December 15, 2015
Do you remember the “Good News – Bad News” jokes? Here’s a favorite of mine: The airline pilot comes on the intercom and says to the passengers, “There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that we are ahead of schedule. The bad new is that we don’t know where we’re going!”
Here is more good and bad news: The good news is that while life is never simple or easy, most of the time it is fairly stable and predictable. Over time and with effort, most of us get pretty good at it. We learn how to turn uncertainties and complexities into habits and habits into routines. At the end of most days we can say to ourselves “Well, today was a pretty good day!” Facing decisions one after another – some small and insignificant, others large and important – most of the time we know what to do: We look closely at the obstacles that stand in our way, then say “Ah, been there, done that,” and move on! And most of the time, things turn out okay. Most days bring few unpleasant surprises, no insurmountable problems, no huge crises.
The bad news is that sooner or later our good luck runs out: Something out of the ordinary will happen. We will be surprised, we will come upon what seems to be an insurmountable or even an unimaginable problem, and once in a while, we will all face a serious crisis. Like it or not, we will be expected – and at times required – to make choices we would rather avoid, address decisions about issues we do not understand, and confront situations for which we are not prepared. Now, rather than “been there, done that,” all we can say is “This is really new and I have no idea what to do.”
Occasionally, one of these “unknown” problems turns out to be an extraordinary one. No matter how we respond, it has the potential to make dramatic changes in our future. Social psychologists have called these moments Choice Points. “Choice Points,” writes John Glidewell, “are the points that set courses that change a family or change a city.”
In Choice Points, published in 1970, Glidewell writes:
Sometimes choice points come up slowly and gradually. I’m pretty sure I don’t notice them until it is too late. Sometimes choice points come up suddenly and dramatically. I am startled and disturbed by the flat demands they make upon me…Faced with a choice point, I find that I am involved emotionally. I feel all sorts of things. I seem to be scared, angry, hurt, and even sometimes glad – all at the same time.Glidewell suggests that there are three human situations – he sees them as universals – within which Choice Points can be expected:
- Fight or Flight: “When to fight and when to run away; and how to fight and how to run away.”
- Dependency or Dependability: “When to be dependent and when to be dependable; and how to be dependent and how to be dependable.”
- Love – Offered or Sought: “When to offer love and when to seek love, and how to offer love and how to seek love.”
Finding ourselves in the middle of one or another of these universal human situations, each of which requires us to struggle with two totally different issues – first the”when” and then the “how” to take action – we inevitably create what Glidewell calls “perpetual problems,” what I am calling wicked problems. They are “perpetual,” wrote Glidewell, because “We come around to them again and again, each time getting a little closer or a little further away from solutions. The tension rises and then it drops, but it never goes away.”
Glidewell stumbled unexpectedly upon one of these choice points – and created for himself a “perpetual problem” – during what turned out to be a painful and life-changing conversation with his five-year old daughter. At the time, he was on active duty in the air force during the Korean War:
“Do air force planes drop bombs on real cities,” his daughter asked?
“Yes, in war time they do,” answered Glidewell.
“Do any people get killed?”
“Yes, some get killed,” answered Glidewell, aware that he was becoming hopelessly caught in the impossible task of explaining the cruel folly of war to a trusting child.
“Why do we kill people?”
“They are our enemies. They are trying to kill us or our friends. That makes them our enemies.”
“Do any little children get killed?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“Are they our enemies?”
At that, wrote Glidewell, “all my adult wrapping fell off and I stood exposed to my child in all my foolishness. I spoke through the shame in my heart and the hot tears in my eyes.”
“No,” he answered, “they are not our enemies.”
Glidewell paused to regain his composure. “The world can be a cruel place,” he finally said. “But I promise you that I will do all I can in my time to build a world in which little children will be safe. It is a solemn promise.” And in the moment, a new future opened up for Glidewell.
Years later, Glidewell wrote that he had never forgotten the promise given to his daughter. After years of focused effort – of fighting what had become for him the Good Fight against violence in all of its forms – it seemed to have made little difference. “But I haven’t had much effect on the world trying to keep [my promise]” he wrote.
Strategic Inflection Points
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, in Only the Paranoid Survive, writes about a day in November, 1994, when Intel had its own choice point moment. A flaw had been discovered in their new Pentium processor chip which was being installed in most of the new computers. The flaw was determined to be a design error in the chip that caused a rounding error in division once in every nine billion times. In practical terms, it meant that the average spreadsheet user would run into the problem once every 27,000 years. The senior managers at Intel decided that since a technical fix was quite simple, there was no need to worry.
But then the media discovered that the chip was “flawed.” Headlines appeared: “Flaw undermines the accuracy of Pentium chips,” and “The Pentium Proposition: To buy or not to buy.” In a matter of days IBM, Intel’s most important customer, announced that they were suspending the shipment of all computers with the Pentium chip installed. And in Grove’s words, “All hell broke loose.” Calls flooded in from thousands of computer users demanding a new chip for their computers. The irony was that none of the callers were actually customers. Intel only sold chips to computer manufacturers, not to individuals.
Intel resisted at first. Their first strategy was to inform these irate callers that they didn’t need a new chip, that the old one would work just fine. It was a serious mistake. No one was satisfied with this. They wanted the flaw fixed! After several days and nights of hectic meetings by an Intel crisis team, they changed course. Anyone who wanted a new chip could have one. And in Grove’s words, “Something big, something different, something unexpected happened…And we embarked on a whole new way of doing business.” The name that Grove gave to this “something” was “Strategic Inflection Point.”
“What had happened?” asked Grove. He made sense of it this way: “…The old rules of business no longer applied…New rules prevailed now…The trouble was, not only didn’t we realize that the rules had changed – what was worse, we didn’t know what rules we now had to abide by.”
What Intel faced that November in 1994 was a transformational choice point. Grove defined it “as a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. When a Strategic Inflection Point hits,” he added, “all rules of business shift, furiously and forever.”
Strategic inflection points are not limited to high-tech firms, Grove concluded, nor “are they something that happens to the other guy…They are inevitable.” And when faced with one, all business face the same challenge: “Adapt or die.”
“When You Come to a Crossroads, Take It!”
Yogi Berra, all-star catcher for the New York Yankees, is considered to have been among the best baseball players in recent memory. But he had become even more renowned for his “Yogi-isms” – his talent for mangling the English language into new and amazing configurations. Two of his most often repeated pronouncements are “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” and “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” But Berra is most famous for this: “When you come to a crossroads, take it!”
When we hear someone repeat that, we laugh. Ha- ha. How silly. Everyone knows that when you come to a crossroads, there are always several roads leading away and sometimes more. “Hey Yogi,” we want to say,” there’s no ‘it’ at a crossroads!”
Or is there? Could it be that Yogi was to something, at least where choice points and strategic inflection points are concerned?
For our purposes, let’s assume that leading away from any choice point crossroads there are at least three possible paths:
– First, we can take the path of Denial. “Hey,” we insist, “there’s no problem here.” Or if we can’t deny it, we can insist that it must belong to someone else. We can “leave the field” and flee in another direction. Or faced with unassailable evidence that there is a serious issue before us, we can procrastinate, saying as did Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, “I can’t think about that right now…I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
– Second, we can fall back upon the habits and routines that we have relied on in the past. We can do what we’ve always done when we faced problems.
– Third, we can take the “road less traveled .” We can plunge into “the swamp,” do the best that we can, figure it out as we go, improvise, engage others and recruit them to help us make sense of it all. And then with their help, put together an action plan. Then, as the Nike ad instructs, we “Just do it.”
All In
Denying that there is a serious problem when there is a one almost never works! And when facing new and unknown situations, relying upon past practices may make one feel better temporarily but will rarely help in the longer term.
Both Jack Glidewell and Andy Grove chose the third option. In reading their accounts, it is clear that the first two options were not ones they chose. When they came to their particular crossroads, only one path fit within their value systems. In response to his daughter’s devastating questions, Glidewell could have answered, “No children were killed. We were bombing the enemy and the children were not our enemies. You don’t have to worry about it.” Or he could have said “It’s all very complicated. You’re too young to understand. We can talk about it when you grow up.”
But he didn’t.
Grove could have said, “There is no problem here. The media always exaggerate things out of proportion.” Or “This is no more than a tempest in a teapot. It will blow over in a few weeks. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual.”
But he didn’t.
Neither used denial as his defense; neither pretended that what was happening was unimportant or insignificant, and after an early struggle, neither put off confronting the issue and moving aggressively to make a new plan. When they came to their crossroads, they “took it.”
And for both, “taking it” was the not end, but the beginning of their journey in new directions. Glidewell writes that after his exchange with his daughter, he made struggling with the complexities and difficulties of war and peace a central part of his life. And after the crisis of the Pentium chip, Grove led Intel toward a new and dramatically different future: “We embarked on a whole new way of doing business,” he wrote.
Coming upon and struggling through choice points is always a harrowing experience. By definition we are “in over our heads,” never a pleasant place to be. But if we “take it” by choosing the third way, there are important benefits to be gained, not the least of which is becoming aware that the world is stranger, more complicated, and more difficult than we thought. And while it is true that we will often be asked to decide before we are ready, and act without understanding what we should do, when it comes to working toward the goals that are important to us, we really have only one choice: “When you come to a crossroads, take it!”