The Business Can't Tell You How to Run It

~630 Words | ~2.5min Read

The business can’t tell you how to run it. It can only tell you how it’s doing and where there are problems. This might sound strange at first. After all, isn’t the business data supposed to guide our decisions? Sure! But here’s the thing: the business only produces data about the current state. The market only tells you the current state. You’re making decisions about stuff that’s not in the business itself. You are making decisions about the current state, and a projected future state! That’s a higher-order concern.

Organizations function as amplifiers. They multiply what any individual can achieve by coordinating efforts across people. But as a consultant, I’ve noticed a pattern! People purchase my time precisely because I’m from outside the business. I have experience from outside to draw attention to issues they’re having inside. Things that seem normal to them by now, immediately pop out to me as trouble! They answers they are seeking comes from without, not within the business.

Now keep that idea in mind for a moment, and jump with me to a related topic. It’s called double-loop learning. It relates to the ideal pattern for Organizational learning. The first loop focuses on learning how to DO the work better. You might be refining techniques within existing frameworks, or something similar. The second loop operates at a meta level: learning how to discover the RIGHT work to do in the first place. Rather than asking “how do we do this better,” it asks “should we be doing this at all?” Sadly, The second loop frequently fails. The people responsible for this level of learning extend beyond individual teams. It is a leader’s job to answer: Is this the right work to be doing anymore?

Leaders don’t do the delivery work anymore, so that first loop isn’t where they act. Instead they own the socio-technical system for accomplishing that work. Does the team have the right tools? Are we following a sound process? How well is the team following that process? But there are right ways and wrong ways to ask those questions. Instead of asking “who made the mistake,” the best leaders ask “what in our system made this mistake likely? Is our system still the right one?”

The data from the current process can only tell you about the results it already got. That doesn’t answer whether the current process is still the best approach. Nor is it the data about what alternatives exist, or which have been tried, and which actually worked! Those answers all exist outside of the current process, outside the business itself.

So what does this mean for you as a leader? You own the work system. Your job is to prepare the system for the foreseeable future. Ideally you create a system with capabilities to handle whatever comes up. That requires cultivating outside perspective, because the data inside isn’t enough. Reading books allows the past to speak to the present. Peer groups allow you to compare notes with what others are trying today. Someone, somewhere has probably solved your problem before. It just might be in a different field or industry. The wisdom is out there. You have to go looking for it.

This isn’t a skill you’ll develop overnight. You’re not going to learn how to do this well until you start managing a team or trying to change processes. Product Ownership makes a great testbed for this question of “should we be doing this at all?” And techniques like the Drucker Memo help you build judgment through external feedback. Both will give you jump start to cultivate your judgment. In the meantime, keep learning, keep seeking.

Your business data may be accurate. But, where do you find the principles to guide your next decision?