Us
veterans know a thing or two about snafus, shitshows and clusterfucks. I found
this article by Corinne Purtill from “Quartz at Work” that you all might find
interesting. I hope you enjoy it …
Let’s say
the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or
whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as
planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you
drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck.
Clusterfucks
hold a special place in public life, one distinct from the complications,
crises, and catastrophes that mar our personal and professional
existences. The
F-Word, former Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower’s
comprehensive history of the term, defines a clusterfuck as “a bungled or
confused undertaking or situation.” Stanford business professor Bob Sutton goes
further, describing clusterfucks as “those debacles and disasters caused by a
deadly brew of illusion, impatience, and incompetence that afflicts too many
decision-makers, especially those in powerful, confident, and prestigious
groups.”
The term
dates at least as far back
as the Vietnam War, as military slang for doomed decisions resulting from
the toxic combination of too many high-ranking officers and too little
on-the-ground information. (The “cluster” part of the word allegedly refers to
officers’ oak
leaf cluster insignia.)
“I have a
weird obsession with clusterfucks,” Sutton tells
Quartz At Work. He and Stanford Graduate School of Business colleague Huggy Rao
took on the topic directly in their 2014 book Scaling
Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, though publishers
demanded that the softer substitute “clusterfug” appear in the final text.
(This was not Sutton’s choice: His
other books include The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole
Survival Guide.)
To
appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first
helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not:
A fuck-up.
“A fuck-up is just something all of us do every day,” Sutton says. “I broke the
egg I made for breakfast this morning. That was kind of a fuck-up.” Whereas
clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of
the human condition.
A SNAFU. While
sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang
military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the
functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and
many of our personal lives). A SNAFU work environment is usually manageable;
one that is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair, another military legacy)
probably isn’t. “When my students with little experience go to work at a famous
company and it isn’t quite as they dreamed, I do ask them if it is FUBAR or
SNAFU, and tell them SNAFU will describe most places they work,” Sutton said.
A
shitshow. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary
describes a shitshow as a “situation or state of affairs characterized by
chaos, confusion, or incompetence.” A clusterfuck may come to possess all those
characteristics, but is more properly identified by the decisions that produced
it than its outcome.
The three
main contributors to clusterfucks:
Sutton
and Rao analyzed countless cases of scaling and expansion, both successful ones
and those that ended in disaster. In reviewing the most spectacular failures,
they identified three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive,
embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck.
They
were:
Illusion. A
clusterfuck starts with the decision maker’s belief that a goal is much easier
to attain than it actually is. The expectation that two car companies with
different languages and different cultures would merge together flawlessly, as
the architects of the
doomed Daimler-Chrysler merger apparently believed? Clusterfuck. The
Bush Administration’s estimate that the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq
would take no more than a few
months and $60 billion?
A clusterfuck prelude of tragic proportions.
Impatience. A
misguided idea alone does not produce a clusterfuck. The idea also needs a
champion determined to shove it along, usually over the objections of
more-knowledgeable underlings. Sergey
Brin’s reported insistence (paywall) on introducing Google Glass to
the public against its engineers’ wishes turned a potentially groundbreaking
piece of technology into a stupid-looking joke.
Incompetence. When
errors of information and timing meet blatantly stupid decisions by people
who should know better, disaster tends to ensue. Bear Stearns wasn’t the
sole cause of the global financial crisis, of course, but former CEO Jimmy
Cayne’s decision to spend 10 days of the 2007 subprime mortgage loan
meltdown playing
at a bridge tournament without phone or email access contributed to
the firm’s collapse—and to the worldwide disaster that followed.
All three
of these failings share a common root: people in power who don’t (or won’t)
acknowledge the realities of their environment, and who don’t push themselves
to confront what they don’t know. Nobody likes to spoil the heady euphoria of
an exciting new project by discussing the possibility of failure. The problem
is, if potentially bad outcomes aren’t addressed pre-launch, they are more
likely to surface afterward, when the reckoning is public and expensive.
The
antidote to clusterfuckery, Sutton argues, is a willingness to confront the
possibility of failure and disappointment built into every new venture, and to
plan accordingly.
He cites
a favored
decision-making tactic of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel
Kahneman (who in turn credits it to psychologist Gary Klein). Before a big
decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the
group in two. One is assigned to imagine a future in which the project is an
unmitigated success. The other is to envision its worst-case scenario. Each
group then writes a detailed story of the project’s success or failure,
outlining the steps and decisions that led to each outcome. Imagining failure
and thinking backwards to its causes helps groups identify the strengths and
weaknesses of their current plans, and adjust accordingly.
“People
make better decisions when they look into the future and they imagine that they
already failed, and they tell a story about what happened,” Sutton says. With
better planning, it won’t be a story that has to be bleeped out.
Cited:
Corinne
Purtill. “ The Difference Between a Snafu, Shitshow and a Clusterfuck.”
(Online) March 16, 2018.
very good.
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