You need to sell your ideas
Most knowledge workers find themselves in one of two situations:
- They need to sell their ideas to some decision-makers.
- Their ideas are incomprehensible to the decision-makers.
They are radically different situations, but both are worrisome and result in irrationality.1
Idea success depends mainly on how it is sold
Or bad ideas sold well beat good ideas sold poorly. This is not ideal, but it is the reality of any knowledge worker. Markets for lemons arise from information asymmetry. As a knowledge worker, that asymmetry is to some extent why the job exists in the first place, with few exceptions, e.g. junior positions with a comparative advantage.
“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
— Several authors
Many knowledge workers would rather learn from inspiring colleagues and supervisors. In particular, they would like to learn something other than sales, which arguably is hated by the best knowledge workers — the “peach-workers.” But that is not how companies work, you need to sell your ideas, and you need to learn to sell them. For anyone that knows that their idea is the best, they will find stronger motivation in changing jobs than in selling their ideas. Perhaps, the way companies work is not the way companies should work.
“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.”
— Matthew 7:6
This is only the beginning of the problems, though.
As soon as there are several levels of decision-makers involved in a decision, which is very common in large organizations, the selling pitch outweighs the idea quality. Most middle managers will not want good ideas that they cannot sell, but ideas that they can sell, regardless of their merits as ideas. That is their job, selling the ideas. Coming up with them is the job of the knowledge workers that they manage, and the sales pitch is the most important part of them.2
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair
If markets for lemons arise from information asymmetry between sellers and buyers, the problems for decision-making may increase exponentially with every level of “reselling”.3 The extent to which the problems increase at each level depends on the culture of the company; if it embraces or fights the bias toward selling. A rule of thumb is the level of specificity in the communication, with the famous 6-pagers being potentially but not necessarily more specific than slide decks.4
“A chain is as strong as its weakest link.” — Proverb
Irrationality is not only a function of the company size, but also of the company culture, and even the company business model. In consulting companies the ultimate decision-makers may be the clients, which are not part of the company. This results in moral hazards, e.g. being ineffective and running in circles for longer times may increase business volume for consulting companies; if they sell it properly and discuss regularly with the customer (Agile) to satisfy their demands in the most trivial requests (law of triviality).
Considering the seemingly unavoidable information asymmetry of knowledge workers, the work culture may tilt:
- Toward the lemon side when the emphasis is set on knowledge workers improving at communication and selling their ideas.
- Toward the peach side when the emphasis is set on decision-makers being more capable of telling lemon and peach ideas apart.
I have only seen the first one around, “your mileage may vary.” In any case, both are still not as bad as the second level of irrationality.
Ideas are incomprehensible for stakeholders
One usual assumption when selling an idea is that the idea is comprehensible, especially when explained properly, and the selling aspect needs to focus on communicating the value or benefits of the idea. This is never true, when explaining any idea in any way there will always be some distance between the understood idea and the thought idea. Hopefully, this distance will be small enough to ignore it, but it will always exist.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — George Bernard Shaw
Decision-makers will need to map the expressed idea to their mental models and knowledge, and that may be insufficient for a correct understanding of the idea.5 This situation is hard to identify:
- Knowledge workers may not identify it due to the curse of knowledge.
- Decision-makers may not identify it because meta-cognition is hard.6
Usually, different stakeholders will hold different stakes. Oversimplifying, while engineering may be concerned about technical debt, management may only be concerned about deadlines. It requires second-order thinking to understand that technical debt will impact future deadlines, and engineering may be considered responsible for worrying about that, by division of labor.7
However, understanding some ideas and their corresponding merits may be both part of the job and impossible in some cases. Regardless of how they are presented. Especially when the information asymmetry is too large.
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
The impossibility of understanding may go unnoticed and be misclassified as the previous situation: “knowledge workers need to improve at communication and selling their ideas.” While that is true, striving at it in this kind of context is:
- A common mistake, with misclassification being more likely.
- A terrible mistake, being in “the wrong room”, in which not even “learning to teach” may be possible.
- Procrastination with “busywork” and a wild goose chase, where many of the lessons learned will need to be “unlearned.”
Reaching this situation is most likely after embracing information asymmetry, the need to sell, and the hierarchical organization of the company. At that point, decision-makers do not know if an idea is good, and they do not care, possibly because the only purpose of the idea is “reselling” it. There may not be a better solution for this other than walking away. The sooner the better, persisting in a mistake usually results in a steep price.
But before considering that there is no solution, properly classify the problem by paying attention to how your colleagues present their ideas and what kind of feedback they get. It is hard to be objective when being involved in a discussion. The more unrelated their work is to yours, the more easily you will see if the area that needs improvement is in the ideas themselves, sales and communication of the ideas, or understanding from the audience.
Conclusion
You will always have to sell your ideas, but the challenges that you will find will vary greatly with the stakeholders that will be deciding on those ideas and the approaches that they take for the decision-making. For example:
- Decision-makers may embrace that ideas must be sold and may try to select best-sellers, usually because they are not the “final customer” for ideas.
- Or decision-makers may try to fight against this problem and judge ideas on their own merits, e.g. seeking objectivity, or data-driven approaches.8
You will find this variability between organizations and also within organizations when sufficiently large.
In any case, you need to learn to tell apart when:
- You need to improve your knowledge, and processes for better ideas.
- You need to improve the communication and selling of your ideas.
- You need a better audience for your ideas — perhaps improve your CV.
The cost of errors in this diagnostic is the opportunity cost of acting in the wrong category. Ultimately, your career is at stake.
This entry is motivated by a tweet from Andy Budd. You may want to check the original tweet and the thread linked within it:
More-than-usual-personal observation: In large corporations, any idea has to be sold twice: before work on it starts, and after work on it concludes. The actual idea and the results of working on it are not as relevant as the two corresponding sales pitches. For short-sighted managers, the sales pitches are the only relevant part of any idea, as they do not have the perspective to understand that the second pitch is easier and better when the results are good, and the good results are more likely to be obtained with good ideas.
Interestingly:
- Psychopaths lack empathy, including empathy with their former selves, which results in this kind of short-sightedness.
- Psychopaths and other members of the “dark triad” perform quite well in large corporations and are over-represented in the C-suite.
This short-sightedness results in irrational behavior, and it is avoidable with perspective. But this is a footnote and a more-than-usual-personal observation because it is hard to know if these “short-sighted managers”:
- do not know,
- do not care,
- know and care but cannot do better,
- anything in between the previous,
- are doing the right thing and the mistake is all mine.
After all, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”, and when surrounded by lemons, it is all a sales game.
On another personal note: When the objective in the market is finding the most “resellable” lemon, we have a degenerate market for lemons, which detaches from reality to focus on sales. If this impacts the bottom line of the company:
- the carrying capacity of the business decreases,
- the lemons overshoot that carrying capacity, and
- mass firings happen when the bubble pops,
- but probably not before the great resignation of any peach-worker that has seen how lemon-workers are in fact preferred.
Note that writing and templates are not forcing functions for quality or depth of thinking. They have no impact on either, but they may be effective in creating the delusion of both, converting an obvious problem into an invisible and thus ignorable problem.
Tom Kerwin (3/100) @tom_d_kerwin
“Templates can organise thinking, but the thinking still needs to happen. It’s too easy to fraud your way through to appear to have thought about a problem by filling out all the boxes in a template” statagroup.com/profiles/brian…
One famous example of failing at communication of ideas is David Bowie trying to explain the impact of the Internet. This may only be possible in a succinct way with an abstract or high-level description, which at the same time is the hardest kind of description to map to mental models by the audience. Clay Shirky covers only part of it in “Institutions vs collaboration,” requiring 20 minutes.
The difference in the understanding is clear when Bowie says that the Internet is a “conveyor of information and rebellion.” Seemingly, this does not map to anything for Jeremy Paxman, at least at the time, who considers that the Internet is only a “conveyor of information,” and claims about it are exaggerated. “Rebellion” may be as crucial for an artist, as information is for a journalist.
Similarly, users and customers, marketing and sales, developers, and management may have different mental models, priorities, worries, etc. A product owner or a product manager is often introduced to have a global perspective and map all (4+) mental models, ideally with reality, but hopefully at least with each other.
Meta-cognition is a fascinating topic, and we could expand on cognitive dissonance, Dunning-Kruger, and other topics; but not today.
Similarly, I like the explanation for Richard Feynmann about why ice is slippery, and why he cannot explain to the interviewer why magnets attract and repel each other.
Some managers adopt a “fighting” management style, rather than a “negotiating” management style. I made these terms up, so I explain:
- Negotiating means meeting engineering and other stakeholders halfway, and finding a balance between the interests and needs of each group.
- Fighting means pushing to get as much as possible of the desired KPI, hoping that other stakeholders will do their part in the fight, to find a balance.
In horizontal companies, both may work, assuming that everybody is happy to play the same game. In more vertical or hierarchical companies, “fighters” will sooner or later start fires that nobody will be able to put down.
Many other problems may arise from this approach, e.g. McNamara fallacy, streetlight effect, etc. However, striving for objectivity provides a better awareness of any potential issues in the decision-making process.
Cross-posted from the Sigmoid newsletter
