In the movie The Chess Players, two noblemen in 1850s India obsess over a long game of chess, while their kingdom slips into the hands of the British East India Company. When they finally wake up to the new political reality around them, they grumble: “The Indians invented the game, but the British have changed the rules!”
To achieve this, leaders must create a clear set of guiding rules to help navigate an uncertain future. Organizations that have endured through tough times have always relied on such rules, even if they were unspoken. For some examples, see Figure Two.
An example of such a cultural rule is, ‘Doctor knows best’. This rule may be unspoken, but it is widely shared and deeply ingrained in healthcare, and it may in turn drive counter-productive mindsets. For example, the belief that “Pointing out a problem amounts to questioning a physician’s expertise.” In the world of hospitals, such underlying factors prevent some physicians from consulting or alerting other physicians, consciously or unconsciously. We find nurses who are too scared to bring up what might be a ‘small issue’ with physicians. We also find families that have too little self-belief to trust their own instincts in such situations, even though they may be the only ones who can connect the dots. But at the Mayo Clinic, the “patient first” rule helps to combat this fear of questioning individual physicians, for the greater good of the patient.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]
What a silly story. Yesterday looks simple in hindsight. Today is a muddle. Well, yesterday looked like a total muddle to those who were living through it real time. Dealing with ambiguity is what humans do, and have always done. Only the \"business strategy community\" has imagined the ability to capture uncertainty on paper or overheads or, now PowerPoint.
on Nov 2, 2012