The wisdom of deliberate managerial criteria mistakes before promotion
Regarding the article Paul JH Schoemaker and Rober E. Gunther, it is necessary to comment that the key is not precisely to make mistakes, but to commit them correctly, in an intelligent way, with wisdom, that is to say, planning them properly.
To identify clever mistakes from those that don't make sense, the consulting firm of the authors listed above has proposed five steps:
1. Identify the assumptions
2. Select the assumptions to be tested
3. Create strategies to make mistakes
4. Execute the mistakes
5. Learn from the process
Before a manager promotes deliberate errors in his organization for decision making, he must take into account certain criteria that allow him to accelerate the increase in the learning curve and also productivity.
Within the criteria you can cite the principles or organizational assumptions; that is to say, if these are wrong and if the decision-making is consequently based on a wrong maxim or that contributes nothing to the benefit of the organization, it is better to go on the side of a deliberate error. In problem solving, the approach taken is also definitive; Traditional systemic approaches are not always the most effective, giving way to innovation and effectiveness in finding quick and practical solutions in a highly volatile business world.
The underestimation of uncertainty can lead to strategies that serve neither to defend against threats nor to take advantage of the opportunities that great uncertainty can offer. In one of the most striking cases of understatement in corporate history, Kenneth H. Olsen, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, announced in 1977 that "there is no reason for a person to have a computer in their home…"
In 1977 the explosion of the computer market was not certain, it had more of a wrong decision than anything else. At the opposite extreme, assuming that the world is completely unpredictable can lead managers to abandon the analytical rigor of their traditional planning processes and base their strategic decisions primarily on their instinctual intuition. This “just go for it” approach to strategy can result in managers making ill-founded bets on lossy emerging markets or products. So it can be said that risk is also a variable or better a criterion in deliberate mistakes.
In another classic from Harvard School, Pygmalion and the Business Administration of J. Sterling Livingston refers to deliberate mistakes as the Model of Failure for success; According to Livingston, the main ingredients are enthusiasm and interest on the part of the boss, on the other hand discouragement, low expectations and lack of involvement of executives lead to poor performance of employees perpetuated by low self-esteem; When an executive treats their sales force like super salespeople, they try to fit that image and try to do everything they know super salespeople are expected to do. But when the same manager treats underperforming salespeople as salespeople who have no chance of success,then this negative expectation also becomes a prophecy of induced, provoked or infused fulfillment. Those salespeople who have not yet achieved success find it difficult to maintain their own image and self-esteem.
The typical response they tend to give to these low expectations that management has of them is to try to get rid of any new damage that may affect them, in order to avoid situations in which a significant failure may be generated. For this reason, they reduce the number of commercial visits, or do not consolidate the closing when there is a probability of a rejection by the client.
When a feeling of offering is coupled with reduced expectations, both factors generate a behavior in which the probability of failure increases and in which, therefore, the expectations of managers are met, similarly in the article by Schoemaker and Gunther, the company assumed that a mistake it was planning to make would cost a significant amount of money, but the opposite happened by turning the assumption around by generating more than $ 1 million in new business.
To exemplify the method, a national example can be cited. In the Tax Administration, both at the national level and in some local ones, this method has turned out to be a strategy that gives very good results; The idea consists of taking a proportion of the taxpayers who have more debts and with more time of validity, with a low probability that they will make their payments and with obligations close to expiring by the prescription, and launch a new process against them of coercive collection or that seeks to collect the money through some type of agreement or special benefit. Surprisingly, the response to these new collection attempts, with a payment agreement or coercively, is a collection that exceeds those normally budgeted with the ordinary portfolio.
References
Harvard Business Review, "Managing People in the Company", Ed. Deusto - Grupo Editorial Planeta, Argentina, 2004.
Harvard Business Review, "Management in Uncertainty", Ed. Deusto, Spain, 1999.
Harvard Business Review, “The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes,” Related article in Management course guide.
