Major Breakdowns and the Alignment of Errors

Who is responsible for the housing crisis? Some candidates are borrowers, lenders, rating agencies, and securities investors.  However, attempts to blame one party or another fail, because the crisis is the result of a combination of errors by different parties which all aligned. Think of a wedge of Swiss cheese; to see through it, all the holes must line up. This approach is explained in James Reason’s Human Error, and illustrated in a diagram from that book:

In the housing crisis, here are some errors which had to align to get to where we are today:

1) Borrowers took out loans they couldn’t afford

2) Lenders made loans to borrowers which the borrowers couldn’t afford

3) Ratings agencies rated securities comprised of these loans as safe

4) Security purchasers relied on the erroneous ratings and bought the securities

Any of these parties could have averted the crisis had they avoided their respective error.

In any complex system, it’s often more likely that a major breakdown is the result of an alignment of errors, rather than the failure of a single component.

People Remember Your Worst Moments

I’ve previously posted on why people tend to remember your worst reasons for your decisions (see here). This is true of all kinds of behavior – Tom Cruise spends a lot of time in the public eye, but what most people remember is his bizarre behavior in this video of an interview with Oprah.

Via Newmark’s Door, here are two entertaining collections of famous worst moments:

Seven Great Talk Show Train Wrecks

The Twenty Weirdest TV Interviews of All Time

It’s obvious, but if you want to be an effective manager, don’t say or do stupid things.

Management Stress and Meetingitis

Via Newmark's Door, Secretgeek on "The Deadly Cycle of Meetingitis." Here’s an excerpt:

1. Q:What do managers do when they're stressed?
   • A:They call a meeting.
2. Q:What gets managers stressed out?
   • A:When projects are not making progress.
3. Q:When do projects fail to make progress?
   • A:When people spend too much time in meetings.

Secretgeek is talking about programming code crises, but the cycle applies to any situation which creates manager stress. The important part of this cycle is the root cause – it’s not the status of the project, it’s the manager’s stress.

Secretgeek’s solution:

Communicate more, in order to meet less. Be proactive in your communication. Don't wait for them to call a meeting. Tell them what's going on. Produce regular reports. Don't "promise" to produce regular reports -- just produce them. Let them listen in on some of your day to day chatter. If you have daily standups, bring the manager in. Stop baffling them with technical mumbo jumbo. Feed them edible slices of information. Walk them through it in bite-sized chunks. Give them documentation tasks to keep them feeling important. Give them communication tasks. Draw pictures for them to stick on the wall of their office.

Keeping manager’s in the loop obviously helps, but in my experience managers only calm down when they develop confidence their people are on top of the issues and elevate them when necessary. It takes time and positive experience for people to develop that kind of credibility with their management (more on that here). Unfortunately, that level of confidence may never develop if the manager believes progress is a result of their involvement and not their staff’s work.

The Inevitability of Errors

Errors are inevitable – no matter what the stakes, no matter how much you practice, things are going to go wrong a certain percentage of the time in any complex task or decision. The New York Times has an article with an excellent example: basketball free throws.

There is nothing in sports as straightforward as a free throw; the equipment is always the same, the geometry is constant, and there is no defense interfering. The only variables are the player’s concentration and control over his or her body. And yet, at the highest level of the game, it goes wrong 25% of the time, year after year after year:

In the National Basketball Association, the average has been roughly 75 percent for more than 50 years. Players in college women’s basketball and the W.N.B.A. reached similar plateaus — about equal to the men — and stuck there.

The general expectation in sports is that performance improves over time. Future athletes will surely be faster, throw farther, jump higher. But free-throw shooting represents a stubbornly peculiar athletic endeavor. As a group, players have not gotten better. Nor have they become worse.

“It’s unbelievable,” Larry Wright, an adjunct professor of statistics at Columbia, said as he studied the year-by-year averages. “There’s almost no difference. Fifty years. This is mind-boggling.”

And it’s not like the stakes aren’t high:

Last season, Memphis was 38-2 despite making only 61 percent of its free throws, missing an average of nearly 10 a game. The Tigers lost the national championship game after missing 4 of 5 free throws in the final 72 seconds against Kansas, which had made a late 3-point shot to tie the game and won in overtime…About two-thirds of a winning team’s points in the final minute typically come from the free-throw line…

Obviously, we need to work to eliminate mistakes and design systems to minimize the chance of them occurring. But, a certain percentage of the time errors will happen. Learn what you can from them and move on.

Keep the Bonuses, Change the Criteria

Thomas Gehrig and Lukas Menkhoff at VOX survey the research on bonuses and suggest we keep them, with some changes. An excerpt:

In fact, banks themselves are trying to correct their internal incentive schemes in order to re-adjust incentives on longer horizons. They seem to largely agree that, prior to the crisis, their systems may have been excessively short-sighted, and they are now trying to base rewards on more sustainable performance criteria such as average growth rates and volumes across longer sampling periods.

My suggestion (posted here) is measuring shareholder equity over a five year period.

Management, Feedback, and US Air Flight 1549

Via The Big Picture, an amazing animation with audio of the US Air Flight 1549 takeoff and landing.

It’s striking how the flight controllers’ understanding of the situation lags actual conditions. I think there’s a parallel with management and regulator understanding of what’s happening on the ground (or in the air, in this case) during rapidly changing conditions.

Do You Work for a Hopscotch Organization?

You probably remember the playground game hopscotch. I think there are some parallels between the game and working in many organizations.

Let’s say you have a simple task to do – you need to get from one side of a room to the other. In a hopscotch organization, you don’t simply walk across the room; you have to hop in a series of boxes in the proper sequence. For example:

Here’s a link to a video which shows the game in action.

Obviously, this is more complicated than simply doing the task. If you can, it makes sense to work on process improvements to simplify hopscotch procedures whenever you encounter them. But what if you can’t?

If my job was nothing but one hopscotch task after another, I think I would probably end up feeling the company was too stupid to be associated with, and would leave.

But, it’s more likely that hopscotch tasks are occasional irritants. If that’s the case, view them like hopscotch - a game you can excel at. Kids, after all, play hopscotch for fun, and a good hopscotch player can cross the course faster than most people can walk it. By all means work to change the game, but in the meantime learn to play, and take pleasure in the challenge.

Micro Management, Tough Times, and Trust

Paul McCord has an excellent post at the Sales and Sales Management Blog on the downward spiral micro management creates. Although the focus of his piece is on sales, what Paul has to say applies to the effect of micro management on productivity throughout the organization. An excerpt:

As morale declines and sales lag even further, senior management gives more and more directives, demanding greater control and more ‘accountability’ on each employee’s part.  When today’s demands don’t create the desired result, they’re added to or changed tomorrow, spiraling in a seemingly never-ending series of demands and threats, each more ominous than the last.

And sales plunge even faster than before.

Once management panics it seems impossible to stop the downhill flow of negative consequences.  The more pressure management feels, the more they try to spread the pressure downward, believing they can demand production via force.

The process inevitably produces nothing other than a bigger hole from which the company must emerge.

If micro managing is such a negative force, why do managers resort to it?  The root cause may be panic, but the belief they need to micro manage their team is based squarely in a distrust of their employees-a belief that their salespeople and managers aren’t working hard enough, that the sales team doesn’t care enough, that their team is intrinsically lazy and is only looking for the low hanging fruit, not willing to get dirty and dig for the hard to find business.

I agree that micro management is much more common when there is a lack of trust in the organization. This tendency is especially obvious when new management is brought in to “solve the problem”. By definition the new manager has no history with the existing employees, so the natural tendency is to assume the problem is attributable to them. This is a difficult perception to turn around until successes start happening and the credibility of the existing employees is established. It may never happen if the manager believes the successes are attributable to his or her micro management.

It’s not just an issue of trust, however; micro management can be a problem during hard times even when there is trust in the organization. Demands for information are one form of micro management.  To solve problems information is needed, so during hard times the demand for information from upper management increases. The only way for middle management to satisfy that demand is greater involvement in the work flow. This is not a trust issue; upper management is trying to do their job and solve the problem, and they need information to do it. Unfortunately, an inherent side effect is the time and resources spent gathering and communicating the information are time and resources diverted from other more productivity activities.

Another cause of micro management is the tendency of managers to return to their comfort zone. During tough times, good managers want to contribute to the solution. If a manager has experience doing the work their employees do, it’s very tempting to satisfy the urge to contribute by taking a more active role in that work. For example, if an employee negotiates a deal and the manager tweaks it to make it a little better for the company, the manager feels like he or she has added value. It’s very difficult for managers to stick to their jobs when the pressure is on.

A Modest Proposal to Reform Management Compensation

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a post on incentive compensation in Financial Times which describes the problem with the typical bonus plan. Here’s an excerpt:

Take two bankers. The first is conservative. He produces one annual dollar of sound returns, with no risk of blow-up. The second looks no less conservative, but makes $2 by making complicated transactions that make a steady income, but are bound to blow up on occasion, losing everything made and more. So while the first banker might end up out of business, under competitive strains, the second is going to do a lot better for himself. Why? Because banking is not about true risks but perceived volatility of returns: you earn a stream of steady bonuses for seven or eight years, then when the losses take place, you are not asked to disburse anything. You might even start again, after blaming a “systemic crisis” or a “black swan” for your losses. As you do not disgorge previous compensation, the incentive is to engage in trades that explode rarely, after a period of steady gains.

Taleb’s solution is radical:

We trust military and homeland security people with our lives, yet they do not get a bonus. They get promotions, the honour of a job well done and the disincentive of shame if they fail. Roman soldiers signed a sacramentum accepting punishment in the event of failure. This is prompting me to call for the nationalisation of the utility part of banking as the only solution in which society does not grant individuals free options to look after its risks.

I like the military analogy, but I think Taleb goes further than needed in eliminating bonuses entirely, and I think he doesn’t go far enough when he limits the proposal only to banking. Here is what I propose for all managers of public companies (or private ones which rely on public support, for example, a privately held bank).

1) Your base pay is limited to it’s military equivalent:

2) The rest of your compensation is in the form of whatever bonus your company thinks is appropriate – no mandated limits or performance criteria. However, the bonus must be paid in cash, and it gets paid into a federal trust fund.

3) After five years, the trustees compare the shareholder equity for the year the bonus was paid with current shareholder equity. If equity is the same or has increased, the bonus is paid. If shareholder equity has declined the bonus is forfeited and used to offset costs of administering the trust and then for some good purpose (education, or unemployment benefit funding). You don’t have to stay at the company to get the bonus.

This approach will cause managers to be thinking about values five years out, which should be a long enough horizon to avoid the problem Taleb describes. It also encourages managers to control employees engaging in risky actions (e.g., traders), and to move on if they think the company is taking excessive risks.

There are plenty of potential objections, but I think the most serious one is that some risk taking often produces real long term rewards, and this approach will dampen productive risk taking in public companies. That’s true, but I think it’s mitigated by the fact that private companies and partnerships will still be around to take big risks, and to provide opportunities for those who can’t wait five years for their reward.

Why I Don’t Promise to Keep Secrets

When someone starts off with, “Between you and me…”, “In confidence…”, “Off the record…”, etc., I stop them, immediately, and tell them this story.

Back in 1993 I was a middle manager at Home Savings of America, managing a group of income property workout officers. I was based in Los Angeles, and some of my direct reports were in New York. On one of my trips to New York, a peer manager based in New York who also reported to my boss took me aside and said she would like to talk to me about a problem, but that I had to promise to keep it in confidence.

I agreed. Everybody likes a secret, and being taken into someone’s confidence is flattering. It developed that one of my officers disagreed with her handling of some issues, and the dispute had ended with some very inflammatory comments by my employee which clearly fell in the category of sexual harassment.

If you work for a company of any size you have been through sexual harassment trainings (probably more than once), and pretty much everyone now knows if this sort of thing occurs it gets reported to the Human Resources department, end of story. But, those guidelines were not in place in 1993. I also knew that the proper handling of this would have been for the woman to report it to our boss, but I also knew why she didn’t. Our boss would have handled the problem with a hammer, and the New York manager was hoping I would take a gentler approach to solving the problem.

Which I did, starting with a strong talk with my employee which left him badly shaken and contrite, and an apology from him to the woman he harassed. I followed up a few weeks later with the New York manager, and she was happy with the result. I was feeling good.

Until a week later, when my boss called me into her office and (justifiably) ripped me a new one for leaving her out of the loop. It seems the story was just too good for the New York manager to keep to herself, and the people she told thought it was too good to keep to themselves, and eventually the story made its way to my boss.

If a secret is so compelling it needs to be a secret, it’s so compelling it will eventually come out. Now, when someone starts to tell me a secret, I stop them and tell them that I will act as I see appropriate, which may mean disclosing the secret. I share the above story with them. Almost always they tell me anyway, and I am free to take the appropriate action without tying myself in knots trying to preserve confidentiality.

Lumpers, Splitters, and Decisionmaking

There are two kinds of people; lumpers, and splitters. Lumpers look for commonalities, and lump things into groups. Splitters look for differences between things, and treat each individually.

For example, you, Ernst, and Ralph are looking at a toy poodle, a labrador, a newfoundland, a sharpei, and a mastiff playing in a dog park. You ask them each to break the dogs into groups.

Ernst says there is just one group – they’re all dogs. Ernst is a lumper. You press him, and he comes up with this group:

Color	Dogs
White	Toy Poodle
Black	Labrador
	Newfoundland
Brown	Mastiff
	Sharpei

You press him some more, and Ernst identifies this group:

Size	Dogs
Large	Newfoundland
	Mastiff
Medium	Labrador
Small	Toy Poodle
	Sharpei

Now it’s Ralph’s turn. Ralph says there are no groups, all the dogs are different. You press him, and Ralph comes up with this:

Color, Size	Dogs
White, Small	Toy Poodle
Black, Medium	Labrador
Black, Large	Newfoundland
Brown, Small	Sharpei
Brown, Large	Mastiff

Note that, although Ralph has identified categories, each dog has his own.

Neither of these approaches is wrong – you need both approaches to make effective decisions. For example, an extreme lumper will not be effective at working out loans, because he or she will offer the same modification to every borrower, and the same modification will not work for every borrower. An extreme splitter will also be ineffective, because every modification will be customized for each borrower, and the time that takes will result in few modifications being completed.

The error lumpers make is the failure to identify relevant differences. The error splitters make is to identify differences which are not salient, encumbering the decisionmaking process.

Ideally, what you want is to identify the salient differences between borrowers (a splitter skill), and group the borrowers according to their salient differences (a lumper skill) so similar modifications can be offered to the each group.

Obviously, people can put on different hats and function as a splitter some of the time and as a lumper on other occasions. I do believe, however, that people have a preferred mode.

These ideas are drawn from Scott Page’s excellent book, The Difference, which I highly recommend.

Are You Consistent Enough to Manage at Wal-Mart?

From Carpe Diem:

Charles Platt (picture above) is a journalist, computer programmer and author of over 40 fiction and nonfiction books and was a senior writer at Wired magazine. Charles moved recently from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position at Wal-Mart, "a company reviled by almost all living journalists," after he read the book "Nickel and Dimed," in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America…Here are some excerpts from his BoingBoing blog post "Life at Wal-Mart":

Several of my co-workers had relocated from other areas, where they had worked at other Wal-Marts. They wanted more of the same. Everyone agreed that Wal-Mart was preferable to the local Target, where the hourly pay was lower and workers were said to be treated with less respect (an opinion which I was unable to verify). Most of all, my coworkers wanted to avoid those “mom-and-pop” stores beloved by social commentators where, I was told, employees had to deal with quixotic management policies, while lacking the opportunities for promotion that exist in a large corporation.

No surprise that better pay, being treated with respect, and opportunities for promotion would influence people’s employment choices. But, how often do we inflict quixotic decisions on the people we manage? It’s important to people that management heads consistently in the right direction. If Wal-Mart can get it right, certainly the rest of us can too.

What to Do When You’re Dissatisfied : Part III – Voice and Loyalty

What should you do when you’re unhappy with a situation? You have three options. In previous posts I’ve talked about reframing your attitude so you’re no longer unhappy, and about exiting the situation. Your third option is to try to change the situation by voicing your concerns.

This option comes into play when the problem is bad enough that you can’t change your attitude towards it, but the overall situation is good enough that it’s worth trying to improve it. Also, you need to believe there’s a realistic chance the situation can be changed.

By staying and trying to make things better, you are being loyal to the organization. Too often people who object to the status quo are perceived as being disloyal, when in fact the opposite is true. The most loyal employees are the ones who don’t exit, and who try to make things better by giving voice to the issues.

How to make change happen is a huge topic and way beyond the scope of this post, but if you want to get started a good place to begin is the About.com article, “Disagree Without Being Disagreeable.”

Differentiating Yourself

Almost always when you are trying to reach new ground (obtaining a new client, seeking a promotion or additional responsibilities, getting a better job) you are competing with others. How do you distinguish yourself from the pack?

Here’s a list from Andrew Sobel’s Making Rain: The Secrets of Building Lifelong Client Loyalty:

1. Do It Faster
2. Do It Better
3. Be Different
4. Be Better Prepared
5. Reframe the Problem
6. Provide Unique Information
7. Establish an Emotional Connection
8. Be Readily Accessible
9. Listen and Learn Fast

I think that pretty much covers it. I highly recommend the book. Here are some links to other work by Andrew:

4 Ways to Deliver Value to Your Clients

Fair Game: 8 Principles for Making Your Competitors' Clients Your Own

Winning a New Client When There Is an Incumbent

What To Do When You’re Dissatisfied: Part II - Exit

The shortest time I’ve ever held a job was six weeks.

I realize that is not a record (I’ve had new hires fail to show up for work after lunch on their first day). But for me, it was traumatic, especially since it was a great job in a great place (Newport Beach, CA), with a great company (Bankers Mutual, since acquired by Deutschebank), working with people I admired and liked. What went wrong? I was under the impression I was working on commission with a draw, and my employer believed I was being paid straight commission. I was selling commercial mortgages and the closing cycle is a minimum of four months, so I was looking at an extended period of no income, with bills to pay and no reserves (and with a bad case of post-divorce blues, too). Under the circumstances, there was only one thing to do; exit.

In a previous post (Part I of this series) I have discussed changing your attitude about your situation rather than changing the situation. But, sometimes changing your frame of reference doesn’t get you anywhere. Over my career, I think I have left jobs for all the reasons it makes sense to exit:

The job is dangerous/unhealthy. In 1977-78 I worked on a mobile flax mill. It gradually dawned on me that the chronic respiratory and arthritis problems the older members of the crew suffered from were probably related to the dust we were breathing and the work we were doing.

You hate, hate, hate the work. Busboy, 1979 for six months. Enough said.

Fundamental misunderstanding about the job (duties, compensation, etc.). The Bankers Mutual situation (1987) in the opening paragraph.

Your employer is too stupid to be associated with. In 1988 I was a workout officer for the FSLIC. During the 14 months I was there, I did not resolve a single, solitary deal. Our days were spent doing endless data scrubs and preparing elaborate committee presentations which were invariably kicked back for more analysis. It became just too embarrassing to be a participant.

Your job has run it’s course. From 1989 to 1995 I was Assistant Director of Special Assets (income property workouts, foreclosures, bankruptcies) at Home Savings in Los Angeles (then the country’s largest S&L).  I had a great team doing interesting challenging work at a great institution. But, the real estate recession was coming to an end, we were laying people off, and I could see the handwriting on the wall.

You are accomplishing no useful work. In 1996, I was Regional Chief Underwriter for Mellon Mortgage in Los Angeles. During that year, I had only one deal to underwrite (and that was one I went out and found myself). Some people might be happy catching up on their reading and web surfing, but I had a perpetual sense of impending doom –surely someone at some point would notice the lack of output.

You stop learning. 1997 – 2005 I was Chief Credit Officer at ARCS Commercial Mortgage (now PNC/ARCS). Like Home Savings, this was a great company, and I had a great team doing interesting work. But, I basically had the same job for 9 years, and in my opinion that’s about four years too long. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks about how it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. My guess is I spent around 27,000 hours at ARCS. The combination of a great work environment and partnership vesting kept me around, but looking back, that extra four years are the only years I wish I had spent differently.

Your organization changes direction. During 2006-7 I was Senior Vice President of Asset and Credit Management for Capmark’s Affordable/Low Income Housing Tax Credit unit. Very interesting work, but six months into it Capmark decided to wind down that line of business.

Obviously there are steps you can take in some of these situations so that it makes sense to stay. A change of direction could actually be a new opportunity. If you feel like you’re not accomplishing anything useful or aren’t learning anything new, it might make sense to try to redefine your job doing other work in the same organization. But, if you’ve truly exhausted the possibilities, exiting is the right thing to do.

Would You Rather Not Know?

If you had an opportunity to know if someone was acting in your best interest, would you take it?

Conventional economic theory would say, “of course”. Companies devise elaborate controls to ensure their employees act in the company’s interest, and not their own. All too often these systems fail (for example, The New Yorker has a fascinating account of how Jérôme Kerviel was able to lose billions of euros in unauthorized trading for Société Générale). There is a whole branch of political science and economics that focuses on the principal-agent problem:

In political science and economics, the problem of motivating a party to act on behalf of another is known as ‘the principal-agent problem’. The principal-agent problem arises when a principal compensates an agent for performing certain acts that are useful to the principal and costly to the agent, and where there are elements of the performance that are costly to observe. This is the case to some extent for all contracts that are written in a world of information asymmetry, uncertainty and risk. Here, principals do not know enough about whether (or to what extent) a contract has been satisfied. The solution to this information problem — closely related to the moral hazard problem — is to ensure the provision of appropriate incentives so agents act in the way principals wish.

But, do people really want to know if their agents are acting appropriately? A recent study (via Overcoming Bias) found the study subjects would “…systematically prefer to remain ignorant…” of the decisions made by a trustee investing on their behalf.

Every parent has experienced this. My son is supposed to clean his room. I know (or at least strongly suspect) he hasn’t. If I confirm this suspicion by opening the door, I will need to punish him, and I don’t like doing that. Better to keep the door closed.

I think this tendency is where a lot of control mechanisms go wrong. The system and procedures may be fine, but if implementation is left to people who would really rather not deal with problems, the safeguards won’t work.

We Want to Trust – Sometimes Too Easily

Trust is an essential element in all good relationships, both personal and business. But, sometimes we are too willing to do so. From a post on The Baseline Scenario:

Free Exchange has Anthony Gottlieb’s recollections of interviewing Bernie Madoff about financial regulation:

“At the time he came across merely as calm, strikingly rational, devoid of ego, and the last person you would expect to make your wealth vanish. I certainly would have trusted him with my money. I cannot say the same of other financial superstars I interviewed. . . . Perhaps it is the most confidence-inspiring ones that you have to look out for.”

I couldn’t agree more. We human beings have this completely misplaced confidence in our ability to judge people by “looking them in the eye.” I recall reading about one study (sorry, I don’t remember anything else about it) which showed that hiring managers were more likely to make good hires by selecting solely on the basis of resumes than by interviewing people - because using resumes is completely objective, while interviews allow you to interject your own erroneous beliefs. (I do believe that if you use interviews well - that is, to obtain factual information, like how well someone can actually write a computer program - you can do better than just using resumes; but maybe I’m just fooling myself.)

I think differentiating “strong situations” and “weak situations” sheds some light on where we go wrong. A strong situation is one in which environmental cues are so strong and widely known that everyone behaves in a consistent way (for example, members of a particular faith know how to act at a wedding or funeral conducted at their house of worship). Weak situations are situations with weak environmental cues which are not widely known (for example, a new employee will probably not know the expected behavior at the company Christmas party).

To loop back to the excerpt above, interviews with a journalist or for a job are about as strong a situation as you can get. You are kidding yourself if you think conduct in such situations is representative of how a person might act in a less structured situation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where they stand in times of challenge and controversy.” Until you have witnessed someone’s behavior in a difficult or ambiguous situation you don’t have a good basis for a decision to trust them.

You can find a further discussion of strong and weak situations in Personality and Organizations by Benjamin Schneider et. al. A less academic discussion of how situations influence personality is in The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo.