Leverage Weekly #73 - Getting honest signals
tl;dr - The more straightforward you are, the easier it is to interpret responses
There is a spectrum of straightforwardness, from self-conscious and careful honesty on one side, through framing, to spin, and then downright dishonesty on the other. In the context of organizations, it is sometimes supposed that it is necessary to engage in framing and spin. In some cases, it becomes so unthinkable that someone would say what is actually happening that words lose their meaning. One example of this is “corporate speak,” where executives talk about how much they value “excellence.”
The primary reason people deviate from honest descriptions is the belief that they will get a better response from some audience if they tailor their response to that audience. One may be worried, for example, that someone will react badly if you tell them that their work is poor. So, one might euphemistically say that it “isn’t perfect” and that while it “needs improvement,” one can certainly “see a lot of its merits.” This is like grade inflation, which renders grades meaningless, but much more general.
There are many reasons to stick to honest descriptions. They are often easier to create. They can require less memory to keep track of. One benefit, however, which is sometimes overlooked, is the fact that giving honest descriptions of things makes it easier to get useful information from people’s responses. If you tailor your response to someone too much, their response only tells you what they think about what you think they wanted to hear. If you communicate more straightforwardly, audiences responses’ can tell you what they think about what you think is actually going on.
One simple example is with titles. In one’s organization, one can give out fancy titles merely as honorifics; being the “Chief X Officer” then means only that so-and-so is important at the company. Alternatively, one can try to have the titles match the powers and responsibilities as exactly as possible. Then one can see how the person, as well as everyone around them, responds to the publicly visible display of the relevant social facts. In many cases, a match or mismatch with the person’s actual propensities, or other people’s actual willingness to follow them will be revealed.
Another crucial case in point is fundraising. There are plenty of incentives for organizations to misrepresent themselves when raising or giving out money. Teams raising money may try to hide weaknesses, frame failures as successes, and misrepresent the amount of money they actually need to raise. Groups giving out money, on the other hand, may mislead people about what they want to fund, how they make decisions, and the amount of money they actually have to spend. An entire essay could (and may be) written on the precise details of the groups’ motivations.
These issues are largest in non-profit fundraising. In for-profit fundraising, it is understood that CEOs talk a big game, but ultimately want to raise at little as possible, since they don’t want to give up equity in their companies. This protects for-profit funders to a degree. With non-profits, on the other hand, there is a presumed focus on the public good, which can create the supposition that neither side will mislead the other. At the same time, non-profits often try to raise as much money as they can.
Unfortunately, the complex positioning that occurs in fundraising also leads to a lot of missed opportunity. Rather than giving an honest signal of what one’s project is, how much money is needed for the next stage, and what the expected challenges are, people often try to anticipate what the funders will say yes to. If a team then receives a “no,” they learn what funders thought about what the team thought the funders were looking for, rather than what the funders thought about the actual project.
An alternative, rarely explored, is to try to describe one’s project as clearly as possible. It’s impossible to avoid some degree of emphasis when describing one’s project, but rather than trying to get a “yes,” the idea is to try to resolve the matter of whether a given funder will fund one’s project now. This can be much faster that the standard alternative. It’s certainly easier, and in many cases, it can even yield a higher probability of raising money. To turn honesty into a good fundraising strategy, however, certain additional components are needed. These will be covered in the following weeks.
The more straightforward you are, the easier it is to interpret responses.
This week, the Leverage team resumed its production of Leverage Weeklies, after a two-month hiatus. It also continued helping the LENR/nucleonics team at MIT, which is beginning its fundraising efforts. The two month-long gap in publication provided a time to reorganize internally, reprioritize, and reorient.
The largest change at Leverage has been the delegation of projects. Oliver is now primarily in charge of the nucleonics project; Melinda is in charge of overseeing work with the Quantum Biology Institute. Geoff is working with each of them closely, but now has more time freed up for writing and learning over the next few months. Ideally, this new setup will successfully empower both Oliver and Melinda, yielding more rapid skill growth, while giving Geoff the time to produce writing to help fill out the public explanation of the Leverage perspective.
Otherwise, the team has a variety of priorities. The long-awaited Gray study is nearly complete. Work with Cliff Sandlin on the mechanisms of magnetic field effects has also reached a critical point and is now producing papers. Geoff has resumed writing Leverage Weeklies, and the whole team has planned a revision of the Leverage bylaws, both as an activity to do together and because it turns out that organizational bylaws actually matter. Good governance begins at home!
There is, of course, an interesting question about when an organization manages to stick to its own schedule and when not. In our case, we have wondered whether deviating from our schedule, as well as our own documentation and reporting on what we’re doing, happens whenever some sort of large change happens. We did just experience a gap, and also experienced a large change, i.e., with delegation and empowerment. Does that mean our hypothesis is right? Was there some other big change? We’ve pondered questions like these at our weekly Leadership meetings, but haven’t gotten any definitive answers yet.