Solutions that cannot work

The method tells you what to do. This tells you what you are looking at.

The numbered white papers are a method: five questions in a fixed order, and depth on each. They are sober by design, because a diagnosis that is amusing is usually a diagnosis that is wrong. This is a different object, and it is allowed to be funnier, because the thing it does is recognition, and nobody has ever recognized a category. People recognize a scene.

So the entries are scenes. Most of them are real, several of them are ours, and in at least one we are the ones who look ridiculous. That is deliberate: a guide to other people’s mistakes is a sales brochure, and a guide that includes your own is an instrument.

Why it is funny, and why that is not a joke

One thing runs underneath all seventeen and is worth saying once rather than seventeen times. None of these scenes is a story about ignorance. A discipline for exactly this has existed since 1962. It has a professional body, ten standards, sixty years of literature and a five-question sequence that takes a competent person about a week. It is not secret, it is not expensive, and it is not difficult. In every scene that follows, somebody could have run it, and instead booked a room.

The two agencies, and the one that lost

A commercial organization is hard to reach by telephone. Customers say so and staff say so, and the complaints arrive every month in slightly larger numbers. The manager decides something has to be done about it, and he is right.

He speaks to a few of his people. He watches for a while himself. By the end of that he is convinced that training is unavoidable, and he asks around his network for agencies who can run a course in telephone handling, and, he adds, in a motivating and inspiring way.

He meets two. The first gives him a good feeling. The trainer thinks he can start almost immediately and would like a short conversation with a few people, so that the program can be tailored. The second gives him a bad feeling. That trainer wants to run an analysis first, to find out whether factors other than a shortfall in competence might be decisive in why the required results are not being reached.

The manager finds this mildly irritating. He is genuinely convinced that training is the answer.

What was on the table, and what was bought

Two observations are worth adding to that scene, and the first is the one that would sound ridiculous in any other trade.

The part worth sitting with is the word “tailored.” It sounds like diligence and it is the opposite of it: the content is being adjusted to the audience while the question of whether content is the problem at all remains unasked. Tailoring is what you do after the diagnosis. Before it, it is decoration.

The interim manager who arrested himself

This one is worth quoting almost in full, because it is the clearest description of the performance paradox anybody is likely to write, and it was written by the person inside it.

It begins as an irritation. Working as an interim manager, he finds himself annoyed by professionals who behave differently from how he would like. It builds over weeks. And then the thought arrives, fully formed and entirely reasonable: it is time to ask a training agency to train this group in results-orientation. Then he is rid of the irritation and the organization performs better.

Read that sentence again and notice how much work it does. An irritation about behavior has become a diagnosis. The diagnosis has produced a remedy. The remedy will remove the irritation, which is true, and improve the organization’s performance, which does not follow from anything.

What makes it remarkable is the second half. Later, the same man writes that he knows perfectly well it does not matter whether somebody drinks coffee for a long time, or talks to colleagues for too long, or keeps to arrangements. What matters is that the environment is arranged so that those fragmentary observations of behavior genuinely stop mattering, because the desired performance is measured, and a measurement is a more objective basis for a conversation with professionals than an impression is. And then: he increasingly realizes that he too is a prisoner of the performance paradox, because he keeps wanting to improve the professional instead of the performance.

What he actually bought, and for how long it worked

What the alternative would have cost is worth putting beside it. The five questions, on a team of that size, is a week: pull the measure, cut it three ways, find the person who already achieves it, walk the floor for a morning, ask four questions of four people. One week of one person’s attention against two days of everybody’s, and at the end of the week you know whether results-orientation was ever the issue.

Note also what he did not do, which is what the guide is for. He recognized the form while he was standing in it. That is available to anybody, it costs nothing, and it is the entire practical value of knowing that these forms have names.

Four more you will meet before lunch

The other forms in this act need less telling. Each one is recognizable inside ten minutes, and each is cheaper to name then than to discover in the evaluation.

The last row rewards a second reading. The reasoning is impeccable (too few experts move across, so too little expert knowledge reaches the consultants, so mistakes are made) and it arrives with a remedy attached to the first link in the chain, which is the only link with a supplier. Nobody has looked at a single mistake. There are mistakes; they are recorded; somebody could go and read them this afternoon.

The water engineers, and the conference that got better every year

This is ours. It is the one we tell against ourselves, and it is the reason this guide exists in the form it does.

Early in 2000, a telephone call. The manager of a team of engineers responsible for water and safety would like to talk about a two-day working conference, to help the team communicate more effectively with one another. There is a thorough conversation about what is needed. We come back with a program, a pleasant location and an agreeable price.

The program includes teambuilding and it runs beautifully. Exercises alternate with quieter moments of self-disclosure, and the team feels itself growing closer. The evaluations are excellent. The client is satisfied, and the next conference is informally agreed before we leave.

And it must be said: a year later the two-day conference goes even better. The expectations of the client and of the participants are exceeded.

There is also a feeling that something is not right.

The client is content with the training. The team also reports that it is not performing well enough: the required goals are not being met, and comparable teams do better. And although the manager senses that the annual conferences contribute little or nothing to the results he needs, he certainly wants to continue with them. They improve the atmosphere, and that is worth something too. Under the circumstances it seems unwise to him to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What we had, and never once looked at

The special location, and the Tuesday after it

The second scene in this act is a sentence you have almost certainly heard in a planning meeting, and it is the opening of a curve with a very reliable shape.

“We really must do something special, so that everybody goes home completely inspired. And I think that is a combination of a separate location, something out of the ordinary …”

Which happens, and it works. The enthusiasm at the start of an improvement or change program is genuine, and it is not manufactured. Then the participants go back and try to apply what they learned, and they discover, again, that they knew perfectly well what needed to change and how, and that the blockages they had already identified are still exactly where they were.

The curve runs from inspiration to frustration, and the second half is steeper than the first. What is left afterwards is worse than nothing, because the next proposal arrives in a room that has been inspired before. The budget went almost entirely on the first half (the location, the catering, the arc of the day) and by the time the learning meets the work there is nothing left to spend on supporting it, which is the argument Wick, Pollock, Jefferson and Flanagan (2006) built their six disciplines around.

The survey they filled in, before they were inspired

Thousands of people, and never once a no

There is one observation in this literature that does more work than its length suggests, and it takes the form of a question you can ask anybody.

Ask a professional whether they could perform better than they currently do. Harold Stolovitch (whose Training Ain’t Performance (Stolovitch & Keeps, 2004) is the standing statement of the distinction this series rests on) reports that across thousands of people he has never once had “no” as the answer (Stolovitch & Keeps, 2004). Every manager and every professional gives the same reply.

Follow that where it goes. If essentially everybody believes they could perform better, something stands between what they are capable of and what they produce, and since it is present for almost everyone, it is unlikely to be a property of any of them. It is in the work: the physical means, the structure, the supporting processes, the information about how the work is going.

The other two forms here are quieter. The environment steers elsewhere: handling time is discussed weekly and the result you actually want is not, so the work moves towards what is measured (numbers 09 and 10). And too little reaches the floor: transfer was assumed rather than designed (numbers 03 and 14).

Three shapes that arrive when somebody finally asks

The last act arrives at the end, usually in a review, and by then the cost of each shape is fixed. All three are questions about what was collected rather than about what was done.

And a closing observation that belongs here rather than anywhere else. In almost every one of these scenes the participants are not fooled. They sense, often from the first morning, that the work being done is not the work that would help, and they say so in the corridor and not on the form. A room full of people who are being polite is the most reliable early warning in this whole profession, and it is the one nobody records.

Seventeen shapes, sixteen addresses

Which is what makes this a layer over the series rather than an appendix to it. Every form has an address. You can arrive at the method by knowing which of the five questions you are on, or by recognizing the shape in front of you, and both routes end in the same numbered papers.

Four claims it does not make

A guide made of stories has a particular way of going wrong, and it is worth naming before somebody uses it as an argument.

• These are observations, not findings. Not one of the seventeen forms is a research result, none carries a frequency, and nothing here says how often any of them occurs. They are patterns two practitioners have seen repeatedly over twenty years, first written down in 2008. Number 02 sets out the evidence rule the series follows and why this field has few studies.
• A scene is not a diagnosis. Recognizing the shape tells you what to look at, and it tells you nothing about this case. Every entry points into a number precisely because the work still has to be done, and the guide is at its most dangerous in the hands of somebody who has just learned four names.
• The people in these scenes are competent. The manager convinced of training, the interim manager irritated by his team, the agency that started on Tuesday: all of them are doing something reasonable under the pressures they are actually under. A guide that reads as a catalogue of other people’s stupidity has misunderstood its own subject.
• One of them is ours. The water engineers is our conference, our excellent evaluations and our informally agreed repeat booking. It is in here because a guide to other people’s mistakes is a sales brochure.

Six lines, on the sentence in front of you

Ten minutes, with this guide open. Line one is the only one that needs anybody else in the room, and line six is the one that makes the recognition survive you.

Two problems, one method, sixteen papers

Two models carry the method. Gilbert’s six conditions ask what kind of cause; Rummler and Brache’s three levels ask where it sits. Both are sound and this series uses both, and it leads with Gilbert, because his unit is the accomplishment, which is what an organization already counts, and because his six conditions are the categories an organization can actually change.

Where this comes from

This guide makes no empirical claim of its own. Every scene and every form is an observation from practice, first set out in Kostbaar misverstand and labeled as an observation here. Where that book named a source for a form, that work is listed below in the edition we checked, and it is cited for what it is: an attribution of where a form comes from, not evidence that anything works. The numbers each entry points to carry the argument, the evidence and the limits, and number 02 sets out the evidence rule the series follows, which is that empirical claims rest on meta-analyses and systematic reviews and never on a single study.

Form numbers throughout refer to the twenty forms of the costly misunderstanding as numbered in Kostbaar misverstand. The other two books of the series are listed in full in number 02.