I was employed by Lend Lease in the 1980s and beyond. It was a privilege and learning experience that has greatly influenced my professional life. To honour that experience I have assembled a series of short articles to chronicle my learning and hopefully generate constructive conversation. With your help let’s see where this takes us.
Always have a view!
Come with a view to each issue/ conversation was a core tenant of the culture. This is not a common expectation in most organisations. What is more common is that a few have a view and others sign up to that view or worse whisper in the corridors.
Actively living with the expectation to have a view generates many benefits:
- Become skilled at forming well informed judgement building the decision muscle.
- Learn to debate the issue and not criticise the person.
- Able to articulate ideas for debate without owning the critique of that idea.
- Able to elicit thoughts from others in a constructive way.
- Much higher quality of decision.
- Expectation gives licence to individuals to speak up making the business more robust.
I was reminded of this lesson while reading Noise, a human in human judgement by Danial Kahneman et al. One proposition is that better decisions are made by the aggregation of independent views brought together (he describes this as decision hygiene to reduce decision noise and bias). It is a multi-step process.
- Form an independent view.
- Bring to the table that view unfettered by the group.
- Constructively debate the differing views to achieve a better aggregated result.
- Be prepared to be won over by the facts and debate not by hierarchy of participants.
To reinforce this concept in practice I have heard stories of Stuart (former CEO and Chair of Lend Lease) make statements of what needed to be done on a particular project at the PCG. The Project Manager (PM) dutifully followed through on the request only to be questioned as to why that was done at the next PCG. Putting the PM through this experience was an education for all of us! Thankyou to the PM sparing me the experience but gaining the lesson.
As we learn lessons it is our obligation to pay it forward!
Please share your thoughts.
