Random Riffs
Be Wary of the Numbers; Listen to the Story
September
2
2009
Several years ago I had a conversation with the CEO of an organization that owned a portfolio of highly diversified companies, each of which would, on an annual basis, submit a business plan for the following year. I was curious to learn how he found the time to get through all that information and data. “Oh that’s simple – I don’t read the reports”, he said. “Once a year I have one-on-one conversations with my presidents and ask them to tell me their stories. If the stories make sense, then I’ll look at the numbers. If they don’t, there’s no point looking at the numbers because I know they’ll be unreliable. You can, after all, make numbers say anything you want.”
Henry Mintzberg would like this story. Listen to this from his “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning”.
Strategies can be rich visions, intricately woven images that can create deep-rooted perspectives. So long as they are articulated in their own terms – which often means images or metaphors rather than concrete labels – ideally by people who know them best (notably their creators), they can maintain that richness. But decomposed and expressed formally, in precise words or, worse, numbers, the rich imagery and intricate interconnections can be lost. The soul of strategy may thus be reduced to a skeleton, much as what happens when a great painting is reduced to its categorical elements – size, colour and texture.
What both of these guys know is that numbers are not reliable surrogates for performance – even if we’ve been assured that they’ve been arrived at through the application of “generally accepted accounting principles.” And so should we, if we’ve been reading the business sections of newspapers and/or following the stock market!
What emerges from this and the two previous Random Riffs is a cluster of notions which I have cheerfully (and perhaps incautiously) lumped together to see what they’ll make of each other. Here they are: conversations and stories; curiosity and learning. I have some experience of what can come from this brew.
In an earlier corporate incarnation I was responsible for a team of consultants who worked largely out of my sight with their clients. To the extent that the firm was interested in numbers, the one drawing the most attention was utilization rate. “How many days did you bill this month?” But utilization rate, in and of itself, is not an adequate surrogate for performance because it doesn’t answer the important question, “Our clients are being billed but are they being well served?” And it doesn’t even come close to answering the much better question, “How might our clients be better served?” Poring over numerical performance surrogates won’t get you an answer to that question.
When it came to the question of performance and how it might be improved, there was one number that interested me: the total number of days (roughly 300) of client experience that were accumulated each month by the team. But we were making no use of that experience – it was unshared, unexamined, unexploited. In the same way that ore only becomes valuable when it’s refined, experience only becomes valuable when it’s subjected to reflection. We regularly say that experience is the best teacher, but we just as regularly avoid the implications of having said it.
So I made some time, created some space, provided some food and drink and, once a month, after work, we met around a single agenda item that took the form of a simple question: “What do we know now that we didn’t know a month ago?” It turns out that the only way to answer that question is with a story. So that’s what we did – we told our stories and talked about what might be made of them. The stories, which were as varied as their tellers, were the bearers of the experiences and the conversations which they provoked/inspired were the means by which we made sense of, and learned from, them. Stories that tell of lived experiences invite interpretation and are, for this reason, great primers of conversational pumps; grist, in the words of Mark Kingwell, for “free-ranging, energized, restless and inventive confabs.”
Conversation is the single greatest learning tool in your organization – more important than computers and sophisticated research. William O’Brien, former CEO, Hanover Insurance Company, cited in Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline”
When I think of these kinds of conversations, the notion of “emergent possibility” comes to mind. Lively and dynamic, “free-ranging, energized, restless and inventive confabs” sustain both individual and collective learning. Perhaps it might be thought of as a way of institutionalizing curiosity where conversing is not about change but rather where conversing is changing. Because we know more today than we knew yesterday, we’re different.
Conversations of the sort I’ve been talking about here are like the musical conversations that are created in the improvising jazz ensemble. Neither is about just anything; they are both about a particular something. The something, in one case, is the theme provided by the story, and, in the other, the theme of the selected tune. Think of it as the interpretation of texts. In his book, “Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation”, Paul Berliner describes such a musical conversation and, in so doing, gets perfectly what I mean about emergent possibility and about conversations that are not about change, but conversations that change us as we’re having them. I’ll let him have the last word.
From the performance’s first beat, improvisers enter a rich, constantly changing musical stream of their own creation, a vibrant mix of shimmering cymbal patterns, fragmentary bass lines, luxuriant chords, and surging melodies, all winding in time through the channels of a composition’s general form. Over its course, players are perpetually occupied: they must take in the immediate inventions around them while leading their own performances toward emerging musical images, retaining, for the sake of continuity, the features of a quickly receding trail of sound. They constantly interpret one another’s ideas, anticipating them on the basis of the music’s predetermined harmonic events. Without warning, however, anyone in the group can suddenly take the music in a direction that defies expectation, requiring others to make decisions as to the development of their own parts. When pausing to consider an option or take a rest, the musician’s impression is of a “great rush of sounds” passing by, and the player must have the presence of mind to track its precise course before adding his or her powers of musical invention to the group’s performance. Every manoeuvre or response leaves its momentary trace in the music. By journey’s end, the group has fashioned a composition anew, an original product of their interaction.
