On Trying to Do No Harm

Sometimes a situation tips into the phase where something has clearly gone wrong, and measures have to be taken — at times desperate, decisive ones. By that point the existing players in the project are usually deeply committed. One holds the information that matters, another runs communications through the channels he has built, a third owns other areas and directions.

If the analysis shows the trouble came from the actions of specific people, a dilemma appears: “don’t change horses midstream”, or replace them and risk new people burning time getting up to speed from zero. What do you do? The decision gets harder the more time matters.

Let me reword a good old joke, the gist of which is that when a shop’s foot traffic falls and rearranging the shelves does nothing, you have to change the staff.

Yes, there’s a temptation to add new people to the team, beef up its skills, and leave the old ones untouched. To “try and do no harm”, as they say. But beyond the fact that this costs more, there’s the question of how responsibility gets redistributed. In practice, the blurrier the zones of responsibility, the more chaos — and the result only gets worse. When two people are responsible for the same thing, it means no one is anymore. On top of that come questions of motivation in the new roles, willingness to accept being reassigned to someone else, and other emotional shifts.

It all works when people own their part in the wrong decisions. But often, right up to the end, everything gets pinned on third parties, with one’s own failings completely ignored. And that’s an alarming warning bell. We all make mistakes, and that’s fine — but refusing to accept this simple truth, the endless attempts to justify oneself or to find a silver lining even where there is none, is a signal that it’s time to sound the alarm.

In the end it often turns out that the wish to “do no harm” leads to far greater harm. If the only way to save a life is to cut off part of the body to stop an infection from spreading, then dragging your feet and making futile attempts to keep what can no longer be kept will end in a fatal outcome. Excessive caution can, at times, be exactly like good intentions — the kind that pave the road to hell.

The best leaders, from what I’ve seen, are set apart by courage, decisiveness, and the ability to take responsibility for their decision, whatever it turns out to be.

For my own part, I try to weigh not only the risks of a potentially wrong decision, but also the risks tied to making no decision at all. And often the second one far outweighs the first in possible damage.

Here’s to all of us not being afraid to set change in motion where the risk of leaving things as they are is critical — however painful that change might look at first glance. 😎