Improving performance isn't always easy

There are things we take for granted that might never have happened without a champion: someone who cared enough to make something change. All of us know in our day to day work change is far from easy – particularly when there are vested interests to be considered.

One champion for change was the 19th Century politician Samuel Plimsoll. His interest was in shipping, and in particular safety. He researched, wrote and campaigned to make marine safety a priority. He even got himself elected to the House of Commons in order to become more effective in his campaign.

His most lasting legacy is something called the Plimsoll line – a line painted on the side of a ship to show the point to which it can be safely loaded. It graphically shows the maximum weight a ship can carry. If the ship is overloaded, the line disappears below the water line and the ship owners were clearly seen to be compromising safety. Simple, effective, graphical – and thanks to Samuel Plimsoll from 1877 onwards it was also the law.

It is difficult to estimate how many people’s lives have been saved as a result of Mr Plimsoll’s belief in his work. Despite opposition from greedy ship owners who cared more for profit than they did for lives, Plimsoll succeeded in passing a law that improved safety and the reputation of the shipping trade. An elegant and effective example of data-visualization.

4 ways to make better decisions

I read an article recently about how groups make decisions. It struck me that whilst not being able to make a decision is harmful to performance, making bad decisions is even worse.

History throws up some monumentally bad decisions that serve as a reminder to us all that smart people sometimes get things spectacularly wrong.

Deciding to launch the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986 even though a good number of people knew there were problems was not one of NASA’s finest hours. Televised live to a huge audience it was a massive set back to their work, and a tragic loss to the families of all those on board.

Yet what impresses me about NASA is its openness. It has an online database of lessons learnt which is there for anyone to inspect. It has very detailed findings by engineers as well as some of the larger and more significant lessons. I have no doubt that as public-facing data it is less frank and less complete than their internal version, but nonetheless it’s an extremely useful reminder to everyone that lessons need to be, and indeed can be, learnt.

It also gives some confidence that things will actually change and people will learn from such a horrendous accident.

A great deal of research has been done on decision making and how to improve it.

Researchers have identified 4 danger signs:

• Emotion


• Attachment


• Using intuition


• Decisions based on self-interest rather than the greater good.

All make us a little uncomfortable because they are certainly not confined to the historically dreadful decisions, but also crop up in our day to day work. And just knowing that list isn’t necessarily going to save us from a mother-of-all-foul-ups.

So, how to avoid bad decisions? Well, that makes interesting reading, too. You might be surprised to hear that all four recommendations involve other people. Far from “committees” producing camels, they actually produce better decisions. Recommendations include:

• Finding safeguards for risky decisions


• Get someone to challenge your views


• Not having all the power vested in one person


• Monitoring what happens afterwards.

Four simple and effective ways to make better decisions.

Targets and scorecards have been shown over and over again to be harmful if they are measuring the wrong things. Deciding what are the right things is easier to say than it is to do, but that little list above might just be some help.