The Premortem

My wife will soon be a happy woman. It has nothing to do with my life insurance policy. I am absolutely confident that Deb wishes only well for me. Generally.

For the last two weeks, I have found it impossible to let her accomplish her nightly classroom chores at the dining room table without "Deb, you've got to listen to this," as I excitedly blurt out a passage from the book that I am (gratefully from her perspective) almost done with.

I highly recommend that every person who would presume to lead buy a copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow, by winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Daniel Kahneman. A syntheis of his forty-year opus of research on decision making, the thesis of Kahneman's book is that we  possess two systems.

System 1 is fast, from the gut, a real shoot-first, ask-questions-second actor. System 2 is slow and deliberate, systemic and analytical, ostensibly rational. How we make decisions, good and bad, is a function of both systems.

I am confident that the book is so replete with things leaders need to know and be able to do that I am committed to sharing ideas from it for the next several weeks. Here is the first idea.

Behavioral economics research suggests that, at the outset of new initiatives, entrepreneurial teams and organizations are prone to a bias that Kahneman terms “the illusion of control.” Its attendant elements include “competitor neglect” and “overconfidence,” both of which are a function of the optimistic temperament, an adaptation needed to persist in the face of obstacles.  

Research: Only 35% of small businesses survive the first five years of opening. A survey of American business founders, however, revealed that the average estimate of the chances of success for “any business like yours” was 60%--almost double the true value.

The bias was more profound when people assessed the odds of their own venture. Eighty-one percent of these entrepreneurs put their personal odds at 7 out of 10 or higher, and 33% said their chance of failing was zero.  

To provide partial remedy to “nasty surprises,” Kahneman reports on a strategy created by psychologist Gary Klein called “premortem.” Conducted in the mid-to-late stage of designing a product, program, or event, the procedure is as follows:

The facilitator or leader convenes the team for a work session. The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write, independently and silently, a brief history of that disaster.” Individuals’ “disaster stories” are then shared aloud for the whole team.

The premortem has at least four inter-related advantages: One, it overcomes the groupthink that affects even high-performing teams once a decision appears to have been made. Two, it legitimizes doubts that otherwise may be suppressed. Three, it encourages supporters of the decision to search for possible threats they had not heretofore considered. Four, it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.

Is the premortem a strategy you may use? I thought so. Tune in next week for another good idea. 

The Risk and Reward of Trailblazing

"Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

It will soon be 200 years since the great American transcendentalist penned these words; yet adventuresome folk world wide have lived and will continue to live out Ralph Waldo Emerson's directive for as long as there is civilization. In fact, civilization depends on trailblazers.

Two sources inform my thoughts tonight, one a report from the January 5, 2012 edition of Education Week on Connecticut superintendents' proposal to transform their schools, and two, an October 2011 National Geographic article on the teenage brain. Bear with me. There are important leadership implications here.

Source One. Spurred by the same challenges facing all US schools--international and racial achievement gaps, low levels of student engagement, limited measures of assessment and accountability, and inadequate preparation for post-secondary education and careers--all 135 Connecticut superintendents have aligned with university professors, educational experts, and the governor to explore alternative public school structures and systems.

Notably, many of these alternatives, if enacted, will lead to superintendents ceding power and control to others and taking more than a little professional risk. "We're not at all naive about the challenges before us. We're goring every ox there is," says  Joseph Cirasuolo, the executive director of the group.

My experience suggests that the complexity of the plans and actions required to realize the superintendents' proposal is tantamount to colonizing Mars. What is amazingly simple, however, is the goal of the group's 134 recommendations--learner-centered education.

From a practitioner perspective, making learning personal will require designing and implementing experiential learning, building charter and magnet school programs, delivering just-in-time authentic student assessment, and capitalizing on technology. Resting squarely on the shoulders of policymakers will be replacing regulatory state mandates with mandated student-learning outcomes, then rewarding schools for meeting or exceeding those outcomes. If the coalition can pull this off, that is trailblazing. 

Source Two. When I read a recent report of the teenage brain in National Geographic, I was struck by the candid pictures of adolescents involved, or about to be involved, in risky or novel behavior. To cite but a few examples, the journalist photographed teens texting while driving, dancing the length of a ten-feet-high fence, tagging graffiti in a tunnel, and participating in a rave adorned in neon body paint. The presumed end of several other photographs violates the PG-rating of this blog.

The author explained that teens take risks not because they haven't weighed aversive consequences. They have. They do what they do--and drive us crazy in the interim--because they have calculated, often quite precisely, the rewards of the behavior and judge them as preferred to less-likely (in their mind) punishment.

We all know that the pursuit of novelty leads teens to dangerous behavior, but what we fail to see is that such behavior also generates positive ends. Meeting people, for example, can create a broader circle of friends, inspire happiness, induce health, and increase life success. Researcher Jay Giedd calls this hunt for sensation the inspiration needed to "get you out of the house."

I will leave it to you to review the narrative explaining prolonged brain plasticity and myelination and its role in turning thrill-seeking teens into risk-averse adults. In the interest of space, I close with author David Dobbs' stunning quote: "In scientific terms, teenagers can be a pain in the ass. But they are quite possibly the most fully, crucially adaptive human beings around."

I invite you to consider similarities in the behavior of the Connecticut superintendents and Dobbs' teenagers. The superintendents are going out on a limb because the status quo itself has become aversive. Kids are failing to graduate from high school, the white-minority student achievement gap is growing, and teachers are leaving the profession in droves.

The teenagers are skateboarding down stair railings and driving cars faster than the law allows because they are exploring the limits of what's possible. And presumably like Connecticut superintendents, they hope to get kudos from their peers. After all, we are social animals.

In closing I don't know how the Connecticut experiment will end. I wish them well. In fact, I'd like to see North Carolinians join them. And if you have a teenager in your house, God bless you. Here's what I do know. We all need to "get out of the house" a little more.