
RMS Titanic departing Southampton on April 10, 1912. Widely acclaimed as "practically unsinkable," she sank in the early hours of April 15, on her first crossing of the Atlantic. Even the word practically couldn't sufficiently protect the prognosticators from risk. Photo by F.G.O. Stuart (1843-1923), courtesy Wikipedia.
You're working on a high-risk project, and the VP of Marketing wants you to reassure the product manager that you'll meet the promised delivery date. Or you've been tasked to find out why one of the company's products was recalled, and the CEO wants to know whether a repetition could ever happen. Or some other embarrassing event has occurred, and it has fallen to you to find a path forward. Isaac, who was in the lead of whatever unit got into such a mess (if the event is in the past), or who is in the lead of the unit that could create a future mess, has asked you to "please reassure them," that everything will be OK and all is well.
Isaac has given you his word that all will be well. That's nice, but very far from good enough. If you do as Isaac asks, your career is at risk.
Here are some guidelines for avoiding your own entanglement in the looming failure you've been charged with investigating.
- Understand your personal risks
- Although your role as investigator is legitimate on the surface, it's possible that your real task is to provide the answer almost everyone wants: everything will be OK. If there's strong evidence that everything will be OK, the risk to you is small. But unless you have access to independent, objective expertise, or unless you're qualified — and permitted and able — to assess the evidence yourself, you'll be relying on the judgments of others if you declare the situation under control. That could be a very risky act indeed.
- Nobody can predict the future
- Assurances Although your role as investigator
is legitimate on the surface, it's
possible that your real task is to
provide the answer almost everyone
wants: everything will be OKof the 100% kind about future events, from absolutely anyone, no matter how respected or expert, are so much bilge water. Nothing about the future is 100% predictable. There's always a small chance of the unexpected occurring. The Titanic was widely believed to be "practically unsinkable." - When you receive such 100% assurances, ask probing questions of the person providing the assurances. Start with, "How can you be 100% certain of anything involving the future?" And get their responses in writing. Such things look a whole lot dumber in print than they sound in person.
- Be judicious in your reporting
- If you can't persuade Isaac to be more circumspect, then gather enough information to provide a foundation for a report along the lines of, "They seem convinced that all will be well, but I couldn't find hard data strong enough to support their claims."
- You probably aren't free to refuse to pass Isaac's claims along, but you're certainly free to include your own assessment along with Isaac's claims. In formulating your own assessment, be careful to restrict it to facts. Unless you have justification, you really can't say that Isaac's claims are false. But you probably can say that you haven't found support for Isaac's claims.
When you do provide the result of your investigation, take care to be explicit if you're merely passing along the judgments of others. Express your projections in terms of probabilities, quantified to the extent possible. If you can supply percentages, do so, but otherwise use phrases like, "strong likelihood," or "small chance." For example, you could say that there's a 90% chance that things are OK.
If in your judgment a report about the uncertain future is required to make predictions without reference to probabilities or chance, there's an elevated likelihood that you've been cast in the role of someone to be blamed in case all does not go well. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
How to Undermine Your Boss
- Ever since I wrote "How to Undermine Your Subordinates," I've received scads of requests for
"How to Undermine Your Boss." Must be a lot of unhappy subordinates out there. Well, this
one's for you.
Social Transactions: We're Doing It My Way
- We have choices about how we conduct social transactions — greetings, partings, opening doors,
and so on. Some transactions require that we collaborate with others. In social transactions, how do
we decide whose preferences rule?
Some Hazards of Skip-Level Interviews: III
- Skip-level interviews — dialogs between a subordinate and the subordinate's supervisor's supervisor
— can be hazardous. Here's Part III of a little catalog of the hazards, emphasizing subordinate-initiated
skip-level interviews.
Cultural Indicators of Political Risk
- Because of fire risk, hiking in dry forests during dry seasons can be dangerous. In the forest, we stay
safe from fire if we attend to the indicators of fire risk. In the workplace, do you know the indicators
of political risk?
Unethical Coordination
- When an internal department or an external vendor is charged with managing information about a large
project, a conflict of interest can develop. That conflict presents opportunities for unethical behavior.
What's the nature of that conflict, and what ethical breaches can occur?
See also Workplace Politics and Effective Communication at Work for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming April 21: Choice-Supportive Bias
- Choice-supportive bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to evaluate our past choices as more fitting than they actually were. The erroneous judgments it produces can be especially costly to organizations interested in improving decision processes. Available here and by RSS on April 21.
And on April 28: The Self-Explanation Effect
- In the learning context, self-explanation is the act of explaining to oneself what one is learning. Self-explanation has been shown to increase the rate of acquiring mastery. The mystery is why we don't structure knowledge work to exploit this phenomenon. Available here and by RSS on April 28.
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- A recording of a program presented June 29, 2017, Monthly
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Decis
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- A recording of a program presented June 24, 2020, Monthly
Webinar, sponsored by Technobility
Webinar Series. PMI members can earn 1.0 Category 'A' PDU by viewing this program. View this program now.
- A recording of a program presented June 24, 2020, Monthly
Webinar, sponsored by Technobility
Webinar Series. PMI members can earn 1.0 Category 'A' PDU by viewing this program. View this program now.
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