Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Openly Prioritize

While in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago, I had a chance encounter at my hotel with Prof. Patrick Whitney of IIT. It was only a few months back when I was at Patrick's conference and he was so busy hosting the event then that I didn't have the opportunity to talk with him at length. Luckily over breakfast at the hotel, I got a whole lot of organizational wisdom from him as he's really seen it all. My placemat menu was filled with scribbles -- a good sign of a good meal.

Patrick made an interesting distinction between fairness versus policy. His point being that a clear policy usually makes everything open and transparent. It's real socialism at work -- everyone gets the same deal no matter for better or for worse. On the other hand, with a closed process at work it's possible to give different deals to different people because an open policy is thrown out the door -- which can be good or bad depending upon what particular deal you get. In the closed model, the perception of fairness is sometimes possible to attain to a degree, but real fairness is close to impossible to achieve due to the fact that the closed system is really by all metrics simply unfair regardless of how it is dressed up to look completely fair. Note that I don't use the words "fair"/"unfair" with any particular judgement value here. The world is unfair. The realist in me know that well. But the idealist in me likes to believe it could be fair at least on the average ... maybe at least on sunny days?

My breakfast takeaway was that the best model to shoot for appears to be one that is "openly unfair." Hmmmm. I guess a better way to put that is to be "openly prioritizing" (and thus also de-prioritizing) based upon clearly shared values. Bets always have to be made in an organization, and achieving a high degree of comfort around the bets made is pivotal so that the wins and losses are not just the leader's but are shared across the entire organization. Everyone is a winner with a win, and even when you lose it's a win because you retain full awareness that the loss was yours -- versus being put in a situation where you've lost and felt you were helplessly out of the loop from the beginning.

I think that ultimately you never lose when being open as it is the core direction that leads to the elusive 8th Law of Simplicity trust. Trust. Wow! Hard. Something for me to think about over the next few decades. Luckily I might still have a few more years to try and figure this all out ...