Here’s the problem with saying, well, when the ball is caught it’s a good decision; when the ball is dropped it’s a bad decision which is that there’s too much noise, there’s too much luck that occurs between the moment of the decision and the moment of the outcome, because we’re not playing chess.
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We can think about how that applies to our own lives, right. Like how are we going down the more conventional route and not taking chances because we’re worried that people are going to point fingers at ourselves. The most important person we need to worry about pointing fingers at ourselves is us.
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That might be one of the worst things that you can say to people who work for you, right. We’re results oriented. What does that mean? Is that they know for a fact… well, think about it, when people are doing a weekly meeting where they’re trying to deconstruct the week’s results. How much time are they spending deconstructing and questioning when they win, right? Are they going, “Whoa! We had this amazing win. Let’s deconstruct that and try to figure out all the mistakes that we made and how we could have done better or maybe that we should have done worse. Whoa! Let’s really look and tear apart that outcome.”
No! Every week at the end of the week you’re looking at all the bad results and you’re trying to deconstruct them to try to figure out if you could have done a better job, if you could have somehow avoided them. What message does that send to your employees? What message does that send to the people who are making decisions and trying to manage the risk along the way? Well, I’m going to have to sit here at the end of the week and listen to my bad results, so what am I going to do? I’m going to make sure that I can cover my ass. I’m going to make sure that I’ve got consensus if I need to get along on my team. I’m going to create false consensus which means I’m just going to get everybody to agree for the sake of agreeing. I’m not going to be trying to find the best way. I’m not going to be trying to challenge the status quo in any way, in order to get to a place where I can do some really cool innovative things that are out of the box because I’m going to get yelled at for it.