"He Didn't Really Mean It But That Other Joker..."

We are funny people. We have 2.4 blind-spots (I can't find my reference for this but trust me!), meaning that there are 2-3 things at which we think we're really good, if not great...but everyone else knows we're not. Like I might think I'm really good at recalling references to facts...but...

One of those blind spots for all of us is our integrity, i.e. walking the talk, sticking with our values no matter the circumstances. A speaker at a workshop recently pointed this out with this scenario:

Assume you've grown up in a wealthy family and you're now a young adult. Money wasn't and still isn't a problem. Your parents were able to afford anything they or you or your siblings wanted. You had a nice house, nice cars, remarkable vacations. You went to the best schools and were able to participate in any extracurricular activities you wanted--participating in any of the sports leagues you wanted, music lessons, ballet, seeing movies, theatrical productions, concerts, whatever. Community involvement was important. Your parents donated a lot and benefited the less fortunate. But as a young adult, you discover that one of your parents illegally obtained their wealth--maybe through drug dealing, embezzlement, extortion, murder...You uncovered evidence of that your mom was involved in these unlawful and injurious practices. Would you turn her in?

Assume you were a young adult in a family that struggled to have any extra income. Your family barely paid the bills. As a young adult, you discovered the reason is because your father was paying off a crime family ("You gotta nice store here, Mr. Smith. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.") You've got evidence. Would you turn it into the police?

Most of us struggle with the first question. Few of us struggle with the second. The reason is an in-group bias, a bias towards people in our group, just like us in socioeconomic terms or values or appearance. This in-group bias provides grace and leniency for an individual who has transgressed our values. "Sure, she violated the policy and flew first-class but she's a good performer. She's a VP. We can let this slide by." The same bias encourages us to excoriate the whole group of 'the others or those people' if one of them violates the policy. "We can't let him get away with flying first-class. He's only a supervisor. They'll take advantage of this slip if we don't make an example of him." Note the motivating language concerning individual versus group in both examples.

Of course, to avoid some of this we decide we're going to treat everyone equally in the name of integrity. Then we get trapped by not treating people fairly. "Sorry, I've got to suspend you without pay for three days because you were late 3 days this week. I feel bad that your kids are sick and you struggled to find daycare since they couldn't go to school...but the rule is the rule. I've got to treat everyone the same." We then tend to treat the employee who could care less about getting to work on-time the same as the person who is highly engaged but circumstances hindered their performance.

One of the recommendations is that we try to show the out-group the same love we'd give to the in-group: love the hourly employees the same as we love our C-suite colleagues, love Republicans and Democrats equally, love the people on the corner with the same assistance as we would our neighbor who needed a bit of help...It's not easy. But exercise the muscles a bit everyday by spotting where you're treating 'the others' or 'those people' or the out-group differently from the in-group. Not just in decision-making--personal or corporate--but also behaviorally like who you greet, show appreciation, chastise, etc.

Maria Shriver, wife of Gov. Schwarzenegger, at the time of driving/talking in disregard of state-wide ban

Chain Reaction

Eli Goldratt, author and management guru, would say that the 80:20 rule doesn’t apply when elements of a system are interrelated. One percent of your system’s characteristics influence 99% of the outcomes because, like a mechanism of meshed gears, a change in one place influences what happens in another part of the organization. Similarly, you may have heard that you need to ask “Why?” five times and then you’re likely to get to the root cause.

Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit relates the experience of Paul O’Neill who wanted to tackle the relatively bad infant mortality rate in the US. His team discovered it was due to premature births, which was in part due to poor maternal nutrition. Young mothers had poor nutrition because they weren’t taught; they weren’t taught because teachers in high school didn’t understand nutrition well enough. So his team dealt with nutrition education at the college level so that high school teachers could educate future mothers. Infant mortality has dropped 68%.

We end up with a lot of procedures because we had a problem at one time and it solved the issue, maybe. Or it was a workaround. But it may not have gotten to the root cause, so we end up with policy on top of policy and procedures that have gone from 3 steps to 15 steps. That’s especially true if we can’t fix the problem.

Here’s an example of an issue with a root cause that can’t be solved, but can be accommodated. School systems are short of money when students leave the district, or the population is less boom-y. When school districts struggle, fewer people move into the district. House values decrease. And this also means less money available for the school district. The tax base shrinks. How do you fix this? In many areas, schools are funded on a per-pupil basis, which is fine when the student population is increasing...like coastal states, suburbs and other desirable places to live. It’s not good for others. A school district can lose 25 students across 13 grades (K-12) which means the loss of 1-2 teachers; the loss in students is not limited to a single grade. It’s like across-the-board cuts in businesses that impact revenue-enhancing efforts, as well as cost centers. It’s also not how costs in the school system are incurred. The only variable cost related to the number of students are the class materials. Facilities and faculty are fixed costs. We can’t stop people from moving out of the district and we can’t force or encourage people to have babies (though a Scandinavian country is trying!). What if schools were funded in a way that accounted for this dissonance in the perspective of how schools operate? Set a standard class room size (20 students for lower and higher grades, 30 students for middle grades, for example). Fund the teacher and class room. The district doesn’t lose money when they lose 25 students because there isn’t a single class that’s cut. When the district loses 25 students in a single grade level, then it loses funding because they can legitimately cut a staff position. Otherwise, the funding remains the same; it also remains the same until another class at a particular grade level needs to be added.

Like many issues, there are relationships that need to be fleshed out. Perhaps some history of how we got ‘here’ and if those conditions still exist or the assumptions are still correct. Test the paradigms; test the assumptions. Test the solution that it will get at the root cause.