Predictable Suprises. By Max H. Bazerman, Michael D. Watkins. Depending on your leadership track record, you might want to avoid going to a bonfire party with Bazerman and Watkins. They are so passionately convinced that many of the big issues encountered by organisations are unnecessary, that they “want to hold leaders’ feet to the fire” for those which were foreseeable and preventable.

The authors quote the physicist Niels Bohr as saying “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” “Difficult, yes; impossible, no,” they claim, saying that responsible leaders should be able to predict potential disasters and prevent them from becoming reality.

This applies easily to talent management, a subject which is currently exercising our thinking at Caret. The impact of demographic change on organisational resourcing is not hard to imagine, yet for many leaders the resulting challenges and pressures will come as a surprise which was fully predictable.

Bazerman and Watkins identify six distinguishing traits of predictable surprises, an example being that addressing a predictable surprise typically requires incurring a certain cost, while the reward is avoiding a cost that is uncertain but likely to be much larger. These six traits alone offer good insight into why predictable surprises occur, and are a very useful prompt for starting to think along the lines advocated by the authors even without delving into the three main sections of the book.

The first of these sections examines two specific “predictable surprises”, namely the September 11 terrorist attacks and the collapse of Enron and Arthur Anderson, looking in some detail at why they were predictable, and why not enough was done to prevent them. There will be too much data and depth for some, but the authors put forward a compelling case, and make good use of the examples to clarify and support their arguments.

The book continues with an examination of why we do not act on what we know. The section covers a number of areas in a thought-provoking manner, ranging from the desire that individuals have to maintain the status quo, to organisational learning disabilities and the political impact of special-interest groups.

Finally there is some help for leaders in preventing predictable surprises, built around a model of recognition, prioritisation and mobilisation. There is some highly usable material in here, although virtually all of it can be found in the authors’ Harvard Business Review article from March 2003 (reprint R0303E), a much more concise read.

The book is replete with examples, but most of them concern government or very public corporate failures, and nearly all are US-based, leaving a significant gap to be bridged in applying the principles to other situations. Despite this, the book as a whole will leave the reader thinking differently, and more likely to prevent some of those big surprises.

Good job too, with bonfire season fast approaching.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 10:48 am and is filed under Book reviews, Leadership, Purpose and Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.