The truism fallacies - underpromise and over deliver
truism: “a statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting”
“a self-evident, obvious truth”
We accept many truisms in the workplace and life. We hold onto them quite tightly and uncritically at times. I guess it gives us a base to build our world view upon, whose foundations are strong enough to withstand our peers and elders' critical eyes. Or maybe it's the circus elephant syndrome*, where so often it is repeated that even when we ought to know better, we don't.
*Circus elephant syndrome
A rope ties the baby elephant born into a circus to a little stump in the ground, so she doesn't escape. Try as she might, she is never able to get herself loose. And she tries often. Until she accepts she's stuck. And once she has grown into the largest and most powerful land animal on earth, and pulling that stump out of the ground would be easy, she no longer tries to get free. She has accepted it.
My instincts in life have always been pretty rebellious. Not in the playing truant, getting high behind the bikesheds or grabbing a couple of penny sweets from the corner shop type rebellion. Rather, swimming against the tide of prevailing wisdom type rebellion. It's why I bought an HTC Hero Android phone in 2009 when all my friends were buying iPhones. Or why I try to reach the green in one when all my playing mates lay up. I am always asking myself why? This series of posts will deal with some of those truisms we encounter in the workplace and unveil the fallacy of them. Some will be general truisms that leaders should be aware of. Others are more technical. This is the first of those.
Underpromise and over-deliver
One of the most common truisms in the workplace is the idea that we should "underpromise and over-deliver". As a 15 year old at school, my teachers taught the concept to me. The idea is that you don't say you can deliver the feature in 3 weeks even if you think it's possible. Say four weeks, and once you deliver it in 3 weeks, people will be happy. But if you don't make it in 3, well, you lower the expectations upfront. That was the thinking behind it. Make people happy, avoid looking bad, and everyone gets what they want. Except, that is not true.
It’s the hope that kills
“It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” ~ John Cleese (as Brian Stimpson in the film Clockwise)
Underpromising is a response to the only, seemingly, other option of overpromising. Overpromising leads to raising people's hopes and expectations, and when you fail to meet those expectations - well, quoting pretty much any premier league manager, it's the hope that kills. In practical terms, it may lead to going over budget. It may lead to you losing your reputation or the trust of your colleagues. It may lead to reputational damage to your company or loss of contracts and money. The point is, don't raise hopes, don't string people along. If we're going to be wrong, we'd rather be wrong in a "good way."
But it's a false dichotomy. It needn't be about underpromising vs overpromising. "Managing expectations" is something we're taught, not by being ambitiously realistic, but by lowering the expectations. We focus heavily often on the lie of knowingly over-promising but accept and in fact, encourage the blatant and just as cynical lie of knowingly underpromising. And the thing, it is a lie borne out of vanity. It is about giving the impression of success and not about actually being successful. And we shouldn't fall into the trap of believing it is a good lie with no victims. The problem with underpromising is that the victims may be oblivious to the fact that they are victims. Setting lower expectations and lower goals rarely leads to over-delivering. Instead, it leads to underselling and underachieving with a facade of success. The victims walk away from a mugging with a smile on their faces.
Embrace expectations
Aim for the highest cloud, so that if you miss it, you will hit a lofty mountain
Before Richie McCaw was a professional rugby player, he sat down with his uncle to draw up a career plan. Richie’s plan culminated with him being an All Black.
‘You don’t just want to be an All Black,’ Uncle Bigsy told McCaw, ‘you want to be a great All Black.’
‘Sign it,’ he said, indicating the list. ‘Sign it Great All Black.’
Muhammad Ali, my sporting hero, told everyone he was the greatest and that he would be the youngest heavyweight champion of all time and beat that “big ugly bear” Sonny Liston when no one else could.
Jason Cundy is a former premiership footballer, playing for Spurs and Chelsea amongst others during his career. He is also a radio presenter who likes to say that sport is about winning. If you don’t try to win what’s the point.
The first two examples are geniuses, freaks of nature. They achieved their ambitions, even if they would were accused of hubris. In particular, Richie McCaw found it uncomfortable being so bold, but his uncle wasn't going to let him be demure about his ambitions. Muhammad Ali was accused of arrogance but never faltered from his goals. Jason Cundy wasn't at that level. He won no trophies in his career. So is his insistence on winning hubris, arrogance or overconfidence? Or maybe setting such high goals is the reason he succeeded in a career that so many people, myself included, would envy. Do we call him an average premier league footballer or one of the best footballers in the country?
Sport is an excellent exemplar of high goal setting and what it can achieve. Sportsmen and women focus on those lofty goals, committing to them so that even if they don't quite reach them, they still achieve more than those of us that set our sights lower. Before the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup in 2011, they set themselves a goal. 'To be the best rugby team there has ever been'.
Goal-setting theory was developed over 25 years of lab and field studies.
These studies showed that specific, high (hard) goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘‘do one’s best.’’ So long as a person is committed to the goal, has the requisite ability to attain it, and does not have conflicting goals, there is a positive, linear relationship between goal difficulty and task performance.
High goal setting is about embracing expectations, not artificially lowering them, driving ourselves to reach further than others expect, even if we don't deliver to our expectations. So I don't fall into the trap of abstract exhortations, the above paragraph also highlights the critical elements to achieve such high goals. We visit those a bit later on.
Embrace the fear
In his seminal book, “Thinking, fast and slow”, Daniel Kahneman writes about the idea of loss aversion, and how it can drive people to more remarkable performance.
Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain.
He says that the two motives are not equally powerful and that the aversion to failure to achieve the goal is much greater than the desire to exceed it. This is probably not a surprise to you. People make better health choices after a heart attack or when they are diagnosed with diabetes. As an exam gets closer, we study harder. Businesses are at their most creative when they are at risk of going under or just starting.
As we underpromise, we have already reduced our motivation to succeed. We have made our motivation one of gain and not one of loss, the less powerful of the two stimuli. This shouldn't be the fear of ridicule or losing our reputations or jobs. This is a fear created by such high internal benchmarks that we set ourselves, and our desire to meet them. As Jonah Lomu put it "We hate coming second place to ourselves".
When you're aware of this concept, then taking advantage of loss aversion and the fear of losing is a useful psychological tool to enhance our performance. Focussing on avoiding "failure" in our eyes is the stronger motivation. And ultimately, I believe when we look back, we won't measure our success relative to what we said we would do, but relative to what we could do.
Measure what matters
I've talked about why we should throw away underpromising, but how do we go about it in practical terms? The book, "Measure What Matters, OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth" by John Doerr, is an excellent insight into a process of goal setting devised by Andy Grove of Intel in the 60s and has gained popularity recently due to Google's adoption from its genesis as a company. Objectives and Key Results - OKRs.
Why do I bring them up here? Well, OKRs are the antithesis of underpromise and over-deliver. OKRs are about ambitious realism, with focus and commitment to the most important goals. As John Doerr puts it in his book, they are about stretching for the amazing.
How do we start? Well, when endeavouring on a new project or task or journey, ask yourself, if everything worked in our favour and if the wind continues to blow in the right direction what is the most we can achieve? Aim for that. Then commit to it. Understand what you need to make it happen. Then get everyone who gains from the success to commit to making it happen. Stretch for the amazing, don't amble to mediocrity.
Taken from the book above, some lessons when creating your OKRs
Less is more. A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, tie each objective to five or fewer key results.
Set goals from the bottom up. When Setting goals top-down corrodes motivation.
No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. A collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement.
Stay flexible. If the climate has changed, and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle.
Dare to fail. While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable.
A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, "is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review."
Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error.
I would add a couple of things to the above. Firstly, make sure objectives are articulated clearly with something concrete to be achieved. Avoid fuzziness in the language so that it is objectively understood and not subjective. For example "Learning and development" is not an objective. "Build a quality training platform for all staff" is a more concrete objective.
The key results aspect is essentially your definition of what a "Quality training platform" is. When defining the key results, consider that if the KRs are all achieved, the objective is by definition achieved.
Build a quality training platform for all staff measured by:
100% of staff have accessed the platform at least once within 3 months
50% of staff have completed more than one course within 3 months
Feedback is 85% good or excellent
By describing our KRs, we can start to focus on the solution and not be distracted by things that don't define success.
As a reminder, be ambitious. Listen to the language of those lessons. Dare to fail, stay flexible, be resolute. This isn't the language of underpromising, and it isn't the language of mediocrity.
