The Hindu Business Line : The eye of the fly: Effective rather than efficient leadership

Doing things effectively is the natural way of doing things. When you do things naturally, you expend the least effort. Doing things efficiently requires an effort _ a skill or an approach which has to be developed.

(This article is based on the author's book, The Case of the Bonsai Manager, published by Penguin Portfolio this month. The last of a three-piece series.)

The problems that leaders are required to solve are, by nature, foggy and unclear. Managers are trained to be efficient. In the process, they sometimes lose their effectiveness. Efficiency and effectiveness are different.

An efficient organization would have certain characteristics such as you work on things you understand quite well; you plan in detail and review actions against that plan; you impose a process and responsibility; you expect completion as per an agreed time table; you would throw resources to accomplish the tasks.

An effective organization would have other characteristics such as you work on things you don't quite understand; you find it difficult to plan in any detail as the way forward is unclear; you try out approaches and adjust your plans flexibly; you expect progress, but are not sure of completion; you have to generate new options continuously, not just place more resources.

It is not that an organization has a choice to be efficient or effective. It always needs to be effective, even if it means not being efficient.

The fly goes around in circles because of its compound eye

The most efficient path between two points is the straight line. Have you ever wondered why the common house-fly is unable to approach its goal in a straight path? Why does it go round and around in a sort of spiraling circle as it approaches its destination?

Given its eye and body structure, the fly has to adapt itself to reach its goal; it gets to its goal in a way that is effective for the circumstance, even if it is not an efficient way.

The fly has two large eyes, so large that they cover most of its head. The fly can simultaneously see up, down, forward, and backward. The fly's eye is made up of about 4,000 tiny, hexagonally packed lenses. No two lenses point in the same direction. Not only that, each lens operates quite independently of the others.

The flipside to this 360-degree vision is that a fly-eye view of the world is highly fractured; the fly cannot easily adjust for distance or see detailed patterns and shapes. Hence the fly does not have any sharp vision. It has what the biologist calls a compound eye; humans have a simple eye.

The human eye sees one large image; the fly sees the same tiny image in each of its several thousand lenses. As the fly approaches an object, the image shifts slightly in each facet. To hold in a constant position its vision of the object, the fly has to adjust its whole body. At each turn of its body, the fly is closer to the object, so the radius of the circle of approach progressively becomes smaller and smaller. If one plots the approach path of the fly, it would resemble a coil or a spiral with a decreasing radius.

Maybe this applies to organizations as well.

Where people are encouraged to think for themselves, there is bound to be a diversity of views. An organization is the sum total of these diverse viewpoints. Differing viewpoints lead to differing agendas and these naturally serve as a source of great conflict among people. These differing views sour human relationships all the way through.

A further complexity comes from the fact that people in the organization may or may not express their genuine view in the formal forum or meeting. If the view expressed at the table is different from the real view that the person holds, there is a further increase in the complexity. That is why any organization, which has a truly `compound' eye, has a very complex agenda.

Like the fly, the anatomy of the organization's `eye' prevents a sharp vision from guiding the movement of the organization. The lack of sharp vision prevents it from moving in a straight line, the efficient path. The organization assesses its distance from a goal, makes a move, reassesses its distance from the goal, adjusts its body again and keeps repeating this till it reaches the goal: just like the fly.

Suppress or leverage turbulence: the spiral

Our erroneous attitude towards the future is rooted in our culturally ingrained notions of predictability and control, a world in which change appears to be linear, continuous, and to some extent predictable. Linearity and stability are artificial ways of viewing the world. This point may seem pedantic, but it is not really so. Our ideas about the future are shaped by our desire to eliminate or suppress turbulence. This reflects in the way we relate to, for example, the use of energy.

When we design engines or earthquake-proof housing, we seek to improve performance and ensure robustness by suppressing turbulence. On the other hand, when we are exposed to the natural forces of energy, we instinctively leverage the turbulence for enhanced performance.

Think of how a skier comes down the slopes or how a glider pilot glides. Both realize that they cannot take a straight path. Their task is to deal with the inevitable turbulence of wind-speeds or the winding nature of the slopes. Both use that turbulence to their advantage. They try to move more effectively rather than more efficiently. They never ski in a straight line, nor glide in a straight line.

Nature rarely uses linearity in traversing from A to B; more often than not, it uses a spiral. A spiral moves faster towards its eye than further out. Think of how water gathers speed as it whirls down a drain; or how planets close to the Sun orbit faster than those at the periphery; witness how a wisp of smoke rises, not in a straight line but in a spiral; picture a galaxy, the shape of a cabbage, seashells, and the shape of our ears. All of them seem to grow from within themselves in a sort of spiral; water flows downhill as a stream in the same wavy way in which blood flows in our veins and the sap flows in a tree.

Clearly, the efficient way and the effective way in Nature are different. So, the issue arises: is there a choice between a straight line and spiral path i.e. between efficient ways and effective ways?

The importance of values

Doing things effectively is the natural way of doing things. When you do things naturally, you expend the least effort. Doing things efficiently requires an effort--a skill or an approach which has to be developed.

If you see Nature at work, you will see that least effort is expended.

Grass doesn't try to grow, it just grows. Fish don't try to swim, they just swim. Flowers don't try to bloom, they bloom. This is their intrinsic nature. In ancient Indian science, this was called the Law of Least Effort. Nature's intelligence functions effortlessly, frictionlessly, spontaneously. It is non-linear, intuitive and nourishing.

In a similar way, in the conduct of our business, you are in harmony with Nature when your actions are motivated by values. When you seek power and control over other people, you waste energy. When your actions are motivated by values, your energy multiplies and accumulates.

So what does it mean in practical terms to leverage the Law of Least Effort through actions that are motivated by values? There are three components to this Law of Least Effort: first, acceptance that things are the way they are at this point of time; second, without blaming others, take responsibility to change things for the better; third and last, avoiding defensiveness of your view, your past actions.

Make the trend your friend! Count on your natural instinct for values.

Values are at the vortex of the spiral. We need to live with chaos and uncertainty, to try to be comfortable with it and not look for certainty where we won't get it. However, we should remember that our journey is towards the vortex, the calm eye of the center. After all, what is the purpose of our managerial actions? If the purpose is only for oneself, it rapidly dissipates.

We should remind ourselves of what Gandhiji said `Beware of politics without principles and commerce without morality.'

Values, and only values, can help us to withstand the political, social and economic turbulence that these will bring.

The greatest mistake leaders can make is to assume that results alone matter, and that morality and goodness have gone out of style.

The great and more satisfying thing in life is a sense of purpose beyond oneself.

(Concluded)

(The author is Executive Director, Tata Sons Ltd.)