Sloan Management Review,March 30, 2010
Teams that fight wildfires have much to teach business managers about preventing complex and dynamic problems from spiraling out of control.
In many disasters, an important factor is what we call “dysfunctional momentum,” which occurs when people continue to work toward an original goal without pausing to recalibrate or reexamine their processes, even in the face of cues that suggest they should change course. Dysfunctional momentum arises daily in organizations, and sometimes with dreadful results. The members of a project that spiraled out of control look back and wonder: How did we get there? How did we miss the cues that might have signaled huge problems ahead? Or, if they did see the cues: Why didn’t we change course?
The Leading Question
How does dysfunctional momentum come about and what can managers do to prevent it?
Findings
¦When engrossed in an action, we tend not to notice small problems that may grow into large ones.
¦To overcome dysfunctional momentum, we have to be interrupted or create an interruption ourselves.
¦Practice ‘‘situated humility.” As no one person can solve the problem alone, diverse input is essential.
Company managers can learn a lot about preventing dysfunctional momentum, and ultimately avoiding business disasters, from people whose everyday job is to manage complex and volatile situations. People involved in high-hazard work such as firefighting have to be more vigilant about emerging problems not only because of their responsibilities to the public but also because their lives depend on it. Thus, they are experts at recognizing and overcoming the forces of dysfunctional momentum — valuable skills to share with the rest of the world. And even on occasions when they fail to get it right, there are valuable lessons for us all.
Momentum can become dysfunctional for at least five reasons:
1. Action orientation. Our culture values action and decisiveness; we get rewarded for making progress and getting things done, especially in hypercompetitive business environments.
2. Inflexible planning. The implementation of plans is critical to organizational success and is one of the key ways in which managers display competence. But planning often locks business organizations into courses of action because the repercussions of going off-plan are so serious.
3. The ripple effect. The interdependencies of an organization’s components often mean that small changes in one part of the system can affect multiple other parts.
4. Rationalization. We experience pleasure when our beliefs are reinforced. Conversely, disconfirming evidence causes discomfort, so we tend to ignore it.
5. Deference to perceived expertise. Finally, momentum is fueled because people often rely on the experience of others, particularly those with more power and status, and abdicate their own responsibility for monitoring situations and taking action to change them if necessary.
Interruptions Situated humility is critical to overcoming dysfunctional momentum because it directly drives behaviors that create interruptions, which in turn may lead to revisions of beliefs and changes in actions. We identify four such behaviors:
1. Voicing concerns. Any good manager recognizes the importance of encouraging employees to speak up about problems or concerns. People closest to front-line operations, after all, are most likely to be the first ones to notice that situations may be going awry.
2. Being skeptical of experts. We also saw many instances of individuals not speaking up about impending dangers. The most common reason for that, however, was not what we might have expected. We know that people sometimes don’t voice their concerns because they fear repercussions — that in one way or another they will be punished.
3. Seeking diverse perspectives. When people, especially leaders, seek out a range of perspectives, they are actively interrupting their own thought processes and actions, thereby creating space to reevaluate the situation and potentially take different and more effective actions.
4. Creating availability/accessibility. Many of the incidents in which actions continued along a disastrous path had decision makers not only failing to seek out other perspectives but also making themselves unavailable to those perspectives.
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