Six Simple Rules: 'Extend the shadow of the future' applied to outcome thinking
People make better decisions when there are feedback mechanisms which help them see the effect their actions in the present will have on the future.
‘Six Simple Rules’ has the thesis that there are simpler, more effective ways to achieve the desired outcomes in an organisation than to resort to making the environment more complicated by doing things such as adding more people.
One of the six rules from the book is Extend the shadow of the future’. What they mean is to ensure there are feedback mechanisms that help people understand the effects their actions will have in the future. I found this was a useful mindset for myself and our leadership team to have.
There are great examples in the book taken from consultant case studies. One memorable one involved a hotel introducing a survey feedback mechanism between the customer-facing staff who received the room maintenance complaints and the maintenance team to better align the activities to what would yield the best customer experience.
In my experience, using ideas from this book in the workplace, I’ve found that the idea behind Extend the shadow of the future can be extended further. When we think with the end in mind, in terms of the few key goals the organisation must balance to succeed, we improve the context we have for decisions.
Making the goals and imperatives of the organisation explicit
To do this involves first making explicit what the desired outcomes are for your organization so that trade-offs in any prioritization decision-making can be made. For example, answering for our leadership group; what needs to be true for us to get where we are trying to go? What risks do we need to actively manage? What needs to continue to be sustained in addition to the new things we are striving to achieve?
I have witnessed first-hand organisations take actions in direct opposition to what would support a great customer experience. In the pursuit of satisfying their customer’s desire for more features and capabilities from their product unwittingly trade-off the quality of the user experience by under-investing in qualities such as performance. A bias to tangibles over what can seem like intangibles results in a quality death spiral.
The quality death spiral can happen when the separation of functional responsibilities obscures seeing the customer experience holistically. Organizations do try to maintain quality in various ways such as by setting user experience KPIs, standards, and quality assurance practices — all of which are important but are ultimately crude instruments in the context of this issue.
These approaches can often be bandaids to flawed decision-making and trade-offs which may have been made far further upstream — in how resources were allocated and choices of what to pursue or not to pursue. This issue is far better to be addressed with better upfront alignment rather than downstream patches.
Worse still, these upstream decisions can often be opaque to the broader organisation. The logic and decision-making are not transparent and cannot be interrogated such that there’s the opportunity to challenge broken thinking and reset the course. Implicit assumptions can lead to addressable challenges to feel inevitable.
There can be finger-pointing and a lack of alignment on where the priority and responsibility lie. But what if as leaders we’ve been explicit about what we believe is important to our success? Would we repeatedly over-invest in areas which won’t help us win and under-invest in areas which are critical to our success?
For many of you, the above may feel scarily close to home. So what can be done differently that can contribute to improving this situation?
Analyze, determine, communicate and constantly evolve the logic of our decisions
The above tweet reminded me that the pursuit of communicating the WHAT and WHY of things is an age-old one. This example from Disney Corporation in 1957 is a noble and obviously flawed example. I still really like it for what it does well.
The authors of this diagram, whether they were the strategists themselves or creatives whose tasks it was to try and translate the new bold vision to the rest of the organisation doesn’t matter so much to me. They set out to communicate in what is attempting to be an accessible way and that is laudable. To communicate both WHAT and WHY they were embarking on major investments, which would otherwise likely seem incongruous without explanation to the broader organisation.
A hallmark of this diagram which I see hints of in more modern approaches to achieve the same goal is in identifying connections between different goals along with some explanation of why those connections matter. Of course, part of what interferes with this diagram being a truly great example is that it's overly complex which distracts from, as much as it makes, the point.
But let’s assume for the most engaged employees I am committed to navigating the cognitive overload, what I like is said employees could actually engage the leaders of the organisation on the logic that has been expressed in the diagram. “Would TV be a successful channel for publicising the products of the Music division?” for example is a question I could ask and engage on.
And this is likely a far more pertinent question to the strategy of a company and the logic that underpins it than maybe if I was looking at a feature sitting on a roadmap. The chance to challenge and improve this logic is democratised and potential flaws or improvements can be discovered more quickly — something which is becoming ever more important in our competitive context.
How might this help us extend the shadow of the future?
So how does this concept help us extend the shadow of the future? Well, it’s not just the simplistic example I gave about allocating appropriately to address quality versus delivering functionality — that’s just the most apparent and painfully visible example in the software development industry today.
Trade-offs against things unseen occur all the time. Companies underinvest in Cybersecurity even though the risk of being compromised has never been higher. Most companies don’t invest in thinking and acting on their strategy even though competing for market share and avoiding disruption is key to their success. Decisions are often much more about the personalities and influence capital individuals have acquired than the integrity of ideas and information itself.
From my career experience, what I have observed in terms of decision quality and successfully investing in the areas that matter most comes when WHAT is being sought to be achieved and WHY that is being sought to be achieved are explicit trade-offs that can more easily be considered.
Maybe a company’s biggest risk is the defensibility of its unique selling points, maybe it's retaining or growing the trust of its users — what is most important is different for most businesses and changes over time.
In the example for Disney, let's make up an example. Let's say, to manufacture an example, that the licensing for the Music division’s content was restrictive such that these assets couldn’t be used easily by the TV division. This might be a disaster if an important part of the success of the Music division is the publicity from the TV division.
Such a scenario could be quite conceivable in a large organisation and I’d wager most of us don’t need to look far to find a comparable contradiction in organisations you have been a part of. But how long does such a restriction last when the use of these assets is clearly an important part of the company strategy and is communicated by the leadership as compared to when such connections are simply implied?
If we want to improve the decisions being made and help anyone within the organisation make decisions which are in tune with how the organisation is trying to succeed, we must find ways for the logic behind our theory of success to be clear for all.
Do you have examples where better decisions were made on where to invest when the elements of what was necessary for success were more explicit? Was knowing how the different elements related to each other useful in giving people the context they needed to make better decisions? Share your experiences in the comments.