Soft Consensus vs ‘Prove Me Wrong’

 

Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied. Leonard Cohen

How you think determines what you see. As a Toyota acolyte, I learned to see & think in a different way. The past decade I’ve been immersed in Innovation thinking - how to create something valuable seemingly out of thin air. This is the first of a series of articles on what I’ve learned.

A human being drew this.

Decision-Making: Consensus or Prove Me Wrong?

Soft Consensus:

When it comes to Innovation (or Strategy), avoid ‘soft consensus’. Here’s a common scenario: Our path forward is unclear. We have conflicting data or no data at all. So, let’s go around the Board room or team room & try to reach a consensus. Let’s give everyone a chance to speak & weigh up what we think it all means. Everyone’s voice gets equal weight, regardless of how much expertise or skin in the game they might have.  People who are most emotional get extra points. Sometimes this devolves further into HIPPO or ZEBRA or WOLF management.^[1]

Everybody pretends things are ‘just great’, and such sessions often end with heartfelt paeans to engagement & inclusiveness.  But to quote Leonard Cohen, ‘Everybody knows the ship is rotten. Everybody knows the captain lied.’

This is a great way to kill Innovation & destroy Value. We thereby institutionalize Confirmation Bias - the Lord Voldemort of bad thinking. New offerings sink like stones & good riddance.  Toyota acolytes are familiar with that great company’s deep understanding of Waste. Is anything more wasteful than designing & releasing an offering nobody wants?

Prove Me Wrong

If you want to innovate, encourage dissent & disagreement. Encourage those who disagree to explain their thinking. Prove me wrong conveys great benefits. For a start, it encourages people to challenge the weakest elements of your hypothesis. It compels the Innovation team to validate their ideas with data. Prove me wrong reinforces the fact that Innovation entails experimenting your way to Value, in the dark.  Rarely do we have a deep understanding of the key questions:

●      Who is the customer?

●      What does the customer value?

●      Why do they buy or not buy?

Pretending otherwise, is preparing to fail. Only through quick, smart & binary experiments can we begin to understand the problem we’re trying to solve. ‘Quick, smart & binary’ are antithetical to ‘soft consensus’, which is commonly slow, thick & data-poor.

Innovation thrives on the margins, with the oddballs, eccentrics & iconoclasts. The ones that challenge that status quo, the ornery & quirky.  Soft consensus, by contrast, cuts off the so-called ‘long tails’ of the distribution, and with them, the interesting, eccentric & profound.

Last Word

Prove me wrong is perhaps the most challenging Innovation mental model. Companies that seek to emulate Toyota rightfully emphasize ‘Respect for People’. Prove me wrong is easily mistaken for disrespect. Mature leaders will understand that the opposite is true. Another common mistake is giving a platform to ‘Grumblers’.  [Please refer to my earlier series on Fukuda’s Parable.] Grumblers and iconoclasts are not the same thing. The former are cynical & disengaged and we must ignore them. The latter are passionate, may be angry or frustrated, but are fully engaged. Listen to them.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

 

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[1] Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, Zero Expertise But Really Arrogant, Works on the Latest Fire