How can leaders create a safe space for learning?

Scott Hammerl

Head of Learning – Enterprise Strategy @ Fannie Mae

Scott Hammerl - SHRM-SCP shared his incredible POV on the future of people initiatives. 🎆

Sniper --> Inner School Teacher --> L&D Guru.

“Acts of consistency are better than acts of intensity”. 🎯

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The Tyranny of Homogeneous Excellence

by Scott Hammerl

Data-driven decision-making, quantifiable performance evaluation, and measurable program effectiveness have become ubiquitous requirements on most Human Resource job descriptions.  Similarly, being able to “drive measurable impact” is widely considered sacrosanct within most People Initiatives.  To be clear, these are noble goals and critical components to achieving strategic objectives.  It’s important to remember, however, that metrics, data, and measurements are not ends in themselves. More critically, without the proper systems and structures in place, the measurements made to mitigate mediocrity end up metastasizing it.  I call this phenomenon the Tyranny of Homogeneous Excellence: a form of willful blindness caused by an intense desire to produce consistent, measurable performance outcomes.  Ultimately, this results in the ostracization of high-performers because they are not within the field of view.    

Metrics Behaving Badly: Two concepts worth remembering

Campbell’s Law: the more important a metric is in social decision making, the more likely it is to be manipulated.  (Example: a sales manager who starts tracking the number of calls each representative makes may cause sales reps to spend more time making calls than closing deals). 

Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.  (Example: when teams use green, yellow, or red to report on their status, critical deficiencies are often hidden to preserve green status – read how Alan Mulally turned Ford around).

From Wells-Fargo employees creating fraudulent checking accounts to Chicago school teachers helping students cheat on standardized tests, you don’t need to look far to find examples where attempts to measure something in the name of data-driven outcomes actually produced undesirable outcomes.

Despite some of these obvious shortcomings, the seductive simplicity of measure-at-all costs myth persists.

For the Record: Measures, managers, and myths

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” is an often-quoted admonition commonly attributed to the late W. Edwards Deming, a leader in the field of quality improvement.  The problem is he never said that.  What Deming actually wrote is, “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.”  Deming repeatedly warned against mandating measurement to steer management decisions, noting that the most important data needed to manage often are unknown and unknowable. 

This, I imagine, is the real issue: fear of the unknown, intolerance for what is unknowable, and anxiety fomented by unknowability. The allure of neat measurements has a gravity many leaders and organizations struggle to escape.  Like people who struggle to adapt outside the Matrix, “real life” beyond the idyllic simulation can be overwhelming and disorienting. 

Cognitive Cannibalism: Parasitic Processing

What Campbell, Goodhart, and Deming really offer are tools to better identify the various forms of self-deception we engage in – particularly relating to our use of data.  Without getting too far into the weeks, suffice it to say that self-deceptions don’t come as isolated instances.  They constellate into complex patterns of self-organization.  Over time, confirmation bias strengthens the degree to which you engage in a narrow framing of situations, which can then feed back into the confirmation bias.  In other words, the way you frame the problem is actually what’s preventing you from solving the problem.  This is a process that feeds upon itself – hence, Parasitic Processing. 

Sic Semper Tyrannis: Call to Action

It is said that fools reject reality and expect things to be different.  The wise accept reality and expect the unexpected.  And the reality is that a strict adherence to a measure-only approach to talent will predictably delivery consistency as much as it will mediocrity.  Understanding the dynamic, complex interactions connected to any one People Initiative is a vital first step.  Data, measurement, and metrics will always play a critical role in how we track success for ourselves as HR professionals as well as our stakeholders.  How big of a role and in conjunction with what other forms of evaluation is what we must be prepared to advocate for.

Organizational Culture Change Example - Alan Mulally Ford Turnaround Story (newageleadership.com)