Making Decisions Outside Your Repertoire

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off the dance floor—to the balcony

To better understand where your customers, suppliers, or teams are, you must take in more and different information than you have in the past. This is about collecting both quantitative data (Wal-Mart [WMT] tracks every imaginable piece of data—product purchasing, time on shelves, and so forth) and qualitative data (Best Buy [BBY] does lengthy research on the retail customer experience and how to better engage female consumers).

If you are observing well, you should never be surprised by sudden shifts in client relationships. Observing is a highly subjective activity, but the goal is to make it as objective as possible. Reflecting in the midst of action—what we call moving off the dance floor and getting on the balcony—is a powerful way to do this. It enables you to gain some distance, watch yourself as well as others while you are in the action, and see patterns that are hard to observe if you're stuck at the ground level, where the action is swirling around you.

Now that you have collected all this data, you need to make sense of it. Interpreting is an inherently provocative act, much more challenging than observing. When you hypothesize out loud and disclose the sense you are getting from your observations, you risk generating resistance from people who have formed different interpretations. They will want you to embrace the "truth"—whatever version of reality works for them.

The current crisis in the automobile industry is a prime example, ripe for multiple interpretations. Automaker and union executives can use many ways to interpret what has happened in the industry. The fact that the industry is in crisis could be thought of as an economic issue or one of design, ecology, or globalization. Interpreting too quickly leads to a narrow response.

The well-designed intervention

Most interpretative patterns are fashioned unconsciously and with lightning speed, throwing you into action before you can ask yourself: "Is my explanation for what is happening correct? What are some alternative hypotheses?" If you do not question your own and your team's preferred interpretations, you may unintentionally end up avoiding the difficult tasks that need to be tackled in order to make real progress.

Once you have made an interpretation derived from your observations, what are you going to do about it? Will you share your interpretation during a meeting, try it out with a small group, or just wait? Your next move, your intervention, should reflect your understanding of the problem and your hypothesis about the best way forward.

Well-designed interventions provide context; they connect your interpretation to the purpose or task on the table so people can see that your perspective is relevant to their collective efforts. If they cannot see the relevance, they might write you off as if you were riding a personal hobbyhorse ("That's Jack's issue").

Strengthening your ability to design interventions that lie outside your comfort zone takes practice, but it is a vital component of effective leadership. It will help you tailor your interventions to each unique situation and make you less predictable. And that makes it harder for others to neutralize you.

Consistency is a great virtue for management. For leadership, it gets in the way. The challenge in the days ahead is to diagnose the situation, discern when management or leadership is needed, and use observation and interpretation skills to move forward strategically.

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky are co-founders and Alexander Grashow is managing director of Cambridge Leadership Associates.

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