(Next week I’ll return to Legal Project Management, team management, and people management topics. I want to touch on one other item first, today and Monday.)

Someone pointed me to the image here as a fun way to head into the weekend.

At a high level, it’s accurate, unfortunately. (It leaves out a fourth class of computer, the smartphone, but you can lump that with the Apple path, except that most users don’t even bother with Step 1, feeling with some justification that it’s useless.)

This drawing leads me to a few questions.

Why Do We Put Up With It?

Price and complexity.¹

We’ve driven the prices down to commodity levels, leaving no margin for support and repair. In Apple’s case, because they’ve figured out how to keep their prices relatively high, there are Apple stores with self-proclaimed geniuses² to do some troubleshooting, but Apple also builds planned obsolescence into their computers at a rate that would have made 1970s Detroit blush.

Complexity is the other reason. A computer to which you can add additional software is an astonishingly complex system which quickly devolves into a morass where, as with Schrödinger’s cat³ no repair person or software company can truly understand the current state of the world. Thus they cannot be assured of repairing it.

What Can We Do About It?

We? Not much.

What Can the Industry Do About It?

Ah, much better question. The software industry could actually address this problem fairly simply and improve the situation manyfold.

It wouldn’t need every one of the, say, half a million software companies, called independent software vendors (ISVs), and the hundreds of computer manufacturers, called original equipment makers (OEMs).

Let’s stick to Windows for a bit, though the problem afflicts Apple and smartphones. (Let’s leave Linux out of the discussion, since it has different problems.)

Can’t Microsoft solve the problem? Technically, perhaps — but the various antitrust actions and consent decrees have stayed their hand. They are aware of it and want to solve it, but believe that legally they cannot do what needs to be done.⁴

But it wouldn’t take everyone to do it. Think  80/20 rule, or long tail. All the industry would need would be for perhaps a dozen large software vendors and three or four computer manufacturers to pledge together to solve the problem.

They won’t do it. They do not believe it’s in their interest to fix the problem, based on conversations I’ve had over the past five years. I would agree that it might not be in their short-term, individual interest. It would, I think, benefit us all in the long term, but you need to survive the short term to get to the long term.

So, on Monday: A manifesto⁵ of sorts on what the industry could do to fix the problem.

I won’t be writing here much next week because I’ll be at LegalTech to speak, meet with various people, catch up on industry trends and wannabe-trends¹, and the like.

If you’re in the area and want to connect — for business, friendship, curiosity, or to get a signed copy of one of my books — let me know.

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¹I wrestled with “wannabe” v. “manqué,” a great word that’s fading from the lexicon. (Only the former is in the current Chrome dictionary.) “Manqué” offers such a delicious taste of sadness, to have tried and failed, whereas “wannabe” suggests that there is still the glimmer of hope that you too, someday, may turn into Madonna. (That’s where I first heard the word used.) Lady Gaga has proven that wannabe-Madonna can indeed have a happy ending. And that’s more than enough of this digression.

This morning Google announced a change in its privacy policy. I link to the Washington Post article about it because searching Google for “Google Privacy Policy” does not bring up Google’s privacy policy as its first result!!! (Okay, it’s first if you count the ads… but many of us have trained ourselves to ignore those orange-background ads when we’re looking for information!)

Here’s a link to the EMail Google sent out this morning. The changes take effect in five weeks, 1 March.

The Good

According to Google, their new policy will do everything but drive your car and polish your shoes. Oh, wait, they’re already working on driving your car for you.

Like vitamins, it’s good for you. So they say.

Maybe.

It’s certainly good for Google as they seek to compete with Apple and others offering more integrated experiences.

It does simplify the privacy policies they currently have, which is like saying that replacing the criminal code with “all crimes are punishable by death” would simplify it. Has anyone outside the legal world ever read a privacy policy (or HIPAA notice, for that matter)?

It will provide for more filtered searching… but I’ll deal with that in the Ugly box, below.

The Bad

Google wants to do things in a “Googley” way. They say their motto is “Don’t be evil.”

Oops.

There’s real evil in the world. Unlike Google, I don’t want to trivialize the word. So this isn’t evil. But it’s not very good, either, or very honest on their part in terms of the way they spin it.

Because you can no longer opt out. (Caveat: That’s what others are saying about it. I’ve read the new policy, and there is nothing specific about opting out. However, there is reference to the account dashboard. Perhaps it will let the half of one percent of users who go to the dashboard and understand it to opt out. Perhaps.)

That’s the real issue. We may no longer have a choice, or if we do, the choice will be too difficult to entertain for most users.

In effect, Google is issuing us a standard car-parking ticket. There’s a contract of sorts printed on the back of the ticket, but there’s no negotiation; you either park and accept the contract or don’t park. But if you want to park, you get the contract.¹

That’s bad stuff, in my opinion.

I personally may or may not have a problem with sharing more information with them. What I have a problem with is being forced to do this. I have an even bigger problem with my not-as-tech-savvy family and friends and colleagues and acquaintances being forced to make this non-choice.

The Ugly

The Washington Post article makes the point that if you’re searching for “jaguar,” you might see “better” (a/k/a targeted or filtered) results if Google knows whether you’re interested in the car, the beast, or a Jacksonville football player. Google will adjust the results displayed based on what you’ve done in the past.

If I’m shopping, that’s not terrible. Indeed, it’s potentially helpful.

Maybe if I’m from New York, I’ll see more articles favorable to the Giants for the next ten days. If I’m from Massachusetts, I’ll see articles supporting the Patriots.

That doesn’t seem so bad… at first. But let’s dig a bit deeper.

Let’s say I’m a political animal. Perhaps I get a lot of mail from Move On, or spend time with the Drudge Report. Google already uses this information to select what it shows me when I search. The “Obama” links shown to the Move On reader are very different from those shown to the Drudge browser.

Think about what that does to our already fractured national dialog. If you think Google is being impartial and that’s why all the Obama articles point to birther links and Gingrich appeals, you’ll be more inclined to accept those “truths”… because “impartial” Google says so. Conversely, if the top links are about dropping unemployment and Bush-caused deficits, you’ll be more inclined to accept those “truths” instead… because “impartial” Google says so.

But Obama is the same person either way.

That’s what filtering does. And that’s ugly.

And Google is promising to do more filtering starting March 1.

We Americans of all political colors scream when we hear that China is censoring the Internet, filtering links, determining what Chinese citizens can and cannot see.

It’s time to start noticing (and maybe screaming) that Google is filtering links, determining what you and I do and do not see.²

By the way, it appears Bing (Microsoft) is also filtering. I’m not calling out Google alone here. However, Google is about to take it to the next level, by combining and sifting through a far greater spectrum of personal information.

Ugly, ugly, ugly.

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¹There are some laws that limit these contracts a bit, just as some US and EU privacy laws will put a bit of a check on what Google can do. Nonetheless, it’s still basically a park-or-don’t-park contract.

²Unlike in China, the other links technically do show up, but much further down the page. Studies show that most searchers consider only the top few links. For all intents and purposes, the other links become almost as invisible as if they were truly censored.

Neat article from Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt on robot-driven (“self-driving”) cars here.

Two items from it that I think are particularly relevant to the topics I usually write about:

Driver: Bug or Feature?

“The fact that you’re still driving is a bug,” [Google's Anthony] Levandowski says, “not a feature.”

I’m sure there’ll be the inevitable responses about computer crashes vs. auto crashes, but Levandowski has a point. Read the sentence again, not as “the driver is a bug” but as “the fact that you still have to drive is a bug.”

Once upon a time, driving was the reason for getting in a car. Sometimes it still is, but most of the time driving is simply something we have to do in order to get the car containing us from Point A to Point B. When I worked at Microsoft, I often faced a 90 minute commute coming home… all of 13.9 miles. (Yes, that’s a decimal point, not a smudge on your monitor.) Driving was certainly no fun on that commute; in fact, I eventually gave up my stick-shift car for an automatic because I didn’t know which would wear out first: my left leg, the clutch, or my patience.

Think about how much we do at work that we really would like to be able to turn over to an intelligent, semi-autonomous agent. Yes, some of us have secretaries and assistants and the like; still, a certain amount of what we do is not, to put it mildly, intellectually challenging to us. Apple Siri, to the extent it works (which is to say, not very well at all in real life), is a start on this process for a few small areas. But if we think differently about the problem, we can conceive of far better solutions.

Email, for example, was one such solution 20 years ago. Internet (and Lexis-Nexis) search is another. There will be more.

Just as there will be robot-driven, semi-autonomous cars.

Will they crash? Undoubtedly less than the humans they replace.

Of course, people, being people, will notice the occasional crash far more than the steady successes… and will have forgotten how much more often they used to crash.

What Data Driven Means

I got so tired in the corporate world of hearing, “I’m data driven.” I rarely told such people that they were no such thing, preferring not to make needless enemies.

But they weren’t.

They were just subjective in different ways… and self-deluded to boot about their blind spots.

Here’s what data-driven really can mean:

The road is just another data set to be mined. So Google isn’t teaching its computers how to drive. It’s collecting data—its cars have driven 200,000 miles in total, recording everything they see—and letting its algorithms figure out the rules on their own. “If you read the DMV handbook on four-way stop signs, it’s easy,” [Google'ss Chris] Urmson says. “Whoever gets there first gets to go. If there are simultaneous arrivals, priority goes to the vehicle on the right.” But it rarely works that way. “People optimize stop signs,” he says…. “[A robot]  needs to learn how people really drive. “This is the data-driven viewpoint,” says Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford roboticist who heads the self-driving project. “The data can make better rules”

It’s not making selective decisions based on interpreting the data. Rather, it’s truly letting the data define the rules.¹

That will play out in ever more interesting ways.

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¹I have way, way oversimplified here. I worked in artificial intelligence research in the mid-1980s and can go into this in far more detail than is necessary; please accept the oversimplification as an attempt to cut to the chase.

Dr. Atul Gawande, surgeon and author of the outstanding book The Checklist Manifesto, wrote not too long ago in The New Yorker about coaching.

In it, he does something very difficult: He talks about asking for help, even though he is already an excellent surgeon.

Asking for help as a professional is rarely easy.¹ As professionals, we’re conditioned to appear on top of whatever we do — with those who evaluate us, with our clients (who also evaluate us), with our peers, with those we’re guiding, and ultimately with our own self-image.

Yet coaching can provide pathways to improve beyond where we are today, at the risk of appearing just slightly unsure or of being judged. These risks, of course, are internally perceived risks. They’re not risks to clients, or to the business we’re engaged in. Nonetheless, those internal risks can be quite fearsome, hard to overcome. Dr. Gawande writes eloquently about his own struggles to take on these risks.

When I teach Legal Project Management, I also offer optional coaching sessions as follow-ups to the training. Perhaps half my clients take me up on coaching. Yet I (and they) often find it takes the coaching to truly cement the lessons of training. From Dr. Gawande’s article, citing research on coaching for teachers:

Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time…. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent…. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

The issue, I’ve found, is that even the best classes focus on issues distilled and simplified to make a point. If I want to demonstrate the value of a project charter, for example, I need to show it in a simple, clear context. However, the real world is rarely simple or clear. Coaching helps map the lessons of training to that messy real world.

I’ve now incorporated at least a little bit of coaching into my two-day training sessions, especially when I’m training groups of teams that work together. I’ll coach attendees on, say, project charters in the context of whatever project (matter, file, case) they’re working on at the time, moving from table to table listening to conversations and offering suggestions. It’s a small step, but I’ve discovered even this small step can help turn the lessons into action.

But separate coaching sessions work even better.

Granted, it’s an odd type of coaching, because for the most part neither project management nor lawyering is really something I can observe in situ. So the attendees bring into the coaching session the questions they have, the problems with which they’re wrestling, the team dynamics in play.

Sometimes I can answer their questions directly, especially if they’re questions about technique.² Mostly, though, I try to help them work through the deeper issues via my own questions and by encouraging the team to say out loud what they’re all usually aware of at some level.

And they they head off to put these answers, some self-discovered, some suggested, into practice directly.

Coaching works.

Coaching matters.

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¹Writing about asking for help is even harder.

²I try to not answer directly but rather guiding them to the answer. Sometimes I’m better at this approach than at other times. It’s an area I need to get better at.

This is the third in a series of articles this week (here and here) on project management lessons we can derive from the cruise ship disaster.

I want to start by quoting cruise-liner historian John Maxtone-Graham in Salon:

It will live on in infamy, and for these reasons: Utter command stupidity, horrendous behavior on the part of the captain, sloppy evacuation, and the vessel settling there and becoming an in-your-face icon of what can go wrong. And, the problem of transient crews with little experience in emergencies. (italics added)

The items in italics have direct, explicit project-management analogs:

• Command stupidity = project manager stupidity… or to be a bit more charitable, project manager willful ignorance.
• Horrendous behavior = bad management/leadership: autocratic or waffling, avoidance of responsibility, panic or freezing when things go wrong, and so on.
• Little experience = project teams that have experience and strengths in their specific areas of expertise but no experience working on projects as projects (rather than as cases, matters, etc.).

The other images might apply as well, I guess. Some projects do indeed feature sloppy evacuation, people running away from the project team when things get tough, though usually it’s bad project management they’re really fleeing. Other projects remain etched in memory as icons, even if the hulk isn’t literally lying awash on a reef.

He also points out that this mess occurred almost exactly 100 years after the Titanic (one day short of 99 years and nine months, to be precise). I’m surprised more snarky headline writers haven’t tried to sneak in “titanic” as an adjective!

The Titanic disaster also saw utter command stupidity and sloppy evacuation, despite more experienced crew that should have handled the evacuation better than they did.

Both the Titanic and the Costa Concordia sailed off course, into dangerous waters, with the captain aware that he was making a dangerous move.¹

About 30 years ago, the captain of the San Juan Islands ferry Elwha also pulled a move like this. (The Elwha, by the way, is almost half the length of the Costa Concordia; it’s not a little boat.) He decided to show a passenger what her home looked like from the water and steered the vessel into a rock. The ferry was damaged, albeit not severely,² but no one was hurt. Again, titanic (sorry) stupidity.

Why do captains do that?

More to the point, why do project managers sometimes do the equivalent? Why would they run a well functioning project onto the rocks³ because, say, they want to vary their routine?

Note that I say well-functioning project. If your project is in trouble from whatever cause, you do whatever you can, even if making changes adds risk in other areas. There are few enough well functioning projects; if you’re lucky enough to become attached to one, or smart enough to pilot your own, keep it moving through well understood waters.

Like a ship, you can move at high speed through well understood channels, or you can creep dead slow ahead among the reefs. The opposite course of action is the wrong approach in either case.

And that’s probably enough on the Costa Concordia as metaphor.

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¹We’ll have to wait for the inquest to truly learn the Costa Concordia captain’s levels of knowledge and awareness. That said, if lacked the marine experience and knowledge to know the danger and know what he didn’t know, then why was he in charge of this large vessel and 4400 lives? It is still possible that the ship’s autopilot system malfunctioned and steered the ship onto the rocks, but so far no one has even suggested that as a possibility. Even if that did happen, the reef is more than a few hundred yards out of the shipping channel; someone should have noticed that the ship was off course.

²The Elwha seems cursed. She’s grounded twice (both times because captains took her intentionally off course, leading to their firing) and rammed both the Anacortes and Orcas docks (mechanical and computer failures). Amazingly, all four incidents happened in clear weather. I’ve been aboard when she’s been pounded by heavy waves (as in “everybody please move away from the windows even though you’re 30 feet above the waterline” heavy waves), and she’s ridden them out without problems. Still, anytime sailors are on a boat, they know that there is only some fallible metal or fiberglass between them and a watery grave. By the way, some stories mention what’s now called Elwha Rock as previously uncharted, but not so. Unnamed, yes; uncharted, no. The rock is visible (!!) at low tides.

³The subject of my next book. But more on that later. I’m still just getting started promoting the current one, The Off Switch. Have you bought your copy yet?

Yesterday I wrote about the rocky setting of the Costa Concordia tragedy.

Today I want to look at some lessons for project managers.

1. Stay in the Marked Channels When Possible

Lesson 1 is obvious. If you can follow the paths that others have clearly marked, it’s to your advantage to do so… most of the time.

Keep in mind that these paths may be “slower” but are also safer, surer. If they will get you where you need to go in the allotted time, then by all means use them.

In other words, learn from what others have done.

However, not all projects align with proven routes, so….

2. If You Venture Out of the Channel, Use Your Charts

There are times as a project manager you need to take risks, to find a shorter course. I don’t mean this only literally, as in the sense of saving time. For example, in the past you’ve managed projects of type X; now you’re looking at one of type Y. You may not be able to impose a type-X structure on it. Does that mean you should avoid it? No. Rather, read up on other project management ideas. Call on experienced project managers for mentorship or training. Be open about your experience with the team, so that together you understand the areas where you’re less sure about the best way forward.

3. Make Sure You Have the Right Charts

A chart for Puget Sound obviously would be useless around Isola Giglio in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Likewise, project tools designed for one type of project may not be terribly useful in other circumstances.

MS-Project is a great tool for certain types of projects such as building construction, but spreadsheets and index cards might work better for various types of professional (e.g., legal) projects. It depends on the project (and to some extent the project manager’s proclivities and skill sets).

4. If You’re in Uncharted Waters, Dead Slow Ahead

“Dead slow ahead” is the engine-telegraph order to move the ship forward slowly… but not so slow that you lose control. A boat moving very slowly can’t be steered easily; there’s no water flow over the rudder. (No matter what the salespeople tell you, boats do not steer just like cars.) Dead slow ahead is the minimum speed needed to move forward under control.

If you never test uncharted waters, you’ll never expand your capabilities, and there are so many worthwhile projects that won’t get done. If the project is worth doing, then do it, even if you can’t do it perfectly.

Just don’t barge ahead blindly. Get training. Find a mentor. Minimize the risks you understand so that you have time to handle the ones you don’t. Explore the reefs with an inflatable runabout, not your ocean liner.

And post someone on the bow to look for rocks.¹

———–

¹In other words, assume Murphy is at play on your project — if something can go wrong, it will. Keep thinking about risks, about what can go wrong. Don’t let them paralyze you, but being aware of them can really make a difference when it comes to either avoiding them or minimizing their effects on your project.

The captain of the grounded cruise ship Costa Concordia says he hit an “uncharted rock.”

Really?

Let’s look at that in two parts — the literal (could he really have hit an uncharted rock) and the metaphorical (how can you plan to keep your project off the rocks). We’ll start with part 1 today.

Boating on the Rocks

First, a confession. I have hit a rock that “no one” knew was there, in well-understood waters.

I used to race large sailboats. In one race a decade ago, we were fighting for the lead as we came to the turn-around point in the race, a small island in very, very deep Puget Sound called Blakely Rock. Most racers here round it twice a year in two different races each called the Blakely Rock Race. We know it well. There’s a broad shelf on the northwest side — let’s call it a reef, in keeping with the Costa Concordia articles. Everyone knows that you give Blakely Rock a wide berth to the northwest as you round it. That shelf is usually underwater, but we all know it’s there, in part because almost every race there’s at least one boat that cuts it too close and scrapes their keel along the bottom, usually with little or no damage.¹

But the other three sides of Blakely Rock drop steeply to the sea.

Puget Sound is very deep — almost 1000 feet deep in spots, though it’s only about three miles wide. It’s a fjord, basically, carved by glaciers.

So there we were, in second place in our division. We cut close to the rock to pass the last boat between us and the lead, and then… wham! We came to a sudden stop.

We’d hit — and come to rest upon — an underwater spire. We were a good 50 feet from the Rock, with its near-vertical eastern face to starboard, and we were hard aground on something where there shouldn’t be anything.

As other racers passed us, they stared, because they too “knew” there was nothing there. Except that at low tide, a spire that is normally covered by 10 to 20 feet of water was now covered by only 7 feet… and covered also by a large sailboat with nine frustrated but uninjured crew.

We got a tow off the rock (thanks to the late race photographer Kelly Henson, who tossed us a line once she stopped laughing) and limped back to the dock and thence to a boatyard to repair the damage (bent keel bolts and a beat-up keel fin, easily if not cheaply repaired). After the race people kept coming up to me and saying, “What did you hit? There’s nothing there!”

Note in the chart at left I’ve included an inset showing our approximate course (the red arrow). The asterisk is a symbol that means “rock you can hit.” Note how quickly we went from 87 feet of water to 7. On the larger chart section you can see the well-known shelf north and a bit west of the rock. Also, note the depths near the right edge of the larger chart — 719 feet, 681 feet, etc. Puget Sound is seriously deep.

Three facts relating to all of this:

1. No boaters in their right mind would approach this island at full speed… except when you’re racing, where every foot of distance you don’t have to cover is a foot closer to the lead. Grounding is an “occupational hazard” when you race; pretty much every one of the 200 boats in the Seattle racing fleet has found the bottom at one time or another, though few find it as abruptly as we did. (There are lots of sandy shelves where, especially in light wind, sailors get as close to the shore as possible to avoid the powerful currents that run through the Sound.)
2. No boaters in their right mind, lacking “local knowledge,” would traverse anything but a marked ship channel without a chart.² (Racers quickly build up that local knowledge, but as I’ve demonstrated, it’s fallible.) That said, I’ve seen way too many boaters, mostly but not always powerboaters, who indeed run across even marked reefs, but they’re crazy to do so… and it often costs them their boats (and occasionally their lives, given that Puget Sound is frigid even in summertime).
3. Rocks are no longer “discovered” the hard way. Areas where commercial boats travel are heavily mapped using sonar and depth sounders. Any possible hazards are charted, and they are marked by buoys and other devices. Commercial travel lanes are routed to avoid these hazards. (Note the purple “traffic lane” at the right edge of the chart fragment shown above.)

The Uncharted Rock

Could there have been an uncharted rock where the Costa Concordia traveled?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s the right one:

Could there have been an uncharted rock where the Costa Concordia was supposed to travel?

Almost certainly not. The Tyrrhenian Sea off Isola Giglio is heavily traveled by commercial vessels. It is certainly possible that the particular rock the captain hit wasn’t on the charts… but it is almost impossible that the captain had the boat where it was supposed to be. The waters off the coast of the island are over 300 feet deep, except when you approach the shore off Le Scole point. In fact, the configuration of the island where he grounded are such that any experienced boater would expect to find rocks and reefs: a chain of visible small islands extending from an onshore peninsula. Of course there are rocks there!

Some commentators have asked, Shouldn’t he have at least seen the rocks? To that I can say, probably not. These cruise ships draw about 30 feet of water (meaning their bottom is at least 30 feet below the surface). A rock 30 feet underwater is by definition not visible.

But…

1. The boat was, it appears, well out of the marked/safe area for commercial vessels, let alone a ship the size of the Costa Concordia.
2. The reef or rock it hit may or may not have been on the chart (I’ll bet it will turn out to have been marked once they reconstruct the accident), but any experienced boater would have considered it likely that there were rocks and reefs in the area.

Lessons for Project Managers

So what are the lessons for project managers here? Well, there’s the obvious one, which is don’t drive your project on the rocks, but let’s go deeper than that.

And I’ll go deeper (30 feet deeper, I guess) tomorrow.

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¹Racing sailboats generally have keels that stick down about four to eight feet below the waterline. My boat at the time, a Schock 35, “drew” about seven feet (the bottom of the keel was seven feet below the surface of the water).

²When I’d race outside the Seattle area, or when I’d sail casually anywhere, I always had charts out, even for routes I’d traveled a dozen times. We live part-time (and kept our last boat) in the San Juan Islands about 70 miles north of Seattle, a paradise of small, rocky islands and islets — up to 700 of them, depending on how you count. It’s full of rocks, reefs, twisting unmarked channels, and wicked currents running at up to 7 MPH. No matter how many times I’d made a particular trip, I always double-checked my charts. Even if I’d wanted to stay in the deep commercial-traffic lanes, there would be times when the 450-foot ferries that serve the Islands would be using those lanes. Many of the passages aren’t wide enough for a ferry and another vessel, so you wind up hugging the shore and avoiding the rocks anyway. Charts — paper or electronic — are essential; there are too many rocks and reefs to commit to memory once you’re outside the bay where your boat is moored/docked.

The NY Times  over the weekend published Susan Cain’s interesting opinion piece on the phenomenon of groupthink.

To start, it’s a real Inigo Montoya moment. (“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”) Every place I’ve worked, groupthink refers to the way subtle pressures to conform to the group’s direction can override individual judgment (cf. Watergate, e.g.). Irving Janis’s original definition was “A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive ingroup, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” Encarta and Wikipedia define it similarly.

It does not mean the loss of creativity when working within a group. There can indeed be such a loss, and maybe we need a word for it… but groupthink is taken, thank you. Business and professional communication is hard enough without engaging in Humpty Dumpty redefinition (“when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”).

That said, I think this article will appeal to many in the legal world, who are used to working alone behind closed doors. It reinforces that worldview.

But how accurate is it?

For example, Cain properly points out the flaws in brainstorming sessions, but fails to point out the benefits. Clearly there are times when all of us are smarter than each of us… and times when all of us are dumber than each of us.

I’m one of those who prefers an office to an open workspace. Indeed, I devote an entire chapter of my new book, The Off Switch, to staying focused in the office. Obviously, as an author I continue to work alone (mostly).

But I also know my best work comes from a combination of working alone and then bouncing ideas and other output off of colleagues.

If I work alone too long, it becomes much more difficult to change the work; we get things set in our head. Indeed, we engage in individual “groupthink” — where the subtle pressure of the group is replaced by the pressure of “look at all the work I’ve already done that I don’t want to have to change.” Most of us have to find the right balance.

Finally, as a computer industry insider, I have to take issue with her description of Steve Wozniak working alone. Her description is accurate, as far as it goes, but…

1. Many of his breakthroughs came when he shared is work with others. For example, other programmers took the raw code he had written and figured out how to make it work with a variety of other programs. If they hadn’t, the Apple computer would be at most a historical curiosity if it were remembered at all. (Probably. Steve Jobs was so good at marketing that maybe he could have sold it anyway!) For example, he wrote some code that became the core of the Apple II’s ability to read and write from a floppy disk (remember those things?), but it took Randy Wigginton and Paul Laughton to turn that code into something actually usable.
2. Woz was and is a genius, a word I don’t use lightly, but that code was slow. A colleague and I rewrote it in the early 80s for one software company to make reading files from the disk about six times faster. I know others did similar work in parallel for their own companies. With more collaboration, he and Apple probably would have rewritten it long before others were forced to. Again, I’m not in any way knocking Woz, a brilliant engineer; I’m just suggesting that collaboration in conjunction with individual work might have paid off.

Stephen “Freakonomics” Dubner writes about one teacher’s fascinating grading system:

In my classroom, students lose 1/4 point for wrong answers on quizzes. But for writing “I don’t know,” they get 1/4 point. (A correct answer is 1 point).

There is a difference between not saying anything and asserting that you don’t know. If you leave the answer blank, did you run out of time, skip the question by accident, or truly recognize that you don’t know the answer?

We all suffer from MAS (Male Answer Syndrome) at times. While the disease may be more prevalent in males, I’ve seen it manifest itself in females executives and managers as well.¹

Leaders of all types would do well to exercise the +1/4-point option more often: project leaders, team leaders, executive leaders, and especially executives and managers masquerading as leaders.

I know it’s hard to say, “I don’t know.” I certainly suffer from MAS at times, though less now than I did, say, ten years ago. I’ve worked for and with numerous folks who shared the disease; it could indeed be truly frightening to be in a room full of such folks.

That’s why I love the +1/4-point option.

If I were leading a team today, I think I’d not just share the article, but ask them for that 1/4 point once in a while.

And if I were on a team where this article had been shared, I’d have a “tip jar” at all our meetings. When someone to whom others look for an answer says, “I don’t know,” the team calls out “quarter point” and puts a token (e.g., a piece of paper) in the jar. When the jar has, say, 20 tokens in it, the team goes out after work — knocking off a bit early, because they’re all read The Off Switch — and has a no-host celebration (beer, pizza, whatever).

Would it work?

I don’t know.

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¹My wife does not suffer from this syndrome. Really. Okay, can I come back into the house now?