Don’t underestimate ‘I’. Don’t slip too easily into ‘we’

The remarkable and much-missed David Ogilvy said, ‘Search all your parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees’.

As usual, he was right. Ogilvy was a one-off. He was brilliantly successful as a leader and agency head. A talented writer, and a good salesman. But read his books, and he probably wasn’t much of a democrat. The Ogilvy stories were about him. He didn’t share the quotes around. He was pretty much an ‘I’ man, not much of a ‘we’ guy. His job was to persuade clients to entrust him with their advertising, and then produce ideas and copy that sold. His era was before the copywriter/art director team became the default setting. Ideas came from one man – him.

There’s a lesson there, I believe, despite it being an unfashionable view. Michael Palin has just had a big birthday, and I read his plea to give the more mature some credit for wisdom. If I also qualify as ‘wise’, my observation would be that people too readily take the ‘we’ position when they put forward an idea which they, as an individual, have come up with. If you have an idea, it’s your idea, not one from a collective. There’s nothing wrong with one person having an idea. That is where the vast majority of ideas come from. If you say ‘we have had an idea’ when it was yours, it doesn’t make the idea any stronger, and it makes you less interesting.

I’m fresh from tackling decision making in Decide, and challenging the conventional wisdom that successful deciders are all left brain thinkers who rely on logic and reason. The target in the book I am working on now is the myth that it is productive to put clever people in conference rooms to play out the familiar ritual of ‘the meeting’.

Our diaries tell us that we spend half our working life in them, but strangely we seldom connect meetings with decision making. This is largely because very few of the meetings we attend seem to produce any decision at all. They start, we talk, they just end, and then we fix the next one. Yet all organisations rely on meetings to develop, process and ratify decisions. Shouldn’t decision taking be about using meetings to engage colleagues and refine the final decision so it is as good as possible?

If only! Two main problems here. The first is down to one of the most disappointing facts of human life. Clever people don’t always behave in a clever way. In this instance having the ability to make good decisions doesn’t mean that you are in fact a consistently good decision-maker. Nor does having clever people in a meeting room necessarily produce great results or good decisions.

Secondly, the average meeting is ineffective because it simply doesn’t work. So many reasons. For instance if there are too many people in the room, it is difficult for individuals to make much of a contribution, with so many voices wanting to be heard. Almost always, in every meeting you can think of, there are too many items on the agenda.

Let’s look at the scenario. All meetings – no exceptions – are called because one person has an idea, a plan, a possible way forward, and needs to engage with the people (usually colleagues, and almost always because of the job titles they hold, rather than their relative meeting or collaboration skills) who can either help move it forward or approve it. Hold the thought that ideas and plans come before meetings, not out of them.

So ten people receive message notices to be in a conference room 10.00 to 11.00 on Thursday. The meeting takes place without two of those invited, everyone talks a lot – often at the same time – and the meeting ends with very little progress, to be resumed in a week or ten days.

I believe there is a better way, and it comes back to ‘I’ and ‘We’. Ideas don’t come out of meetings. They come from people. Individuals.

My suggestion is that the person who has come up with an idea or plan works it up as far as possible on the basis of ‘my idea is….’. Then they engage with the one colleague they feel is most likely to be helpful in advancing the idea. This isn’t a meeting, it’s a work session. In due course the two colleagues will need to involve another person to make progress. That’s three people in the room. And so on, adding one person at a time.

Usually five people will be enough for all but the most complicated situations. The process is called the stepladder principle. No long agenda. No politics. No overtalking. No passengers. No time wasting. The progression from ‘I’ to ‘We’ is smooth. And now the team is ready to involve approvers and decision makers (if necessary) with a well-developed case. That will be a proper  meeting designed to lead to a decision. It will work.

Read more from David.