Resistors to Information-Driven Decision-Making

People, not all of whom are friends, tell me that I was an innovative community destination marketing (DMO) executive during my four-decade career in .

That’s sad, because two characteristics with which I am credited are still so rarely found: what we now call integrated marketing and the use of analytics for decision and strategy making.

Any credit due is because I worked under innovation-friendly governing boards in each of the three innovation-friendly communities I served.

Even today, still only 12% or 1-in-8 organizations globally qualify as “analytical innovators” according to a new survey by the MIT Sloan Management Review and North Carolina-based SAS Institute.

This means they thrive in an analytics-driven culture, mandated by senior management, which means endorsed by board policy. These organizations have groomed higher levels of analytic skills and here’s the kicker, they are deploying analytics for strategic advantage.

Strategic mindset and analytic skills are now more important for marketing executives than creativity according to executive search giant Spencer Stuart.

This is because, in the words of Tony Parker who heads up marketing for a company whose brands now touch 1-in-4 people globally every day, analytics enables and enhances creativity.

A strategic mindset from the board through its chief executive to every corner of an organization is a huge competitive advantage because deciding what to do as well as forecasting the best direction is all about evaluating tradeoffs.

Being driven by data-analytics-metrics is simply the best way to choose among tradeoffs.

So where do the vast majority of other organizations fall?  According to the study, nearly 6-in-10 are analytics wannabes.  They have an attitude of “oh yeah, that too” but they fail to deploy analytics as a “core asset.”

Fully a third of all organizations are “analytically challenged.” This means they rely more on just anecdotal experience and personal opinion and suffer from poor data and analytic management skills.

Half of the 78% that believe they need to be more innovative are held back by “analytically challenged” executives and governing boards.

Ironically, many data skeptics and resisters are also usually top performers personally, according to an analysis last month in Harvard Business Review dissecting the psychological resistance of those afraid of data-driven management.

This is why a friend of mine who consults with community destination marketing organizations like those I led got so much grief from sources he didn’t expect when he chastised DMO execs for being data-resistors.

Data enemies have high perceived but low actual performance.  Data friendlies are perceived low but are actually high performers.  Data skeptics fall in the quadrant of high perceived and high actual performance.

The authors found that those who resist data are what I would call “control freaks.”  They hold their organizations hostage because they fear data will show a better way than their experience alone and they will look bad or their organization and community will look backward.

Because of rotations and term limits, I probably worked with around 120 different board members during my career.  I say “with” because an executive only works “for” the board as a unit.

While the boards as a whole were data and innovation-friendly, there were at least ten members appointed who weren’t and many of those were high performers in their day job.

They were easy to spot.  While they endorsed board policies such as being data-driven, they usually worked in meetings to undermine, restrict or pooh-pooh data.

A couple were data cynics who made cheap shots by purporting that anything can be proved by data, perhaps saying more about how they use it than me as the target of their dispersion.

A few others were data-skeptics, some because neither their personal experience nor that of their employer valued analytics as a core asset.  Some just never grasped the difference between data, analytics, and metrics and how to weave them into a guiding organizational narrative.

A few even tried to pull the organization backward from best practices to outmoded regressive practices only because those were familiar and often because they had been siloed from best practices.

It worked a time or two until other board members realized the ramifications and we got back on track.

I’m less forgiving of executives who remain stuck in their heuristic ruts.  Studies find them even more common in marketing and media organizations where until four decades ago standard metrics were difficult to come by.

But many want to be data-driven, they just work for boards that don’t, ironically populated by the 3-out-4 of non-marketing execs who still struggle with believing that marketing can drive demand and revenue.

According to the study by MIT and SAS, there is a high correlation between an organization being an “analytic innovator” and being growth-oriented.

Maybe being growth oriented and “analytic friendly” should also become pre-qualifications for serving on boards.

Obviously they should already be for any executive.

Issues of Inquiry, Innovation and Trust

One of the hardest things I found to teach people during my now concluded career was to ask questions, or more importantly, the questions behind a question.  Many preferred to waste effort instead on trying to decipher or guess what I wanted.

The reason this makes a difference is covered in a new book published this month by Warren Berger entitled A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.  In one section, the book describes why some people stop asking questions.

As I did at that age when my dad nicknamed me “windy” for a time, researchers find that in a three year span from the ages of two to five, children ask about 40,000 questions.  Starting with preschool, however, the number of questions asked drops off a cliff.

This is when people begin to worry more about asking the “right” questions and when the divide widens between those with a “fixed” mindset and a “growth” mindset.  Researcher Dr. Carol Dweck points to this difference, all things being equal, when some students are stymied by failure and others thrive.

Berger even talks about replacing mission statements with questions.  For example, Pandora, the popular music streaming service might have one that says, “what if we could map the DNA of music?”  Square’s might be “why can’t everyone accept credit cards?”

Questions, this overview shows, are more important than statements, more important than answers.  In my former career in visitor-centric economic development, it would be “how can increased visitation foster unique sense of place?”

The secret to innovation in the workplace is to hire people who inherently question why they are doing things the way they do, who seek “continual and never-ending improvement.”

In a recent blog, Seth Godwin suggests that marketers should focus on the one question, “do they trust me enough to believe my promises?”  In other words, “can you and will you deliver on your brand?”

Berger, who I followed over my career when he wrote often for numerous marketing publications about creativity, cites the book by Harvard researcher Dr. Paul L. Harris entitled, Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others.

You have to earn trust.  As Godwin writes – “Earn trust, earn trust, earn trust. Then you can worry about the rest.”  A few weeks before "A More Beautiful Question” was published, I read another new book entitled, The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning and More.

It is written by Dr. David DeSteno, a researcher at Northeastern University who previously authored Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us.

“Trust then,” DeSteno writes, “is a bet, and like all bets, it contains an element of risk.”  He notes that “at the most basic level, the need to trust implies one fundamental fact: you’re vulnerable,” open to uncertainty.

I’ve literally spent my entire life learning to trust.  The day I was born, I began to decline.  The first few months were a struggle as my parents tried a range of formulas to not only get me to gain weight but to stem the almost constant projectile vomit.

That first deep winter on the ancestral Idaho ranch that was our home in that nook pointed into Yellowstone Park between Montana and the Teton’s shared with Wyoming, a family miracle occurred.

One day when my dad went down into the cellar for another can of formula, none could be found where it had been resupplied the day before.  So in desperation my parents fed me “whole” cows milk and almost immediately I began to thrive.  As a result, my wiring was left with a sense of hyper-vigilance and a fragile sense of trust overall.

Most individual breaches of trust, when we are adults, DeSteno writes, “though unwelcome don’t necessarily make one feel universally vulnerable.” 

I survived those first six months with both an indomitable drive and a near universal, subliminal vulnerability.

In part, along with my parent’s love, character and trustworthiness, this primal experience fueled success, more professional than personal.  In the words of Dr. Harris in an interview with the Boston Globe about why asking questions is so important for children cognitively:

“…it seems likely that this [asking questions] is an incredibly important engine for cognitive development.

…The child has to first realize that they don’t know something...and that other people are information-bearing agents…Then the child has to be able to, somehow or other, realize that language is a tool for shifting stuff from that person to them.”

I got my share of “just because” and “because I told you so’s,” but overall my parents always made it safe to ask questions and fostered a sense of inquiry and imagination.

Reading The Truth About Trust, more than six and a half decades later helps me not only realize how far I’ve finally come in being able to isolate failures of trust by others but also how much pain I may have caused others over the years when I didn’t.

So my personal mission statement in the form of A More Beautiful Question has not been being creative and innovative, traits with which I am often credited professionally, but “Can trust be learned on a deep personal level?”

Gratefully, my answer is that it sure can.

Having Seen The Future So Many Times

Some of my friends and a few readers of this blog think I’m prescient, but in the words of Nicholas Negropointe, founder of MIT Media Lab:

“One of the few advantages of age when you talk about the future is you’ve been there so many times.”

What can seem like anticipating change, in my case at least, is really only a matter of sizing up how patterns of evolution repeat themselves, something anyone can learn to do.

As few are, I’m certainly no Negroponte, who spoke in 1984 at the first TED Conference, an organization I had not even heard of until just before I retired nearly four years ago, following launch of its website.

I still remember how astonished I was at having been totally ignorant of the TED movement until a friend, Larry Moneta, leaned over during a meeting to explain when I first heard the TED acronym mentioned that it stood for “technology-entertainment-design”.

I suddenly felt as lost as Rip Van Winkle after a twenty-year snooze.

Negroponte, by the way, is the founder of the “One Laptop Per Child” movement which I have blogged about before.  It has become more like one tablet per child and is being used by 2 million children in 42 countries across the globe.

As Guy Raz marveled recently, Negroponte is also the person who foretold touch screen technology nearly a quarter century ago.

His 1984 touchscreen vision was presented only three years after I had first set eyes on an IBM personal desktop computer in a store window in Philadelphia where I was attending a conference.

Occurring less than a year after the launch of the first cell phone, Negroponte anticipated the first touchscreen smartphone by a mere 23 years.

The source of such visions is not isolated.  Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants explains that “ideas are not self-contained things; they are more like ecologies and networks.  They form clusters.”

In his fascinating book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson notes that it is a myth that innovation can be incentivized or driven by the competitive pressures of the profit motive.  They spark from creative environments.

While both are technology gurus, these observations relate to any evolution or change.

Johnson’s history includes the role of the coffee houses in launching the Age of Enlightenment in the late 1600s and 1700s which was such a powerful influence on the founders of our nation.

Any foresight with which I am credited is a lower form of innovation, more like seeing patterns and connecting dots.

An example that Johnson details was also summarized recently by Pagan Kennedy in the wonderful innovation column “Who Made That?” which appears in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

She mentions the person in 1858 who came up with the idea of putting erasers on the end of pencils sold the idea to an entrepreneur who was denied a patent because all it did was connect two existing and already prevalent inventions.

Maybe not an invention but that is often how innovation occurs.

Even More Important than Innovative

Earlier this month, I spent a week in a villa overlooking the northern Pacific coast of the Central American Republic of Costa Rica where the tropical-forested mountain range of the Nicoya Peninsula begins its 3,000’ assent above pastoral cattle and horse ranches.

I was tagging along with a friend, her daughter, and two of her daughter's friends, all three of whom are college aged.  Their majors are architecture, psychology and International Relations.

In part, when I wasn’t mesmerized by the spectacular ocean view, I took respite reading a newly published survey of employers entitled “It Takes More Than A Major.”

The survey samples “executives at private sector and nonprofit organizations, including owners, CEOs, presidents, C-suite level executives, and vice presidents.”

More than 9-in-10 agreed that “a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.”

Eight-in-ten employers agreed that “regardless of their major, every college student should acquire a broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences.”

Tellingly, a similar ratio felt it was important that “those they hire demonstrate ethical judgment and integrity; intercultural skills; and a capacity for new learning,”  things I also wish were minimum requirements to run for elected office.

When it comes to “ethical judgment and integrity,” 76% of employers believed this is “very important.”

By more than 2-to-1, employers believe colleges should place more emphasis on the “ability to connect choices and actions to ethical decisions” as an outcome, a greater ratio than those who want more emphasis on science and technology.

More than 8-in-10 say that more emphasis should be placed by colleges on critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills and the ability to analyze and solve complex problems.

Double the ratio of employers want more emphases on critical thinking and reasoning than those seeking more emphasis on the ability to innovate and be creative.

Is it possible that employers see the high correlation of critical thinking to innovation?  Apparently so.  Oh, and 83% believe it is very important or fairly important for students to learn the ability to research problems and analyze solutions.

By 8.5-to-1, employers believe the concept of a liberal education is “very important” compared to “only somewhat important.” Tellingly, three in four would unequivocally recommend the concept of liberal education to their own child.

Coincidentally, Dr. Dick Brodhead who also lives and works in my adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina, recently co-chaired a report to guide public policy in this regard entitled “The Heart of the Matter.”

Those who know Dick as a friend, as I do, were not at all surprised at his quick wit on last Thursday’s edition of The Colbert Report.  When finished with his gig as president of Duke University, in the tradition of Steven Wright, Dick would be a great stand-up comedian.

Strategic Introspection

It’s been twenty-four years since I was recruited to Durham.  A friend who is also retiring recently surmised it was probably because I already had various levels of experience at founding and growing community-destination marketing organizations (DMOs.)

Others during my now-concluded career credited me with strategic vision, something that always made me feel humbled and a bit awkward to describe when asked, often even now in retirement. 

Maybe that is part of what fueled my interest in how researchers and other experts describe strategy, insight and vision beginning with a keen interest I developed in strategic geniuses such as Napoleon, George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant dating from college days and before.

Start-ups are chaotic.  In the first few months a lot revolves around what Dr. William Duggan at Columbia Business School calls the “expert intuition,” that comes from being able to make quick decisions based on repetitive personal experience and practice.

This is what a hitter uses in baseball.  In his incredible book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, neuroscientist Dr. Robert A Burton explains that at the minimum it takes 200 milliseconds to react to the typical major league pitch traveling between 80-100 miles per hour which will cross home plate in approximately .380 to .460 milliseconds.

The ball travels nine feet before the batter’s retina can process that it left the pitcher’s hand.  There is no time for deliberation because the reaction time and swing alone equal the travel time to the catcher’s mitt.

However, there is some strategic thinking involved too.  The best hitters closely study the background and past performance of pitchers in order to make an educated guess about the kind of pitches that may be thrown in certain circumstances.  Pitchers do the same with opposing team hitters.

I was credited with the thoroughness of the various plans I cranked out for marketing, organization, performance metrics and decision-making within weeks of each of my DMO start-ups.  Of course people usually didn’t realize these plans were just a form of scaffolding and place-holders.

I needed time, not to do in-depth planning which would come later, but to get my head around the over-arching strategy unique during a given time to each community I represented.  According to Duggan’s books and lectures, this comes from what he calls “strategic intuition.”

Classes I took in the 1970s at BYU that touched on strategic thinking and planning took the approach still taught in many schools today: “figure out where you are; decide what you want to be; make a plan;” “set goals and objectives; then identify tactics.”

In other words “ready-aim-fire.”

As Duggan notes in several of his books, papers and interviews, the word strategy dates to 400 B.C. but it didn’t become a field of study until 1810, first related to the military, then by the late nineteenth century in business and by the twentieth century in social enterprise including the public sector.

The planning model I learned in my college days originated in the late 1830s.  However, lacking the resources of large organizations during my career and possibly due to proclivity,  I accidentally stumbled and bumbled into a very different - and according to Duggan - a far more effective and creative approach put forth a few years earlier.

The planning-first approach over relies on “expert intuition” which is based on what you know.  Using “strategic intuition” to first identify an over-arching strategy takes more time up front but you make up for it in effectiveness. It begins with scouring historical resources to find “what works.”

It involves disconnecting the dots and reconnecting them as informed by digging back into history, past studies and background with fresh eyes and then coupling your experience with the experiences of many others.  In the case of Durham, this process took me almost two years from the time we launched, but this aspect was also ongoing.

Some dismiss this as part of the creative process vs. planning.  I realize from reading analysts such as Duggan that strategic thinking for me was both/and but it always began with seeking “strategic insight.”  The flaw Duggan finds with the more wide spread “planning model” is that “learning what works comes at the end not the beginning,” what he terms a “fatal flaw.”

Many large organizations start a strategic planning process with top-down goals and objectives from a governing board and then add tactical elements.  Even after the fact, many fail to identity an over-arching strategy and the eventual outcome is these plans resemble operational plans more than strategic plans and fail to project into the future.

Even when predicated on “strategic intuition,” plans should be organic and updated in real time as new information is gathered and new “strategic insights” surface.  Having a plan is not an excuse to turn off strategic thinking.

Some organizations get by without any strategic planning or thinking required by their governing boards or stakeholders and a few may still consider their leaders to have strategic vision.

Ironically, these individuals unencumbered by structure may still benefit from some elements of “strategic intuition.”   While they may not be accessing background or data stored on the shelves neuroscientists tell us we have in our brains, they still have what Duggan calls “presence of mind.”

This means they can free themselves of goals and objectives and switch directions when an insight or new combination of elements occurs to them or is presented by others.  They must also have the resolution and drive to persevere.

Even so, without more accountability and a fuller approach to strategic thinking and planning it is likely their decisions will often be contaminated by what the new book entitled Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath describes as the “four villains” of good decision-making, “narrow-framing,” “confirmation bias,” “short-term emotion” and “overconfidence.”

By failing to anchor in what Duggan calls the precedents at the heart of “creative strategy,” they not only fail to be visionary but they miss a crucial ingredient for innovation.  They also risk being held hostage by special interests.

I never had the luxury to fly solo like that but I know from introspection and study more about why some people viewed me as strategic and visionary than I ever did at any time during my career.

To learn more about strategic thinking, one can do no better than to read Professor Duggan’s books Napoleon’s Glance, The Art of What Works, Strategic Intuition and Creative Strategy.  He’s also a great story teller.

Lifetime Lessons From Synchrony

Watching a young friend perform recently for the last time as part of her talented high school chorus in Durham, North Carolina where I live reminded me of a 1995 book by Dr. William H. McNeil, now a professor emeritus from the University of Chicago.

Entitled Keeping Together in Time : Dance and Drill in Human History,  McNeil wrote about the “emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison…” as a “cultural ritual” and “muscular bonding.”

Both were demonstrated as I watched last week but I am sure there was plenty of typical high school drama going on behind the scenes.  A 2009 organizational behavior analysis by researchers at Stanford University shed light on the relationship of this type of synchrony and cooperation.

Dr. Scott Wiltermuth is now at the University of Southern California and Dr. Chip Heath at Stanford but formerly at Duke University here in Durham, is with his brother Dan the co-author of several books including the just-published Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.

In their joint study entitled Synchrony and Cooperation, Wiltermuth and Heath concluded that “people acting in synchrony with others [such as the highly-choreographed chorus I saw] cooperated more…even in situations requiring personal sacrifice.”

The study also confirms why this cooperation did not entirely mitigate negative behind-the-scenes’ emotions that night such as shunning, bullying and cliquishness common in every high school and far too common in life as well.

The synchrony learned in chorus, athletics, orchestra, marching band, drama and many other endeavors at elementary and secondary schools are teaching skills as important as any of the AP and Honors classes many of the performers last week were completing prior to graduation.

Learning how to work together as a team, to synchronize, even with people you may not like or who may not like you on a personal level, is an incredibly vital workplace skill.  Synchronous activities in school also foster creativity and collaboration with people who have different styles.

The conflict I am characterizing as drama may be hurtful in high school but overall it is also a vital experience for the workplace as illustrated so eloquently in a TED presentation by Willful Blindness author and former CEO Margaret Heffernan entitled Dare To Disagree.

The inability to engage and resolve the conflict of ideas and concepts is often at the root of the inability of so many organizations to be effective.

But feeling “part of a whole” as New York University Business School ethics researcher Dr. Jonathan Haidt explains in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, doesn’t always require being in a festival atmosphere.

For much of the population it is one of the awe-inspiring by-products of nature.

How And Where Ideas Source

The quote below really resonates with me.

“Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks.  They form clusters. – Kevin Kelly, author of What technology Wants.

The source is one of two authors interviewed in the current issue of Wired Magazine.  The second interviewee is Steven Johnson, who’s new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation  comes out next week.

These are two must-reads for anyone interested in innovation and creativity.

Each book takes a different but historical look at the evolution of ideas both through the places they have incubated and the inter-relationships of people who generate them.