ASQ – Orange Empire May Meeting
May 8, 2012

In 1982 the Kings finally made it to the playoffs. This was not particularly momentous since the Kings had made it to the playoffs the four preceding years, just to be eliminated in the first round. In spite of that, the Kings were my team and I loved them. Yet these days I often felt like a jilted lover as they regularly botched easy shots and lost games to lower ranked teams.

They hadn’t always been this way. In the ’70s they held their own, and they even had a decent enough 80-81 season. But then in ’81-’82 they took a nose dive. Their total goals were well below the NHL average and when it came to preventing goals, it sometimes looked as though they were playing for the other team.

Third Game of the First Round

This was third game of the first round 1982 playoffs: Edmonton Oilers led, by the greatest of the greats, Wayne Gretsky, against the Kings. In light of the Kings recent record, it was understandable that the Oilers, and just about everyone else, expected an easy win for the Oilers.

The game went as expected; the score at the end of the second period was Oilers – 5, Kings – 0. Before the Zamboni had finished half the ice, the stands were half empty. Clearly there wasn’t much interest in witnessing the final humiliation.

Wayne Gretsky in an Interview

Sometime later Wayne Gretsky acknowledged that in the Oilers locker room that night after the second period they made fun of the Kings. Not for a single instant did they doubt that they knew exactly how the Kings would play the final period or that the game would end in an Oilers’ victory.

Why the Oilers Strategy Failed

Let me back up here and say something about the Kings’ strategy. The Kings had been successful in the ’70s using a conservative defensive strategy, based on preventing opponent goals in low scoring games. As people tend to do, they held tight to their winning model never questioning it as time went on.

The beginning to the ’80s saw a shift in the game. The times were changing, as they inevitable do, but the Kings didn’t notice. The game turned fast and offensive, and the Kings seemed unable to adapt. That night in April, 1982 the Kings were again working their obsolete strategy, and it was bringing them ruin.

Back in their locker room, the Oilers were cocky and laughing, and vowing to stick to their strategy. They were ahead five goals, an impossible number to make up, especially by the Kings. Believing they had nothing to lose they decided to continue playing fast and risky, concentrating on racking up as many goals as possible, rather than preventing the Kings from scoring.

Kings Desperation Opened the Way to Insight

In the Kings’ locker room, desperation opened the way to insight: they would finally change their thinking and their strategy. Banking on the notion that the Oilers, certain of their win, would continue with their strategy of favoring goals over blocking , the Kings decided that in the next period they would concentrate on scoring, but they would do it in a focused, methodical way, making each move count.

The Oilers Never Saw it Coming

In the third period the Kings came back and scored and scored again until with a little over three minutes to go in the game the score was 5-4 Oilers. The Oilers never saw it coming. Then the unthinkable happened: thirty seconds before the end of the third period the Kings made the final goal of the period tying the score at 5-5, sending the game into overtime.

Another intermission. No one left the stands. Then history was made. Two minutes and 35 seconds into overtime the Kings scored. The game was won in what has been call the single greatest moment in Stanley Cup history.

The Thinking Behind the Strategy

This game has been analyzed many times from many different perspectives.
For me the most interesting perspective has to do with the thinKing that went behind this game, the thinking of the Kings and of the Oilers. The Kings were so mired in their beliefs about the strategy that had brought them victory in the 70s, that even in the light of their spectacular under-performance in the 80s, they never questioned it, not until that night in 1982.

It Cost the Oilers the Game

The Oilers, giddy from their success that night, never asked themselves if there was something more they should be thinking about or if there was something they weren’t seeing. They assumed that the end of the game would be like the beginning, but it was not. Their taken-for-granted thinking cost them the game.

Both teams were so betrayed by their successful strategy that they didn’t bother to question the thinking or assumptions behind it. Fortunately for the Kings, in the kind of breathtaking inspiration that comes out of desperation they did break through and won the game.

I was there that night, and I did not desert my Kings. This time they rewarded my love.

Besides the Oilers, the losers were Jerry Buss, who assumed the Kings’ loss and went home and those spectators who decided en masse that there was nothing more to be seen and left before the dazzling third period.

THE VISION:

A culture where employees don’t become plaintiffs.

When employees feel that they have no recourse, no power, and voice, they sue. It’s their only source of power and they only way of being heard. Create a culture in which employees feel empowered and heard.

» Create a culture in which employees feel that they can speak up and even complain, and where they feel they will be heard.

» Create a culture where employees feel that you are communicating with them.

» Create a culture of integrity where one standard fits all: everyone is held to the same values, even the boss.

» Remove blame; concentrate on behaviors and results not judgments.

» Treat all people with respect no matter how menial their work or how stupid their mistakes.

» Build trust by being trustworthy. Do what you say you’re going to do.

» Don’t be an arrogant, remote boss. Remember it’s easier to sue people you don’t like or respect.

THE PLAN:

Create a Crisis Plan for how you will handle lawsuits, whistle blowers, union threats, etc.

» Don’t wait for disaster to figure out what to do; have a plan and stick to it!

» Don’t trust difficult decisions to knee-jerk reactions.

THE CULTURE:

» Question your own assumptions /mental model about how you run your organization.

» Know what you want. The very first item on the agenda for organizational policy makers is to answer the question, “Do we really want a culture of open communication?

» Create official policies that promote integrity and communication. Employees know you’re serious when you make it official. Listen when people have a complaint.

» Respond openly and appropriately.

» Walk the talk. What you really do when an employee has a complaint will matter way more than what you say.

» Reward desirable behavior: you’ll get what you reward.

It’s a funny thing about closet space, the more we have, the more we fill. And, when we run out of space we think, I need more closet space or I need a clever way of stuffing more into the space I have. So we refold, reorganize, vacuum seal and even throw some stuff away.

Sometimes, a week later we discover that we really wish we had some of the stuff we got rid of.

Time is Like Closet Space

Time is like closet space: we fill up the time we have, discover we haven’t enough, and start reorganizing and dumping, all the while getting more and more stressed.

We make small phone calls between big appointments or have meetings on the way to the car. We’re told to fill in little bits of open time by reading email and doing short tasks, and our lives start taking on the look of a Byzantine mosaic. But the truth is, in the end we still haven’t time for what’s really important. Worse even, we discover that some of the things we deleted from our calendars because there wasn’t time, are exactly the things we like. What we’re left with is a lot of “necessary” but grindingly un-meaningful stuff.

For all the talk we hear about “mastering time”, in the end time cannot be mastered.

Time just is. It’s the fourth dimension, and it’s even more enigmatic than the first three.

Physicists can’t agree on what it is or how it works. We can’t understand it and we can’t control it. The best we can hope for is some degree of control over how we operate within it.

In other words, we cannot master time we can only master our own behavior.

Knowing What’s Important is Tricky

Making the best use of time doesn’t mean finding ways of cramming more into our already bursting schedules. It’s not about knowledge management software or smart phone organizers, or another system we have to make time to learn to use. What it is about is discovering what’s important, in the long term as well as the short, and how to attend to it.

Knowing what’s important is tricky, since it requires that we know what we value – not easy in a world that continually pounds us with all sorts of things we’re told we should value, even if we don’t. These things usually take money so we fill our time with work in order to be able to afford them.

A good way to sort out what’s really important in your life is to ask the question, “When I’m very old and looking back over my life, what do I want to have done?”. Ask, “At that will make me say, ‘I did what I came to do. I have lived a good life?’” That’s what’s important.

At work the situation is a little different. There’s a whole bucket of things screaming to get done. They range from important and urgent to not important and not urgent and everything in between. Generally what’s not important and not urgent is pretty obvious and fairly easy to avoid. The things that usually get our attention are what scream the loudest even if they’re not important. These urgent but not important things shove the quieter important but not urgent things off to the side, but not forever. The neglected important things grow up to become urgent important things usually requiring much more time and energy than they did initially.

The Big Questions

The big questions for figuring out what’s important at work are , “What is my mission, i.e., what is the goal of my work, which if accomplished would mean I was successful?” Answering this question means making some decisions about what “successful” means: does it mean promotion, or doing a good job, or more money, or loving what you do, or making a difference in someone’s life? The next question is, “What are the tasks and milestones that are critical to accomplishing that goal?” The answer to the last question represents mission-critical activities, and they are what’s important to your work.

Figuring out what’s important is the first and hardest step. Then it’s time to step back and see if your current priorities are in agreement with what’s most important in your life and work. If you feel that time is swinging you around by the hair, chances are they aren’t.

The next step is a little simpler: examining your activities to see if they support what’s really important. In business this means looking at all the tasks you have to accomplish and ranking them by how much they each contribute to your mission. The higher the ranking the higher the importance, so this is where you put your attention and time first.

High Leverage Activities

There’s another class of activities, called high leverage activities, that are important because they deliver the biggest value for a relatively small input of time and energy. They’re often hard to see because they tend to be the quiet important things. These activities include cultivating relationships, knowledge, health and resources. At work that could mean developing relationships with mentors, superiors, peers and subordinates, developing job knowledge and skills that go beyond your present job, and training employees. In terms of family, there no higher leverage activities than developing strong and trusting communication with your children.

In the final analysis what’s important is finding a balance that allows us to get the most satisfaction out of both work and our private activities. Since, unlike closets that we can simple add on to if necessary, we have to make do with twenty four hours in a day, no more, no less. How we use this time and whether or not we use it in meaningful ways to a large degree up to us.

Management vs Unions

The battle between the three involved unions – pilots, engineers and ground crews – and Qantas management is a classic one these days. Qantas wanted to outsource a good part of its operation to Asia, primarily Malaysia, in an effort to lower operations costs. The unions, of course, focusing on the loss of Australian jobs (and union power), found it unacceptable, and the fight was on.

The First Shot

Stranding passengers in order to punish Qantas employees was the shooting-themselves-in-the-foot part. The reload and shoot again part came three weeks later. Instead of making brief contrite apologies to the passengers who had been stranded, offering them an offset and moving on in the hope that they would eventually forget, what Qantas did next was straight out of Mad Men.

The Reload

On November 29 Qantas, in an effort to mollify disgruntled passengers, launched a contest with prizes (really cheap prizes) asking them to describe their “dream luxury in-flight experience”.

Now this might have been a fine strategy in the past: the contest would have been announced in print or on radio and TV,  responses would have arrived quietly at Qantas HQ, and any negative responses disposed of in private.

Instead, at a time when they were locked in a bitter labor dispute and on the heels of the most irksome treatment of passengers in all airline history, Qantas used Twitter to invite participation in the contest.

“Be creative”, the Qantas tweet encouraged.

Let the Mockery Begin

Qantas was not prepared for just how much participation or creativity they got. The Tweets went viral: somewhere around 25,000 Tweets and reTweets flew in a twenty-four hour period. A huge percentage were negative, and they were right out there for everyone to see. Instead of mollifying disgruntled customers, it spilled the whole ugly mess in front of the world. Qantas’ pre-SMM strategy was a disaster. A couple of quotes from the Twittersphere captures the tone,

“Somewhere in Qantas HQ a middle-aged manager is yelling at a Gen Y social media ‘expert’ to make it stop,”

“Alan Joyce now seeking an injunction to ground Twitter due to #QantasLuxury fiasco“.

It’s All About the Thinking

While Qantas must now hurriedly be  trying to find out not only what went wrong, but more urgently, who’s to blame for the Twitter fiasco, what’s really going on is far deeper than  a couple of bad PR decisions. What’s at issue and what isn’t being addressed is the thinking behind it all – on all sides.

What the world has been seeing from CEO, Alan Joyce, throughout this whole thing is a kind of divisive thinking that cannot ever bring lasting solutions, and he expresses it with the kind of arrogance that only monumental positional-thinking can produce.

But Alan Joyce is not the only one. For union managers Qantas’ off-shoring move, was not only a threat to Australian jobs, but also to their powerful positions in the airline industry.

No Learning Seems to be Taking Place

The situation is now in the courts. According to Australian law, at this point all adversarial action by all parties must cease: neither the unions nor Qantas management may make a move against the other.

The outcome will be resolved through a judgment of the court. Both sides will likely abide by that judgment, but as in most cases of compromise or imposed solution, both sides will dwell primarily on what they had to give up in order to have a settlement rather than on what they gained.

Given the political and economic climate in Australia, the award for feeling the most-shafted will likely go to the unions.  And, as in most such cases where the root thinking behind the problem has not been examined, trouble will surface again, and when it does one might hope that Qantas will remember what it felt like to shoot itself in the foot.

Live Twitter Feed #QantasLuxury

Qantas Fail Whale Image by @kellulz

I have to admit to not being a football aficionado. While I can calculate the trajectory of the football to any part of the field, I’m usually more interested in the relationships among players and coaches than the location of the football. In general I don’t think about it much when I’m not watching. And yet, the Penn State pedophilia scandal has me thinking.

How Could This Have Happened?

I’m seeing a lot of puzzlement about how this could have happened, a lot of looking for the culprit, and a lot of people distancing themselves from the blame. People are scared that as the stain grows the small part they played or should have played, their inaction or their tacit support for the people involved will drag them into the legal pit, and worse, disgrace.

I predict that the problem will prove to be far more complex than simply a pedophile, his victims, and his witting or unwitting accomplices. Over the coming months and even years the issue will be researched and commented on countless times. Psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, sports experts and even anthropologists will give their opinions.

New Rules and Regulations Will Be Prepared

Reports will be prepared, and like Sarbanes Oxley after Enron, new legislation and regulatory guidelines will be  implemented to prevent future breakdowns in conduct between sports staff and children. The guidelines will likely extend to non-sports situations involving children and adults, and for a while all such situations will be suspect.

I also predict that these new rules will not resolve the problem. The reason is that the Penn State problem is a symptom, not a cause. If we learned anything from Enron it should be that legislation solves very few problems if the underlying causes of the problem are not addressed. They were not in Enron’s case, and, in fact, rarely are.

These New Rules and Regulations Will Not Work

Invariably, the problem shows up again, under different guise perhaps, but show up it does. While Enron’s specific brand of peccadilloes have been banned through legislation, primarily Sarbanes Oxley, this legislation did nothing to prevent the latest example of mega-lapses in economic ethics in the form of the current Wall Street debacle, just different enough from Enron to make us think it is a whole new problem. In reality, though, it is indicative of a deeper systemic dysfunction in the ethical underpinnings of our economic system.

In the case of the Penn State scandal (this seems like way too small a word for the horror it represents), there will be investigations, firings, and indictments. Blame will fly in every direction. Finally, there will be a veritable mycelium of regulations, laws and guidelines. But history has shown us that this problem will happen again, not necessarily in the same form, but in the form of some kind of ethical outages covered up to protect powerful people, groups and private interests.

How Could So Many People Have Behaved So Badly?

Joe Paterno was a guy with a reputation as a stellar football coach and a decent man. I suspect that Spanier and McQueary and the people yet to be implicated are equally decent, and yet these good people made conscious decisions that led to terrible outcomes. How could so many people have behaved so badly? The answer will not be found in a rigid examination of isolated individuals or in ferreting out and blaming the culprits. The clue lies in the question itself: “How could so many people….?

In order to understand the conditions that brought about the Penn State problem, we have to understand the system within which the people involved functioned. Power results when a person or group controls a resource that is both highly desirable and scarce, in this case money. The football department at Penn State is powerful not because people love football above history or journalism or women’s basketball, but because it controls the largest donations to the school. The university has a very great interest in protecting the football department even at the expense of the students and the community, because it must protect its vital and vast financial interests.

This is Not a Football Problem

This made Joe Paterno the most powerful person at Penn State. It also made the football department the most desirable place to be. But unlike Disneyland, which is also a desirable place to be, the football department at Penn State is an elite organization. Membership in the group is difficult to obtain and is open to only a very few. While a lot has been written about the culture of college football programs -they are violent, paternalistic, hierarchical, and militaristic – I do not see this as a football problem. Rather this is a problem having to do with the dynamics of highly cohesive groups: the Penn State football department has fallen victim to its own elitism, and it is called “groupthink”.

Groupthink

Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs in deeply cohesive groups where membership in the group is highly coveted and difficult to obtain. People vie for admittance and once in, express an almost slavish loyalty to the group and its leaders. To step outside the rules of the group would be to risk the unthinkable: banishment. Most members do not take the risk, and so, in their desire to remain desirable to the group, members act in ways that might otherwise be foreign and even contrary to their values.

Groupthink’s Master Identity

Where there is groupthink members tend to make membership in the group a master identity and place the good of the group above anything outside of it. Anything that happens in the group has first and foremost to serve the needs of the group and its members. To the members of the Penn State football elite, survival of their insular unit was more important than the safety of the victims, since they, the victims, were outside the group and their very presence posed a threat to the group. I cannot help but wonder (actually I am pretty sure I know) what would have happened if the victim in the shower with Sandusky was Paterno’s grandson or the son of a member of the group. We can conjecture that the outcome would have been very different.

Groupthink Allows the Unthinkable

This gives us a little insight into McQueary’s actions. McQueary was a young graduate assistant newly accepted into the coveted and closed ranks of the football coaching circle. He was a fervent, loyal and submissive member. He was also deeply disturbed by what he saw, but given the groupthink that saturated the department, it would have been unthinkable and a grave breach of loyalty for him to go directly to the police. So he went to Joe Paterno, the patriarch of the group, instead and dutifully left the matter in his hands.

As for Joe Paterno, he says he regrets not doing more. Did he not do more because he was just too busy to think about it? Was he simply out of the university decision-making loop and so put it out of his mind? Did he actually know what was going on and followed what he considered to be the bare letter of the law, throwing out what he might have known to be the moral thing to do? Did he answer to a “higher power”, one that required a crasser and more slavish loyalty than did the victimized children?

There will be investigations and inquests and it is important that we do not judge him before the evidence is in. All we will ever know is whether Joe Paterno has been found innocent or guilty according to the standards of the law; we will never know whether he acted in an ethical, moral and humane way according to his own standards. What we can surmise is that he acted according to the standards of the Penn State Football Department and groupthink.

Visit SlideShare for a downloadable Presentation of “How Groupthink Sacked Penn State”