10
JUDGEMENT AND IDEAS
Good judgement is the key to executing any plan. We need the ability to make the right decisions at the right moments. Yet those with a high fear of failure struggle with respect to judgement. For instance, how many times are we told to make decisions relying on our gut instinct when, as High-FFs, our gut instinct may be derived from fear, insecurities and perceived slights and prejudices against us? For the recovering High-FF, gut instinct is something we may have to ignore or overcome in order to make strong decisions.
In Judgement (2007) leadership academics Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis state that solid judgement requires a good character and a strong internal “moral compass,” both of which – as High-FFs – we may feel we lack. Yet strong long-term goals and a thought-through strategy offer us the most powerful possible benchmarks for our decisions – making any judgements not about us but about the pursuit of our goals. And if we divide our activities into objectives, strategies and tactics, we are capable of making decisions at a lower level that – no matter what the outcome – should have no immediate bearing at the higher level.
According to Tichy and Bennis, judgement calls are made in three stages. There is the “pre” stage, which is in discerning the actual judgement required – “framing and naming” the judgement needed. This is followed by the “call” in which the decision is made, although we first gather as much information as we need, which may lead to the realization that we do not have enough information or need to enlist different people. And finally there is the “execution,” which is making our decision happen. This requires commitment.
And if this sounds like a recipe for protracted decision making: so be it. Strong decisions take time to get right, especially for the recovering High-FF with a past wrecked by poor decision-making.
“Good judgement is not one terrific aha moment after another,” write Tichy and Bennis. “In the real world, good judgement, at least on the big issues that make a difference, is usually an incremental process.”
This chimes well with Stephen Covey (1989) who states that the best way to improve our responses is to focus on the distance “between stimulus and response.” If we can lengthen this distance our decisions will be less focused on our emotions (a common High-FF trait) and more focused on achieving our goals, which should produce better results.
Tichy and Bennis also state that decision-making is in three domains: judgements about people, judgements about strategy, and judgements in times of crisis. We will deal with people later and have already dealt with strategy in the previous chapter – so what about judgements in a crisis?
Crises are the moments for the recovering High-FF to step out of the shadows and step up to the plate – not least because the potential for humiliation has been removed. Failed is the current state – our worst-case scenario has arrived – allowing the High-FF to take humiliation-free risks, which takes us back to Gene Kranz and his “failure is not an option” moment.
Certainly, we must take responsibility for dealing with a crisis when it comes. Blame can wait for calmer moments, although we should thank those responsible for giving us the opportunity to make strong decisions from (usually) a depersonalized perspective.
According to Steve Chandler (2001) we should look for the gift within every problem. For instance, in public relations the most regular crisis we face is an unhappy client. If the cause is external – some poor publicity perhaps – then the crisis will strengthen their dependence on us. We are the fire brigade arriving just in time to put out the flames and direct the clean up (usually involving a nice lunch with the offending journalist in order to “re-educate” them). If the crisis is internal – they are unhappy with us – then this is usually a good opportunity to go back to the Campaign Plan, reassess the tactics and (after repeated tactical failures) ensure we have the right strategy.
If the problem really is with us then it is often a chance for me to step in and show my team what I can do to soothe a client’s anger. I can take charge of a project or return to the fore with respect to running the account, which will do my stock little harm with both my employees and the client. If even that fails and we lose the account – which is rare given the structural strength of our Campaign Plans – we then have a major opportunity to learn from our mistakes and perhaps reshuffle the team.
A final point on judgement deals with those 50:50 choices – especially when it isn’t always apparent which route best supports our long-term objectives. Deciding between closely aligned university places, career paths, job-offers, promotions or even potential employees are key moments in our life and they can, for the High-FF, trigger fear-based insecurities that lead to false evaluations and major mistakes, or indecision at best. If life comes down to a handful of decisions, these are them – and they are usually the moments, above all else, that provide the monkey with all the evidence he needs regarding our innate awfulness.
There is no easy way of dealing with such decisions, and no way of completely removing the fear. My own method has been to draw two columns headed by our choices – say UEA or UCL – with the rows the factors that will influence my decision, which for universities would include such things as: structure of course, course reputation, college reputation, city, distance from home, other friends attending, nightlife and accommodation. We then need to score each and, importantly, weight each (perhaps banding a few of the peripherals – such as city and nightlife – together). And if it gives us the result we didn’t want, then the exercise at least helps confirm the choice we favour.
And importantly we should not regret the decision. Regret is a major trait of the High-FF, with us spending much of our lives pondering parallel universes, “if only” we’d made this or that choice. Of course, the rival world is always the one in which we have achieved our goals and lost our fears, leaving us cursing our poor decision-making or hesitancy regarding opportunities. Meanwhile, our purgatory continues in the real world – with those regrets piling up just beyond every decision-requiring crossroads.
Yet regretting the unknown is madness. It is self-inflicted torture and a cheap victory for the monkey. And it is easily refuted, simply because we are – indeed – High-FFs. As stated, the insecurities that dog High-FFs are innate. There is no decision or outcome that will remove our fears, so the feelings we have now we’d still have – even if we’d made all the right decisions and achieved all our wildest dreams (as stated, an insight into celebrity behaviour is all the evidence required to prove this point).
And we must remember that each lifespan involves multiple 50:50 moments. Sheer probability tells us that we’ll get some right and some wrong, so it is self-defeating to simply focus on those we potentially (but not certainly) got wrong.
Of course, as High-FFs such balanced thinking is a stretch, so we could always focus on the fact that, “knowing our luck,” we’d have probably been run over by a bus on the first day along the alternative road.
Like judgements, ideas are key execution tool. And, again, they are a problematic area for those handicapped with a high fear of failure. Many High-FFs are very good at generating ideas, although most High-FFs fall at the first hurdle when it comes to implementation. Over time, this renders us incapable of differentiating between good and bad ideas, which – sadly – leaves us haunted by our creativity (especially when we see our ideas being implemented by others). For those with a high fear of failure ideas can seem like pipe-dreams, often giving us nothing more than false hope and an additional layer of frustration.
Other High-FFs, however, can struggle to think imaginatively – perhaps because, so trapped are they in their current status, they have switched off their creative brain. So while the sensitivity of the High-FF lends itself to creativity, poor experiences may mean we have extinguished the flame or – potentially worse – become tormented by our own ideas.
And this is bad news when trying to implement a strategy for meeting our objectives because navigating the inevitable “rocks in the river” (to quote Robbins) requires strong imagination as well as strong judgement.
According to advertising executive Jack Foster in How to Get Ideas (1996) people who come up with good ideas know they exist and know they will find them, which can, initially, seem unhelpful. What if we are not confident good ideas exist? If Foster states that the most important factor needed for successful idea generation is self-belief, then those without it are surely doomed, at least in terms of idea generation.
But there is hope. For Foster the key problem is being a grown up. Adults think too much. They are hampered by experience, which – for those with a high fear of failure – is usually negative experience. Boundaries, rules, fears: all crowd in on the adult trying to generate ideas.
So the answer is to be more like children. As children we all indulged in imaginative play without rules or boundaries, so we need – once again – to tap into that childlike freedom of illogical and silly creativity.
“Kids are natural born scientists,” says Foster, quoting astronomer Carl Sagan. “First of all they ask the deep scientific questions. Why is the moon round? … By the time they get into High School they hardly ever ask questions like that.”
For the High-FF, this is because the fear of failure has kicked in – with all the attendant concerns regarding public humiliation.
Yet nearly all children go through the “why” stage, and we should do our best to return to that wonderfully creative period when young eyes are looking and articulating thoughts and ideas for the first time.
In fact this is highly possible for the High-FF. As stated, High-FFs are often sensitive types that have ideas but then fear the criticism airing such ideas may bring. Yet this is no different to any creative: designers, writers, artists are all overly sensitive to criticism. The difference between them and us (as High-FFs) is that they manage to overcome their fears. How? By pursuing strong objectives via well-thought through strategies and well-executed tactics. This has meant that their RAS is tuned to their creativity, not their sensitivity.
High-FFs, meanwhile, are tuned incorrectly, which either blocks creativity totally or paralyzes any potential our creativity generates. With our RAS set to goal-achievement, however, our ideas are likely to be more useful to our positive pursuits, rather than our darkest contemplations.
James Webb Young is the Sun Tze of ideas. And in his 1960s book A Technique for Producing Ideas he set out what he saw as a strong process for advertising creatives to follow when trying to think up campaigns in that burgeoning industry.
“The production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords,” was Webb Young’s view.
He stated that there were general principles that underpinned the production of ideas, and that these included the notion that ideas are, more or less, “a new combination of old elements.” This is not dissimilar to a comedian’s thought process (Foster suggests we study comedians if we are struggling to think like children) and, like the comic, the key need is the ability to see relationships between different elements in order to create a new (perhaps funny) version of reality.
Webb Young followed this up with a simple and intuitive step-by-step methodology:
But what if this only throws up rotten ideas? According to Foster there is no such thing as a bad idea. As with Thomas Edison and his experiments with light-bulbs/rubber, bad ideas are no more than part of the elimination process for the creation of good ideas. And some bad ideas are not bad ideas at all – they just haven’t been judged correctly. For instance, Richard Drew – the inventor of Scotch tape (as Sellotape is known in the US) – was told to “take this tape … and shove it” by the person first trialling it.
Yet we need to be aware that no ideas are final. For every good idea we have there is, according to Foster, an even better one out there. This should motivate us to supplement our ideas with refinements and additions but also to quickly replace our weaker ideas with new and stronger ones. In fact, as long as we are thinking of ideas, we are in the correct frame of mind for thinking up the right idea.