Looking good is not the job
The idea
Every idea this week came down to one choice. Do you want to look good in the room, or do you want the result? You rarely get both, and the room is a poor judge.
Where it comes from
This week’s three posts. Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on 7 May 1941, as told by Andrew Roberts in Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Jay Heinrichs in Thank You for Arguing. And Giora Romm, a young Mirage pilot, speaking in Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate.
The story
Start with Thursday, because it has the sharpest picture. In Romm’s squadron, air-to-air training kills were awarded on gun camera film. Over time a habit had crept in called the demonstration shot: a pilot fired the camera from a position that was not quite a kill, purely so that in the evening debrief he could prove he had been on the other man’s tail. It proved nothing about whether he would have won the fight. It only proved something to the room. When the commander, Ran Ronen, banned it and insisted on the target dead centre for sixteen consecutive frames, the pilots groaned. Romm reckons the squadron’s flying improved by something like forty percent the next day. Nothing had changed except that it was no longer possible to look good without being good.
Once you have seen that pattern, you see it everywhere. It ran through the whole week.
On Wednesday, Heinrichs drew the line between a fight and an argument. In a fight you try to beat the other person. In an argument you try to get the outcome you came for. Scoring points is the demonstration shot of the meeting room. Every point you win proves to the people watching that you were right. None of it moves the other person towards the thing you wanted. So Heinrichs says to decide the outcome first, then let the other person score. Concede anything that costs you nothing. The room will think you lost. You will walk out with the decision.
On Tuesday, Churchill applied the same logic to failure. He told Parliament there are two kinds of mistake: the one made towards the enemy, by daring, and the one made on the safety-first principle, by hanging back. Notice which looks better. Nobody is hauled before the House for not attacking. The report reads well, the numbers are tidy, and the cost, the thing that was never attempted, is recorded nowhere. Churchill asked the Commons to back the commanders who make the daring mistake and to look much harder at the safe one. The House backed him, 447 votes to 3.
Put the three together and you get one rule with three faces. In a debrief, it is the demonstration shot. In an argument, it is the points. In a review of what went wrong, it is the safe mistake. Each is a way of being judged well by the people in the room while the real result goes nowhere. And each has the same fix: change what gets measured, so that looking good and being good become the same thing. Ronen changed the camera rule. Heinrichs changes the question from “who was right” to “what do we want”. Churchill changed it from “what did it cost” to “which way was it facing”.
Romm put it in six words: “Ego meant nothing. Improvement was everything.”
A question to sit with
Where in your business is a demonstration shot still rewarded, and what would you change about the camera so that it isn’t?