Rent 9780131568150 | Know What You Don't Know : How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen

Summary Table of Contents Author Biography

Problems remain hidden in organizations for a number of reasons, including fear, organizational complexity, gatekeepers who insulate leaders from problems that are coming up, and finally, an overemphasis on formal analysis in place of intuition and observation. This book lays out the key skills and capabilities required to ensure that problems do not remain hidden in your organization. It explains how leaders can become effective problem finders, unearthing problems before they destroy an organization. The book explains how leaders can become a... MOREn anthropologist, going out and observe how employees, customers, and suppliers actually behave. It then goes on to present how they can circumvent the gatekeepers, so they can go directly to the source to see and hear the raw data; hunt for patterns, including refining your individual and collective pattern recognition capability; "connect the dots" among issues that may initially seem unrelated, but in fact, have a great deal in common; give front-line employees training in a communication technique; encourage useful mistakes, including create a "Red Pencil Award"; and watch the game film, where leaders reflect systematically on their own organization's conduct and performance, as well as on the behavior and performance of competitors.

Uncover Your Company's Emerging Problems-and Solve Them Before They Explode into Disaster bull; How to become a world-class problem-hunter...and why you must bull; 'Connect the dots': Uncover the hidden patterns that could mean big trouble bull; By the best-selling author of Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer Tired of 'fighting fires'? Start 'detecting smoke'-so you can fix your company's problems before they erupt into crisis! Face it: Your most dangerous problems are the ones you don't even know about. Know What You Don't Know will help you hunt down those hidden, festering issues: the ones that could destroy your organization if you don't discover them soon. Michael A. Roberto teaches the seven skill sets you need to become a world-class 'problem hunter.' Roberto shows leaders how to get past dangerous information 'filtering'...watch how people behave, not just what they say...pick meaningful patterns out of raw data...encourage smarter risk-taking and 'useful failures'...build a culture that welcomes challenges to conventional wisdom...draw crucial lessons from your organization's 'game film'...and get your team to act on what you've learned. There are plenty of books about problem solving. But you can't solve a problem until you know it exists. Read Know What You Don't Know, and you will.

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Acknowledgments	p. xii
About the Author	p. xv
Preface	p. xvi
From Problem-Solving to Problem-Finding	p. 1
Embrace Problems	p. 6
Why Problems Hide	p. 9
Cultures of Fear	p. 9
Organizational Complexity	p. 11
Gatekeepers	p. 13
Dismissing Intuition	p. 14
Lack of Training	p. 15
Making Tradeoffs	p. 17
Becoming an Effective Problem-Finder	p. 18
The Isolation Trap	p. 20
Circumvent the Gatekeepers	p. 27
Why Filtering Takes Place	p. 31
Efficiency Concerns	p. 31
Pressures for Conformity	p. 32
Confirmation Bias	p. 33
Advocacy	p. 34
Circumventing the Filters	p. 35
Listen with Your Own Ears	p. 36
Seek Different Voices	p. 39
Connect with Young People	p. 41
Go to the Periphery	p. 43
Talk to the Nons	p. 45
A Most Prescient Leader	p. 46
Become an Ethnographer	p. 53
Why Don't People Do What They Say?	p. 57
Leading Questions	p. 58
Group Dynamics	p. 59
The Unconscious Mind	p. 61
Honing Your Powers of Observation	p. 62
A Few Words of Caution	p. 66
Hunt for Patterns	p. 73
What Is Intuition?	p. 75
Faulty Analogies	p. 77
Solutions in Search of Problems	p. 80
Building Your Pattern-Recognition Capabilities	p. 84
Better Analogies	p. 84
Mentoring	p. 87
Mining the Data	p. 89
What Do You Learn at Business School?	p. 90
Connect the Dots	p. 95
The CIA in Kuala Lumpur	p. 97
The Phoenix Memo	p. 98
The Minneapolis Field Office Investigation	p. 99
The 9/11 Attacks	p. 100
Why Not Share Information?	p. 102
Information Sharing in Small Groups	p. 104
How to Facilitate Information Sharing	p. 106
Leading Teams	p. 107
Leading Organizations	p. 109
Mindset Matters	p. 112
Encourage Useful Failures	p. 119
Why Tolerate Failure?	p. 121
Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Failures	p. 125
Before the Failure	p. 126
During the Failure	p. 127
After the Failure	p. 130
Useful, Low-Cost Failures	p. 132
Teach How to Talk and Listen	p. 139
Crew Resource Management Training	p. 143
Communication Errors	p. 145
Improving Interpersonal Communication	p. 147
Briefings	p. 147
Handoffs	p. 149
Speaking Up Effectively	p. 151
Listening	p. 155
Train Teams, Not Individuals	p. 156
Watch the Game Film	p. 161
After-Action Reviews: Promise and Peril	p. 166
Competitor Intelligence: Promise and Peril	p. 173
Deliberate Practice	p. 176
Looking in the Mirror	p. 180
The Mindset of a Problem-Finder	p. 185
Three Dimensions of a New Mindset	p. 189
Intellectual Curiosity	p. 189
Systemic Thinking	p. 191
Healthy Paranoia	p. 192
Index	p. 195
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Michael A. Roberto is the Trustee Professor of Management at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, after six years as a faculty member at Harvard Business School. His research, teaching, and consulting focus on strategic decision-making processes and senior management teams. He is the author of Why Great Leaders Don�t Take Yes for an Answer (Wharton School Publishing, 2005).

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