263: Jennifer Pahlka. Amy Edmondson. Albert Einstein
Good morning dear friends
Four years ago, Jerome September, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Dean of Student Affairs, started a postgraduate reading club. This year they’ve been reading No Last Place to Rest by Dr Dineo Skosana.
Immense possibilities are unlocked by creating reading communities. You sharpen critical thinking, develop shared language, refine listening and speaking skills, and deepen trust. Well done Jerome!
If you’re looking for books to read, I like the Nobel Prize’s recent listing of Nine Literary Works that Impacted the World, and you might enjoy President Barack Obama’s 2025 Summer Reads. I wish more presidents would follow suit (well, perhaps not all of them, but even then, if they were compelled to read widely, we’d see more compassion and capacity for managing the world’s complexity).
/strategy
Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America and was deputy CTO in the Obama administration. Two years ago, she published Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
In The Book I Wish Every Policymaker Would Read, she and Ezra Klein discuss her core concepts. Although they speak about the confounding gap between policy intention and actual public service delivery, their insights apply in any complex organisation.
She comments, “A friend of mine who worked in the government digital service in the U.K. pointed me to this idea that’s written about the British civil service. That it is literally divided between the intellectuals and the mechanicals”.
Anyone who has worked in a large organisation’s middle layers will have encountered this divide: PowerPoint ideas that have every strategy soundbite and little connection to operational reality.
Any strategy’s ambitions must be coupled with clarity about how it will be achieved.
Pahlka shares many examples of how that disconnect subverts effective delivery.
California’s Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Scheme is one.
A great programme formed to do what you think, it also helps reduce the burden on the primary health care system. The application form has a mere 212 questions. Easily completed by a hungry person.
The result of every government department trying to get what they need to keep their bosses happy, with no-one asking what this means for the person desperate for nutritional assistance.
The final result, as Pahlka puts it, ‘concrete boats just don’t float’.
I’m sure you have examples in your business where HR requires one set of answers, and risk another, and compliance another. All well-intentioned, together, disastrous.
The Friction Project tells us that the average employee spends 28% of their day dealing with email. At least some of that will come from competing compliance demands.
Pahlka encourages us to replace the judgmental stance we often take when encountering poor performance with an analytical curiosity:
“When systems or organizations don’t work the way you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.”
I was reminded of Netflix founder Reed Hastings’ reflection:
“When one of your people does something dumb don’t blame them. Instead ask yourself what context you failed to set. Are you articulate and inspiring enough in expressing your goals and strategy? Have you clearly explained all the assumptions and risks that will help your team to make good decisions? Are you and your employees highly aligned on vision and objectives?” (No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention)
Effective strategy takes care of implementation. If it doesn’t it is merely a dream that quite quickly mutates into a nightmare.
Whatever decisions you’re making, ensure you experience it from your customers or staff members’ point of view. Once you have, you’ll find simpler ways.
(Klein has recently published, Abundance. It is on Obama’s list, who describes it as a “blueprint for reforming government so it can deliver for working people”.)
You can explore more about Netflix here and The Friction Project here.
Colonel John Boyd, whose relentless drive for simplicity led to the F-16’s design, spent his life fighting the effects of bureaucracy. You can read about him here.
//self
In The Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed, Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson tells us to “embrace the possibility of failure to reduce the occurrence of failure”.
If we assume nothing will ever go wrong, we will, sooner or later, get an unpleasant surprise.
Edmondson advises that we start with framing, “explicitly emphasizing the complexity or novelty of a situation helps put you in the right state of mind.”
Failure happens when we don’t acknowledge that the context has changed or respect its complexity (the reverse is also true, we can over-engineer processes for simple, routine contexts wasting energy and resources).
Second, she says “make sure to amplify, rather than suppress, weak signals…Amplify doesn’t mean exaggerate or dwell on it endlessly; it simply means make sure a signal can be heard. And if its message ends up being ‘all is well,’ we must learn to be nonetheless glad we asked”.
This is tricky for leaders to get right.
It requires creating space for people to challenge and welcoming the input, even when it turns out to be incorrect or, in the moment, seemingly unnecessary. You’re reinforcing the system and the process, not the instance.
Edmondson says, “Make it psychologically safe to be honest about a small thing before it snowballs into a larger failure. Too many of the large organizational failures I’ve studied could have been prevented if people had felt able to speak up earlier with their tentative concerns.”
She writes about a healthcare process innovation called a rapid response team. Simply, a nurse could sound a concern alarm, and an expert team would quickly assemble.
Despite having a significant impact on healthcare outcomes, the process was abandoned in several instances. Why? Because not every alarm ‘needed’ intervention and so nurses were admonished for wasting time. In the sites where rapid response teams worked, each alarm was treated as a learning opportunity. It mattered less whether the alarm was real or not, but that the team experienced learning. And those hospitals, and their patients, reaped the rewards.
Edmondson’s final suggestion is practice. Self-evident, but one we often forget.
September’s book club enables a space for students to explore ideas and debate outside the pressures of performance.
Managing complexity, creating simplicity, is rooted in how we listen and respond. The signals we send to our team affect the signals we get to hear.
(You can read more of Edmonson’s work here).
//soul
Albert Einstein, in a 1932 letter to Queen Elizabeth, observed “As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists”.
Strategy, soul and self are all best served by constantly grappling with what is whilst envisaging what could be.
All the best
Karl
PS: If you’re interested in my executive coaching practice, you can learn more [here]. If you’d like me to curate and facilitate a reading group for your leadership team, details are [here]. And if you enjoyed this letter, subscribe [here].