I love what you said, Todd, as you’re talking about candor. You said, How do I confront an issue without becoming the issue? Because people are so defensive. If you’re listening, that’s a moment of take a note, tweet it out, document it, because we often become the issue because of the way we deliver information.
That’s exactly right. I’ll stay theoretical and I’ll get practical for a second. But also, just think about it. You consult organizations, I consult organizations. We spend a lot of time inside of these companies, and we can’t solve any problem that we can’t talk to each other about honestly and openly. And yet this is something that we struggle with incredibly. And I’m working on a project right now with a large pharma company, and they’re trying to update their organizational design. And there have these been issues with the current organization design that have been going on for, say, about a year. But when you really start to look at why those issues have persisted, it’s Because people aren’t having honest and effective conversations with each other about those issues. You remember that famous was that cool hand Luke with Paul Newman? What we have here is a failure to communicate. And I’m seeing that left, right, and center, Ron, as the underlying cause for a lot of organizational misery, the underlying cause for why decision making is way too slow, for why execution, we have gaps in that for results that miss the mark. And my team and I have studied nearly 50,000 documented conversations that haven’t produced the results that people wanted.
And in every single instance, there is something the person is doing or not doing who shared the conversation with us that they’re blind to, which is compromising the truth in their critical conversations when the truth is needed most. So the reason I think it’s so valuable, just to summarize, because that was your really good question, is because we’re not very good at it, and in organizations, we really need to be.
