Are you sure?
Here’s a glass of wine I didn’t ask for.
I’m in Bologna, Italy, this week, and that means eating at trattorias every night. The pasta is superb, the salami and prosciutto equally good, and wine is on the table at every meal.
Our waiter tonight was charming, chatty, informative. We had one bottle of wine between four of us, and then he arrived with this. He said, “Here. This one is very good.”
We demurred. One of us said, “We’ll just stick with water, thanks”.
He gave a disarming smile and proceeded to uncork the bottle. “You must try this. You’ll love it”. And proceeded to tell us what it was. Poured a little into each of our glasses.
Now, what he did was flatly illegal where I live, in Australia. Our ‘responsible serving of alcohol’ laws mean he would have been fined about half his annual salary for pushing alcohol onto his patrons. Here in Bologna, he’s just doing his job.
And, doing it very well. He was right. It was delicious, and we gladly drank the second bottle.
But, it got us thinking of the boundary conditions to his approach. How pushy is ‘too pushy’? How irresponsible was he really being (serving a second bottle to four middle aged consultants on a business trip)? What is our own responsibility to say ‘no’ if we really don’t want it?
Question: How can your sales people be just assertive enough to get your customers to try more, or consume more?
The destruction of ambiguity
The reason I’m in Italy is to attend a global meeting of consultants and our conversations are wide-ranging.
We’ve talked about newsjacking (look it up); about whether there’s a trade-off between satisfying work and revenue (I don’t believe there is); and about the factors that increase or decrease clients’ capacity for ambiguity (read on).
One consultant had this to say: “I notice that my clients’ Gen Z workers (born 1995 onwards) struggle with uncertain situations, unclear direction and imprecise instructions”.
Several people agreed and as to why, another consultant offered this: “I blame rubrics in schools”.
Now, rubrics didn’t exist when I was at school. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a scoring guide that articulates how specific components will be assessed for an assignment. My son, Jasper, who’s 15 (next week) uses them extensively at school. Every assignment has a table that shows what acceptable, good, very good, and outstanding looks like.
I told Jasper, “You’re lucky. We had to guess what our teachers wanted from us. We had no idea whether what we’d done was good enough for 65% or 95%”.
Jasper replied, “It’s true that kids who follow the rubrics really thoroughly do really well. But, they’re not using their imaginations”.
His remark supports what this consultant said: that setting clear behavioural expectations increases competence, but decreases agility or creative response to uncertain demands. Do you agree?
Question: What can you do within your business to increase (young) workers’ ability to work with uncertainty?
Chaos monkeys
Have you ever seen Netflix fail? I haven’t.
One reason is that they stress-test their systems by deliberately ‘throwing spanners in the works’ of a system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.
Netflix’s culture of ‘freedom and responsibility’ meant that engineers were NOT forced to design their code in a specific way. Instead, they aligned teams around the notion of infrastructure resilience by pushing ‘server neutralisation’ to the extreme. Their Chaos Monkeys are programs that randomly choose a server and disable it during its usual hours of activity. Engineers are told they have to build redundancy and process automation to survive such interruptions.
And, it works. “Killing” parts of their system, while ensuring customers don’t notice means that uptime rates are high, almost faultless.
Question: What ‘chaos monkeys’ can you use to stress-test your customer-facing processes?
You’re invited
Good news! I’ve managed to secure the rights to screen the remarkable documentary UnCharitable in Melbourne. If you’re working for a non-profit, or in philanthropy or fund-raising, this is a must see.
I’ll be hosting a screening at the NOVA in Carlton on the afternoon of Wednesday June 5th. Next week, you’ll be able to reserve a ticket for you and colleague, so stay tuned. Let me know in the comments if you definitely want to come, and I’ll make sure you don’t miss out.
Let me know you’ve enjoyed reading this week by clicking the heart below, and I’ll look forward to being back in the Southern Hemisphere next Friday.
Andrew
I love this story and equally love suggestions from really good waiting staff...Having a knowledgable waiter make a suggestion is a "step into my world for a moment and imagine this" experience for me. Doesn't always go well, but that's ok too. I'd love to come and see "UnCharitable"...Yes please hold a ticket for me. Interesting topic, and being in the same room as some of your other Strategic Mindset focused people even more so. Anna x
I'd really like to attend the screening please Andrew.