The Cult of Action: How ‘Bias for Action’ is Brainwashing Organizations

Imagine it’s early morning and you’ve just logged into your “mandatory all employee” call with the Executive Team. Between bits of corporate buzzword bingo and quarterly sales results, a phrase is repeated: “bias for action.” The CEO looks meaningfully into the camera, opining the importance of taking action to stay ahead of the market and competitors. It sounds like a call to arms, a mantra for progress and success. As other managers visibly nod their approval, you think to yourself how a “bias for action” sounds reasonable. In business, we want to foster agility, build momentum, move forward. Growth and progress tend to be at the center of management’s north star, therefore a sense of urgency to take action is comforting and appealing.

The problem is, action without coordination or deliberation can lead to catastrophic results. This becomes a near certain outcome when action is promoted as a value without due regard for the practices that make solutions and actions effective: problem definition and analysis, hypothesis and experimentation, collaboration and dialogue.

The human-friendly workplace needs more “Accountability”

My friend George Dinwiddie enjoys thinking about controversial things, so let’s talk about something potentially divisive. This one’s for you, George.

Accountability is a fraught concept when it comes to management and organizational culture. Too often, it is used as a justification for punishment, when it is really better applied as a means of mutually defining parameters for success. I propose a reorientation of our view of accountability towards a more human-friendly, collaborative framing. In this piece, I suggest a practical approach to defining accountability at three levels: the organization as a whole, the job or role as such, and in relation to day-to-day tasks or other ad hoc situations.

Flipping the Script: The Paradox of Managerial Importance

Stop me if you’ve heard this story about management culture in a company, or experienced it yourself (especially if you happen to work in an American-based organization): Management tends to be the folks who were “high performers” in prior individual contributor-type roles, see their authority as evidence to make decisions, are the highest paid, receive the most public recognition, and are the most entrenched (i.e., abdicate responsibility without consequence and allocate blame for poor results).

Given a reader somewhere, perhaps you, raised their hand to acknowledge this experience, there exists a paradoxical truth which underscores this circumstance. While managers are often considered the backbone of an organization, the reality is that if they were to disappear today, the company would likely continue operating in the short term (and have the runway to recover and hire new management). However, if the workers were to vanish, the company would be left paralyzed, unable to function, and critically impaired.

Avoiding the “Problem with Problems”: The Importance of Problem Definition

Just recently, I pulled up a chair at a neighborhood bar top eatery to have dinner at the end of a long day. When the bartender asked if I wanted anything to drink along with my meal, I eagerly requested a pour of a local San Diego craft beer. It had been a mentally exhausting day navigating the struggles of a company performing poorly, and the antics and pernicious behaviors which accompanied the situation were wearing on me. As I held the cool, condensing glass, I closed my eyes and sighed loudly, anxiously awaiting a fleeting moment of calm… that first sip.

With a loud slap of the hand on the wooden bar, a startling voice next to me boomed out, “Now I know EXACTLY how you feel right now!”

Truth, Lies, and Agile

When I first discovered “agile software development” in 2005, and experienced working in an “agile way”, the impact on me changed my career. People say you gravitate towards what you’re good at or enjoy, and agile helped reveal how much I value working together on a goal.

At that time, my mentors in agile software development reiterated to me the importance of using principles for experimentation, how technical practices are the systemic constraint of software agility, and how continuous improvement is not a meeting or post-mortem. They guided me with customer centricity, introduced new methods and programming practices, and motivated me to learn systems thinking.

But most of all, they kept me mindful that the manifesto for agile software development is about agile software development. Today, I lament the state of agile in the industry today: what agile is perceived to be, what people talk about, what experiences folks have with “agile transformation”. Similar to exploring the gaps between what Scrum is, and what Scrum isn’t, I’d like to do the same with agile. What follows isn’t an all-inclusive list; rather, the topics which I believe are misrepresented often and most damaging.

Throwback to years past: “Agile is a wasteland” and other labels

Circa 2020 and a well-known agile manifesto signatory is curating unbecoming labels for the state of agile. Certainly, now that it’s been said, agile is finally dead. After the infamous premature proclamation in 2019, there’s no way that pesky agile can survive this one… right?

Well, there’s an even peskier problem underfoot. See, somehow agile managed to keep going after a different signatory declared it dead in 2014. And that instance followed yet another different signatory burying agile in the ground while the audience at Agile 2009 cautiously listened in.

What a waste of time we engage in. Labels, accusations, assumptions, proclamations. For all the effort and thought we put into such behavior, the state of agile–however you see it from your place within the large-scale system–is unsurprisingly surprising. We’re shaking our fists at the most basic of systems principles (channeling John Gall here):

COMPLEX SYSTEMS EXHIBIT UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR
– combined with –
COMPLEX SYSTEMS TEND TO OPPOSE THEIR OWN PROPER FUNCTION

That’s not to say coping or giving up is beneficial. Rather, since a system cares not about your desire for order or function, labeling it has no discernible effect. Agile is how you see it from your position within the system; you might consider, instead, how to use it wisely.

Or, if you’d prefer a gentle nudge, consider this throwback from 2015 and work with patterns, rather than labels, accusations, assumptions, or proclamations.

Do you need an “Agile Coach”? Probably not.

“Agile Coach” is a made-up thing. I’ve met countless people who hand me a business card with “Agile Coach” on the front. I have worked with stables of coaches from consulting organizations. I’ve lost count of the number of “Agile Coach” job descriptions I’ve been asked to review. Describing the responsibilities, behaviors, and activities of “Agile Coach” often varies among people. And in my experience, asking management to describe how the role delivers value to people comes out vague and equivocal. I’ve observed the role tends to be about “driving” things (process, training, change) and, speaking as someone whose career has primarily been this very title, often does more harm than good. 

Dangers of Optimizing for “Role Success”

Could you imagine what the human body would be like if each organ in the body were incentivized and managed according to separate role-specific criteria?

Perhaps we want all our body parts to pull their weight and be productive. The heart may be encouraged to increase its beats per minute by 15% day over day. Your poor eyes might be measured on reducing blinks to ensure more constant sight. The stomach could be subject to any number of possible scenarios – keep up the flow of digestion with less stomach acid (“do more with less!”) or ramp up productivity by creating more acid (“100% utilization!”). Just think about how your lungs could be subject to performance management! What a mess it would be… the human body would be so out of sync you might even question if it could remain functioning. No need to wonder; when we manage the body this way, the results are catastrophic.

If the detriment to complex systems is evident in managing parts, why do we similarly manage our companies to the tune of “Role Success”?

In Opposition to the Convention of Hiring: New Principles for Hiring

Annie looked down at the table and softly said to her fiancee, “I’ve never been this nervous, or excited, about a job.” Sitting on the table was a package from the company she had been interviewing with. The interview process had been unlike anything she’d ever experienced; she felt fairly evaluated, trusting of the company mission and values, and she knew the company was a perfect fit for her. The day prior, the company informed Annie she would receive a package–the very package on her table–and would contain everything needed: the company’s hiring decision, feedback, and other insights from the hiring process.

Annie took a deep breath and opened the package.

Towards a Culture of Teams

Have you ever been asked to work with a team, then observed team members interacting with each other, well… never?

The desire to transform an organizational culture to one inspired by teams is understandable. There is no shortage of evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, which suggests teams (and teamwork) are a competitive advantage. The desire for such results through the use of self-organizing teams has led to the popularization of teams as a common organizational design.

What I’ve found in my career, however, is a tendency for organizations to both manage and incentivize teams like a “matrix” (of individuals) despite the assumption or label of “team”. The net effect is predictable: silos within teams. Research has shown my experience to be prevalent and related to inattention of cause-effect relationships between people and their environment, plus absent knowledge of base conditions which invite teamwork (Devine et al., 1999).