Customer Experience Design

Where egos, we go

Apologies for the awful play on words in the title. Tracy pointed out yesterday that I was being particularly juvenile and I guess it's still working  it's way through my system.

Anyway, the subject of this post is ego. A rare serious post by Scott Adams on the effect that ego can have on our decision making made me think about the effect that other people's egos can have on us.

How many times has a colleague or your bosses let their ego make a decision which has been bad news for you? And if you multiply the potential impact of ego up through the chain of command it's easy to see how an ego driven decision by a chief exec can have really big repercussions for everyone in a business. Sometimes the big boss can find that he gets the worst outcome. Just witness what's happened to Conrad Black.

But most of the time they seem to get away with little damage, or even some reward. And leave all the little people to pick up the pieces.

Tough questions

A nice little provocation from Marty Baker.

Makes me think about the broader issue of asking fierce questions, i.e. the tough, outcome focused kind of questions that we all too often shy away from. It may be a little trite, but polite teams generally get polite results.

For more on fierce questions you could also read Susan Scott’s excellent book of the same title.

How many fierce questions have you asked lately?