Harry: 0:00

If you are not taking the facts as some version of reality, and you are deluding yourself or deceiving yourself into thinking that other things are true, at some point, you may very well and in all likelihood will encounter a point where your ability to get what you want is no longer the case. The relationship snaps, the relationship with reality.

Narrator: 0:31

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry: 0:41

Jorge, it's great to see you again. I so appreciate the conversation... the last conversation really kicked off a bunch of thoughts for me. And I brought a reading today that I wasn't... I think I stumbled on it just based on my interest in strategy, strategy deployment, and decision making. And it just seemed so timely. I figured I would add it into the conversation.

Jorge: 1:10

Great to see you again as well, Harry. To refresh people's memory, or in case they didn't listen to our last episode, we were talking about whether money is the horse that's pulling the cart in a business or vice versa somehow, right? What is the business in service to? Is it in service to providing a service and making money off the service, or is it in service of making money? Those will lead to different cultures. And now that you've given us that little preamble and that you brought the word strategy to the table, I am really intrigued to hear what you've brought.

Harry: 1:50

Cool. Okay. As is typical, I'll reveal the title and the author at the end if it isn't self-evident on the way through it. And it's a little long, I apologize for that. But, I think it's definitely worth taking a minute for. Here goes. "At its most simple, executing strategy is about planning to do in order to achieve certain outcomes and making sure that the outcomes we've planned are actually carried out until the desired outcomes are achieved. In stable, predictable environment, it's possible to make quite good plans by gathering and analyzing information. We can learn enough about the outside world and our position in it to set some objectives. We know enough about the effects any action will have to be able to work out what to do to achieve the objectives. We can then use a mixture of supervision, controls, and incentives to coerce, persuade, persuade or cajole people into doing what we want. We can measure the results until the outcomes we want are achieved. We can make plans, take actions, and achieve outcomes in a linear sequence with some reliability. If we're assiduous enough, pay attention to detail, and exercise rigorous control, the sequence will be seamless. In an unpredictable environment, this approach quickly falters. The longer and more rigorous we persist with it, the more quickly and completely things will break down. The environment we're in creates gaps between plans, actions, and outcomes. The gap between plans and outcomes concerns knowledge. It's the difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know. It means that we cannot create perfect plans. The gap between plans and actions concerns alignment. It's the difference between what we would like people to do and what they actually do. It means that even if we encourage them to switch off their brains. We cannot know enough about them to program them perfectly. The gap between actions and outcomes concerns effects. It's the difference between what we hope our actions will achieve and what they actually achieve. We can never fully predict how the environment will react to what we do. It means that we cannot know in advance exactly what outcomes the actions of our organization are going to create. Although it's not common to talk about these three gaps, it is common enough to confront them. It's also common enough to react in ways that make intuitive sense. Faced with a lack of knowledge, it seems logical to seek more detailed information. Faced with a problem of alignment, it feels natural to issue more detailed instructions. And faced with a disappointment of the effects being achieved, it's quite understandable to impose more detailed controls. Unfortunately, these reactions do not solve the problem. In fact, they make it worse. There's a model for creating a link between strategy and operations and bridging three gaps. It involves applying a few general principles in continually changing specific circumstances. They're not difficult to understand, but their implications are profound."

Jorge: 5:36

Now I'm super curious. you said that there were three means to do that.

Harry: 5:42

Yeah. You have to read the book.

Jorge: 5:43

I'm going... it's like, what are they?

Harry: 5:47

Interestingly, you and I have been talking around this topic. Episode after episode, and I think in large measure, we've covered this before and we'll talk about them more right now, but this is a piece, I think it was from chapter one of The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay, which we've talked about previously. And I am keenly interested... I spend so much time with, leaders, teams, and organizations that struggle with the linkages between what it is they want to accomplish and the outcomes they actually get. And Bungee's argument is and he oversimplifies it, I think a little bit, but perhaps in a way that makes it more accessible his argument is that our natural result is to tighten up the cranks and to really do what some people would characterize as micromanage, inadvertently. And the actual approach to getting significantly better outcomes is quite the opposite of that. It's looking at each stage and he only characterizes it as three stages, but I think there are more, we can talk about that in a minute that, if you look at each stage, there are some more generative, more resourceful responses, so rather than falling prey to the natural tendency to micromanage, whether it's to seek more information or to be more specific in what it is you're trying to get done, there are more flexible approaches that you can take to improving the chances that you're gonna get what you want.

Jorge: 7:30

You're right. This is an ongoing theme in our conversations. I'm gonna try to name it because it feels like we have an emergent... I don't think it's yet a framework, but like an emergent set of axes that we can start locating ourselves in. This feels to me like one of the axes here is your degree of delusion. It's like, how delusional are you with regards to what is happening in the world and what you have control over. This might be fresh in my mind because a couple of nights ago I saw the movie Sunset Boulevard, which I don't know if you've seen that with, Gloria Swanson.

Harry: 8:17

Maybe years ago.

Jorge: 8:20

The gist of it is she's a silent... this movie was made in, it came out I think in 1950, And Gloria Swanson plays a silent era movie star whose time has passed. But she does not realize that her time has passed because her environment is very carefully controlled to make it feel like she's on top of the world still. And maybe it's because it's fresh on my mind, but as you were reading that, it came to me. It's like, are we being honest with ourselves? And the degree to which we are acting in ways that we think are going to move us forward, but in reality are only serving to convince us that we are doing something. I had a really insightful interaction with Claude a few days ago. I was working on... I was chatting with Claude about building a sales pipeline for my consulting business, and I was asking about all these ideas that I had and using it how you use AI as a kinda like intellectual sparring partner. I was working in that modality. I was saying, "I could write about this because I think I can write well, and I can do this." And at one point... I have to preface this by saying, I have given Claude instructions to push back on me because I do tend to fall into these traps, and I've explicitly wanted to jar me out of this. So this wasn't an in innate reaction, this was a reaction that I've actually asked for. But Claude came back to me and said, "You need to stop this, because what you're doing. Is you're trying to spend your time in things that you can control because it's going to make you feel better to feel like you're doing something, when in reality what you should be doing is you should be picking up the phone." I'm gonna use air quotes, like you should be picking up the phone and talking with people and actually getting conversations going rather than waffling by doing this other stuff that you think you can control. So I felt a little bit like Gloria Swanson. It's like, "I've configured my environment to make it feel like I'm actually doing things," but it's like, "No, you're not doing things that are really helping you."

Harry: 10:40

Oh my God. That is so Interesting and funny and not funny at the same time.

Jorge: 10:46

Yeah, it's scary, right?

Harry: 10:48

I'm literally having a conversation with a leader right now that I'm trying to move to action and that is the crux of the issue. I really would love for you to send me that piece of text and I'm gonna forward it to him and say, "This is what I'm talking about." Wow, that's so articulate. It's something I knew intuitively but hadn't articulated.

Jorge: 11:13

Yeah, it took me by surprise as well, and it's one of the things that I do find valuable about interacting with these things that, especially if you... Like I said, I intentionally wrote instructions in that Claude project for it to push back on me, but it is helpful to have someone come up and say, "Hey, I could help you with this, but you might be barking up the wrong tree here." That is helpful once in a while. And I don't know if this is in the spirit of what you were saying, but when the reading started by saying that, I forget exactly the wording there, but it was like in a perfect environment, in an environment where you know everything, then yes, plans are linear. No environment is like that, right? Especially now, we live in a world of a lot of uncertainty, complexity. There are no linear situations or very few of them anyway, and certainly none that we have control over. And the question then, and this is where the John Boyd thing that we've talked about so many times comes in, it's like, how effective are you at actually reading the environment accurately and responding in a timely and skillful manner? I think that's the key.

Harry: 12:34

And it's not just responding in a timely and skillful manner, it's orienting. Back to Boyd. It's observe, orient, decide, act. it's about correctly interpreting what's actually happening, what does it all mean? And you have to pass through that meaning making step effectively. What's so profound about this, in addition to the fact it ties back to so many of the conversations we have that you... I think we've talked about my, at one point in my illustrious career, if you wanna call it that, I came up with this, theory of stupidity. Have we ever talked about that? I can't remember.

Jorge: 13:14

I think it came up in one conversation, but recap it.

Harry: 13:17

Yeah, but the, gist of it is like, stupidity is clearly a pejorative term, right? It's probably the wrong term, but it's this idea and it became central to all of my leadership and development, coaching and consulting work, it's still central to so much of what I do now but the idea is, there's no such thing as a stupid person, right? The definition in this limited frame is that stupidity is a result of a series of decisions and actions that lead to results that are the opposite of the intended outcome or the espoused outcome under the conditions of self-deception. So if you say you want X and you do Y and Z and you don't get what you want, is that stupidity? No, if it was a calculated risk. No, if it was a mistake. No, if it was an error in judgment. But yes, if you were being willfully ignorant of the facts. Yes, if you were deceiving yourself into believing that something was true, when in fact it wasn't, or believing something is not true when in fact it is. And this ties directly back to that, because once you get into that mental frame of deceiving yourself into a worldview, the challenge is some of the other cognitive biases start kicking in, like the confirmation bias. You start then inadvertently sorting for information that confirms what you believe and inadvertently and unconsciously dismissing information that might dissuade you from it, for example. And so I do think that this notion of delusion, self delusion, or self deception and the implications of it are central to this.

Jorge: 15:22

Thinking back to it, I do remember us having this conversation, I think it was in episode six, where we talked about Chesterton's Fence, and I remember... and this is coming back to me because the same reaction I had then I'm having now, which is the distinction that comes to my mind is the difference between skillful and unskillful action. And I remember you pushing back on those terms by saying, :No, we actually do need the pejorative, term stupid to describe the situation." And I think it's because what is implied here is unwitting self-sabotage, right? It's like you have this goal and your actions are actually moving you further away from the goal. That's not just unskillful, that's stupid.

Harry: 16:16

Right. Here's where my brain went with this. Many years ago in a land far, away, and maybe this is TMI, I got a divorce. And we are not gonna go into the details of that, but I will tell you that there was this really interesting book I read called Crazy Time, which describes the mechanics of how relationships come undone. And think of it as a diverging set of explicit and implicit agreements. And at some point if those agreements don't get renegotiated, something snaps and you move into the land of unrecoverable. I think that's what happens here too. I think it's the same kind of pattern. It's sort of your relationship with reality, if you will, the kind of explicit and tacit agreements you have with the people, the places, the things, everything that you engage with as a human being, as you move down this path, if you are not taking the facts as some version of reality, and you are deluding yourself or deceiving yourself into thinking that other things are true, at some point, you may very well and in all likelihood will encounter a point where your ability to get what you want is no longer the case. The relationship snaps, the relationship with reality.

Jorge: 17:48

I often use the US Constitution as an example of an effective system...

Harry: 17:59

Hmm.

Jorge: 18:00

That has been working for a long time now. And it's rare. It's almost like software code that's been working as intended. And part of the reason for that is that it does have this amendment mechanism, which, maybe it's not used as much as it could be because the world that we live in is very different than the world that this piece of software was written for. But one of the points of the creation of that document that I often think about is that Thomas Jefferson, one of the people who, at a minimum, influenced the ideas that went into it argued that it should be rewritten anew every, I think it was like every 19 years, because of the very reason that you're bringing up here, right? The environment changes, contexts change, and you need to renegotiate agreements.

Harry: 19:12

Right. And sometimes it's just the understanding of what those agreements are. It's not actually the agreements in spirit themselves.

Jorge: 19:20

Oh, say that again.

Harry: 19:22

Yeah, I was thinking that it may not be about the spirit of the agreements, but how those are articulated over time, right? Because how we understand those agreements may change as context and environment changes. They may need to be described in different language, for example, to make the same point, lest they be limited in terms of their applicability because of the language that was selected at the time. They become hard to interpret.

Jorge: 19:54

Absolutely. And changes in the context lead to very different implications for some of the... the things that you agreed to in the past you might not agree to today given new technologies, new social and cultural norms, new ways of working, new... I don't know, maybe you have new neighbors in the world, countries change around you. No, I'm thinking in terms of a country. But to your point, like this applies also to personal relationships. It applies to the business. But let's take a step back here and try to slap snow chains on this thing. What does this mean for somebody who's trying to gain traction, specifically in their work life?

Harry: 20:49

I think a couple things. One, like this prioritization principle jumps up, which is, if we had infinite resources, we would just do everything. We wouldn't need to prioritize, really. We could just willy-nilly go invest in everything we want to have happen, and we would do that. And I think likewise, when, in an environment that's perfect, in an environment that's predictable and sequential and consistent, sure you can just tighten the screws, right? You can get more specific, you can gather more information, you can do the things that Bungay talks about. But that's just not reality. In reality, you're dealing with a dynamic complexity of an environment that as a leader, forces you to reconcile what's actually happening in the outside world as fact with the truths that you hold, and modifying how you think about the world and incorporating that into the intersection of the purpose that you have, the mission that you are pursuing, the strategy you've decided on, the decisions that follow that, the actions that lead from those decisions, and the results that you're getting, all in service of these outcomes you hope for. Like you need better, more creative, more flexible approaches to addressing the gaps between those way points. Otherwise, you're gonna continue getting results that are, at worst, the opposite of what you say you want.

Jorge: 22:37

I'll read it back to you. To prioritize effectively, you have to be able to read the room clearly. You have to be able to read the environment, right?

Harry: 22:49

That's right.

Jorge: 22:50

And if I might add like a practical thing that someone listening in could do is examine your sources of information about what is happening in the world, whether at large or in your particular corner of the world, and try to determine, to the degree you can determine such a thing, how much you've crafted your inputs to convey to you the picture of the world that you want to receive versus a picture of the world that makes you doubt your position. Or to put it in other terms, like try doing something like what I did with Claude, where you're prompting it to push back on you rather than reinforce your beliefs, right? Nudge you out of your comfort zone to perhaps look at angles you might have missed. Is that fair?

Harry: 23:55

Totally. You want to look at it as feedback and with the frame that feedback is a gift. You may not like it, as one friend of mine says, "The facts are friendly," right? That's not, the facts themselves don't convey any emotion. It's your reaction to them that you'd really need to manage.

Jorge: 24:15

Well, feedback... I'm saying it this way specifically because I think that for the last maybe fifteen years or so, we've become enmeshed in these thought bubbles where we only read the media that agrees with our worldview. And I think that's now a cliche when it comes to the news, for example. But we run at risk of doing that in our personal and professional work as well. We have such control over our inputs now that it is possible to set things up to tell us the stories we wanna hear, rather than the stories that we need to hear. And the question is, how do you nudge yourself out of that?

Harry: 25:10

I just wanna underscore maybe a piece of this, which is, back to your news example, I think a lot of people who fall prey to this don't realize they're in a structured information funnel. And I think where this gets interesting is, when you're not aware of the fact it's happening, that's when it really behooves you to be intentional like you were with your conversation with Claude about asking specifically for pushback.

Jorge: 25:41

Yeah, I think that's the muscle that we have to flex here.

Harry: 25:44

I think that's right.

Jorge: 25:45

Get me out of my comfort zone.

Harry: 25:47

that's right. That's powerful. Tell me what I don't want to hear. And in my book and when I went to 21st Century leadership up in Tacoma, Washington, one of the questions that they put forward in that training was, what are you pretending not to know?

Jorge: 26:06

Ooh.

Harry: 26:08

What are you pretending not to know? That allows you to interrogate yourself. That's a very powerful mechanism for accomplishing this without having to talk to anybody.

Jorge: 26:20

Ok, that's it. I'm going to go off and do some introspection, Harry. Thank you for that.

Harry: 26:25

Thank you so much. That was a fun one. Really appreciated the conversation.

Narrator: 26:30

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.