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When something bad happens, it seems to be human nature to find something –or someone– to blame it on. A few-hundred years ago, it was easy to find a scapegoat for a bad harvest, mental illness of a loved-one, the sudden death of your goat, a boil on your butt, or a hangnail. This scapegoat was called a witch.

It must have been pretty easy to find someone in any 17th century town that could be easily labelled a witch. It could be someone that didn’t follow societal norms, had mental illness, had a preponderance of warts, or had the dreaded third nipple (these were sometimes called the ‘witches mark‘ as the nipple was supposed to be used by demons to feed).

Today we are so much more knowledgeable about the world. When we have a bad harvest, we generally recognize that weather patterns have a random element. Mental illness is generally considered to be something hereditary, or environmental, and not the result of being cursed. We seek rational and scientific explanations when things go wrong, right?

Not so in politics and business. It’s the Witch Hunt 2.o.

Now, instead of comparing the weight of the accused to a duck, the yard stick of choice is an auditor.

We like to think that auditors are unbiased, truth-seeking individuals right? Well, if your competence is estimated by your ability to find fault in something, I think you are likely to find fault in anything. For comparison, think of a crown prosecutor or district attorney: are they lauded by the number of cases they won, or with the number of cases where justice was done? Yah, when an auditor is asked to find fault, they go for the win too.

A case in point: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford goes after the Toronto Housing Board (TCHC).

Mr. Ford has asked for the resignation of the volunteer TCHC board members citing the auditor’s findings that revealed: “between $4 million and $10 million was wasted on sole-sourced contracts. The report also revealed issues with record-keeping at the agency and found that $200,000 was misspent on luxury chocolates, spa trips and a Christmas party.”

Wow, doesn’t that piss you off? A government agency wasting $10M and spending $200K on chocolate. The nerve! Fire all those evil volunteer board… WITCHES!

But lets scratch the surface by actually reading some of this auditors report:

Significant cost savings are likely possible if the recommendations contained in this report as well as the City Auditor General’s previously issued audit reports are implemented. Procurement at the TCHC is in the range of $200 million. Savings as a result of increased competition could in our view be anywhere from two to five per cent of this amount. Conservatively, cost savings of approximately $4 million to $10 million may be possible. In addition, significant savings are possible as a result of increased coordination of operations between the TCHC and the City.

Wait, 2 to 5%? I’d be willing to bet that any armchair quarterback could look at any organization’s books and find 2-5% that could have been saved. Would you call for the leadership’s resignation? If they took such liberties with $4-10M headline, I am starting to wonder how much was spent on chocolate…

What happened next? The volunteer, unpaid, counsellors were dismissed and replaced by a close friend of Rob Ford (he lead his transition team) who is going to receive an undisclosed paycheck! Wha?

The point of this post is not to show that Rob Ford is reading from a well-worn copy of ‘Dictatorship for Dummies!’, but how we as citizens and employees so often get duped by the same refrain: “The system is broken because of evil corrupt people that go to work every day trying to screw us!” Nobody seems willing to look at all the people they know, and at themselves, and realize that the vast majority of people don’t think this way (Rob Ford could perhaps be an exception here).

Lets look at some of the drawbacks of using the Witch Hunt 2.0 mentality when trying to improve organizational performance:

Successful organizations are based on trust, you start with a serious trust deficit if you treat the organization as they enemy
Fear is a poor motivator, when was the last time you heard of a team winning a championship because of fear?
One of your first moves is usually to oust a bunch of people who have organizational knowledge of the very problems you are trying to fix
A focus on bad people ignores a much more prevalent problem: bad systems

So what can we do about the Witch Hunt 2.0? Stop supporting (or electing, or appointing) people who spend most of their time pointing fingers.

Taming the Stubborn Elephant

I’ve never ridden an elephant, not even one of those little pygmy ones you see at fairs (probably because I don’t go to fairs, since they are depressing and a bit creepy). Even without this firsthand experience, I can imagine that if I were to ride an elephant, and that elephant and I were to have a difference of opinion, I would end up on the losing end.

Chip & Dan Heath, brothers and co-authors of one of my favourite books “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”, borrow this metaphor of an elephant and its rider to represent our emotional side, and our rational side respectively. To illustrate this simply: the rider makes the decision that they want to lose 10 pounds, the elephant eats that 20 oz. steak anyway. Change efforts often boil down to short-term payoffs trumping long-term goals, with the elephant playing the role of villain.

The focus of this book, and why it is such an important read, is how to successfully implement change when you don’t have a lot of will power, authority, and/or many resources at your disposal.

Most –if not all– of the time we want to implement change, this is the very situation we are in. On a personal level, we have our own elephants that can help or hinder us, and when dealing with others, many more elephants.

While I would characterize ‘Made to Stick’ as ‘a marketing degree with a psychology minor in a book’, ‘Switch’ would be ‘a degree in organizational behaviour with a side of economics’. It drives home the fundamental concept that behaviour can’t simply be understood by looking at rational self-interest, rather, it is a complex combination of self-interest, perceived identity, social cues, your environment, and emotions thrown in just to make things interesting. Out of this complexity, they derive a clear methodology for implementing change, and illustrate this approach using a wide range of real-world examples:

Conservation: Saving the St. Lucia Parrot
Health Care: Reducing the intern work week from a patient-killing 120-hour works to 80
Public Safety: Creating ‘designated drivers’ 5-seconds at a time
Customer Service: How Rackspace went from bottom to top by getting rid of voicemail
Corporate Culture: Getting paper pushing bureaucrats to care about the customer
Amoung many others…

Fundamental to all these change initiatives is that the vast majority of people would do the right thing given the right context, environment and motivation. Before I close with a brief outline their methodology, I want to recommend that if there is one change-related book you read this year make it this one!

“Switch” methodology:

Direct the Rider
1. Look for existing bright spots and building from what is already working
2. Identify the destination clearly
3. Provide crystal clear black & white behaviours that lead to change
Motivate the Elephant
1. Make your audience feel bigger
2. Make your problem seem smaller
3. Leverage emotion to advance your goals
Shape the Path
1. Change the environment to make the change easier
2. Encourage habits that fit with the change
3. People instinctively want to fit in, use this to assist change