I think about that long-ago conversation, sometimes, when speaking with management and leadership teams. Their take on what went wrong and what caused it can, at first, sound quite a bit like the wind-up for a Three Stooges pie fight...only without the pies.
Like the "Rashomon Effect" Perry and I were talking about (based on the amazing Kurosawa movie--think CSI: Feudal Japan in which people posit plausible, but differing accounts of events), blame-shifting and the regrettable inability to parse "what's so" based on the limits of perspective can surely hamstring a team looking to make a quick shift.See how nicely I said that?
Even more troubling is the tendency of people to cling to their account of events...all the way to the bitter, hopeless (pieless) end.
- It was those people HR hired!
- If accounting could have given us better numbers...
- The IT people can't program worth a damn!
- I blame Bush, the economy, the Chinese, global warming.
- (in sotto voce: it was the CEO's fault!)
What's powerful is the realization that no one "owns" The Truth (said with gravitas)--not even the CEO, who only knows what he or she sees...and little of that with absolute certainty. Even more powerful is the ability to put together a "workable truth" with enough facts with which to make decisions and enough flexibility to quickly shift as more information becomes available.
