The blind leading the deaf
Platitudes like “Be the most competitive enterprise”, “Provide customers with the best information to make the buying decisions!”, and “Unlock shareholder value!” are numbing to the ears. Yet sweeping strategy statements like these are often swiftly attached to an organization’s cultural facade–deploying “graffiti artists” to tag everything from interoffice memos to employee’s marquee screensavers–often with the expectation that if touted loud enough, an organization will realize the embodiment of the slogans.
These bumper sticker goals leave employees directionless or even cynical. Why then are executives swept off their feet, glowing with more passion than on their wedding night, when proclaiming these found keys to success? It’s primarily because the messenger has been immersed in the logic and conversations underlining the message for so long that when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of knowledge in their minds. Frontline employees, however, are not privy to the underlining meaning and consequently hear only slick, opaque phrases that slide in one ear and out the other.
Ultimately, executives touting such messages are blinded, cursed by their knowledge, while the audience is deaf to the passion and depth of the message given. As a result, statements meant to ignite a strategic path all too often fall on deaf ears, only to become meaningless slogans.
A recent Harvard Business Review article (December 2006) addresses the curse of knowledge and the difficulties it poses in uniting employees behind an organization’s goals. The article points to a study conducted by Elizabeth Newton, a graduate student at Stanford University. The study was comprised of a game that assigned people one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener”. The goal was to see if the listener could determine what well-known song the tapper was rhythmically playing on a table. By the end of the experiment, 120 songs were tapped out, but surprisingly only three (2.5%) were guessed correctly.
I tried this experiment with my colleague, John Whittlesey, who, I should note, is a talented opera singer with very well tuned ear. I first tried the “Happy Birthday” song thinking for sure John would pick it up right away. I quickly arrived at the end of my composition and found a confused face staring back at me…hmmm maybe he wasn’t familiar with that one. So I tried another familiar tune and started to jam to the “Flintstones” theme song. Well, it didn’t take more than a glance to see this wasn’t going to work either. It didn’t take any encouragement on my part to find that the tables had turned. John quickly started to orchestrate, with gusto, a wonderful melody of noise. After its completion, I came to find out that it was the “Flintstones” theme song. Why on earth didn’t I recognize a song my ears should have been turned to, having just attempted it myself?
The article uses the study to illustrate what it calls the curse of knowledge; that is, it is impossible for the knowledge base (the tapper) to avoid understanding all of the underlining meaning supporting the knowledge shared (to avoid hearing the tune he’s performing). While the learner (the listener), struggles to decipher the knowledge that seems to be presented with such ease (witnesses a bizarre ritual set to a cacophony of noise that seems to effortlessly entertain the musician) and risks not internalizing the message, but instead relegating it in their mind as a noble-sounding plaque to hang in the organizations lobby.
Though the study means to demonstrate the deafening effect of information imbalance, I don’t believe it completely explains why I was not able to recognize John’s rendition of the “Flintstones” theme song. There was little information imbalance other than perhaps the difference in musical ability; I was familiar with the song, still in my mind from tapping it out moments prior, and familiar with the rules of the game, yet I missed the distinguishing notes all together. There was clearly a disconnect between my external and internal ear. Had I been given the task to orchestrate the “Flintstones” theme song, I would have no problem forming the song accurately in my mind. But if it were necessary to be taken to task to experience first hand, any knowledge shared (which success in the experiment seems to require), then we would still be running around in the buck, ducking from the thunder gods in the sky. So how have we been able skirt the information imbalances that exist between any two people and share knowledge over the millennium? It has been through the use of stories, analogies, anecdotes, and visual cues that have provided the concrete patterns on which to adapt one reality to the next.
In his book “Winning“, Jack Welch states that mission statements should be so real that “they smack you in the face with their concreteness” (Welch 14). He reminds the reader that despite Ben & Jerry’s crunchy granola, hippy, save the world persona, it still has “profitable growth” and “increasing value for stakeholders” as prominent elements in its mission statement. I agree with Jack that too often the reality escapes mission statements, however, no matter how “real” a strategy statement is, it still runs a great risk of becoming trite in the minds of the organization’s employees, who are permitted to escape the knowledge underlining each thought-provoked word.
The HBR article (cited above) used Trader Joes, a specialty food chain, as an example of a company that employs a visual description to bring concreteness to an abstract mission statement. Trader Joes describes its target customer as an “unemployed, college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo”. It’s a simple and exaggerated image, but its use provides the definition needed to bring its employees in tune with its goals. If you’ve been in a Trader Joes, you’ve witnessed customer service and product selection that would seem to fit the preferences of such a fictional customer.
Knowledge, whether conveyed in concise but ultimately complex strategy statements or solicited through an investigation of best practices, requires tangible and concrete stories, analogies, or visuals to ensure an effective translation and adoption. Current knowledge management resources are being invested in efforts focused almost exclusively on capturing knowledge bits from a network of internal or external experts. These efforts are creating repositories of “tappers” blindly dancing to their cacophonies and are cursed to fail.
Clicks of knowledge
Adam Sandler’s most recent adventure on the big screen, Click, was slain by critic after critic, making one wonder why anyone would invest a night on such entertainment. Last week the people overturned the critics’ voice, awarding Click the People’s Choice Award for best film comedy. Click is an example of a product that seems to defy convention with mass appeal. Tapping into the social preferences that can oppose the critical eye is what Proctor & Gamble’s People’s Choice Awards, launched a decade ago by the giant consumer goods producer, is all about. In the spirit of the awards show, P&G has launched two social-networking efforts in an attempt to better understand what best resonates with its consumer audience.
The first networking effort is an extension of the annual awards show. The People’s Choice Community site (launched last Wednesday, a day after the show) is celebrity and fan club driven. The second networking effort, Capessa, was launched last month. Designed for Yahoo’s health section, Capessa is a forum for women to discuss subjects such as parenting, pregnancy, and weight loss. According to a recent WSJ article, the marketing on Capessa will be subtle. P&G will not run ads for its products, but will occasionally offer some links to P&G experts offering tips about specific issues such as parenting or offer a P&G newsletter on a particular subject. Indeed, the only mention of P&G on the Capessa site is a line at the bottom of Web pages that identifies Capessa as being produced by P&G Productions.
These two efforts, particularly Capessa, are not about marketing to the communities, but rather learning from them. According to the article, both new sites will act as continuing focus-group-type environments where P&G–by monitoring consumer discussions on the sites–can learn more about its target audience’s likes and dislikes and what consumers in different stages of life care about; “It’s going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers,” according to Jim Stengel, P&G’s global marketing officer.
Not only does P&G stand to gain knowledge from the discussions and patterns of its users, but the communities themselves will likely benefit from the resources P&G brings. Both sites will be produced by P&G Productions, a unit that is best known for producing popular soap operas such as “As the World Turns” and “Guiding Light”, and will be used to capture on film the stories of select community members. Utilizing these resources, the stories will likely be choreographed in a way that better communicates the experiences and knowledge they hold.
The resources and informative approach taken by the worlds largest marketer will allow the company to better understand the consumer preferences that can often run contrary to the beliefs and conventions of product developers’ critical eyes. P&G’s efforts stand a greater success of succeeding where others have failed (including Wal-Mart’s failed teen targeted social-networking effort, “The Hub”); the choreography and purpose they bring to the chaos that typically surrounds online communities ensures that ideas and knowledge are exchanged with the appropriate lighting.
The success of P&G in fostering online exchanges of knowledge will likely pave the way for other corporate sponsored, social-networking vehicles. Their success will rest squarely on their ability to not only interpret what’s hot and what’s not, but to provide the structure and resources to the knowledge they contain in order to set them apart from the garbage bins of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube…
No time to talk
The Wall Street Journal announced that Wal-Mart would be moving many of its 1.3 million employees from predictable schedules to flex based shifts early this year. The world’s largest retailer will join the company of K-Mart, Target, and RadioShack who are already on their way to transforming their workforces into lean, variable costs by using systems from companies like Kronos, Workbrain, and Cybershift to predict the peeks and troughs of customer activities. A culture of flex staffing, requiring employees to take up odd shift durations and rotations at the big-box stores, will likely have a broader impact on the expectations of the American service worker.
Though this seems certain to improve productivity standards, there are costs that should be considered that could offset any gains, the least of which is impact on the informal knowledge sharing that occurs during the “unproductive” hours of a shift. Consider what happened in the early 1990’s when executives at London’s water supplier sought to improve productivity by providing its inspectors with hand-held computers and eliminating the central dispatching station. It turned out that the use of the technology to eliminate the time spent by inspectors changing cloths, having a cup of morning coffee, and picking up their trucks at the dispatch center eliminated much more. The depot played a key role in facilitating the informal exchange of vital tricks of the trade among inspectors. The need for this knowledge exchange was so great that Dave Snowden, then a knowledge-management consultant for IBM, found that the inspectors were meeting on their own time at a local restaurant to jot down tips.
While the idea of employees sitting around a table to exchange ideas is quaint, the sure disruption from the mix and churning of staff in and out the door with each ebb-and-flow of customer demand is certain to breakdown the informal conversations that naturally occur during traditional shift hours. Furthermore, there will likely be erosion in relationships and familiarity among employees who could expect to be among new faces at any given time during working hours. According to Thomas Davenport, a professor of information management at Babson College, “employees rarely learn from colleagues they don’t already know”. Working among strangers would be detrimental.
The extent to which Wal-Mart is able to transform labor into a truly variable cost will be interesting to watch, especially as productivity factors such as the employees’ knowledgebase, low turnover, and employee loyalty stand to diminish. We could see the net effect of such productivity systems having a null or even negative impact on the bottom-line.