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Culture Shift: The Causes & Cures of Collective Amnesia
May 19, 2008
The one question no business leader should ever have to hear: "What are we doing all this for, again?"
By Paul Levesque
A group of people are stranded on a deserted island. They spot a distant rescue plane low in the Western sky. Meanwhile, the Eastern sky is menacingly dark with an approaching hurricane. The group holds a meeting to discuss whether their collective focus should be on building a signal fire, finding storm-proof shelter, or both simultaneously. The recovered written minutes of their final debate are full of lengthy and heated exchanges about the merits of natural-vs.-man-made shelters, and which kinds of wood produce the smokiest fires.
Whether it's island castaways or managers who forget to improve team productivity through incentives during touch economic times, the fact is people can sometimes forget what’s really most important. One of the most frequent causes for this kind of forgetfulness is distraction. The more a distraction represents a real or potential threat of some kind, the likelier it becomes that other matters will be temporarily put aside.
Collective Amnesia in the Workplace
It's a common pattern in the life-cycle of many businesses.
When a new business is launched, it's on a mission to fill some need in the market. All businesses begin with this kind of external focus. Everyone on staff knows what's important.
But, sooner or later, problems begin to arise. New competition emerges, key suppliers start dropping the ball or customer preferences take an unexpected turn—and suddenly the numbers aren't looking so good. In response to the potential threat, everyone's attention turns inward. Gradually the well-being of the organization begins commanding more attention than the well-being of customers in the marketplace. A downward spiral has begun. Customers feel neglected and gradually begin to defect, which worsens the numbers, increases the severity of the threat and subsequently intensifies the distraction from the organization's original mission.
In my consulting experience, one of the dead giveaways that an organization is suffering from terminal collective amnesia is when I ask senior managers about their mission, and they tell me it's "to survive." To make matters worse, different managers usually have different—and often conflicting—survival strategies in mind. By this point, the biggest threat to their survival has become their collective neglect of the more basic issues upon which the survival of all businesses depends.
The Antidote to Collective Amnesia
Threats and distractions are fundamental leadership issues. And leaders who get everyone involved in the mechanics of deflecting or resolving threats are making a critical mistake. This simply intensifies the internal focus and the anxiety, giving everyone official permission to forget about customers "until this crisis blows over."
The reality of organizational life is that threats and crises never blow over. Once employees begin thinking of their main responsibility as "putting out fires," they may never go back to seeing their overarching mission as "filling customer needs."
Not, that is, unless the leadership keeps reminding them about it. That's the real cure for collective amnesia: constantly place everything that happens within its larger context, so that the ultimate mission is never forgotten.
Three tips to make this easier:
1. Never discuss the "what" of anything without clarifying the bigger "why."
It should never be a matter of "We're doing this." It should always be, "We're doing this because it's going to help us achieve that." Every task during every business day is directly related to achieving a key business objective—and that vital link needs to be emphasized over and over again.
2. Provide frequent "high-altitude progress reports" that indicate how near (or far) mission success is.
"Right now we're here. Last month we were here. In six months we hope to be here." Regular updates of this kind remind everybody what all their work is for, what it's helping accomplish in the larger scheme of things.
3. Keep employees personally involved in mission strategies.
Employee involvement is always a powerful motivator—but its effects are especially positive during periods of threat and uncertainty. Nothing says "don't let this temporary situation distract you from our larger mission" more effectively than getting employees directly focused on—and involved in—the larger mission itself. If the mission revolves around customer satisfaction, for example, and there are uneasy rumors circulating about a merger or a takeover, there's no better time to get work teams brainstorming creative new ideas for improving the customer experience.
It's a fight-fire-with-fire situation. If distractions are making people forget what's really important to the business, the solution is to distract people from the distraction by refocusing their attention on what matters most.
 Editor's Note: Think you have the skills to keep your team focused when collective amnesia rears its ugly head? Find out in this week's podcast at www.incentivemag.com/cultureshift where Paul Levesque presents his leadership pop-quiz. You may have a lot to learn about the high-cost of forgetting your main mission.
We want to hear your feedback on "Culture Shift" columns! Send comments to stacy.straczynski@nielsen.com to let us know what topics you'd like discussed in upcoming episodes of the "Culture Shift."
INCENTIVE online "Culture Shift" columnist Paul Levesque is an author, seminar leader and public speaker with two decades' experience as an international business consultant specializing in the connection between employee motivation and customer satisfaction. He is a senior consultant with Boston-based Novations Inc., and is also founder and CEO of Customer Focus Breakthroughs Inc.
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