You have to feed the beast!
As I was eating dinner with a client a few months ago, I asked him to think about how we (Failsafe) could be of better service to our clients. I encouraged him to take time to think about his answer and to be in touch with me at a later date. But immediately, he said “I don’t need to think about it! Bob, if you want to be of better service to your clients,
You have to feed the beast.”
Later, after thinking about it for a while, I got in touch with him again to probe his meaning, but he retracted the phrase and told me (more or less) that he merely meant that the results of any causal learning endeavor must be seen on the bottom-line -- and “as a business person, I would not say this is negative.” Please do not get me wrong. I appreciate this person, and what he is saying.
But why would he have initially used those words? Did something in his subconscious suddenly emerge, revealing a true but unwanted feeling? Do we all have “beasts” within our lives -- circumstances that always seem to threaten us that are easily placated but difficult to permanently resolve? Are we more willing to merely keep the beast satisfied than to do whatever it takes to remove the beast (including “killing” it if necessary)? Are we all prisoners, in effect, of these beasts -- who demand more and more, “or else?” What are the “beasts” of our “business lives?” Are we merely them by “feeding” them? Would we be better off without them? If so, what would be the meaning of “killing the beast?”
So many questions. What are your thoughts?
Please reply on this blog so that everyone can share.
5 comments:
I see the beast within myself in the way that I feed it to avoid conflicts. In reality I go against my own values. I do what I think others want me to do. Others do the same, and that creates a society based on fear. In the end we don’t know where the fear started, but we blame it on culture, shareholders, management, etc. You scared the beast within your client Bob, that is why he had to take action.
-Tore Skoglund
It is quite interesting that your client used such a profound analogy to help your business. Profound in that he was relating a supposed point of success for his company to help your company. His clarification is reveals a caution to anyone advocating the Failsafe method: learning from failure as Failsafe teaches, is not a “casual learning endeavor”, it’s a way of doing business. This client seems to think learning from failure is just a bolt-on process to feed some KPI that management can use to justify movement of the bottom line, +/-. True, if the endeavor is successful, the bottom-line is enhanced, but not because it merely fed “the beast”, the people (the real beast of the business?) must change. A class quote rephrased: If you think just feeding the beast will solve your problems, you don’t understand your problems.
What is “the beast”? I suppose your client was speaking of the company he works for, not by just a derogatory name, but what in his heart the company has become; people normally say what comes from the heart, giving him time for his mind to reformulate the response is evidence of this. I imagine a beast of a company is heavily top-down, underlings lacking understanding the purpose of their work, an ignorance or disconnect from things that can affect the bottom line. Can a culture of blame thrive happily in a business atmosphere that looks to the “way we do business” as a beast? Here’s the short side of all this: your client is the beast, part of it at least, and until he changes the beast will always loom over his decisions. I wonder if this is a large corporation or a small business, and as it goes, is there some point where businesses grow into a beastly nature, rather than an organization of humans providing a service to other humans.
If this client sees that Latent Cause Analysis doesn’t go far enough to feed the beast after they have used the process consistent with the way it is taught, you are dealing with thistle weeds not dandelions. Feeding the beast is a diversion from getting rid of the weeds.
-John Curtis
Craig,
When writing this blog article, we spent more time deciding on which PICTURE to use than in writing the blog itself. One of the pictures we considered as a photo of a person that was "greedy for money." But that imagine was too "leading." It would have suggested that "the love of money" is the beast.
Although that is certainly one of its manifestations, I was more interested in hearing what people thought the beast was, without us leading people down a path.
Bret jumped right to the "money" issue. You introduced another one:
"being concerned about their own personal detached individual success at the expense of everyone else which ultimately leads to their own destruction due to their own self absorption poisoning"
Thank you for sharing that "potential beast."
I wish others would suggest some other forms of "the beast."
-Bob Nelms
Would agree with Brett to a point. In most all businesses it is unfortunately true that money drives the beast, the love of money is the root of all evil and therefore it is the beast but this beast is seen and it can be seen in just about every mirror out there if one has the courage to honestly evaluate oneself from a healthly team leadership mindset with a service minded approach to being a value to the success of the whole, the team instead of being concerned about their own personal detached individual success at the expense of everyone else which ultimately leads to their own destruction due to their own self absorption poisoning.
-Craig Johnson
Unless you have had major incidents recently within your organization, feeding the beast is done with unseen food. All of the savings driven by safe work are hidden, "what if" types of additions to the bottom line. People within HSE put forth a plan or process, most all people managing a budget see is what it is taking away from their "bottom line".
Killing the beast is out of the question. That would mean killing the business. The beast is there, stockholders demand we fatten the beast.
-Bret Graham
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