Photo by Zevotron (Flickr CC)
I have written before about the risks of misusing business intelligence software and misinterpreting business intelligence data results. To help avoid these and many other business risks, organizations should encourage employees to be “intelligently disobedient.”
This term is from a great article by The Leader as a Mensch (click for my review) author Bruna Martinuzzi which cleverly presents this highly beneficial trait:
I once worked for a technology company that encouraged employees to practice what they called “Intelligent Disobedience.” The concept originates from Seeing Eye dogs: while dogs must learn to obey the commands of a blind person, they must also know when they need to disobey commands that can put the owner in harm’s way, such as when a car is approaching.
Intelligent disobedience is not about setting out to be disagreeable or arbitrarily disobeying rules for its own sake. Rather, it is about using your judgment to decide when, for example, an established rule actually hinders your organization, rather than helps it…the antonym of intelligent disobedience is blind conformity.
That blind conformity, all too rampant in weakly-run organizations with executives preoccupied with loyalty, can rear its head any number of ways, including using business intelligence/business performance management software to “do the wrong things right.” Blind conformity can also result in blithely sticking to conventional wisdom within product marketing or product management, resulting in, for example, an excessive preoccupation with competitors instead of actively differentiating your products from the market.
Bruna Martinuzzi offers a number of ideas to encourage cultivating an environment of intelligent disobedience, several of which are directly applicable to the wise interpreter of business intelligence data, as well as product marketers and product managers, including the following…
Quoted from “Intelligent Disobedience” by Bruna Martunizzi:
Consider the benefits of decentralizing some of the decision-making in your unit. If you are used to making all the decisions, allow those closest to the customer the flexibility to make appropriate decisions on the spot, as for example, to right a wrong, even if the decision is contrary to some established rule of the organization. This places the value where it should be — on customer satisfaction rather than on lockstep adherence to the process — but it also places value on team members by giving them the authority to bend the rules when necessary.
Don’t surround yourself with yes-men. Ponder the words of Barry Rand of Xerox, quoted in Colin Powell’s A Leadership Primer: “. . . if you have a yes-man working for you, one of you is redundant.”
Help your people distinguish between fact and conjecture. Conjecture can be influenced by mental scripts which don’t have a bearing on current reality. Be the voice in the room that calls others’ attention to this possibility, and help everyone pause so that they can analyze inferences and conjectures that may or may not be valid.
Be aware of mind traps that lead to blind conformity. Mind traps act as mental straight-jackets, preventing you from thinking creatively and rationally. These include, for example, the “herd instinct”, i.e. relying on the fact that “everybody else is doing it.” Here is a compiled list of the ten most common thinking traps.
Read Bruna Martinuzzi’s complete post.
