A friend of ours working inside a large U.S.-based organization marvels at how much time gets wasted on what he calls Empty Arguments. Empty Arguments, he observes, result in too many unfocused meetings and conversations involving too many people, and require too much follow-up and clarification.
In exploring this theme with him, we came up with eight Empty Arguments that suck up bandwidth and limit a company’s potential to innovate, adapt, and act quickly on opportunity:
1. Who’s in charge.
The quest for, and maintenance of, one’s status is one of the most prevalent and profligate business behaviors there is. It results in wasteful games like that old standard, “Kissing The Boss’s Ass.”
In the improvisational model, who has high status in a scene depends not on one’s job title or institutional pedigree, but on the circumstances of the scene. Leadership does not always have to come from the top. It is as likely to emanate from the center, in the form of rapid consensus-building, or from the rear, in the form of decisive and enthusiastic support for a scene, a player or a productive game.
2. Scapegoating (a.k.a. The Blame Game, a.k.a. It Wasn’t Me, a.k.a. I Never Got Your Email)
This Empty Argument is another classic time-waster, a purely political game that’s a huge drag on productivity. In the improvisational model, teams succeed and fail together. Everyone is in charge, everyone accepts credit, and everyone shoulders blame.
Just look at how much time and effort BP is spending on assigning blame for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama made a good move yesterday by accepting full responsibility, a move designed to clear the air of this Empty Argument. Edit. Done. Move on. Whenever you, as a manager, sense any energy being devoted to scapegoating, edit the scene and move on.
3. The Big Idea (a.k.a. The Killer Concept, a.k.a. The Gamechanger, a.k.a. The Moby Dick)
The quest for a Big Idea can turn into an Empty Argument in a three ways: 1) Stalking, capturing and processing a Big Idea can blind your team to other opportunities (this was an okay game on a whaling ship in the 1840s, not so much in the networked business environment of today); 2) so many people inside and outside the organization have to weigh in on a Big Idea that its original intention and power gets watered down or lost; and 3) the Big Idea will inevitably get divvied into a series of Little Ideas, so why not simply start with Little Ideas?—all of which will have the potential to morph into Big Ideas! Start small and build, don’t begin big and diminish! Enhance, don’t dilute!
Focus on purpose and all your Little Ideas will align themselves with Big Themes. Focus on process and Big Ideas will emerge organically. Focus on people, because Big Ideas don’t change the game quarterly, people do, on a daily basis. Big ideas come and go. Purpose, process and people are the stars you can steer the ship by.
4. The research. Research is a snapshot taken in the past. It can tell you a lot about where you’ve been but very little about where you’re going. It is a dial on the dashboard but is not a way of charting your course or predicting what the weather will be like in the future. Research can inform a scene, but it should almost never be what the scene is about.
5. How to spin a story. Scripting, editing, re-writing, getting bottlenecked on approvals, and then spinning a narrative for your audience is a really Empty Argument. As much as I abhor her politics and her prideful ignorance, Sarah Palin gets a lot of credit as an improviser. The reason she can stay relevant and a beat ahead of the news cycles is that, unlike John McCain and most other politicians, she’s not scripting or trying to spin anything, she is relating to her environment in real time, in her own authentic way. It drives the liberal news spinners crazy. (President Obama does the same to the righties.) Nosy neighbor? Build a fence! When Palin makes notes on the palm of her hand during a speech, the Ivy League-educated (I do not include Brown grads in this) grademaking machines in the liberal media try to spin it as “Doesn’t do her homework.” Palin, however, knows intuitively that 90% of the people who see this image will have it made this move themselves. We can relate. The lesson: Living your narrative is more effective than trying to live up to a narrative you’ve scripted, then convincing others to buy into it, too (see Woods, Eldrick “Tiger”).
6. Labeling. In the Networked World, curation is an essential skill. The ability to provide context for ubiquitous content is important, and should be an area of constant focus. The Empty Argument here begins with the notion that everything has to fit into the known universe of the organization or brand, that there will be an institutional meme to deal with every anomaly. In a networked environment, there are so many anomalies that this is an impossibility. Don’t waste time arguing about how to label everything. This dampens originality and creative energy. Approach every situation as its own anomaly. Act first, label later.
7. The platform. This is one of the newer Empty Arguments that have gone viral in large organizations. Decisions about which technology platforms to use has become a high-stakes game that often involves tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of discussion and debate. Here are a couple of reasons why platform Arguments are often Empty: 1) There are too many platforms to assess with any certainty, thousands of them. No one can be an expert in all of them. For this reason, decisions about platforms often as not come from a personal agenda, and not from any qualified assessment of all the options. 2) The platform is secondary to the narrative. By arguing about platforms, a company is pulling focus from its narrative. This is putting the cart ahead of the horse. Performance has very little to do with platforms. Great design is great design whether it’s computer-generated, hand-drawn or modeled in clay. Narrative first, platform later.
8. Who’s right and who’s wrong. When you script your narrative, there’s only one ‘right’ way to deal with a problem and every other way (see ‘Labeling’ above) is, by definition, ‘wrong.’ Improvisers understand that there’s always more than one way to solve a problem, and that the ability to collaborate and come up with original solutions to original problems is far more effective than arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong in any given scene. Improvisers focus on whether or not behaviors are consistent or inconsistent with themes and environment. This liberates all sorts of possibilities that aren’t present when the argument centers on right vs. wrong.
So…let’s put a cost estimate on these Empty Arguments:
The organization where our friend works, a relatively well-run company by American standards, employs 120K people around the world. Figure 10K of them are managers who have a say in the direction of the company and its brands. Our friend estimates that a third of a typical manager’s day (call it 3 hrs/day) is spent engaged in Empty Arguments. That’s 30K management hours a day across the enterprise. At an average cost per manager of $100/hr, that’s $3M a day, which equates to approximately $270M worth of wasted time per quarter!
Improvisation gives employees the ability to see and minimize the Empty Arguments listed here, and many others, too. If the managers at my friend’s company can spend one less hour per day on Empty Arguments, it will save the company $1M per day, or $360M per year in resources that can be put to better use.
That’s a lot of Empty.
Arvai’s presenation rambled all over the place. He seemed to have no one particular point he was driving at. Frequently, he’d turn his back to the audience, look up at his Prezi projected on a large screen, scratch his head, and navigate around the Prezi until he found the next thing he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he got a little lost as to where in the Prezi he could find what he was looking for.
A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.
Underneath his fright wig and his goofy screen persona, Harpo Marx was one beautiful human being. In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he lists his family’s rules. It’s some of the wisest advice a father ever gave his children:
John Hagel III,
While you’re lacing up your Google running shoes, or in the vernacular of this future, your ‘Googs,’ you get an alert on your mobile that there’s a major drought looming in Tibet, which is on track to record its lowest snowfall ever.
