Thursday, October 16, 2014

Is Leaders' Talk Cheap?

Earlier this year, two sociologists provoked a probing debate about the integrity and value of interviewing as a research method.  Colin Jerolmack and Shamus Khan, respectively of New York University and Columbia University & Berlin School of Creative Leadership (Steinbeis University), launched their broadside in the May 2014 issue of Sociological Methods & Research.  While this methodological deep dive and accompanying critical discussion were made in the context of a specific discipline, the challenges mounted have relevance for research in all fields where interviews are widely used.  For management and business studies, in particular, in which interviews of leaders are often central to substantiating and defending accounts and insights of organizational and industry practice, such questioning has potentially far-reaching implications.

Though Jerolmack and Khan’s argument is dense and sophisticated, one of their major concerns is captured in what they call the ‘Attitudinal Fallacy,’ which claims that correlations of reported attitudes with situated behavior are never high enough to presume equivalence. ‘Attitudes are poor predictors of action’, they contend, and since interviews are shaped by and convey subjects’ attitudes, they constitute an inherently unreliable approach to researching the reality of these individuals’ actions. 

Respondents to the original piece closely engaged this issue of ‘ABC’, or Attitude-Behavior Consistency.  For instance, Karen Cerulo, a researcher of cognition and culture at Rutgers, acknowledged the longstanding discrepancy or word and action while nevertheless urging that critics don’t overstate the problem.  Sometimes what people think or say does inform what they do, she notes, and so we should still value, if with more circumspection, the content of interviews.  Moreover, even if words and actions are sometimes specifically inconsistent, individual level data can sometimes illustrate more general patterns of action worth highlighting.

To their credit, Jerolmack and Khan don’t reject interviews entirely but instead call for greater methodological pluralism in research.  Rather than relying entirely or disproportionately on interviews, in other words, they urge increased deployment of ethnographies, deep or participant observation, qualitative data gathering, little or big data, and holistic analysis.  In research on business and leadership, especially, questioning the integrity of interviews and calling for multiple research methods compounds the challenge of gathering data and insights about individuals and organizations. 

This is not only an issue for researchers of business and management research and analysis but for readers and practitioners.  Ask yourself: How many recent books or articles on leadership or effective business practice have you read that rely on interviews, typically of successful leaders about their beliefs and experiences, to advance a distinctive insight or approach?  Content drawn from interviews or other first-person sourcing of business leaders’ viewpoints is especially common, indeed is a major selling point, in popular business writing and journalism.  

Connecting Individual Attitudes with Organizational Behaviors
The words of leaders are typically taken by readers and listeners as reliable expressions of their behaviors – past, present, or future.  The credibility of those words, and those speaking or writing them, is crucial, of course, and turns back to the fundamental challenge of ABC.  While we may debate whether Marissa Mayer’s online strategy for Yahoo! is the right one, for example, we accept that her words capture what she and the company are actually doing.

Yet the matters of credibility and consistency are further tested by the break between individual claims or characterizations and the often widely disparate actions of organizations.  Even as leaders speak, the connection to collective behavior – as summary, explanation, cause, plan – remains opaque amidst so many possible causes.  As much as we want to ground our understanding of corporate and collective reality in personal attitudes, explaining corporate or organizational behavior demands wider attention to persons, situations and the actual interactions between them.

Research and Access in Business and Organizations
Jerolmack and Khan identify another shortcoming, the ‘Accounting Fallacy’, to emphasize the fallibility of individual accounts and self-reporting and how they cannot accurately stand in for analyses of actual behavior.  To generate wider explanations of the situations and interactions in organizational life requires multiple research approaches.  Yet in most corporate settings, these are impossible for outside researchers and analysts to pursue.  Confidentiality, distraction, and the priorities of time and other resource allocation typically limit or preclude more robust access to people and situations.   

The usual response to this lack of access is to judge leaders’ words by specific indicators of their organizations’ performance.  Rather than methodological pluralism in research about corporate actions, particular outcomes – like products, services, and financial, innovation or creative results – become the basis for assessing those words.  This makes certain sense.  After all, we invest in some firms, say Alibaba, because of the value they can deliver or promise to customers and in the marketplace.  Yet even in a world of inevitably incomplete information, attributing the successful or failed results of complex organizational behavior to individual words is a poor substitute for ascertaining more robust and varied understanding of the actual collective situations producing the results. 

Interviews as Public and Professional Performances
Another source of uncertainty in trying to connect the words of leaders to their organizations’ actions is the recognition that many interviews, whether public or ostensibly not, are performances.  Both the carefully crafted pronouncements of leaders and their closely managed professional personae affect whatever claims researchers and others may be able to make about them.  Even when the words may not correspond to actual behaviors of the organization, present or past, they may nevertheless be presented in the interests of the company, its brand management, and public relations.

Ultimately, an ethical aspect emerges here: do we trust what leaders say?  And even if we recognize that some words may be exaggerated (recall Steve Jobs’ ‘reality distortion field’), do we justify that hyperbole in terms of other ends, like increasing shareholder or market value or hyping and delivering new products?  While the trust issue exists in all interviews, where we can question the correlation of self-reports of behavior, the test of consistency between words and actions becomes all the more complicated when leaders may be trying to achieve multiple ends and speak to multiple audiences in the same interview.

Authorities, Elites, and Celebrities
If the interview responses of leaders are shaped by a range of organizational interests, the interactions with researchers and others that prompt these responses can be strongly impacted by the status or reputation of the leader himself or herself.  We choose to interview or otherwise solicit the perspectives of leaders in the first place because of their experience or position, expertise or accomplishment.  Yet that very appeal to authority can limit the thoroughness of the interview and consequently the integrity of the verbal data emerging from it.

At a practical and human level, interacting with very senior or elite leaders involves unequal power relations that can be difficult to navigate.  Consider the prospect of interviewing Richard Branson or Sheryl Sandberg or Martin Sorrell.  Establishing the kind of access, trust and rapport so important for substantive exchanges and then producing meaningful data is particularly challenging with the involvement of subjects like these who possess great seniority, reputation, and even celebrity.

Caveat Lector
Taken together, these considerations suggest that interviews with leaders, since they typically concern collective or corporate behaviors as well as those leaders’ reports of their own individual actions, would benefit from more multidimensional analysis and layered understanding of their accounts.  While this call resonates with Jerolmack and Khan’s general imperative to expand the range and integration of methods employed in researching social or corporate action, it takes on special significance in a field of research where leaders’ words are accorded such value and prominence.  For external researchers of organizations, gaining meaningful access and developing robust contextual understanding of the special situations (and constraints) of organizational life are ongoing challenges.  For readers of business and management research as well as more popular analyses reliant upon the words of leaders, the methodological debate should prompt us to question, constructively but more diligently, the accuracy of the claims leaders make about their own actions as well as those of their organizations.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Move Fast (Together) and Fix Things: Some Lessons of Crisis Leadership

Early this summer in Tokyo, I had the opportunity to hear an insightful presentation on the media and social responses to the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown.  The session was part of a Berlin School of Creative Leadership Executive MBA module in Asia and the presenter was an alumnus of that program, Yukio Nakayama, who serves as Executive Creative Director at the Dentsu advertising agency.  After providing general background on the events, Yukio’s account focused on how Dentsu adapted the Internavi system, which provided everyday on-demand traffic information to individual drivers in Honda vehicles, to generate public mapping of road usage and access through Twitter and Google in the early days of the crisis. Extending the Internavi system and data on 311 is an inspiring example of how creative solutions to crises can emerge with the right leadership.

Before sketching out possible broader leadership lessons of the episode, we should be clear about what we mean by “crisis.”  Helpful here is Herman “Dutch” Leonard’s call to distinguish routine from novelty.  We can’t, Harvard professor Leonard believes, treat a true crisis as simply an “overgrown routine situation.”  This problem of misperception occurs even in conscientious crisis preparation and planning efforts, when the underlying approach is to deploy more of the same kinds of resources (like police, medical, and food, reconstruction, data management) as during normal, non-crisis times.   

We need also to take care to differentiate crises of the order of what happened in Japan in 2011 from crises faced by many organizational and business leaders.  As important, even existential, as the latter may be for some firms, their crises lack the social, cultural and economic scale and sweeping life-and-death risks of 311.  That said, in assessing such an immense event, we might nevertheless extract some principles that bear on the still complex decision-making and communications challenges faced by business leaders.  

Explaining how Dentsu adapted Internavi’s capabilities within 20 hours for public benefit, Yukio illuminated several key tenets of successful leadership.  These began with a situational awareness that enabled his colleagues to recognize the difference between the exceptional character of 311 and routine accidents or congestion.  Also necessary was an understanding of how to build sudden collaborative structures across diverse institutions and constituencies.  Preparation was essential, but, again, had to be of the appropriate type: while simulations and scenarios were fine, developing and testing capabilities for cooperation across organizations and with the public proved more helpful once the nuclear disaster occurred.  Those capabilities, more specifically, included how to enable improvisation and, in this case, address and communicate quickly the problem of producing accurate traffic and road information. 

The development of Internavi is a great example of decentralized intelligent adaptation at a societal level.  Structurally, that decentralization involved non-hierarchical or top-down relationships among multiple public and private institutions enabled by technology.  The intelligent adaptation was likewise marked by an ongoing and effective process of inquiry that facilitated collaborative problem-solving and communications.

Such tenets and tendencies are hardly unique to the Japanese experience, of course.  In the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing Response [MBR], analysts found the successes of a variety of responders benefited from similar values of situational, collaborative, improvisational and inquiring leadership.  In fact, the preliminary findings of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, released in April 2014, identified five foundations of the intelligence and leadership that shaped the Boston MBR:

1) An overriding objective that: forges unity of mission and connectivity of action; is compelling enough to override standard practices as needed; and obviates bureaucratic obstructions, distractions or bickering.
2) A spirit of generosity that rallies groups and individuals to assist one another and overcome constraints of resources, know-how or tools to achieve the paramount mission, expressed as “Whaddya got? Whaddaya need?”
3) Respect for the responsibilities and authorities of others, described as “staying in one’s lane” while assisting others to succeed in their lane to accomplish mission-critical duties and tasks.
4) Neither taking undue credit nor pointing blame among key players, oftentimes portrayed as “checking your ego at the door.”
5) Genuine inter-personal trust and respect developed well before the event so that existing and dependable leadership relationships, integrity, and camaraderie can be leveraged during the event, often described as “don’t wait for an emergency to exchange business cards.

The preliminary report discussed these findings as a positive instance of “swarm intelligence,” which is more generally understood as the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems.  The concept initially arose with efforts to analyze and explain complexity in multi-agent systems, from bacterial growth, ant colonies and fish schooling to robot interactions and artificial intelligence.  Among the usual precepts of swarm intelligence are diversity, independence and decentralization.  In contrast to other approaches to group interactions and behavior, the concept also recognizes that too much internal communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent. 

Analyses of responses to 311 in Japan and the Boston Marathon bombing offer valuable insights for leaders about how to work effectively in complex, decentralized systems dealing with novel and fast-changing situations.  Yet their lessons, important as they are, tend to focus on the macro-level of institutional relationships or group dynamics and on the resulting decision-making, action and communications.  While they recognize how essential are collaborative and trusting interpersonal relationships, in other words, it was beyond the scope of the analyses to examine more closely how individual leaders should behave to ensure the best collective decision-making and actions.   

That research is ongoing elsewhere, perhaps most notably at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  Among the key factors of collective intelligence that have been identified there thus far is “social perception,” that is, the ability to discern someone else’s thinking and emotions.  “When it comes to the effectiveness of groups,” said Thomas Malone, head of CCI, in a recent interview, “we are what we see in each other.”  Beyond empathy, this social perceptiveness involves discernment of others as well as a kind of ongoing awareness of, and commitment to, the versatility of thinking and equality of contributions across the group.

A final level of leadership to be addressed in coping with crises involves the leader himself or herself.  Not surprisingly, perhaps the best guidance in this regard comes from Bill George, the former Medtronic CEO and current Harvard Business School professor of management practice who wrote Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis in 2009.  While much of the book addresses larger aspects of crises, it does so from the leader’s perspective (e.g., “dig deep for the root cause” or “blending internal and external communications”).  However, at least two of George’s lessons, including the first, concern the leader’s own self-understanding: “Face reality, starting with yourself” and “You’re in the spotlight; Follow True North.”

Recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses and remaining true to one’s values and purpose are enablers of leadership success in all situations.  However, in crises, such self-understanding and authenticity in decisions and actions are vital.  George goes on to ask, “Will you stay focused on your True North or will you succumb to pressure?”  The pressure and stress of crises derives from many causes, notably the novelty, complexity, and urgency of the dynamic situations they present.  Retaining the presence of mind to think, act and work with others according to one’s own values while responding to those situations is a consummate leadership challenge.

Whether they are at the scale of 311 and the Boston Marathon Bombing or of a single organization whose local world has been turned upside down, crises are crucible experiences that define leaders.  Yet perhaps counter-intuitively, an abiding lesson of the responses to these massive events is that more effective leadership resulted from individuals ceding control, sharing responsibilities, and openly collaborating and communicating with others.  Rather than relying on a single authoritative leader taking unilateral actions and decisions, success emerged from individuals humbly willing to contribute to decentralized leadership and decision-making, to work collectively with a common purpose, and to learn together to solve novel problems.