The Perils of Trusting Too Much

Suppose that within your own company you hear about a great process improvement or a breakthrough in customer service. You will undoubtedly want to know how to achieve the same thing in your area. But how do you go about understanding what happened so that you can enjoy similar results? This question is at the core of organizational learning — how organizations create, retain and transfer knowledge to amplify the results.

It is likely that you will try to find a key player who has been involved in the project — preferably someone you know and trust — and you will listen carefully to understand what made the complex initiative work. Or perhaps you will hear this talented corporate citizen tell the tale at the annual President's Awards Dinner. In either case, you would be relying heavily on the most dependable source you can find, using personal connections or others' endorsements to get the story.

Who could argue with this approach? Intuitively, it seems obvious to go to the most trusted person. But a trio of researchers, comprised of assistant professor Gabriel Szulanski and doctoral candidate Robert Jensen of the Wharton School and doctoral candidate Rossella Cappetta of Bocconi University in Milan, relates in their white paper “When Credible Sources Share Complex Information” (http://jonescenter.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/2000.htm) that such an approach is fraught with peril. Contrary to our instincts, accepting the word of people whom we believe to be trustworthy can greatly hinder understanding of a complex situation to the extent that truly learning something of value from it becomes difficult. The account we hear might even compel us to take the wrong path.

The authors based their theory on primary and secondary evidence gathered from Intel, McDonald's Corp., Rank Xerox, Banc One Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores. The theory was then tested in a two-year study of 122 transfers of organizational practices within eight firms, including Rank Xerox, Castrol, Kaiser Permanente, AMP, AT&T, Chevron Corp., EDS and BP Amoco. Their conclusion: A credible source can be relied upon to tell you everything you need to know to replicate a success only in quite simple, easily understood situations — for example, how to flip a hamburger. When situations become more expansive and complicated, as they are in most high-impact endeavors in corporations, trusting a single source — regardless of how capable and well intentioned — will almost always result in misunderstanding and failure.

Here's why: We take far too much for granted with a trustworthy source. We assume that the source knows the many factors related to the success, understands all the interconnections that influenced the results and comprehends the whole interplay of subtle actions by many people leading to decision making. By accepting the interpretation of another, we also assume that our source was able to discern what was really critical to the outcome versus those events that simply happened to take place. Ironically, since we would expect far less from a less trustworthy source, we probably would ask a lot more questions and possibly get a better idea about the critical factors leading to success. With a trustworthy source, we may unwittingly suspend our own powers of observation and judgment. “Their benevolence and integrity make us vulnerable to their unwitting misdirection,” points out Szulanski.

In light of this, what is the most prudent course of action? Are we doomed never to know how to replicate success, if even our smartest and best intentioned cannot tell us? Not at all, says Col. Michael Harper, U.S. Army, retired, who is coauthor with Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan of “Hope Is Not A Method.” First, we must take the burden off our best and brightest to be “The Answerman” and instead encourage all involved in an undertaking to engage in a disciplined discussion of what worked, what did not and why.

“In a learning culture, learning is about people giving it their ‘best shot,’ not experts providing ‘the answer.’ In the case of more complex systems, facts vary depending on how you ask the question. Given what we struggle with in large organizations, things can look very different depending on one's perspective or type of involvement,” says Harper, who is now principal of The Harper Group in Bowling Green, Kentucky. “A generative, adaptive organization is all about dialogue. Getting everyone involved — not just one trusted expert. What we should expect of our most trusted leaders is to state what they believe to be the facts, to be dedicated to dialogue, to be open to other facts and to be motivated by the best interests of the organization.”

In other words, as the saying goes, unanswered questions are far less dangerous than unquestioned answers.