Idiots, Explorers, and You: Improve Your Organization by Widening Your Perspective

As an external advisor and consultant, I'm often cast in one of two roles: the blithering idiot, or the exotic explorer. Before you too hastily choose a label for me -- a prospect I don't relish, given the odds -- allow me to explain by way of a small example.
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As an external advisor and consultant, I'm often cast in one of two roles: the blithering idiot, or the exotic explorer.

Before you too hastily choose a label for me -- a prospect I don't relish, given the odds -- allow me to explain by way of a small example.

Much of my firm's work is for large companies, and the process by which these businesses pay other businesses follows a general pattern: We propose some work and a price, the client agrees, and then we do the work and send our invoice.

That's the pattern in broad strokes, anyway. The thing is, details differ from client to client, and even within the same client. And they differ quite a bit.

In some companies, the person we'll be working with signs our proposal. In others, a purchasing person signs, and in others, nobody signs. Sometimes, we receive a formal purchase order - a PO - as our only indication of acceptance. Other times it's just an email. Sometimes there's nothing unless we ask for it. Some groups won't let us submit an invoice until we receive a PO, while others don't send a PO until we submit an invoice. Some clients ask to rewrite our proposal in their template, while others ask us to insert their phrases into our template. And, every once in a while, we receive nothing but an unmarked payment, and we have to research what it's for, using clues like the name on the check and the amount of the payment.

The truth is, when we engage with a new client, we have no idea how the process is going to work with them. Usually, I'm the one that ends up asking. And when I do, the response is almost always a combination of amazement and surprise.

Occasionally, that amazement and surprise is delivered negatively. Something along the lines of, "well, I don't know what your other clients do, but we do it the right way, and I can't believe you don't know this already." That's when I get cast as the blithering idiot, blundering on even the simplest things: "You should know better!"

More often, the amazement and surprise is a lot less negative and a lot more subdued. The majority of our clients are happy to explain their processes. And, they're legitimately interested to hear about how things differ in other companies. That's when I get cast as the exotic explorer, back from faraway places: "Tell us tales of foreign lands!"

But whether I'm playing idiot or explorer that day, the underlying issue is the same: Humans have a tendency to believe that everything that they see around them is just like everything that there is around them. To hear something else is fascinating, frightening, or both.

Now I've just been talking about different flavors of accounting practice, a topic that's pretty well defined and constrained -- after all, there are only so many ways to pay an invoice. But you can imagine how much more pronounced this becomes when the subject goes beyond accounting, to the real focus of my firm's work: behavioral norms and corporate culture.

How many flavors do you suppose there are of office politics? How many "standard" approaches to informal influencing? How many sorts of quid pro quo back door negotiations?

If those are difficult to think about, try these: How many different ways are there to hold a staff meeting? How might an organization handle resource sharing between departments? To what extent should communication placed before a senior executive be polished and perfected versus being left in a more raw and discussable format?

Each organization - sometimes each department - has its own answers to these questions and countless others like them. Some individuals are better than others at contemplating the existence of alternate answers conceptually, but anyone who's been in the same place for a few years invariably finds it increasingly difficult to believe such things viscerally. The pull of "how we do things around here" is strong, and it only grows stronger with time, and the notion that things could be so different just across the street is really difficult to internalize.

That's how I get set up for the idiot-or-explorer result. I may be surrounded by the kindest, most open, most improvement-minded group of professionals I've ever met. And, I may be able to perceive a change they could make -- maybe a change to the way they run a particular meeting -- that would improve their work considerably. And it may be that, just yesterday, I was sitting with a different group in a different organization practicing the very behavior I recommend.

And yet, when I do recommend it, this open-minded, polite, thoughtful group will collectively look at me as if I had three heads -- as if I had just suggested that we all climb to the roof of the office building and fly off into the sunset. As if such a thing has never been done.

Then, privately, they'll distribute their regard for me on the idiot vs. explorer continuum. Some will decide I'm clueless and should be thrown out. Others will regard me in a sort of romanticized and aspirational way, the visionary from a foreign land here to spread hope that tomorrow could be better. In the worst case, the two factions begin to argue; then the debate about how to respond to my recommendation gets replaced by a debate about whether I'm idiot or explorer.

In reality, of course, I'm neither. I'm just a guy who knows that things could be different.

I'm happy to report that I'm getting better at this. Over the years, I've become clearer on both what to recommend and how much to recommend, so that a group can try something feasible before moving on to bigger steps. In most of my consulting work, I pair this step-by-step approach with the sharing of a broader conceptual framework of what we're all trying to do together. That way, the romanticizers and optimists can look forward to the future on the horizon, and everyone else can build confidence through small successes right now.

But that's just my part. If you'd like to make things better where you work - and this is true whether or not you're collaborating with an external advisor like me - you have to do your part, too. You have to not only listen to, but also seek out, ways in which things could be done differently. You have to adopt the mindset that change is not only possible right where you are, but that it might even be desirable. And, you have to keep reminding yourself that everything you see is not everything there is.

If you do have external help, when that person suggests something that sounds impossible, ask yourself how it could work, instead of jumping to why it won't. If you don't have one, try making some crazy suggestions yourself. Hold up an ideal that seems completely unachievable - stress-free meetings, two day workweeks, whatever - and ask yourself what could be put in place to make it happen. You probably won't achieve the impossible - if you do, it's a bonus - but at least you'll broaden your thinking about what could be.

In the end, breaking the chains of "how we do things around here" is the first step in recognizing opportunities for improvement, the first step in creating meaningful change. The payoff can be tremendous, but to get to it, you have to be willing to risk looking like an idiot.

Or, at the very least, willing to teach your consultant how to get paid.

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