“… dragging down businesses, dragging down the economy … stymying the ability of public services to do what we need them to do.” Anthony Painter, the CMI’s director of policy

This is only going to get worse.

I know nothing about nuclear physics but could ask a research candidate to tell me what’s wrong with this equation.

E_b=(m_initial-m_final)*c 

A quick prompt in a well-known AI tool can make me look like an expert - on the face of it.

After that, I’m sunk. I know the equation as a fact (meaning that I can recite it), but don’t understand it.

I know WHAT the sequence of letters and numbers is, but not a clue about HOW to apply it. In fact, I don’t know what any of it stands for.

It is an example of surface knowledge. Yes, an extreme, but worth making.

This is one of the reasons why new managers are failing and dragging their organisation down. The quick fix does not work.

YouGov’s poll for the Chartered management Institute found that 82% of new managers in the UK are “accidental” and have little or no management training.

Why do so many think that you don’t need any decent training in this area?

This is the point. Anyone can do a search or input a prompt on ‘what to do as a leader or manager’. I have a list of actions for finding out the performance of a nuclear physics research department. But what I don’t have is the knowledge of the real team, the real people in order to ask the questions:

• in the right way
• for the right people
• at the right time.

I definitely will not have the understanding of how to react to the outcomes.

 

This is why organisations need professional help. Leadership and management training is an investment with huge ROI. The CMI’s work highlights this.

Ignore it and sink.

If you want to avoid sinking, get in touch.

 

The Guardian (23 Sep 2023). Heather Stewart. Bad management has prompted one in three UK workers to quit, survey finds.

Decision making is a fundamental part of all leadership levels. Pretty much everything I have read about it advises that time needs to be spent analysing data and interpreting outcomes. Falling back onto past actions is not always regarded as a good thing.

As Chris Griffiths points out in The Creative Thinking Handbook, the shortcuts that selective and reactive thinking provide will stifle innovation and hold back progress. There is plenty of evidence cited to support this. For example, Chris mentions Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ (2011) that brings our “thinking faults, heuristics and bias” to light.

So I was intrigued by MITSloan’s recent article (06 Sep) ‘The Potency of Shortcuts in Decision-Making’. It points out interesting research that suggests CEOs who make quick decisions based on heuristics often make better decisions than those who take a more “comprehensive” approach.

On the face of it, this is good news for those who only rely on direct experience to make decisions -and there are plenty that do. As David McRaney states in ‘How Minds Change’, it takes less energy. David points out that psychologist Andy Luttrell suggests that it is “costly to keep re-evaluating everything all the time”. We can see the logic.

However, as always, context is important.

I’m sure many will agree that there are times when a decision must be made immediately, or at least in a short time period.

As the MIT article authors Kruse, Bendig and Brettle point out, relying on rule of thumb (as heuristics can be briefly defined) works best in noisy and dynamic situations and where “information is scarce”. And, I suggest, when you simply have to get on with it.

Early in the MIT piece it seems to suggest that because we are in times when we are data rich, it’s knowing “how much is enough” and then knowing what to do with it that is important. This supports the ideas that:

• heuristics can save time because it cuts down on the careful analysis of increasingly huge sets of data
• adding more information is not always going to help.

This puts heuristics in a favourable light. But as Kruse, Bendig and Brettle point out, there is a strong chance that bias can creep in. They also argue that it is pointless to take shortcuts when a lot of objective data is readily available. Indeed, this is where McRaney’s citing of Chaiken and Eagly’s Heuristic-Systematic Model fits in. 

It is at this point where the middle leader can offer support to senior colleagues who like to dive straight in.