Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making

"Our natural tendency to maintain silence and not rock the boat, a flaw at once personal and organizational, results in bad—sometimes deadly—decisions. Think New Coke, The Bay of Pigs, and the Columbia space shuttle disaster, for starters. Here's how leaders can encourage all points of view."

That's how Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson describes her paper "Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making."

In this and other papers she describes how a culture of fear and anxiety in American business organizations effectively suppresses both dissent and innovation, resulting in deadening places to work that are not competitive and neither agile nor adaptive.

A good paper of hers that is not listed there is "Speaking Up in the Operating Room: How Team Leaders Promote Learning in Interdisciplinary Action Teams", Journal of Management Studies 40:6, September 2003. Here she follows up the same thread of work that got Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins the Eisenberg award -- figuring out how to let nurses be heard when they saw something that was out of place in the operating room, where historically their voice was neither welcomed nor heard.

As with the Army Leadership Field Manual (FM22-100), the challenge for organizational revitalizing coaches is to disentangle the lines of authority (meaning command) from the lines of authority (meaning confirmed knowledge or eyes from boots on the ground.)

The elitist British culture in the 1800's gave us a management model where the human beings in "management" were considered genetically superior to the other life forms called "labor", giving management unique skills to have a monopoly on all wisdom and thereby deserve all authority.

In the 21st century, organizations are so large, so rapidly changing, and so complex that the sources of wisdom have to be eyes at the front, and "management" is always playing catch-up with a legacy mental model that is running behind. The "higher" up the chain of command managers are, the more removed they are from the reality at the front.

General Colin Powell said once that, if a General in Washington and a soldier at the front-line disagreed on a fact, he'd side with the soldier as having more current information.

The problem is that, with authority-type-1 (power to issue legitimate orders to others) tangled up with authority-type-2 (sight and possibly insight as to what's going on in the real world), management too often perceives a challenge to authority-type-2 as an insubordinate challenge to authority-type-1, and quickly moves to "put down the rebellion."

The result is to blind upper management entirely, which now lives in a mental model detached from reality, spinning off out of control and clueless as to why their actions are proving ineffective or counter-productive, since, by their understanding of the situation out there, what they are doing should have worked.

Anyway, the military has worked this out, at least the concept, and FM22-100 is a superb description of how an organization can retain authority-type-1 (central command) and open up and delegate authority-type-2 (new eyes with surprising news that may totally revise the picture of what's going on outside.)

Other organizations, such as hospitals, might be able to learn something from how the Army figured out how to disentangle those two concepts.

In my mind, it is simply a "vertical loop" where there are two pipes, not one. Commands come down one pipe from above, and news about reality, particular surprising news that central command's picture of the ground needs updating, go up a different pipe, and the two not only don't interfere, but form a loop that makes them amplify each other.

This is a single cybernetic loop, a "clothesline loop over a pulley at each end" and the more each side PULLS on it, the more the other side goes the direction they want it go to.

So, the guys on the ground have to PULL on the rope, and willing accept orders from above, while at the same time the guys on the top have to PULL on the other side of the rope, and willingly accept updates to their mental model of the situation from below.

The whole thing breaks down if either side fails to do their job. If Generals issue orders, but never listen to what the result was, the result is always defeat on the battlefield. If soldiers want a say in what's going on and being decided to do next, but don't want to listen to the resulting stream of orders, that breaks down too.

But if both sides do their jobs, soldiers listen to orders (authority-1, the down-going rope), and generals listen to soldiers (authority-2, the up-going rope), then after a transitional period where trust is being built and this is becoming "phase-locked" and synchronized, we have the full power of cybernetic control available to the organization -- the best of both worlds.

The transitional period to this model can be helped, I think, if what "lean" calls "the final state" is clear to everyone in advance. Lean production thinking ("The Toyota Way") is described by people such as Professor Jeff Liker very strongly based on "philosophy", a term that is largely discounted and meaningless to Americans today.

A better word, the word used in FM22-100, is "Doctrine". That word also has a bad flavor to American culture that worships "freedom", but some kinds of freedom are in the way of success. Runners with rigid bones can move faster than jellyfish. It's a nuanced subject, this rigor versus local-rigidity-with-pivots. But, even more so than "doctrine" come the other dreaded words - "discipline" and "standards."

The US Army has worked its way through those nuances, disentangled the different meanings of authority, and, to the extent their doctrine of accepting both command from above and "dissenting views and challenges to the model" from below is utilized, they are basically unstoppable in their mission.

They can still be defeated if their Doctrine is broken by leaders at the top who want to pick and choose, keeping the "giving orders to below" part, but discarding the "getting updates from below" part. That's not a failure of the Doctrine, it's a failure to follow the Doctrine.

The cybernetic "clothesline" only works if the up channel and down channel are both working and mutually supportive. Some of the first orders downward have to be "send more dissent upwards! We can't hear you!"

This is the nature of the problem that Professor Amy Edmondson researches, that started this post. How to overcome fear of speaking up and empower workers to dissent.

But, use nuances please. Dissent-type-1 (disagreeing with the mental model) needs to be ENcouraged. Dissent-type-2 (disagreeing with a command structure existing or my role in complying with it) is to be DIScouraged, as always.

The command structure gains credibility and strength to the extent that the commands reflect good judgment based on good data, and the only source of the data are the boots on the ground at the front. If the soldiers keep their place (and listen to commands) and the generals keep their place (and listen to advice), it comes together and works.

The most common mode of failure appears to be generals who mistake a fraudulent silence, caused by suppression of dissent-type-1, as agreement with their mental model, and then keep on issuing orders that are detached from reality, resulting in contempt for the whole system and ultimately a collapse in the command structure entirely, let alone a military defeat.

======== afterward

I realized after I posted this that many middle-class suburban children have never actually seen a clothes-line these days. They've grown up with gas or electric dryers, and clothes-lines are prohibited as being tacky or lower-class by suburban Covenants and Restrictions for housing developments.

So, I put a picture of one above. (source: Blessings in the South.) It was remarkably hard to find this picture. This seems to be a "simple machine" of incredible importance for insight that today's generations don't even have in their mental toolbox or vocabulary.

For those who have never seen this in action, there is a loop of rope strung between two pulleys, one on each end attached to poles. In the picture above the lady has three such loops.
She stands in one place and hangs a sheet, say, over one side of the rope, clips it on with clothespins, and then pulls the other side of the loop toward her, which pulls the sheet she just hung away from her, opening up a new spot for the next thing to be hung. That way she doesn't have to move the basket of clothes or herself.

The rule of thumb, of course, is that "You can't push with a rope." Yet, with a loop of rope, effectively you CAN push with a rope, by pulling.

This is the magic of the vertical management loop in the Army Doctrine. To "push" your advice upwards, which is "impossible" as it is pushing on a rope, you "pull" on the commands coming downward. And at the top, to "push" your commands downward (also seemingly impossible), you clear the way by "pulling" the reactions and comments from the troops upwards.

Neither side can cheat here - the rope has to be continuous, and trust in it has to build over time, but then, this model actually does work for the US Army. They can balance very strict command with very good intelligence, overcoming the old saw that "army intelligence" was an oxymoron.

The same principle could, in principle, be applied to government in general ("government intelligence") and corporate management in general. The same rules apply. If both sides do their jobs, it works, and victory is possible. If either side only wants to "push" and doesn't want to "pull", the whole thing breaks down and becomes dysfunctional and defeat is likely.

The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations - part B

Yesterday, in my post The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations, I reviewed a few of the lessons Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline teaches that we can learn from thinking in circles, not in lines.

There are other properties of loops that are critical, but as subtle as the difference between the behavior of a spinning bicycle wheel (a gyroscope) and a stationary one, or attempting to throw a plate or a playing card that is spinning rapidly versus one that is not spinning. At first glance you might say - it's just spinning, so what? But the behavior of trying to throw a plate and a "Frisbee" is quite different - the plate may go 20 feet and the Frisbee 100 yards.

Spinning rapidly in a circle matters. All feedback is not the same. The speed of feedback in a feedback loop also matters. The feedback rate matters ( loops per second or per day or per year).

But this morning I want to start looking at vertically oriented loops in hierarchically structured organizations - for which a triangle or pyramid shape is more helpful than a circle for discussion.
(Imagine the pyramid shown on the back of every US dollar bill.)

Say that the "boss" is the eye on the top of the pyramid, and that the boss's orders come down the right side, through the "chain of command" (which is actually a branching tree shape.)

At the bottom of the organizational pyramid, where it actually touches the reality and "ground truth", employees attempt to carry out those orders, and imagine that activity moving us from right to left across the bottom of the pyramid. Finally, status reports ("mission accomplished!") move back up the chain of command being consolidated at each level all the way back to the boss at the top. So, we have a vertically oriented loop, or cycle, because now new orders come down the chain and that loop pattern repeats.

So far, so good.

In a static, simple world, if all employees except one named "Joe" report success, and Joe keeps reporting failure, the classic model would say that the action management needs to take is to replace Joe. The model says all employees are interchangeable machine parts and if a part fails to do its job, the part is broken and should be replaced. This is a simplified version of McGreggor's "Theory X" of management, very popular in the machine age, from 1850 - 1950.
Another implicit assumption is that the boss completely understands the tasks to be performed, and is the resident expert. If people don't "perform" it must be because they are "lazy" and what is needed is a "bigger whip." Employees are told to "jump" and they don't need to understand why or agree -- they just need to ask "yes sir, how high sir?"

That model worked for early industrial models, such as workers in textile mills, or slaves picking cotton.

But, in a dynamic, complex world, that model breaks down and doesn't work. Actions and responses that worked yesterday suddenly no longer work. The "cheese has moved." The organization has to learn new responses to the same old inputs. The response of the outside world to an action is no longer predictable, and has to be judged based on rapid-feedback and a quick poke to see what happens and learning from that. We move into McGreggor's "Theory Y" of management where the expertise is now on the bottom of the pyramid, where front-line
troops are as likely to reply "What bridge? The bridge is gone!" as "OK, yes we crossed the bridge." Now an ever-changing set of facts or dots of information have to be aggregated upwards and "reporting" has to change into continuous "sense-making" of shifting patterns and images of the battlefield truth.

Again, this model is not that strange. It's the basic model we use when we have to move a bit of food from the table to our mouth on a very windy day - we move the hand a little, see where it is now, move it a little move, see where it is now, etc., in a very rapid sequence that automatically adjusts for the wind. If we don't adjust for the wind, the hand and food will miss the mouth on the downwind side. We don't "compute" wind velocity and use Newton's laws to figure out what to do - we just do it and watch while it's happening. It's no big deal. It's the basic "cybernetic loop" of tiny intent, tiny action, tiny perception, and repeat the loop rapidly over and over. It's a loop we can use to cross an unfamiliar room in the dark. Move slowly, stay alert and aware, and adjust as you run into things. It works. It doesn't require quantitative analysis or calculus or a computer or a PhD in robotics. It just requires using a very basic action and sensory loop over and over.

And, like any feedback loop, causality disappears in the normal sense. Motion alters perception and perception alters motion and the two become one, in a very real sense, a single motion-perception action and a loop as an actor.

Again, no big deal. So why is this important?

The big deal is that our society is in the middle of adjusting to this change from "Theory X", and a stable, static world with expertise at the top to "Theory Y" with a very dynamic, unknown world and the expertise at the bottom. In fact, because of the property of loops, there really is no longer much of a "top" and "bottom" in the classical Theory Y sense of the terms.

Just as the level of the water could be seen to control the hand on the faucet, the staff at the bottom of the chain of command can be seen to be controlling the General at the top of the pyramid -- and both those models are wrong, because it's actually the shape of the feedback loop that now has taken on a life of its own, on a whole different scale, and is controlling both of them.

Senge's point, and mine, is that most of the organizational problems we see around us are because we haven't managed to get that much right. In some health care organizations, an extreme case of the expertise being on the "bottom" of the pyramid, the top management still thinks in "Theory X" terms and tries to see itself as the expert in everything and "gives orders" to move in a certain way. The body reports back "No -- what bridge?" and the boss sees this as stubbornness, stupidity, or hostility and things just get worse from there.

Arguably one of the best "learning organizations" around is the US Army. I've mentioned many times before role of Doctrine in FM22-100, the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The pyramid model I just described is the theoretical basis for the doctrine, and every field action is supposed to be followed with a "lessons learned" session. News, particularly surprising news about a misfit between upper management's concept of where the battle or bridge should be and what actual boots on the ground see in front of them, is supposed to be free to travel upwards. Management, as it were, is supposed to listen to the staff and learn what's actually going on, not what management imagined yesterday was going on. It's not insubordination to say "Sir, What Bridge Sir?"

By simple trial and error experience, repeated millions of times, the Army has finally figured out what works and what doesn't and come to some conclusions that are startling to the Theory X old guard, but not at all surprising to the Theory Y thinkers. For one thing, listening has to go upwards, at every level. It's as important that superior officers listen to junior officers as vice versa. If new conditions at the bottom don't result in a new picture of what's going on at the top, the whole pyramid will simply drive off a cliff or otherwise carry out actions that bear no resemblance to reality.

And, because the picture of reality is not perceived directly, but has to come up the chain of command and be re-filtered and consolidated at a dozen different levels, that process has to be incredibly accurate, frank, honest, and unbiased. Even a 10% "adjustment" in facts, repeated over and over at each level of consolidation, can result in a reported "reality" at the top that is 180-degrees out of whack.

In a profound sense, the key word is integrity, and not just integrity when the going is easy, but integrity when the going is tough - not because of enemy action but because of "friendly fire from above". That kind of integrity is also part of the other key word in the doctrine - character.

If the information flows freely and rapidly and can spin up to a high rate of rotation, as with a bicycle wheel or gyroscope, this whole design pattern becomes very stable, agile, nimble, and capable of navigating the most bizarre terrain as events unfold in surprising and unexpected ways. BUT, if there are pockets of resistance to the flow of information, such as cover-ups, that model breaks down. Or, if there are superiors who think "superior" means they know everything and they don't need to learn from their men, the model breaks down. So, another few important words are honesty and humility.

See US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100
and What relates Public Health and the US Army?
and the whole posting from my Capstone slide 7 Theories are Changing which has twenty more references to the literature on high-reliability organizations in nuclear power plants and chemical plants and aircraft cockpits and hospital intensive care units, and what makes them actually work in practice. It just keeps coming back to the same thing and the same model that's right in front of us be we haven't finished mastering.

And, again we have a place where our religious heritage has been observing what makes society work for thousands of years and has more wisdom to offer on this than scientists, although the science is beginning to catch up at last. Our religions have been stressing virtues - integrity, honesty, compassion, humility, etc. - for centuries but we haven't really been listening or haven't thought that "mattered any more in the modern age." Actually, the basic cybernetic model is ageless, and true at any size and scale. It's going to be something we have in common with aliens from other worlds when we meet. It's a universal truth every bit as solid as other physical "laws" we rely on.

These are truths that are seen by Hindus, by Muslims, by Christians, by Jews, by atheists, and by learning organizations like the US Army. They can serve as a basis for unity among even such diverse groups and cultures. They can link science and religion without either side having to admit they were wrong about something and lose face.

Grasping and implementing that truth certainly looks like it could give us far more "bang per buck" than investing in new technology, new weapon systems, new gizmos and gadgets, and other ways to shift the detail complexity around.

Also, see my early post Virtue drives the bottom line with many links at the end to such literature. (excuse the formatting near the top of that post - I'm technically challenged by the html editor.)

Another author's take on this subject is "Spirituality in the Workplace - The Sixth Discipline of a learning organization, by Harish Midha at the University of Toronto.

Peter Senge's latest book is Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future and readers interested in that book might also be interested in Stephen Covey's book The Eighth Habit. All these books teach the same gospel - that we are going to have to come to grips with the nature of community to "make it" through our social problems of this century, and that community requires us to realize the power and impact of "virtues" when amplified by the feedback properties of complex systems.

Another post I wrote exploring the role of community, virtues, and organizational learning and agility is The Importance of Social Relationships (short)

I also recommend: Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues

A general summary of what I think are my best dozen posts on related subjects is here.

This is also relevant:

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

Enjoy, and please, for reasons this whole post embraces, send me feedback! A human can't sustain a thought without some measure of social support! Criticisms and objections are welcome. Use the comment box below, or send to my email in my "profile" box above.

Wade