The Cost of One Degree

Feb. 3

Ambiguity costs; clarity pays off.

My first flight to Africa was on the longest, commercial, non-stop flight available (at the time): from Atlanta in the US to Johannesburg, South Africa. The flight took 17½ hours and covered 9,700 miles. If you do the calculation (as I did), had the pilots’ course been off by just a single degree at the beginning, it would have resulted in us missing Johannesburg by nearly 170 miles. We would have never hit the runway.

In order to reach our goal, not only did the pilots need to be precise about their course direction, but they had to be constantly recalibrating during the flight for things like the changing wind speed, wind direction, and the rotation of the earth. We do something similar as we drive when we constantly check our location against Google maps. (In the old days, it would have been an actual paper map, and in the very old days of ships, a sextant and the sun.)

Guiding an organization’s growth, business decisions, or project is not much different. A clear view of the destination, combined with constant recalibrations, is essential. And, just as a plane or ship must constantly recalibrate due to environmental factors, so must an organization or team.

Clarity versus ambiguity

I like to think of this accuracy of direction in an organization as “clarity versus ambiguity.”

For every degree of ambiguity your team experiences—on topics such as new decisions, what is most important right now, or who is responsible for what—you introduce negative cost, schedule, and productivity impacts. You will miss the mark. The greater the ambiguity, the greater the negative impact.

Whether navigating the sky, the ocean or a business goal, there will be environmental factors attempting to push you off course. Factors may include things like the size of the organization, the organization’s culture, the length of time to the goal, or the changing customer, economic, and competitor environments.

The critical advantage for an organization is to have everyone aligned and working towards the same destination. Imagine if, on my flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg, the ground crew had thought the destination was Cairo, not Johannesburg. It’s still Africa, but the wrong end of the continent. Would the plane have received enough fuel? Or enough food for the passengers?

The point is to imagine the cost to your organization of even the slightest amount of ambiguity across your teams and departments. Are they all as aligned as they should be? Are they working off course, or worse yet, inadvertently working against one another?

The Chief Reminding Officer

Clarity around the direction of an organization or project doesn’t happen just at the launch, but requires “recalibration” every day. This is how organizational health expert Patrick Lencioni often puts it, “If you are a CXO, you are actually a CRO—the Chief Reminding Officer.” Every decision your organization and teams make requires constant reminding of where you are and where you are headed, all the time.

As your team’s Chief Reminding Officer, you must remind your team of your current location and direction. So, what does that mean? Here are the fundamental six items to be absolutely clear on*:

Why do we exist?
How do we behave?
What do we do?
How will we succeed?
What is most important now?
Who must do what?

We will discuss each of these in more depth in future articles. For now, here is a simple practice you can put into place starting with your next meeting. After initiating this discipline, you will see dramatic changes within your team in just weeks. It is a simple discipline to understand, but difficult to apply consistently. However, if you can be consistent, it will be a powerful “recalibration” for every team.

A simple practice

Carve out 10 to 15 minutes at of the end of EACH meeting. As a group, answer and agree on these three questions:

What decisions did we make? (You would be surprised at how much ambiguity is uncovered by this simple step.)
Which decisions are to be held private and not to be discussed outside of the immediate team?
Which of the decisions must be communicated to people outside the team?

Of the decisions that are to be communicated outside the team:

What audience needs to hear this decision?
Who is responsible for that communication?
When must the message be delivered?
How will the decision be communicated each decision? E.g. In person via presentation or conversation? Via email? Cascaded through management? In a company newsletter?

Evidences of Clarity

The transformation on your team will happen within just a couple of weeks. You should start to see evidence of clarity, such as:

Ambiguity on your team will drop.
Back-channel conversations and secret decisions will diminish.
Team members will anticipate the question, “What did we decide?” Debate and discussion around topics will become more lively, crisp, and to the point.
The decisions about when, who, and how to communicate messages will become much quicker (almost automatic) as the team becomes accustomed to thinking about the responsibility to communicate decisions.
With greater clarity, individuals and teams can be trusted to make decisions without seeking “the boss’s” approval for every step. Employees will feel empowered and engaged, and the bottleneck at “the boss” will diminish.

This simple discipline recalibrates your entire team. Clarity is achieved not only within the team, but for everyone else who needs to hear and understand the decisions which were made. Avoid the unwanted costs of ambiguity and begin to focus on absolute clarity as the root of productivity.

Implement this simple meeting practice for a few weeks and let us know what happens on your team! We’d love to chat and are here to help.

*For further reading on the importance of clarity, see Patrick Lencioni’s book The Advantage.

Meg Mittelstedt