COMMON SENSE
IT’S NOT ALL THAT COMMON BUT IT’S A SKILL YOU CAN LEARN
The trouble with common sense’, the old saw goes, ‘is that it’s not all that common’. And in my experience, nowhere is this truer than in work or business where I have seen very, very smart people – far smarter than I’ll ever be – propose or do some incredibly dumb things.
Of course it’s easy to say that someone doesn’t have much common sense. It’s such a vague statement that it could mean almost anything. So a few years back I decided to try and codify common sense. I would write a book that identified the ‘principles’ (if that’s not too grand a word – though I think it probably is) of common sense. More simply, the book would identify a bunch of things which if you were doing them or even conscious of them, then you would be exhibiting common sense.
The result was a book called Simply Brilliant.9 The book sold pretty well. In fact I think I’m correct in saying that it’s been my best seller to date and with the most translations.
Common sense is a skill. It can be learned.
And why would this be a good thing to do? Well – a couple of reasons. The first and most important one is that it gives you a framework for thinking, a sort of mental checklist. If, for example, somebody is proposing a certain course of action or project or venture, you can run it by your mental checklist and see if it stands up.
The other reason is that you would stand out from the crowd. In my experience, not a lot of people carry around this mental checklist with them.
So here then are the ‘principles’ of common sense.
1 Many things are simple
Of course, some things are definitely not simple. Launching, manning and maintaining the International Space Station, for example, surely has some tremendously complex elements to it. But most of us aren’t NASA engineers and scientists and a lot of the stuff we do probably has a simple explanation or solution. So if you find yourself at a meeting, for example, and the participants are working up some tremendously complex solution to a problem – chances are they’re barking up the wrong tree.
The thing to do then would be to call stop. Ask if there’s not a simpler solution. Ask the question, ‘What would be the simplest solution to this?’ or ‘Can we find a simpler solution to this?’ There’s a good chance you’ll be able to.
2 Know what you’re trying to do
You need to know what you’re trying to do. And you need to know precisely – it can’t be vague.
This may sound ridiculously obvious but it’s actually been the cause of death of a million projects. One of the more spectacular examples recently was the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative (DMI) project cancelled in the middle of 2013 after a spend of £125.9 million.
The National Audit Office’s report on the project said, among other things, that ‘The BBC did not establish clear requirements’. [My italics.]
After the cancellation, James Purnell, the BBC’s director of strategy and digital, said: ‘In the future we are going to rely far more on off-the-shelf technology. We’ve messed up and we apologize to licence fee payers for that’.
Ah – that’s okay, then.
Another way of thinking about this is with the idea of ‘boxes and clouds’. What you’re trying to do has to be a box. It has to be well defined. You have to know what’s inside the box and what’s not. What are you to achieve (in the box) and what are you not trying to achieve (outside the box)?
If you don’t have a box you’ll have a cloud. You have no real idea what exactly you’re trying to do. If you don’t know then neither will other people. Such a situation is guaranteed to end in tears.
3 There is always a sequence of events
This is how everything gets done. Knowing the sequence of events in advance is called a plan. Knowing them while you’re engaged in figuring them out is called firefighting. Knowing them after the fact is called a post-mortem.
I hope you’d agree that firefighting is dumb. I hope you’d further agree that trying to figure out what happened after everything has fallen apart is completely dumb. That leaves planning as the only option left standing.
If you want to plan anything, if you want to estimate the time something is going to take, the number of people you need, the cost or budget – you need to figure out the sequence of events.
There’s more on this in the chapter called Projects and Getting Stuff Done.
4 Things don’t get done if people don’t do them
I know this sounds ludicrously obvious but there are a vast number of (especially) bosses out there who believe that work can be done without people. These are the bosses who say things like ‘That’s just the culture here’ or ‘I don’t want to hear anybody using the word “can’t”’ or ‘We like a can-do attitude here’ or ‘You’re going to have to learn to do more with less’ or ‘You should be working smarter not harder’ (whatever that’s supposed to mean) or ‘You’re being inflexible’ or ‘You’re not being a team player’ or ‘Is this plan based on a five-day week?’ or ‘You’re lucky to have a job’ or ‘JFDI’ (Just ******* Do It) or ‘We have no choice – we have to do it’ or ‘That’s not the kind of attitude we want around here’ or ‘I don’t think you’re suited to the culture of this organization’. In short – there have to be people to do the work or else the work can’t be done.
5 Things rarely turn out as expected
Think about Murphy’s law: ‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong’. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy’s_law if you’re in any doubt about that statement. The upshot of this is that you need to consider all the possibilities before taking action.
In 1920 the United States enacted prohibition laws to suppress the alcohol trade. It was felt that this would be good both for the nation’s health and for public morals. Put more simply, there would be fewer men drinking their wages, fewer drunken men beating their wives and neglecting or abusing their families.
On the face of it, it might have seemed like a good idea. Certainly, American legislators and temperance crusaders thought so.
The result, of course, was that many small-scale producers of alcohol – wineries, brewers, distillers – immediately went out of business. And if that wasn’t bad enough, large-scale organized crime set up a vast illegal alcohol industry.
Things rarely turn out as expected.
And so you need to have contingency in your plans.
You also need to do a risk assessment. This is just a fancy way of saying that you need to do the following:
- Make a list of all the things you can think of that could go wrong with the venture you’re proposing to undertake. These are the risks to your project.
- Grade each of these things as to their likelihood, that is, how likely they are to happen. Use a scale of 1–3. 1 is low, 3 is high, 2 in the middle.
- Grade them again as to their impact – the effect if they do happen. Use the same 1–3 scale. 1 is low, 3 is high, 2 in the middle.
- Now multiply the likelihood by the impact. For any items that end up rated a 6 or a 9, identify some actions you can take to reduce or eliminate these risks.
6 Things either are or they aren’t
The cause of a million project failures. The terrifying ‘we’re 90% done’ syndrome – which generally means that 90% of the time has gone rather than that 90% of the thing has been done. Something is either done – or it’s not.
Break the project or venture down into the sequence of events – essentially, the list of jobs to be done.
Now the way to track progress is that each job can exist in only one of two states. It’s either done (and hence you’ve made some progress) or it’s not done (and so you haven’t made that progress).
7 Look at things from others’ points of view
The so-called ‘Golden Rule’ – ‘Do as you would be done to’. Look on Wikipedia and prepare to be astonished by the number of civilizations and religions that this has been, and still is, a part of.
In all your working life you’ll have to deal with people. Sometimes you may have difficult decisions to make that are going to affect people. You may have a bewildering variety of choices open to you – possible paths that you could take. In those circumstances it can be very enlightening to put yourself in the shoes of these other people. How will they view each choice that you might make? And in turn, how will this affect your decision making?
So there it is. Common sense. Try looking at your job/work through this lens for a few weeks and see what happens.