Success in any business depends on the ability of distributing information and time in the amounts that would produce profitable ratio between resources spent and outcomes achieved.
What if we have to make decisions without knowing?
The varying relationship between information and time can become a real nightmare for anybody with authority and responsibility. People usually ask:
Do I have enough information to decide right now?
Aligning information & time becomes even more difficult when several entities with different systems and cultures embark on one project. Understandably, people often tend to hide the incorrect results of their work by fingerpointing at someone else 'causing the problem'. The teams in many alliance projects, that happily co-operate in the beginning, happen to get rough and retract information, trying to save their own interests in the end.
Some cases of project collaborations have come down to grisly effects of financial loses or even worse, leaving the unfinished work altogether. As a natural (not rational) response, traditional processes are replete with controls and check points. Decisions are referred up on the corporate or project ladder while subordinates are loosing productivity waiting for the decisions to be made ‘upstairs’. Top executives are snowed under requests for decisions and clarifications of instructions already given. Corporate emails and data rooms are full of meeting notes and memos in multiple versions. Individual responsibility is diluted in the flood of information quantities but nevertheless, everybody looks busy.
But what if the problem is not entirely in the end results where is usually found? What if in tracking the problem, the never ending spiral of causes and consequences leads us back to the beginning? What if the issue lies in the initial planning with some small negligence? Perhaps one decision was made too hastily or too many options eluded the correct choice. Or there was a small miscommunication somewhere in the process.
The Wheel of Ignorance
The spin-off principle behind each and every undesirable situation in business could be called the Wheel of Ingorance.
There are generally two causes for such a state:
- Culture based on ‘grey zones’ as manipulation areas to avoid direct responsibility and therefore consequences of an incorrect decision
- Competencies based on specialists of in-depth expertise but without sufficient overlaps to be able of considering larger perspectives often necessary to bridge over functional or departmental boundaries
