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Poison Your Culture By Demanding Answers, Not Questions

By Chunka Mui, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

Deep inside an otherwise insightful New York Times interview with Brent Saunders, CEO of Bausch and Lomb, is a very dangerous piece of advice. Saunders’ advice is captured by the headline of Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” interview: “Getting Ahead by Having Answers Instead of Questions.” Here it is in full context:

 Q. Other career advice?

A. I think most people don’t realize that everybody comes to the C.E.O. with problems. Most people don’t come to tell me good news. The people I rely on or view as high-potential folks are people who come with a problem but also bring ideas for the solution. It may not be the right solution. We may do something entirely different, but they’ve been thoughtful about it.

Earlier in my career, when I went to my C.E.O.’s, I walked in and said, “Here’s the problem and I have two ideas for what we can do.” I never walked in without trying to be thoughtful, and at least two steps ahead. If people are looking to advance their career, they may want to be more thoughtful about bringing some ideas for solving a problem, and not just presenting a problem.

For those looking to advance their careers, Saunders is right. CEOs and, managers in general, are constantly bombarded with problems. The reality is that they prefer underlings who bring solutions, rather than problems. (Which also means, of course, that they frown on those who act otherwise.)  Saunders is simply reflecting the prevailing attitude in most organizations.

At the individual level, this attitude makes a lot of sense.  What manager wants to lead a group of whiners and naysayers where the problems all flow to the top?  What manager wouldn’t rather lead a thoughtful and empowered organization, where questions come nicely framed and, at worst, are accompanied with multiple plausible solutions?  This is especially true for CEOs, for whom there is no “upstairs” to pass the buck.

The organizational consequences, however, can be dire.  The problem is that, as the old saying goes, “you get what you reward.” Writ large, this attitude—especially when it is strongly espoused by the CEO—leads to corporate cultures that discourage raising questions altogether unless one also knows an acceptable answer. This might be fine for low-stakes, run-of-the-mill questions where it is reasonable to demand that people be “more thoughtful,” as Saunders does.  But, such cultures also smother really important questions, where the potential answers are not so easy or, more dangerously, will be ill received.

Take, for example, the billions of dollars that IBM squandered on the OS/2 system. It may be hard to remember OS/2 at this remove, but it was IBM’s alternative to Microsoft’s Windows in the late 1980s and early 1990s. IBM pushed OS/2 as hard as it knew how, because it was desperate for all kinds of strategic reasons to retrieve the near-monopoly it had created for Microsoft in personal-computer operating systems. The problem was, the market had rejected OS/2. Once Microsoft came out with a vastly improved version of Windows, in May 1990, the battle was over. Microsoft won. IBM lost. But IBM executives couldn’t admit that to themselves. They kept talking about ways to reposition OS/2, about ways to improve it. They couldn’t say, “This OS/2 thing is a problem that has no solutions. Let’s shoot it in the head and move on.” As a result, IBM spent roughly $1 billion on OS/2 work after the rest of the world knew the fight was over. In all, IBM lost some $2 billion on OS/2 before pulling the plug in 2005.

In researching thousands of the biggest business failures over the last 25 years, Paul Carroll and I found that as many as 46 percent were strategic errors that could have been avoided if companies had asked better questions about the potential pitfalls.

What’s more, I would be willing to bet that in every failure we studied, there were critical thinkers in the heart of those organizations who saw the dangers of the proposed strategy but did not feel empowered to raise the tough questions.

Looking forward, the inability to ask tough questions will be disastrous for many companies.  As I have written, a swarm of technological megatrends—including mobile devices, ubiquitous cameras and sensors, social media, the “cloud” and “big data” analytical tools—is bringing disruptive change to every information-intensive industry.  Companies will either reimagine themselves and lay claim to the markets of the future or be reimagined out of existence.

Companies mostly likely to survive, and thrive, are the ones that face up to very fundamental questions about the potential dangers that these disruptions might pose. These questions will be uncomfortable, and have no easy answers.  But, by understanding the right questions, these companies will be best positioned to think big, start small and learn fast, as thus avoid the hazards.  Instead, they’ll most likely reap the opportunities that will also be enabled.  Those unable to do so will join the long list of former market leaders such as Borders, Blockbuster, Circuit City, Kodak and many more, that would not face up to their fundamental challenges.

I’m not trying to argue that CEOs should foster environments of whiners and naysayers.  Instead, they need to foster environments where insightful questions are embraced and encouraged.

One way of doing this is to always have escalation mechanisms that enable vital information and divergent viewpoints to reach decision makers—even when that information doesn’t fit into normal communications channels or, more critically, when the regular channels might otherwise squash that information.

Microsoft, for example, routinely conducts anonymous surveys of team members to ask for their predictions on when their products will be delivered. Group leaders know that such surveys can happen at any time, which tend to keep them honest.  The surveys don’t help avoid product delays but they at least give management an accurate picture, which can then be used for planning and communications purposes.

Sometimes escalation mechanisms can be done with humor, as demonstrated by my old friend and mentor, Mel Bergstein.  Bergstein, who I’ve seen cultivate candor in multiple organizations, and in teams numbering from tens to thousands of people, mastered the technique of regular rumor contests.  At company meetings, he would invite anyone to submit rumors.  He would have the group to vote on the rumors, pay cash prizes for the best ones, and then address them.  With playful prodding and a consistent record of candor, Bergstein cultivated cultures where thoughtful questions were fair game.  Employees trusted that they could speak truth to power.  It also sent a powerful message to all layers of management that questions were to be taken seriously because, if they weren’t, they could be kicked upstairs.

Informal mechanisms do have their limits, especially in high-stakes situations such as the disruptive markets and existential dangers in front of us.  If left to chance, the right questions might not appear.

To protect against the most dramatic strategic failures, more formal mechanisms are needed for articulating the toughest questions that organizations must face.  I’ve found two techniques to be particularly effective.

One technique is to embrace the organization’s doomsday scenarios.  Thinking big is not just about bold aspirations; it also requires understanding the starkest .  How might the future unfold to threaten the organization?  What are technology developments, customer activities, stakeholder actions, competitor and new entrant moves, government actions, and substitutions that might let new products or services supplant existing ones?  My experience is that almost all the needed knowledge to craft crisp and coherent doomsday scenarios is inside the organization; insiders just have to be freed from the explicit and implicit organizational and cultural encumbrances working against those insights.

One reason to look for doomsday scenarios is that it helps spot vulnerabilities and spark improvements even if doomsday never comes.  Another reason is that it helps to build alignment.  Getting beyond vague views and developing detailed, shared views of existential threats and how quickly they might arrive can help management teams develop consensus on timing and move forward in unison.  But people tend to avoid thinking about truly worst-case scenarios, so this technique is designed to make sure that they do so.

Another effective technique is to subject high-stakes strategies to independent stress testing.  Ideally, strategy developers would benefit from the questions raised throughout the planning process.  The CEO would also get feedback and challenges along the way, before making any final public commitments and risk embarrassment if he later backs away from the strategy.  The stress testing would culminate in a final “last-chance” review done toward the end of the decision-making process but before it’s too late—before momentum is so great that almost nothing can stop the strategy. In practice, it should never come to that.  Just the anticipation of such reviews should lead to better outcomes, and a well-orchestration stress-testing process should uncover and address critical issues along the way.

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As Clay Christensen has observed, “More often than not, failure in innovation is rooted in not having asked an important question, rather than arriving at an incorrect answer.”

Rather than creating environments where people “get ahead by having answers instead of questions,” CEOs should strive to create environments where people strive to ask the best questions.

This article draws from research for the forthcoming “The New Killer Apps: How Incumbents Can Beat Startups,” coauthored with Paul B. Carroll, which will be released September 2013. To learn more, visit the book’s Facebook page.

Follow Chunka Mui here at Forbes (click on the +follow button next to his picture), on Twitter @chunkamui or at Google+

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