US is a presentationcracy

GW Bush decided to attack Irak because he claimed there were weapons of mass destruction. Later it turned out to be false and then Bush defended himself that the presentations he got from his intelligence people claimed that there should have been....

Well, I guess it’s up to each and every one of us to decide, whether we believe that Bush told the whole story when saying that, but I believe it could have been a truth. Namely that is how leaders all over the world make decisions: They make judgements based on the presentations that the people make for them. Then you could say that it is the presentations that have the power to lead decision making to this or that direction...it is the presentations and consequently the people who make them, who are in charge.

So that means then that our organizations are in fact managed and even led by making presentations. Sounds possible, doesn’t it...but hold on. Shouldn’t organizations be run based on facts?!! I think that yes, of course they should be. Mere presentations can lack or belittle critical and relevant factual information. A good example is the story about how the explosion of space shuttle Columbia is said to have happened because some crucial points had been missing in a ppt presentation that was done for NASA managers. The Washington Post article about it [1] seems to blame mostly the practise of using .ppt as a presentation media, but I claim that the problem is much bigger and deeper. I think the problem is the fact that the everywhere the world is more and more operating based on presentations and presentations alone.

As a European dealing with organizations and management practises both US, Europe and previously even Asia, I can tell that many here in Europe often think that the management US businesses often revolves around making convincing presentations rather than good presentations (we don’t tell this out loud to US colleagues in order not to offend them, because they wouldn’t understand anyway). With this distinction I mean that a convincing presentation is something that makes the listeners convinced, but a good presentation is such that it covers all the relevant facts as thoroughly as possible. A bit similar distinction is used in organizational behaviour literature to separate between successful managers and good managers. Successful managers make career and look good within the organization and the good ones make things really work...and oftentimes the succesfull and good managers are not the same people! (More about this for example in a great basic text book [2]). What makes things tricky is that in order to be convincing (or successful) there always needs to be at least some substance and facts - but not necessarily everything that is critical to make the right decision. A convincing but not very good presentation can also be biased or drive hidden agendas... so oftentimes in practise it is hard to separate beforehand a truly good presentation from a convincing one. But there are telltales of course….

I think that for the overall good of the organization, we should strive for making good presentations. Yet in practise it is the convincing presentations that usually get rewarded and lead the decision making. But in the long term doesn’t this build bubbles inside the organization? Relevant information gets missing because of the presentations are convincing rather than good? Risky and sometimes even false proposals get accepted - like in the shuttle case, or perhaps even Irak war case? I think it very much does, and I even suspect that this could be one of the very fundamental reasons why we see our economical structures collapse right now. So much air and risk has been built within our system because of the last 20-30 decades of mismanagement embracing convincing presentations instead of good presentations. It’s not just subprimes….it’s everywhere!

Related to this, I must refer to a book, which I read just recently, namely ”Black Swan” by Nicholas Nassim Taleb [3], . Taleb makes good job in proving that indeed we do have a tendency to love convincing narrative rather than assess facts and risks objectively. I think he is talking about the same phenomena as I that we love convincing presentations to a point that we often blind ourselves from risks. And that this trend has now become vastly emphasized in the global economy and politics as a result of faster technology, networking, globalization, and all. Taleb makes nice analysis how us in general and many scholars in economic sciences in particular tend to base our thinking in ”platonized” (as he expresses) models and induction. Taleb goes also rather philosophical with many of the cases he discusses, and even though I 'm not sure if I would sign all of his ideas, I think he has broken important ground to really critically rethink how we manage organizations today. My view is more narrowly from practical office life. I see everyday how everything is managed based on presentations – and presentations alone.

The power of presentations goes so deep into both the public sector and business life that I would call our current western societies with a name presentationcracy...In a presentationcracy it is the presentations which rule the world and hence the power is held by the people with presentation skills instead of the people who have the best ideas or most knowledge. Not a new idea I think, but it still gives you the creeps if you think how pervasive this phenomena is down to the grass root level, even when people decide about small municipal issues or minute company spending or risk taking.

Ok. But why do I title this rant that it is specifically US that is the presentationcracy? Aren’t all nations? Yes, I think so, all are, but US is leading. I think it is perhaps because we in Europe and Asia have been usually slower to develop our market economy (because we are so culturally brainwashed to respect unconditionally our bureaucracy and governement led ”official” knowledge) we have not fully given up ”the other information” namely top-down dictated unquestionable wisdom that our national states and the official school system has taught us. So besides the information that the ”presentationcracy” produces we have had also some other kind of "true" information available that has been (at least sometimes) produced by different kind of logic.... yet I’m not saying at all that this often nationalistic official wisdom’s had in general been any better for decision making, (usually on the contrary), but perhaps it has given the decision makers perspective, another way to look at things, at least on the grass root level.

I think that since the days of Thatcher our stuffy European bureaucracy has been most often perceived as bad thing...and rightfully so I thinkm since the economic activity in Europe in the 70s was pretty constrained and my guess is that all businesses had been lost to Asia an US altogether if things hadn’t changed to be more market driven...but now I think it is US in turn, who is about to go bellyup with it’s purely business driven ethos. Recently most businesses seem to embrace shortsightedness, risk taking, opportunism over strategy and presentationcracy (and I’m far from being alone with this view). Look for example what all the business schools teach...and how! Lot of the business management teaching is driven by slogans like ”you deserve what you can negotiate”which encourages directly to make convincing presentations instead of good ones and in many places most management teaching is only case studies thus building ”inductive knowledge” from the convincing narrative of individual events. Since this is a blog and not a scientific article I happily go even further and claim that making things convincing instead if good has become a part of people’s values – in US particularly. Ok, making it convincing might be a good philosophy for sales people, but not for managers or leaders who should also try to protect owner’s money (or in public organizations people’s tax money) by assessing facts and risks realistically, too.

Well, based on the little I have heard mr. Obama talk, it might be that he indeed does have a clue...at least some of the way. But if you agree to what I just presented here even partly, you must realize that he has a much much more massive task ahead than just making some legislative hat tricks and spending money in dying industries ;-) He has to somehow adjust the whole culture how management is done in US. And not just at high govt or corporate level but everywhere.

I do hope Obama will succeed. I would be absolutetely horrified of the view that the world economy in general would slide back to a Sovietunion kind of a stagnation, where everything is measured only by it’s bureaucratic merits. The way I see for example how the EU administrative monster is currently being built with Lisbon treaty and all, I would say it doesn’t look too good... but that’s another story altogether =)))

So how would I myself fix things then? I think Obama and other leaders would need to think ways how the organizations woudl and could start rewarding good presentations rather than convincing ones. I could tell some ideas if you want to know how that could be accomplished, ....but then I would need to ask to make a consultancy agreement with me first :-)

references:
[1] Washington Post article, available in internet feb 17th: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html
[2] Robbins, S. and Judge, T. Organizational behavior, Pearson Education
[3] Taleb, N.T. Black Swan, Random House, April 17 2007