Category Archives: Learning

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What Does Winning Look Like?

If you’ve ever been in a planning meeting with me, you are familiar with this question: What does winning look like? This is how I like to frame decisions around initiatives we are considering. If we can define success in advance, we will know if we achieve it. If we have no idea what winning looks like before we commit resources to a project, how do we know if it was worth it once we deliver the work product?

We all know what winning looks like in sports. If one team has a higher score than its opponent, that team wins. Simple enough, but is it also winning if there were so many injuries in the latest game that half the team can’t play in the next game? What if the team’s coach coach delivers the win, but on a series of controversial decisions that damage team morale for the rest of the season? What if someone cheats? Some of winning is straightforward, but not all of it.

Let’s consider a working example in business.

Let’s say we have an idea for a new set of features we think we want to create for our e-commerce platform. One way to decide what winning looks like is a simple ROI (return on investment) calculation. Suppose the project cost is a million dollars. The first thing we want to do is get back that million dollars through incremental profits. Remember always that revenue is not profit. We have to take all our fixed and variable costs out of sales before we achieve a contribution to earnings. A million dollars of revenue does not pay back a million-dollar investment, but if our contribution margin on those sales is 20%, then we need an incremental $5m of revenue to produce $1m of incremental cash (presume that general and administrative costs are unchanged to simplify things).

Let’s say then we’ve articulated the minimum payback to break even we need on $1m of investment is $5m of incremental sales (that is, revenue we would not have received without the new initiative). Of course, no one wants to break even in business, we want a multiple of that investment back. Do we want 5x, 10x, or more? A lot of that depends on the scale of the business, but let’s say we want 5x our investment to call it a win. That’s $25m of sales generating $5m of cash for a 5x return.

The next question we might ask is how soon do we want that return. Some of that will depend on the numerous initiatives competing for investment. If two potential initiatives are evaluated to deliver the same 5x return, but one can do it in six months and one can do it in a year, I’d say we go with six months. So the cash we produce is important, but so is the time we have to wait to get it back.

Does winning end there? Is selecting an initiative solely based on return on investment and time? Seldom are those the only factors in play. We need to think about the strategic value of our initiative. Does it lift our customer count? Sometimes that is even more important than the incremental cash we are producing, particularly if we are focusing on the lifetime value of a customer. In this case we might set a goal that the new initiative increases our customer count by 5% in no less than a year. If we know what those customers are worth to us in the long run, we might go back and pick the initiative with the one year return on investment over the six month time frame if the additional customers we are acquiring are all the more valuable.

Another factor in winning might be market positioning in the competitive environment. Let’s say we’re convinced the feature we’re considering is something our customers have been requesting in customer service feedback, because no one else does it very well. Winning in this instance might be about acquiring market share above other metrics. When we launch the feature, if we see our online orders increase by 5% while a competitor’s volume stays the same or declines, we might call that winning, particularly if we can translate that gain in market share into higher customer count or improved lifetime value.

The point here is not to enumerate all the ways we might factor winning, but to force a robust dialogue ahead of committing to an initiative that builds a consensus around the work we will do together. If we collect data in advance, set goals for the improvement of key performance indicators (KPIs), ardently debate the relative merits of the various initiatives before us, and then make an informed choice, we can clearly measure the success or failure of the initiative. If we just reach to heaven for inspiration, how can we know if we won or lost?

Wise business leaders know that if we discuss upfront what winning looks like and then fail to achieve it, there is no blame to be assigned. We haven’t failed at all, we have learned in an experiment that mattered and held consequence. The argument is for better process management, to spend the time in advance discussing what winning looks like so we know it when we see it or don’t see it. Failure to invest that time ahead of committing resources to an initiative is indeed a form of failure, even if the initiative happens to succeed (how you know it succeeded when you didn’t address that in advance is another story entirely).

Don’t move forward without deciding what winning looks like. Crafting a thesis of the change you are trying to affect and the benefits you intend to bring establishes a benchmark for measurement. Insisting on this step early in product development will not only improve the odds of success, it will improve the teamwork and ability to share in the success a team creates together.

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Photo: Pixabay

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How Sure Are You?

Lately I’ve been struck by a surprising phenomenon finding its way into all kinds of discussions. That would be the expression of certainty.

It seems increasingly in many of the conversations I’m having that others have reached conclusions they feel no further need to revisit. It’s more than certainty. It’s absolute certainty.

Here are some varied examples:

Let me tell you what the Fed is going to do at its next meeting.

Let me tell you what the NASDAQ will do between now and Christmas.

Let me tell you how the conflict in the Middle East will end.

Let me tell you what Elon Musk is really after.

Let me tell you what’s ultimately behind climate change.

Let me tell you who is going to win the presidential election.

Let me tell you what’s going to happen to the nation after the election.

Note the lack of the words might, probably, likely, or even most likely. The statements above are followed by declarations of certainty. Needless to say, these utterances do not come from people who are experts in all areas of knowledge. Who can claim broad insight — approaching clairvoyance — across such a broad spectrum of complex topics? These statements are offered by ordinary folks whose opinions form much the way too many undisciplined declarations emerge in real time.

These days, I often find myself the least certain person in the room. I wonder, how can everyone be so sure about what they are proclaiming?

I work in a business where decision-making is data-driven. We have spirited arguments about work strategies all the time, and the boss doesn’t always win the debate. We argue with facts because there is shared value in our outcomes. Sometimes opinion prevails, but only when subjectivity is guided by objectivity.

We also require a lot of close listening before we get to conclusions. We know our choices have consequences on our company’s results, the actions of our customers, the well-being of our employees, and the financial impact on all our stakeholders. Data drives rigorous thinking. We take our choices seriously.

I realize company culture has little to do with random conversation or even the talking heads clamoring for attention on the media platforms that flood our lives. We are aware fake news creeps into all corners of communication. Somehow a justification for lying has woven its way into popular opinion, where the deliberate application of false information seems to some less of a vice in mainstream conflict if it is deemed a means to an end. Still, when I hear people parrot incoherent arguments expressed by others either for some concocted agenda or strictly entertainment value, it surprises me how willing we can be to compromise our credibility for nothing that would warrant it.

I wonder how so much claimed certainty continues to pierce our uncertain world. The internet fills our lives with noise. You’d think it would humble us to seek more truth before we convince ourselves we have found an answer. You’d think our personal character and integrity would matter more to us. We are endlessly willing to let a social media algorithm drive conflict in our discussions and stir our ire, rather than invest a bit of time validating our expressions before we pile onto the verbal brawl.

Do I expect this to change broadly anytime soon? Probably not. It’s too easy to speak without citing facts, to claim the right to say what we want, when we want, how we want, and believe this is without consequence because one voice self-corrected has little bearing on arena spectacle.

Yet that’s not true. One voice self-corrected is an example that leads to another and another. If those with authority won’t lead by example, imagine the influence of the broad population accepting the burden of that same leadership by caring enough to speak with a tad more precision.

I’m not suggesting anything outlandish. It’s a matter of individual commitment to modest self-reflection over boisterous hubris. Before you say something with absolute certainty, simply ask yourself: How sure are you?

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Photo: Pexels

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Sniff for Myth

The mantra of modern business decision-making is often tied to the basic concept of data-driven reasoning. If you hold a leadership position within an organization, you know that understanding data is a mandate. Data is the foundation for supporting a thesis, building consensus around a point of view, or building an argument for change. Data won’t tell us everything we need to know, and data can easily be misinterpreted, but if we aren’t looking at objectively collected data in forming an analysis, we might be better off buying lottery tickets than investing our company’s money in a resource-heavy plan.

If we know that data is essential to our success, and we know that critical decisions are better informed with data than without it, how is it that so many myths creep into the workplace? By myth, I mean a widely shared belief in a set of rules that a company has adopted without a sufficient test or challenge. In the worst of all circumstances, that myth may have no foundation at all.

As companies grow and practices become routine, repeated behaviors can be handed down from one generation of managers to another. I’ve often written about the notion of “but we’ve always” to point out the routines we come to follow without question, long after the reasoning for those practices has become obsolete. Most companies are guilty of this in one form or another. The good ones find a way to eliminate obsolete practices before they do real damage. Failed companies often find themselves immersed in a death spiral because they stopped questioning what made them successful and found it more expedient to repeat the same actions long after their relevancy left the playing field.

Each year in our cycles of strategic planning, we ask ourselves what is working and what isn’t. Data is often a great indicator in both directions. When we see metrics trailing downward and don’t ask ourselves why, we allow passive behavior to perpetuate itself. Often when we dig into that data, we find there are reasons something that was working no longer is creating the value that was expected. Several things could be going on: a once solid practice has become obviated, a proven practice that was working is no longer ardently being followed, or a practice has emerged from grassroots innovation to replace an existing practice because the people who created the variation come to believe it works — without proper data to support it.

Any of these cases for decline are possible, as are a host of others. All of them allow myth to replace math. When myth in a company takes over workflow, nothing good is likely to happen. It is always our job to sniff for myths — to question existing practices when data reveals a negative trend that must be corrected. Bringing deliberate change is what effective leaders do. Allowing myth to perpetuate is how once-great companies join the dead brand graveyard.

We are always fighting myths. We discover practices we put into place a decade ago were never updated for new technology. We discover a practice we reinvented to drive better results is quietly being rejected by staff members who either don’t like it or don’t understand it, but are sure they are helping matters by covertly sticking to the old practice.

Perhaps we observe a decline in KPIs and temporarily conclude something must be wrong with raw materials because we know the processing methodology we put in place is sound, only to discover that methodology has been misunderstood by the team members utilizing it. We may discover that a team’s interpretation of methodology widely differs from the guidelines developed, not because the guidelines are unsound, but because they have been explained poorly.

In each instance, a myth of what we are doing and why we are doing it overtakes what should be standard operating procedure. It could be an honest set of mistakes. It could be a misunderstanding. It could be a lack of rigor in reevaluating once-proven practices. Regardless of cause, data tells us if we are winning or losing in the form of metrics and dollars. If those signals are getting worse and we fail to delve into the practices behind the decline, we let the myth of proper functioning triumph over the innovation required to unseat the myth.

Company culture is highly efficient at enforcing rules. Veterans in companies are eager to tell rookies “how things are done here.” Sometimes rookies learn existing processes, immediately convince themselves there is a better way, and think they are doing us a favor by doing things that better way without a proper framework for evaluating results. Sometimes company culture is our ally and creates peer reinforcement of best practices. Sometimes company culture invents its own set of operating principles assuring the peer group everything is going as planned when that is not true.

Organizations function from an agreed set of rules, but often the origination of those rules is long-forgotten while the perpetuation of those rules lives on. Myth-busting makes old rules go away, ad hoc rules become exposed, and misunderstood rules become clarified. If we’re looking at data that tells us something is wrong, our intuition in identifying wrongness is only a first step toward correcting it.

Ask yourself if there might be a myth undermining your success. Then go look for it, and without embarrassing anyone, quickly build a consensus to reveal the misapplied rule. Do this often enough and the myths you sniff will be systemically corrected. No company can eradicate all its myths, but companies in constant learning mode can shorten the longevity of misconceptions and revitalize broken practices by reconciling conjecture with data.

That’s how teams get past myth and win together with shared understanding.

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Image: Pixabay

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David Coon: An Appreciation

The end of each year is a time for reflection. We often look back on the past year and try to summarize our milestones. Sometimes we set New Year’s resolutions with the best of intentions. At the moment I’m thinking about someone who won’t be part of the new year.

That is the way of things, perhaps the hardest part of being human, knowing almost as soon as cognition forms that there are bookends on all of us. That inescapable awareness is in many ways the essence of our humanity. We have no choice but to internalize it with relative calm. It doesn’t make it easier when we say goodbye, but it does give us a chance to express thanks for the lives around us who change the course of our own.

The Reverend David P. Coon was the head of the school I attended through middle and high school. He officiated at my wedding. I dedicated my second book to him. It is difficult to record in words what he meant to me because I would be looking for the kind of words it takes to summarize five decades of character-building.

Certainly the earliest of those years were more concentrated, but those took place at a time when I was least likely to understand the transformation he was causing to occur in my mindset. In those days he was Father Coon and I would literally tilt my head up to be able to look into his eyes. He walked the halls of our campus with a magnificent physical presence, a baritone voice that reverberated in the corridors, an embodiment of pure confidence, and a sense of authority that never needed to be asserted. He could be questioned on matters of intellectual curiosity, but not on matters of expectation. He expected we would take our education seriously, our shared community seriously, the mandate of maintaining humility seriously, and the place we would come to take in the world seriously.

He was a serious man and he endeavored to help us see the seriousness in the paths before us. He also laughed as loudly as anyone I’ve met and made us laugh, mostly at ourselves at the times our seriousness crossed into counterproductive meandering. We could ponder the world, obsess on this philosopher or that scientist, but we always needed to be moving forward. Laughing at ourselves moved us forward. It helped us frame ambition appropriately in service to others. It was okay to be on a reward path, but it was not okay to think that material rewards meant a hill of beans compared to healing our world. To gain his respect, we would be required to commit our gifts to the continuum of that healing.

I would not be exaggerating to share that without Father Coon’s influence, it is unlikely I would be typing these words. Our teenage years are a crapshoot at best; mine were a casino where the odds were daunting. Somehow this stranger, this teacher of the impossible, got me to stop betting against myself. He mopped up a mess and caused me to believe everything ahead of me was more important than everything behind me. How much of that did I understand? Come on, I was a teenager, none of it. Yet I remember it now, and it works even better with fewer years left ahead of me than there are behind me.

Was he a visionary? He would just say he was a teacher. I’m going to stick with visionary.

His career was remarkable, but I am going to let others write about the expanse of that. He took an all-boys school built on the ancient tradition of recital and transformed it into a modern coeducational place of learning. He initiated change that broadened the paradigm of “sage on the stage” to embrace peer cooperation that put the whole of the student body above the celebration of any single student. One Team, we called it. He elevated ‘Iolani School to global recognition as a laboratory of exemplary process and a trusted model for lasting outcomes.

He took the tragic lessons of the Vietnam War and opened the minds of a diverse audience to the possibility of peace. His sermons beckoned the beauty and unlimited empowerment of embracing one’s opposite. He was a theologian who could preach with the best of them, but he was a pragmatist who knew declarations without substantive action were the fast track to cynicism. He was not a cynic. His faith was unwavering, a boundless reservoir of resilience and optimism, ardently tested, joyously unshakeable.

If you needed food, water, a quiet moment of prayer, or a reinforcing nod of encouragement, you didn’t have to ask. He was always showing us how kindness and strength were compatible. He was an inspirer of unusual aspiration. The highest order of ourselves is of course never achievable, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to make it our life’s work to try.

Later in life, when he presumed I had reached adulthood, he insisted I call him Dave. That in his mind was one of the least difficult challenges he presented to me. If only he knew.

My wife, Shelley, there with Dave and a few family attendees at our wedding with a little New Testament and a little Old Testament, likes to talk about planting seeds. This is her spirituality, and she immerses herself in it as a matter of routine. When I mention the five decades of Dave, it is just these seeds that he planted that have blossomed in different expressions over the years. At our wedding, as I broke the glass, this Episcopal priest belted out the words “Mazel Tov” with such resonance they probably echoed in Jerusalem.

Those echoes live in me today. I’ll carry the octaves of his voice with me until my inescapable fate is the same as his, the same as us all. The learning inside me is without end because he made that important to me. The questions in me are more important than the answers because he showed me why the questions are eternal but the answers get rewritten by the centuries. Judgment is for the certain, and how many of us can be that certain with so little knowledge? Reflection takes us forward, always forward, because it requires systemically removing our ignorance. Forward is a path to wisdom, where humility is not a choice, but a necessity.

Demonstration of awe and honor is common among theologians. Dave knew that, likely early in his life, no problem. Would you expect less of a kid who grew up boxing in Flint, Michigan only to become a man of the cloth in Hawaii? The trick wasn’t that he knew it. The trick was he got me to know it, a highly unlikely candidate for that sort of unnerving alchemy.

And the next kid. And the next kid. And the next kid.

Those were the seeds he never stopped planting. They flourish now in every part of our world, across languages and borders, wherever there is a need for healing. The lives he inspired carry forward hope, breathe aspiration, and most of us try to remember on occasion to laugh.

Earlier this month I received our usual Christmas card from Dave and his wife, Joanne. In it was a printed note that said it would be their last, that they were going to spend their remaining time focused on each other and their family. I immediately put our card in the mail to them, telling them I would frame their photo and keep it on my desk forever. That card came back undeliverable. Of course, I didn’t know he was in hospice. That makes this almost our last Christmas together.

I end the year incomplete. Timing is everything and we seldom get to say goodbye to everyone we lose. I enter the new year a little more alone, a little less formed, but in knowledge that those seeds were well-planted if not fully seen and understood a half-century ago. Our character is tested daily, our mistakes are endless, and our learning is forever incomplete. Each of us should be so lucky as to have a few people who guided us forward and never let go. If you enjoy the good fortune to have been so inspired by a person of such wisdom, there aren’t enough ways or words to say thank you. We can only offer a humble appreciation.

Dave, this appreciation is eternal, as are your teachings, as is your incomparable love.

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Image: Dave & Joanne Coon, Christmas Card 2023