You both value diversity of behavior and thought, but your experience has led you to the conclusion that there are different times and places for those things.
Your best chance of avoiding hiring problems related to culture alignment is to ask questions that get to the candidate’s worldview. Don’t just talk about what you value or believe. Get down to why things are the way they are. Why is it better or worse to do X? Why is it better or worse to communicate in Y way? And so on.
Leadership and culture
Unlike when you are a worker, you must have an explicit understanding of basic assumptions when you are in leadership. One reason is what I’ve already said about hiring. You can align around values and beliefs, but basic assumptions dictate how those values and beliefs are acted out. Additionally, as a leader, you must have a clear understanding of your company’s basic assumptions, or else, you will struggle to understand why your people act the way they do sometimes.
As a worker, you have no need to have explicit awareness of your company’s basic assumptions. To do so would be like the difference between simply knowing that gravity acts in a certain way versus knowing why it acts in a certain way. In my example of the arguing family, most families almost never talk about arguing or not arguing. Arguing, or not, is just what they do. They have learned that that is the best way to act.
From the leader’s position though, you must get down to basic assumptions and have a clear understanding of them. Otherwise, you and someone else can seemingly agree on espoused beliefs and values, but still be in conflict that it seems is not resolvable.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about “The Innovators Prescription”. It’s a good book and worth your time. What has been on my mind though has been the dichotomy between–and process of going from–a primary care physician to a specialist and how we do not follow a similar model in the business world.
In healthcare, we can expect to go to a primary care physician, have some level of diagnosis performed, and then be recommended to a specialist if appropriate. For example, you had a cold back in November, your cough persisted, you saw your primary care physician, they prescribed something and said to come back in X weeks if it did not get better, it did not get better, you went back, and they referred you to a pulmonologist.
In business, we self-diagnose and go straight to the specialist. When you have a revenue problem, you diagnose it as a website or brand issue, go to the website or brand solutions provider, get your prescription, and go on your merry way.
Unsurprisingly then, many organizations never overcome the challenges that they face because they really are not very good at diagnosis–unlike a primary care physician that might not specialize in for example knee or lung issues, but who does specialize in 1) dealing with the most common challenges and 2) knowing how to identify a problem and point you in the right direction. This is one reason that so many businesses jump from problem+solution to problem+solution.
They have a problem. They misdiagnose it. They go to the solutions provider they think they need to solve the problem they believe they face. They get that solution. And 6 months later, 1 of 2 things occur. Either, they move on to the next problem+solution set (which more than likely is just a new manifestation of the previously unsolved underlying challenge) or they blame their solutions provider for not fixing their problem. When more than likely, the work they got was appropriate for the price and circumstances, but it was not what was needed in order to address the actual challenge.
Some businesses try to build their version of the hospital, where you have all specialities under one roof, but you still face a challenge here. In most cases, you go to for example a big marketing agency for a specific job like an ad campaign or a new brand. You do not go to them for diagnosis, and having worked at marketing agencies, my experience is that they generally are not good at diagnosis…even if they have people within the business that could do that job. And, even if you are open to being diagnosed and the one unicorn employee in the agency is able to provide that diagnosis, that hospital (marketing agency) is incentivized to keep you in house rather than to recommend you to a specialist, so you often cannot even trust the diagnosis.
The same thing happens in management consultancies, specialty business service providers (like accounting or HR shops), and more. Those are all either the equivalent of going directly to the ophthalmologist and telling her you need a specific eye surgery (which she provides of course) or going to the hospital and having them try to keep your options limited to only the services they provide under one roof.
What most organizations need is a primary care physician.
Rarely, do the trusted advisors in the business world provide all services. The best ones though specialize in diagnosis so that your business can get the challenge it faces actually resolved rather than doing what I have experienced both as an employee in some businesses and also as a solutions provider for others, which is jumping from problem+solution to problem+solution, getting everyone’s hopes up that this is the thing that will unlock your organization’s potential, and then wearing down your social and leadership capital due to never getting to the other side where people can just buckle down and focus on the challenges in the business’ mission and vision rather than the challenges that just get in the way of actually doing the job.
A little self-promotion
Incidentally, this is something that originally attracted me to my company Bigwidesky, something we specialize in, and something I’d like to think I have gotten better at over the years, so if you are open to exploring if the challenges you face have underlying causes that you might not be seeing, I’d be happy to chat.
