We like heroes. Companies promote heroes.
But few ask the question of whether there are situations in which a hero creates
loss for their company, even as they are trying to win by overcoming a crisis.
Recent research by Julien Clement published in Administrative Science Quarterly looks at this question and finds some worrying answers. The context for drawing
these insights is interesting, by the way, and explains the choice of hero in
the illustration. He studies teams in the online game DOTA 2, which experienced
multiple challenges due to rule changes.
The start of the insights drawn from the
research is that organizations are coordinated systems, so any attempt to
change one unit can have consequences for other units. Change in one place
usually makes the entire system a little worse, until corresponding changes are
made elsewhere. When heroes do their work, they also put other heroes to work.
That is only the start of the insights,
though, and the continuation is worse. It is important to also ask why a crisis
happens. Maybe it is because the hero’s particular unit experiences a local
problem, for example related to the technology it operates, the inputs it gets,
or the market for its outputs. But it could also be because of a system-wide
problem that affects the entire company. If that happens, problems will occur
in multiple units at once, and the changes to each unit will affect other
units, creating a very confusing environment where it is hard to tell the
difference between the original crisis and the new problems created by other
units’ changes. When heroes go to work on the same problem and don’t coordinate,
the problem can grow bigger.
If heroes might lose, then what is the
alternative? Simple. Any organization has a center, and when the entire
organization is hit by a system-wide problem, the center needs to take charge.
This is the time for a CEO and top management team to diagnose the system-wide
problem and search for a solution. The system needs to change. Of course, the
heroes can still be given work, but the task of each one should be defined and
distributed centrally. (Notice how this explains why the Marvel heroes always
struggle unreasonably much given their abilities – they are not centrally
coordinated, but their adversary is.)
The lesson for an organization is clear.
The idea of operating it as an independent adaptive system is wonderful for the
sequence of small and local challenges that constitute its daily life. At the
same time, it is exactly the wrong approach for dealing with larger,
system-wide problems that occasionally happen and sometimes spell the
difference between success and failure.
