Saturday, June 18, 2011

What Do You Do When One of Your Decisions was Wrong?

Decision-Making

Even the most carefully crafted plans sometimes go wrong.  It is bad enough when these decisions are personal; but worse when they are corporate, or organizational. This is because there are more people involved, and the consequences are public and usually costly. There is great potential for embarrassment  and sometimes more serious consequences. Yet, one cannot ignore such a decision even when it has been proven to be erroneous. That is where strategic flexibility comes in.

According to Shimizu and Hitt (2004), strategic flexibility is the ability to “identify major changes in the external environment, quickly commit resources to new courses of action in response to those changes, and recognize and act promptly when it is time to halt or reverse existing resource commitments.”

 I have devised a four step strategy with the acronym: RACE.

Recognize: This step requires that you recognize the mistake and cease making decisions or taking actions that advance the organization in that direction. There may be the temptation to hide this mistake, but this step also requires that you admit this error to parties that need to know.

Assess: You must assess the new situation, including the facts, changes, both internal and external, and get a status report. Failure to stop and take stock could cost more time and expenses later when it becomes obvious that you have missed critical issues during the process.

Chart: Using all the information gathered in the previous step,  plan to chart a new course. This will take into account all previous plans, new contingencies that led to the present situation, making sure to include ongoing monitoring processes that will ensure prompt response to changes in the external environment.
 
Execute: After an experience where a decision has gone wrong, there may be a tendency to be reluctant to take bold steps in new decision making. However, it is necessary to move forward because the work of the organization must continue. Therefore, armed with the confidence that you have done all due diligence, you must boldly execute the new plan.

Strategic Flexibility: Organizational Preparedness to Reverse Ineffective Strategic Decisions
Katsuhiko Shimizu and Michael A. Hitt
The Academy of Management Executive (1993-2005)
Vol. 18, No. 4, Decision-Making and Firm Success (Nov., 2004), pp. 44-59

Thursday, April 28, 2011

We are Slowly Losing Ourselves:Marriage

Before the colonialists came, our marriages were a blend of two families. The man's family came in full force. The wife's family cooked and cooked. They wined, they drank, and they got to know one another. Their events became our events, and we were bound together.

Then we got educated. We became Christians, and we Yorubas started calling our traditional marriage the engagement. The colonialists called it marriage by native law and custom. We did worse. We called it "engagement".

Yet we seemed to maintain the crucial parts of the ceremony. We sang, we danced, we ate, we met one another. Our families became one. I personally handled a few of those events for a few family members. It was an intimate experience.

Then, something happened. I don't know how. Maybe we became scared of one another. I don't know.  All I know is that we seem to have yielded the essence of our marriage events over to strangers.  They call them alaga iduro and alaga ijoko. These are usually perfect strangers who seem to have only one purpose: to make as much money as possible for themselves from the participants at the event. The two families, sitting at opposite ends, like people at war, the alagas sing unnecessary songs, create uninteresting distractions, and pass around their bowls for money. The money that used to go to the "wives" in the families now goes to these strangers.  

The reason that the families use a spokesperson is a throw back to our original culture, where the suitor could not go directly to the girl's family, but had to go through a trusted person  known as the "alarina". 
Much as we should keep this aspect of our culture, we must be careful not to debase the event to where there is little or no interaction between the families. 

I have nothing against people who have to use strangers, but the essence of the event must not be lost.  Our culture is what makes us who we are. It is what makes our loved ones do what they can to see to the success of our marriages. It is what creates friendships that last a lifetime.  

If we throw our culture away and try to be "educated" and become like other people, no matter how much we try to be them, we are still imitators, fakes.

Let us value and preserve what is ours, or we lose ourselves, forever.