“Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.” - Albert Einstein 1
Although organisational culture has many layers, it’s most tangibly experienced by people as "the way we do things round here".2
The three most important things any organisation — or any part of an organisation — does are:
Make sense of itself and the dynamically changing context in which it operates;
Make decisions about what to do and what not to do; and
Take actions in the world.
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Organisational success ultimately depends on how and how well it does sense making, how and how well it does decision making, how and how well it does action taking, and how and how well these are joined up.
For an organisation to thrive in our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, sense making, decision making, and action taking must become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
That, in a nutshell, is a future-fit culture.3
Unfortunately, organisations often approach sense making in ways that don’t make much sense.
Take for example the slips of paper handed out by the checkout operator at our local convenience store: “Hope you had a fantastic instore experience today. Can you rate our service please at <QR code/URL > Today you were served by Jamie. I only get recognised when it’s a 10”.
How unbiased is customer feedback likely to be when prompted by: “I only get recognised when it’s a 10”?
If I thought Jamie’s performance was only a 6, would I bother going online to score him?
Does this prompting mean Jamie gets more 10’s than reflects the actual average instore customer experience..?
It absolutely does — which is one of the many deficiencies in the feedback scoring system the store uses: the fundamentally flawed but still widely adopted Net Promoter Score (NPS).4
Then there’s the question of whether Jamie's performance on the checkout is actually what dictates whether, as a customer, I have “a fantastic instore experience”?
What if Jamie performed admirably on the checkout, but my overall experience was unsatisfactory because the store had sold out of my favourite bread?
Or maybe I was in a hurry, got stuck behind a shopper who couldn’t decide which cheese to buy, and the store layout made it impossible for me to evade them, get the rest of my shopping done, and get on with my day?
The only way the convenience store’s feedback process could assess “a fantastic experience” is if by “fantastic” they mean the original definition: “weird; insane; make-believe.” 5
But it’s not only feedback systems based on NPS that are Not Proper Sensemaking.
The world is awash with similar make-believe feedback systems masquerading as, masking, and manipulating organisational sense making.
Take the ubiquitous happy sheets used to evaluate learning and development events.
From 2010 - 2015 I was retained as a specialist advisor on innovation leadership and learning with one of the world's leading providers of executive education.6
They were regularly scored #1 worldwide in custom executive education, but still relied on scores on happy sheets to assess their course presenters.
What the happy sheet scores actually measure is infotainment — information delivered in entertaining ways enjoyed and appreciated by the participants.
But does infotainment generate worthwhile and lasting learning in participants or their organisations?
Dream on…
My most memorable experience of this came from an early foray into delivering skills development training for technical managers some 30 years ago. 7
I was apprenticed to a slightly scary Scottish presenter who, at the end of the course, handed out the obligatory happy sheets and then proceeded to explain the feedback scoring system in a fierce Glaswegian accent:
“On the feedback form you have to enter a letter from A to D.
So, if you think the course was amazing, “amazing” begins with an A — so you enter A on the form.
If you think the course was average, “average” begins with an A — so you enter A.
If you think the course was awful, “awful” begins with an A — so you enter A.”
He was an adequate and entertaining instructor.
But his chutzpah, and his deliberately cultivated half joking, half menacing description of the scoring system meant he invariably scored straight A’s. 8
A big part of the problem is that feedback metrics like these seek to serve two purposes.
On the one hand, they purport to measure service effectiveness.
On the other hand, they’re used to reward or penalise those delivering the service. 9
So, there’s a built-in incentive in the latter to use all sorts of tricks to manipulate customers to give fantastic feedback that unavoidably undermines the former.
That’s why the old adage: “what gets measured gets managed” morphs more often than not into: “what gets measured gets manipulated”.
If you want further evidence that the feedback systems organisations employ rarely provide senior executives with good sense making about the actual experience of customers — and the employees who directly serve them — you need look no further than the hugely successful TV franchise Undercover Boss. 10
First launched on the UK’s Channel 4 in 2009, the series places senior executives undercover in the body of their own organisations, where they learn first-hand how out of touch with reality are the perceptions they’ve formed via their flawed formal feedback systems.
The fact that Undercover Boss has been franchised in over twenty countries shows how common and widespread the problem is of deficient sense making, leading to poor decision making and ineffective action taking in organisations around the world.
This reliance on flawed formal feedback systems is a symptom of a more serious organisational malaise — senior executives stuck in the dangerously outdated legacy mindset that their role is making decisions — as opposed to creating conditions in which good decisions get made and implemented throughout the organisation.
If organisations want to generate genuinely great customer experience, as opposed to fantastic feedback, senior executives need to deeply appreciate and adjust to their real role in future-fit leadership and, in particular, why they must move on from the anachronistic notion of “decision rights”:
Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives (1997) ed. Gerald Holton, Yehuda Elkana, p. 388, from The Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem (1979).
Find out more about organisational culture, how it emerges, and how it can be influenced in this previous post.
Find out how to access the leverage for creating a future-fit culture in this previous post.
The many fallacies of Net Promoter Score (NPS) and why it’s Not Proper Sense making are neatly laid out in this article by User Experience (UX) Designer Jared Spool.
If you’re curious about who it was, check out my LinkedIn profile.
Cambridge Consultants, the open innovation lab I worked for at the time, was asked by an external training provider if one of our people would teach on their course for technical managers, and I decided to explore the opportunity.
He explained his secret score elicitation strategy at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho — part of an all-night bender, which he regarded as a necessary rite of passage for his apprentice infotainers…
Presenters got a relatively low base rate of pay with a significant bonus geared to happy sheet scores.