The Cognitive Dissonance worm-hole
Those who listen to National Public Radio, know the Lake Wobegone motto that “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." In a Cognitive Dissonance Environment certain beliefs exist that are so ingrained in the company’s culture that they force people to collect data supporting them, but ignore data not consistent with those beliefs. Over the years I have seen slogans and buzzwords become embedded in the company’s folklore, migrate to becoming consistently held beliefs, and eventually becoming sacred beliefs that could not be challenged. When things go wrong, or not as planned, teams assess reality as it is defined by those credos, and transport themselves to the Lake Woebegone Universe. They will address all other aspects of the company, but ignore any data indicating the problem may be because of one of those long held beliefs.
This was a lesson I learned after an investor group asked us to assess the reasons for the declining revenue of a manufacturing company in their portfolio. The company founder, started the company thirty years earlier based on the core belief that engineering excellence was the key to success. He hired “the best and the brightest” and the company prided itself on its engineering prowess. Every facility was adorned with engineering award plaques earned in the early years of the company’s existence and engineering had a special seat at the table. So when sales declined, an internal team spent six months analyzing data to understand the reasons. High prices, and the lack of an advertising program were identified as reasons and the team launched projects in both area to address them. Alas, that did not generate any meaningful results. By not questioning the “best and the brightest engineers”, they missed the one major contributing factor to the declining sales. The market place viewed the latest products from the company as shoddily built and poorly engineered. The team failed to recognize that in reality, the founder was no longer involved in engineering and had not been in fifteen years despite the rousing speeches on the subject. And to make things worse, the engineers who designed the original product had been retiring for the last ten years, and the company could not hire the “best and the brightest” based on its past glory because competitors paid much higher salaries. Even questioning the role of engineering was sacrilege for so many years that presenting our assessment was an extremely tough day for all involved. But, after the company traveled back from Lake Wobegone to the Relentlessly Objective Reality universe, it hired a new director of engineering, re-structured its campus-recruiting and compensation package, and bought a small engineering firm to jump start development of the next generation of products.
