Lean Communication for Leaders Part 3: The Control Paradox

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One of the hardest communication skills to master may be to know how to refrain communicating when necessary. In other words, knowing when to shut up.

Being a leader has never been easy, but in some ways it’s tougher than ever today because of the complexity and dynamism of our environment. When the task is simple, and you have a pretty good idea of what future conditions will be like, you can specify very clearly what you want people to do and expect that they’re not going to encounter many exceptions. If they do, they can ask for direction and you’ll have plenty of time to make the appropriate adjustments.

But when too many changes or unexpected events happen at once, that comfortable system can quickly break down—particularly when a more nimble competitor is behind some of the unexpected events.

In an uncertain environment, the first casualty is clarity. People are less sure of what to do, so the natural tendency for the leader is to step in and tell them. In other words, the reaction to uncertainty is additional detail: “when this happens, do this.” It’s meant to be helpful, but clarity and detail are not synonymous, nor is there a direct linear correlation between them. Sometimes additional detail helps, especially when it gives concrete direction, but too much detail can obscure meaning by overwhelming the person on the spot who is trying to figure out how to react to the novel situation; it can be hard to figure out what’s relevant at that particular moment. It may be an extreme example, but I’m reminded of the recent tragic picture of pilots rapidly thumbing through a loose-leaf manual as their 737 pitches up and down violently and seemingly randomly—and we all know how that scene ended.

As a leader, you value predictability. That’s what plans are for. You plot your moves, forecast their results, and communicate them to the people who have to execute.  But there is a lot of room between intentions and results. When you say do X because you expect Y will happen—but instead Z happens, or Q or K or some totally unexpected such letter, you feel a loss of control. When the situation is slippery, your impulse is to tighten your grip; you put in tighter controls.

But tighter controls require more metrics, which means more reporting, which means less work creating value, while at the same time sending a message to followers that you don’t trust them to use their own judgment, which stifles initiative, which causes you to impose even tighter and more stringent controls. Eventually the control system may require more attention and activity than the environment you’re supposed to be operating in. You become more internally focused, and activity becomes more important than output. In lean terms, more and more of the work you do does not contribute to value for the end customer, who doesn’t care about your policies, processes and KPIs. Eventually the system collapses under its own weight, or you get your clock cleaned by nimbler and more efficient competitors.

The control paradox is that you begin to focus on preventing waste and lose sight of creating value. It also means that reporting replaces dialogue as a means of communication; it makes you—not the end customer—the arbiter of what constitutes value, and thus violates the most important principle of lean.

The drive for control means well, because it’s meant to prevent waste, but reducing or preventing waste, while extremely important, is never the main reason for doing anything; creating value for a customer is.

How to avoid the control paradox

You may find it surprising to learn that the cure for the control paradox comes from an organization that most people don’t know for their flexibility: the military. But it does make sense: what other organization operates in such a chaotic and competitive environment than the military?

Comparisons between military and business operations are often way overdone, but in both fields, an organization attempts to achieve certain goals in a competitive environment. Businesses strive to increase their share value by achieving profit and growth objectives. Their plans, however don’t act on inert objects. They run up against the independent will of customers and competitors, not to mention suppliers, regulators, legislators, general public opinion, changing technologies and even nature itself in a world that is ever more tightly connected and changeable. All of these impact each other in innumerable feedback loops, creating complexity that makes it impossible to plan with precision.

Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military officer, introduced the concept of friction, his term for all the “uncertainties, errors, accidents, technical difficulties, the unforeseen and their effect on decisions, morale, and actions.” In other words, a general can plan in meticulous and brilliant detail how a campaign will go, but things will always deviate from the plan, and an organization must have the capacity to adapt to changed circumstances.

The 19^th century Prussian army, under the tutelage of Helmuth von Moltke, worked out an approach to communication to allow the organization to adapt and avoid the control paradox, and its methods have permeated military planning in the US today to address what writer Stephen Bungay[1] calls performance gaps, but which we can also see as sources of waste:

Knowledge gap: As a leader, you  do not have all the information you need to decide on the best course of action. Or you have too much information, much of which is simply noise.

Alignment gap: Your instructions may not be correctly understood or interpreted by lower levels, or they may not act on them as expected.

Effects gap: Even if everything is done as planned, it does not always have the intended effect, especially when competitors or customers don’t do what we want.

To deal with the knowledge gap, von Moltke said, “Do not command more than is necessary or plan beyond the circumstances you can foresee.” Rather than detailed plans and orders, the leadership communicates its strategic intent, that is what needs to be achieved and why. They set the direction, not the exact path, and let followers figure out the how.

Address the alignment gap by: “Communicat(ing) to every unit as much of the higher intent as is necessary to achieve the purpose.” Make sure that each level clearly understands the intent of two levels above. Thus, when subordinates have to make a quick decision in a new situation, they ask themselves: “What would my boss tell me to do if he knew what I know now?”

Finally, because the top can’t react immediately when actions don’t have the intended effects, “Everyone retains freedom of decision and action within bounds.”  The person on the spot is in the best position to decide what to do.

In other words, the paradox of control is that the only way to retain control is to give it up.

[1] See my previous post recommending his excellent book, The Art of Action.