Don't Try to Win Them Over
Data and AI professionals have to navigate the treacherous politics of the work environment on a daily basis. My new book, Data, Strategy, Culture & Power, was written to help you see those forces around you so you can respond more effectively. But there are times I wish I’d known what I know now, and could apply it to working with business execs – like in this personal story where Greg Satell’s wisdom from Cascades could have saved me two months, a lot of agony, and about $150K.
Several years ago, I was working with the VP of E-Commerce at a multi-billion dollar Consumer Goods company… an org solidly in the Fortune 500. Like most companies of that size, their data was a mess, but there was a major new product release coming up and the executive team really needed some solid KPIs to guide their decision making.
My job was to help them figure out how to get there.
After a 6-week deep dive with a team of 5 people, we figured out the quickest sustainable way to get to the KPIs the leaders wanted. (That is: we struck a balance between accuracy, time to solution, and making sure our work would be building blocks for a reliable process that wouldn’t be thrown away.) There were four major activities we’d have to do, and each of them would take about 2 or 3 weeks. We’d have the entire use case delivered within the upcoming quarter, and they could use it as a solid foundation to make even more KPI use cases visible. We thought this plan was not only admirably aggressive… but great.
But the VP was nonplussed. “I just want that fourth part,” he said. “I don’t need those first three things. Can’t you just do the fourth thing? That’s all I need, so I can have it in two weeks, right?”
The peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he said, was all he was asking for. Did we really need to get the bread, and the peanut butter, and the jelly first? Why couldn’t we just make him the sandwich? That was the important part, he emphatically stated.
What did I do next? I tried to convince him of the merit of the plan. The solution had to be… buy-in, right? Maybe he just needed some convincing. Maybe he needed to manage up, and I wasn’t giving him the data or the arguments he could use for that purpose. With a little more work and persuasion, I convinced myself, he’ll see that anyone would need to get the ingredients first before attempting to make his KPI sandwich.
We were convinced: we just had to try a little bit harder, and find that one angle that would help him see the light!
It didn’t work. We must have spent a hundred hours with him and his colleagues on Zoom trying to find a happy medium. But no amount of logical appeal would win this guy over... every conversation, every proposal ended with “… but I just want the sandwich, I don’t need the ingredients.”
It was around this time that I discovered Greg Satell’s (literally!) revolutionary book Cascades. According to Greg, persuasion is not the key to transformation. Rather than spending all your time trying to win over people who can’t see what you see (or don’t want to see what you see) – find the people who can see it, and believe it’s the right thing to do!
What I should have done was focus on the people who could see the logic of needing ingredients before we could build a sandwich… the VP of Consumer. The Chief Revenue Officer. The head of procurement who could easily, easily see that we were offering an amazing professional services rate on an aggressive timeline. Did we work with THOSE supporters? Nope. I kept trying to win over the VP of e-commerce… who at the time was not in favor with his own boss. Not smart.
Ten weeks later, we were all trapped in the same infinite loop of doom, and if the VP had only let us proceed with the work weeks earlier… he’d have had his sandwich.
Next time, I’m going to listen to Greg: “You create change by bringing people in, not by pushing them away.” And any time you find yourself trying to convince someone… you’re more likely on the side of pushing them away.
Instead of seeking buy-in and trying to overcome resistance, FIND YOUR FRIENDS. Band together. Demonstrate progress, rather than describing it! Your future self will thank you.