Cargo Cult management

A famous Feynman story

I first encountered the term "cargo cult" in the late 1980's when reading one of Richard Feynman's books, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" on his quite interesting life. He actually used it in a commencement address at CalTech in 1974. In short, he refers to a practice of dogmatically executing a set of activities in order to obtain a certain result but without the underlying essentials being present. The links above will give you more information on the excellent way Mr. Feynman made the point. For that I defer to him as one of science's great storytellers.

A lot of management is "cargo cult" management

The reason I'm bringing this up is that only last weekend, I was talking to some friends about the false expectations that exist about management in the minds of many people, and the dangers that entails. I contend that a lot of management is really "cargo cult" management. Let me explain my point.

We put someone, a "high potential" manager, in a certain position, with a management role and with the "mission" to manage, but without a clear context nor the access to the necessary tools, systems or even decision power about these to truly and actively manage his function, his processes, his team ...

The word "management" and the associated degree of the "MBA", the manager par excellence so to speak, is supposed to automagically result in better functioning and better outcomes. And interestingly, in the first few months after the entry of a new manager, functioning may actually improve. It took me a while to figure out that the most likely cause of this is probably "management by announcement", where the anticipation of and the first reaction to the new manager will lead people to believe that something may actually change. They adapt their functioning for a limited time, in anticipation of what they hope this new manager will bring is fundamentally different from the one that came before ... but the fairy-dust wears off after a while.

Failure of management is often due to failure of leadership

What is left is yet another "high potential" who failed to live up to the high expectations. There's a reason for those failures, and often the high potential is not the only one at fault. For a manager to manage, he needs a management system, a set of agreed upon, communicated underlying systems and procedures. These rules need to be clearly understood by the collaborators and consistently applied across the area or department the manager is responsible for. Ideally, these rules are the operational translation of a vision.

Now, let's contrast that to the reality that this new manager often finds himself walking into an environment where no such clarity exists. Real management first requires a thorough overhaul of systems and structures ... and exactly that overhaul is one of the last things a new manager will actually attempt to do. And the question is, should he be the basis of that overhaul.

Good, but especially relevant management has an essential prerequisite: good governance. A clear vision on where the organization is going with no lack of clarity on how to achieve that vision (operationalization) and who will do what (roles and responsibilities) to achieve that vision. In order to know what not to do, first you need to be very clear and succinct about what to do. So, if you want real management, you first need to create an environment in which it can actually take root. And the talent to create that environment is called leadership. A leader is someone who can develop and communicate a vision, its avenues and its constraints. A leader inspires people to find their way to that goal. Making sure the people get there in the most effective, efficient and economic fashion is the role of the manager.

Management should complement leadership

It reminds me of the description the late Stephen Covey had about the difference between leadership and management. A manager supports execution by the team, while the leader points the way. Lack of clear vision and direction just leads to teams running around in circles, without a clue as to where they are headed. Management cannot really influence that without requiring the manager to overstep his boundaries.

And management should not replace leadership. It should complement it.

How Valve gets the new economy: treat your employees as the adults they can be

In a blog post about how Valve operations are significantly different from other environments he had worked for, Michael Abrash made some very astute observations about how our current creative economy is significantly different from anything that went before. He states:

"almost all the value was in performing a valuable creative act for the first time."

He continues to observe that this essential change results in rendering most of the existing command and control structures irrelevant. I quote him again:

"If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation.".

Hence, traditional command and control no longer works if you want to be successful in the current economic reality. Or if it still works, you're in reality one disruption away from irrelevance.

But traditional organizations, built on command and control, have a hard time doing what they should be doing: giving their responsible employees the trust that they will act as grown-ups and focus on what their most relevant contribution can be. Now, this is not easy for organizations, but it's a significant challenge for the employees as well. Mr. Abrash again, when speaking about that maturity and the responsibility it entails:

"That it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most valuable resource in the company – their time – by figuring out what it is that they can do that is most valuable for the company, and then to go do it."

However, and this is key, allowing your employees adulthood is also allowing them to make their own mistakes and allowing for the group to help them in correcting them. He states:

"Sometimes people or teams wander down paths that are clearly not working, and then it’s up to their peers to point that out and get them back on track.".

The challenge is therefore to allow your collaborators the freedom and give them the trust to fail, but also to succeed. Get out of their way and make them create.

I would like to extend this. The success of our future organizations will depend not on the level of command and control we build, but on the level of trust and allowances for useful failure we are willing to give our collaborators. This is the new economy, where the significantly reduced layers of management, if any, only exist to allow the collaborators to play for epic wins. For the rest, they need to get out of the way.

I encourage you to read the entire article here.

Thank you, Mr. Abrash, for some great insights.