Failure to face the truth
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A primary blocker of progress, from our personal lives to our corporate strategies, is a
Once you start seeing the pattern of âfailure to face the truth,â you see it everywhere. In almost every meeting, someone is thinking something and not saying it, even though one of the best uses of a meeting is to unveil and discuss insights. In every strategy discussion, thereâs a monster in the room no one will name, even though the point of strategy is to identify and then construct a battle plan against the monsters. Written plans and strategies are all optimism and confirmatory data, rather than crystalizing the scary challenges so that we can attack them together.
Those who break through this barrier are rewarded, as many famous books and frameworks point out. Itâs fun to see this in action, because the examples are individually interesting, and because a totality of instances illuminates the pattern.
Radical Candor
âWhen you say âumâ every third word, it makes you sound stupid.â Not the feedback Kim Scott was hoping for after what she thought was a successful presentation to executives at Google. And it came from Sheryl Sandberg of all people. (Before she joined Facebook).
Now Scott knew, that Sandberg knew, that Scott wasnât stupid. Therefore, it was obvious to her that this feedback was meant to help, not âobnoxious aggressionâ as Scott would later name the same straightforwardness when the motives are to belittle and hurt rather than to coach. And so Scott was grateful for being made to âface the truth.â In her words:
Why had nobody told me for 15 years? It was like Iâd been walking through my whole career with a hunk of spinach between my teeth and nobody had had the courtesy to tell me it was there.
The truth is a courtesy; conversely, failure to face the truth is at least impolite, and at worst âruinousâ in Scottâs terminology, as when a manager withholds necessary feedback for fear of hurt feelings or being seen as unkind.
Scott is now famous for promulgating this philosophy of direct, honest, empathetic facing-of-the-truth in her book, Radical Candor . It starts with a foundation of personal trustâtrust that the feedback-giver genuinely cares for the well-being of the feedback-receiver, and that it is given in the spirit of âfacing the truthâ and not in the spirit of domination or manipulation or other ill-intentions that people in positions of power might visit upon those subject to that power.
Weâre thankful when a coach admonishes us and shows us a better way; a coach that lied to you, even by omission, telling you everything is fine when it isnât, would be a bad coach.
Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Possibly the most famous book on diagnosing problems in team dynamics, and building high-functioning teams, Five Dysfunctions by Patrick Lencioni starts with the observation that great teams are built in layers, each requiring the ones below it to be effective:
source
(Click to Enlarge)
Exactly like Scottâs Radical Candor, it is critical that a team be capable of constructive conflict, âdiscussing the real issues,â facing the truth. That requires the team to first build trust, so that it is safe to have conflict.
âFailure to face the truth,â together, in the open, prevents teams from being great. We must have enough trust in each other to face the truth, together. If someone canât handle that trust, maybe theyâre not right for the group after all.
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Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
In one of the seminal books defining âstrategy,â Richard Rumelt lists common hallmarks of bad strategy. Each one is so common, youâll shake your head and laugh (or cry, if youâre guilty of these sins):
⢠Fluff . Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses [non-specific or] esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking. ⢠Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. ⢠Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. ⢠Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are âbadâ when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable. â Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy , p32
His phrase âFailure to face the challengeâ is my inspiration for âFailure to face the truth.â Strategy must identify and then address the most important and difficult facts-of-the-matter of the market, competitive space, customers, product, and team.
Itâs scary to say âOur market is shrinking,â but if itâs true, and you refuse to identify it, if you donât write it down that crisply, if you donât challenge the company to come up with alternatives for how to address it, if you donât build a strategy that expressly attacks it head-on, then it will be fatal. Face the truth.
Lazy language belies a deeper failure
There are traces of âfailure to face the truthâ even in Rumeltâs other bullets. Fluffy language is a personal peeve of mine. In the benign case it is simple lazinessâavoiding the work of crafting prose by filling the requisite space on the page with jargon and generic phrases. In the worst case, it belies the lack of having thoughts in the first place.
This problem is rampant in marketing and content-marketing, but sticking with the theme of strategy, itâs especially common in âvisionâ or âmissionâ statements, theoretically summarizing the companyâs aspirations, but often just a non-specific blob that also applies to any other company in the space, e.g.
A leading provider of website development for businesses of all sizes.
Well, that was easy! Easy because it says almost nothing, and as a result, itâs wrong. Wrong because it doesnât develop websites both for coffee farmers in Ethiopia and also for Teslaâs launch of their next vehicle (âall sizesâ).
Perhaps itâs laziness, after all the only words that communicate anything about what it is , is âwebsite development.â Or perhaps the company refuses to âface the truthâ of what it really does, and who it really serves, where itâs really strong but also weak, afraid to say ânoâ to any potential customer. What if, instead:
We are boutique artisans chosen by discerning businesses who demand the highest-quality, completely unique web experiences.
Sounds like a small company (âboutiqueâ) who nevertheless charges a lot (also âboutiqueâ), but delivers amazing work (âdiscerningâ and âuniqueâ). By saying ânoâ to people who donât want that, you get to say âyesâ to interesting projects at profitable rates, even beating out larger competitors who you can argue are just âfactories that churn out the same website with different colors.â But only if you face the truth.
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Confront the brutal facts
In Good to Great , one of the most-cited books on the formula (if such a thing exists) for successful businesses, Jim Collins frequently returns to the story of A&P and Krogerâtwo companies alike in dignity in fair 1960s America, where we lay our sceneâyet Kroger catapulted past A&P because, in Collinsâs words, only Kroger was willing to âconfront the brutal facts.â
Kroger and A&P grew about the same for twenty years, both under-performing the broader market. Grocery stores are hard. (Source: Good to Great)
Kroger exploded with success after âconfronting the brutal facts,â while A&P continued to falter. (Source: Good to Great)
Collins tells a fantastic story, abridged here:
A&P stood as the largest retailing organization in the world and one of the largest corporations in the United States, at one point ranking behind only General Motors in sales. Kroger, in contrast, stood as an unspectacular grocery chain, less than half the size of A&P. ⌠A&P had a perfect model for the first half of the twentieth century ⌠cheap, plentiful groceries sold in utilitarian stores. But in the affluent second half of the twentieth century, Americans changed. They wanted ⌠bigger stores, ⌠fresh-baked bread, flowers, cold medicines, forty-five choices of cereal, and ten types of milk. ⌠and they wanted to do their banking and get their annual flu shots. In short, they no longer wanted grocery stories. They wanted super-stores. ⌠Hereâs whatâs interesting: Both Kroger and A&P were old companies heading into the 1970s [Kroger 82, A&P 111]; both companies had nearly all their assets investing in traditional grocery stores; both had strongholds outside of the major growth areas of the United States; and both companies had knowledge of how the world around them was changing. Yet one of these companies confronted the brutal facts of reality head-on and completely changed its entire system in response; the other stuck its head in the sand.
Collins goes on to detail this last sentenceâhow both companies were fully aware of these changes, A&P even opening a test store under a different name, which was a âsuper-storeâ that didnât even sell A&P items, which outperformed their standard stores. Not wanting to face those facts, they shuttered the test store and went back to business-as-usual. Meanwhile, Kroger made the same experiments, found the same results, and decided to pivot the entire company to become the modern-day supermarket.
A&P saw the truth, but failed to face the truth. Whether itâs Jim Collins analyzing dozens of companies or Rumelt with his experience with dozens of strategies, the pattern is the same: Face the truth, or be killed by it.
When itâs hard, we avoid it
It seems obvious that avoiding the truth would lead to bad outcomes, so why do we do it? Because itâs hard. Itâs not the only obvious thing in our lives that we avoid, solely because itâs hard. Diet? Exercise? Giving feedback? Working on our relationships?
Itâs hard to tell the truth to someoneâs face. Itâs hard to realize that your industry has completely shifted, and itâs really hard to say that out loud in front of the whole company. Itâs hard to say ânoâ to a customer when you have bills pay, and itâs hard to make a major strategic choice, because what if youâre wrong?
Thatâs a good explanation for failure to face the truth, but itâs not a good reason.
Face the truth.
Go ahead. Faith will follow. âJean-Baptiste le Rond dâAlembert, encouraging early practitioners of calculus, even though rigorous proofs of its legitimacy were still a hundred years away.
https://longform.asmartbear.com/failure-to-face-the-truth/
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source. A primary blocker of progress, from our personal lives to our corporate strategies, is a. Once you start seeing the pattern of âfailure to face the truth,â you see it everywhere. In almost every meeting, someone is thinking something and not saying it, even though one of the best uses of a meeting is to unveil and discuss insights. In every strategy discussion, thereâs a monster in the room no one will name, even though the point of strategy is to identify and then construct a battle plan against the monsters. Written plans and strategies are all optimism and confirmatory data, rather than crystalizing the scary challenges so that we can attack them together. Those who break through this barrier are rewarded, as many famous books and frameworks point out. Itâs fun to see this in action, because the examples are individually interesting, and because a totality of instances illuminates the pattern. Radical Candor. âWhen you say âumâ every third word, it makes you sound stupid.â Not the feedback Kim Scott was hoping for after what she thought was a successful presentation to executives at Google. And it came from Sheryl Sandberg of all people. (Before she joined Facebook). Now Scott knew, that Sandberg knew, that Scott wasnât stupid. Therefore, it was obvious to her that this feedback was meant to help, not âobnoxious aggressionâ as Scott would later name the same straightforwardness when the motives are to belittle and hurt rather than to coach. And so Scott was grateful for being made to âface the truth.â In her words: Why had nobody told me for 15 years? It was like Iâd been walking through my whole career with a hunk of spinach between my teeth and nobody had had the courtesy to tell me it was there. The truth is a courtesy; conversely, failure to face the truth is at least impolite, and at worst âruinousâ in Scottâs terminology, as when a manager withholds necessary feedback for fear of hurt feelings or being seen as unkind. Scott is now famous for promulgating this philosophy of direct, honest, empathetic facing-of-the-truth in her book, Radical Candor . It starts with a foundation of personal trustâtrust that the feedback-giver genuinely cares for the well-being of the feedback-receiver, and that it is given in the spirit of âfacing the truthâ and not in the spirit of domination or manipulation or other ill-intentions that people in positions of power might visit upon those subject to that power. Weâre thankful when a coach admonishes us and shows us a better way; a coach that lied to you, even by omission, telling you everything is fine when it isnât, would be a bad coach. Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Possibly the most famous book on diagnosing problems in team dynamics, and building high-functioning teams, Five Dysfunctions by Patrick Lencioni starts with the observation that great teams are built in layers, each requiring the ones below it to be effective: source. (Click to Enlarge) Exactly like Scottâs Radical Candor, it is critical that a team be capable of constructive conflict, âdiscussing the real issues,â facing the truth. That requires the team to first build trust, so that it is safe to have conflict. âFailure to face the truth,â together, in the open, prevents teams from being great. We must have enough trust in each other to face the truth, together. If someone canât handle that trust, maybe theyâre not right for the group after all. subscribe. Don't miss the next article. â. Subscribe. Thank you for sharing! Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. In one of the seminal books defining âstrategy,â Richard Rumelt lists common hallmarks of bad strategy. Each one is so common, youâll shake your head and laugh (or cry, if youâre guilty of these sins): ⢠Fluff . Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses [non-specific or] esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking. ⢠Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. ⢠Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. ⢠Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are âbadâ when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable. â Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy , p32. His phrase âFailure to face the challengeâ is my inspiration for âFailure to face the truth.â Strategy must identify and then address the most important and difficult facts-of-the-matter of the market, competitive space, customers, product, and team. Itâs scary to say âOur market is shrinking,â but if itâs true, and you refuse to identify it, if you donât write it down that crisply, if you donât challenge the company to come up with alternatives for how to address it, if you donât build a strategy that expressly attacks it head-on, then it will be fatal. Face the truth. Lazy language belies a deeper failure. There are traces of âfailure to face the truthâ even in Rumeltâs other bullets. Fluffy language is a personal peeve of mine. In the benign case it is simple lazinessâavoiding the work of crafting prose by filling the requisite space on the page with jargon and generic phrases. In the worst case, it belies the lack of having thoughts in the first place. This problem is rampant in marketing and content-marketing, but sticking with the theme of strategy, itâs especially common in âvisionâ or âmissionâ statements, theoretically summarizing the companyâs aspirations, but often just a non-specific blob that also applies to any other company in the space, e.g. A leading provider of website development for businesses of all sizes. Well, that was easy! Easy because it says almost nothing, and as a result, itâs wrong. Wrong because it doesnât develop websites both for coffee farmers in Ethiopia and also for Teslaâs launch of their next vehicle (âall sizesâ). Perhaps itâs laziness, after all the only words that communicate anything about what it is , is âwebsite development.â Or perhaps the company refuses to âface the truthâ of what it really does, and who it really serves, where itâs really strong but also weak, afraid to say ânoâ to any potential customer. What if, instead: We are boutique artisans chosen by discerning businesses who demand the highest-quality, completely unique web experiences. Sounds like a small company (âboutiqueâ) who nevertheless charges a lot (also âboutiqueâ), but delivers amazing work (âdiscerningâ and âuniqueâ). By saying ânoâ to people who donât want that, you get to say âyesâ to interesting projects at profitable rates, even beating out larger competitors who you can argue are just âfactories that churn out the same website with different colors.â But only if you face the truth. subscribe. Don't miss the next article. â. Subscribe. Thank you for sharing! Confront the brutal facts. In Good to Great , one of the most-cited books on the formula (if such a thing exists) for successful businesses, Jim Collins frequently returns to the story of A&P and Krogerâtwo companies alike in dignity in fair 1960s America, where we lay our sceneâyet Kroger catapulted past A&P because, in Collinsâs words, only Kroger was willing to âconfront the brutal facts.â Kroger and A&P grew about the same for twenty years, both under-performing the broader market. Grocery stores are hard. (Source: Good to Great) Kroger exploded with success after âconfronting the brutal facts,â while A&P continued to falter. (Source: Good to Great) Collins tells a fantastic story, abridged here: A&P stood as the largest retailing organization in the world and one of the largest corporations in the United States, at one point ranking behind only General Motors in sales. Kroger, in contrast, stood as an unspectacular grocery chain, less than half the size of A&P. ⌠A&P had a perfect model for the first half of the twentieth century ⌠cheap, plentiful groceries sold in utilitarian stores. But in the affluent second half of the twentieth century, Americans changed. They wanted ⌠bigger stores, ⌠fresh-baked bread, flowers, cold medicines, forty-five choices of cereal, and ten types of milk. ⌠and they wanted to do their banking and get their annual flu shots. In short, they no longer wanted grocery stories. They wanted super-stores. ⌠Hereâs whatâs interesting: Both Kroger and A&P were old companies heading into the 1970s [Kroger 82, A&P 111]; both companies had nearly all their assets investing in traditional grocery stores; both had strongholds outside of the major growth areas of the United States; and both companies had knowledge of how the world around them was changing. Yet one of these companies confronted the brutal facts of reality head-on and completely changed its entire system in response; the other stuck its head in the sand. Collins goes on to detail this last sentenceâhow both companies were fully aware of these changes, A&P even opening a test store under a different name, which was a âsuper-storeâ that didnât even sell A&P items, which outperformed their standard stores. Not wanting to face those facts, they shuttered the test store and went back to business-as-usual. Meanwhile, Kroger made the same experiments, found the same results, and decided to pivot the entire company to become the modern-day supermarket. A&P saw the truth, but failed to face the truth. Whether itâs Jim Collins analyzing dozens of companies or Rumelt with his experience with dozens of strategies, the pattern is the same: Face the truth, or be killed by it. When itâs hard, we avoid it. It seems obvious that avoiding the truth would lead to bad outcomes, so why do we do it? Because itâs hard. Itâs not the only obvious thing in our lives that we avoid, solely because itâs hard. Diet? Exercise? Giving feedback? Working on our relationships? Itâs hard to tell the truth to someoneâs face. Itâs hard to realize that your industry has completely shifted, and itâs really hard to say that out loud in front of the whole company. Itâs hard to say ânoâ to a customer when you have bills pay, and itâs hard to make a major strategic choice, because what if youâre wrong? Thatâs a good explanation for failure to face the truth, but itâs not a good reason. Face the truth. Go ahead. Faith will follow. âJean-Baptiste le Rond dâAlembert, encouraging early practitioners of calculus, even though rigorous proofs of its legitimacy were still a hundred years away. https://longform.asmartbear.com/failure-to-face-the-truth/ @asmartbear. subscribe. Don't miss the next article. â. Subscribe. Thank you for sharing!