Set Up to Fail

I just posted over on the Always Done It That Way blog about an HBR article that talks about the “middle term” time horizon. I posted over there, because it ties in directly with the post from the book that I wrote about Middle Level Thinking (which happened to be my favorite, of all the 20 posts I wrote).

But I want to make a slightly different point here. The article talks about large companies and their focus either on meeting short-term financial targets (Horizon 1) or in supporting efforts to create long-term growth (cutting edge R&D, Horizon 3). A big problem, as I pointed out in the other post, is that we have ways to measure efforts in Horizons 1 and 3, but not in Horizon 2. Horizon 1 projects make the numbers, and Horizon 3 projects inspire us, but anything in the middle (when compared to either end) pales, and, eventually, is cut.

The underlying point I want to bring out is the propensity we have to set ourselves up for failure, without even realizing it. No one imposed upon us our standards for judging these Horizon 2 efforts. We created the criteria, and we also create the projects, and then they always fail. The problem is in the way we went about it: we didn’t see the connection between these criteria we established (over a period of years) and the projects that would eventually fail because of the criteria.

The answer, of course, is to take a closer look at things that don’t work, and investigate whether or not we created the conditions for that failure. That doesn’t sound like fun, does it!? It’s much more satisfying to blame the economy, the industry, that employee we fired last year, or the competence of people other than us who did the work. I tell people over and over in conflict situations that the only thing you actually control in this world is your own behavior, and they always respond with a knowing nod. They accept that when looking forward about what to do next. But do we want to face that when we try to understand why something didn’t work out as planned? Maybe we set ourselves up to fail? If you have the courage to actually answer that question, then you can set out on the path to make things better.