The Million Dollar Parrot: 25 Brief Stories for Big Breakthroughs. Gerald de Jaager
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On the downswing the hands move away from the body too soon, out toward the target line, and you end up cutting across the ball from out to in. Thanks to the homunculus, I make a very good living.38
The homunculus isn’t an actual part of your brain, but rather a depiction of what you look like to your brain based on how much of your brain’s capacity is devoted to each part of your body. The image at the beginning of this lens illustrates the homunculus. Your hands, lips, and face are much better represented in your brain than most of the rest of your body. More brain cells are devoted to one thumb, for example, than to the entire back.39 (In mice, the whiskers and snout take up most of the sensory brain space, whereas monkey brains dedicate large areas to the feet. That’s evolution for you.)
Much as the ability to execute a good golf swing is impaired by the brain’s over-recognition of the hands and under-recognition of the trunk and legs, imbalanced inputs to the corporate “brain” get in the way of organizational performance.
If you drew a picture of your organization based on the inputs it seeks and deals with and the ones that have a hard time getting recognized and addressed, what would that picture look like? Would it look that way because it’s proper, or just because of evolution? Consultant Roger Martin argues, “The most exasperating fact about big companies in crisis is that they got there by doing what once made them big.”40
Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons has similarly observed that what has been said of armies may also apply to companies: they are often very ready to fight the last war, but unprepared for the next one. In articles and books, Simons has shown how often control systems fail to capture all the current data that decision makers ought to have, because those systems are designed for yesterday, not today. For example, systems and practices established to take advantage of boom times can hamper adaptation to downturns.41
Speaking at The Masters Forum in 2007, information technology expert Jeffrey Sampler urged that organizations have to develop new sensory skills to compete effectively in an environment of rapid change and competitive threats that can appear seemingly out of nowhere. “How many people have a mental model that’s incorrect? You think you understand the way the world works, based on your working data, and you make decisions based on that data, but the data may be totally inaccurate,” he said.42 Among other things, he asked:
Do you have real-time customer profitability data down to the second decimal place?
Do you have accurate, granular cost data that capture not only direct cost but indirect cost? You’ll have to make some fairly precise cuts, and you must know that.
If an organization is not as sensitively attuned to those data as we are to our lips or fingertips, Sampler was saying, it will be in trouble.
You might add issues of your own to the ones Sampler noted. In a major survey, only 23 percent of companies said they had a systematic way of identifying what knowledge needed to be protected and retained for the company to remain fully competitive.43 Two major 2007 studies of boards of directors reported that directors felt that they lacked adequate knowledge of vital strategic and operational information regarding the overall health of the organization.44
In the first lines of his book, Evolution of Consciousness, Stan-ford professor Robert Ornstein writes, “The mind is a squadron of simpletons. It is not unified, it is not rational, it is not well design-ed—or designed at all. It just happened, an accumulation of innovations of the organisms that lived before us.”45 Organizations can be like that, too, unless those in charge remember the homunculus.
Get it right, and an organization can develop the same sensing ability as Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind climber to scale Mount Everest: “His hands are like antennae, gathering information as they flick outward, surveying the rock for cracks, grooves, bowls, nubbins, knobs, edges and ledges, converting all of it into a roadmap etched into his mind.”46
Experience the Homunculus
from “They Do It with Mirrors” by Helen Phillips47
There are a few simple illusions that demonstrate the amazing malleability of the brain’s image of the body. One trick is to sit at a table and recruit a helper. Hide one hand under the table, resting palm down on your knee. Then ask your helper to tap, touch and stroke with their fingertips the back of your hidden hand and the table top directly above the hand with an identical pattern of movements, for a minute or two.
It’s important that you concentrate on the table, where your helper is touching, and that you can’t see your hand or their hand under the table. The more irregular the pattern, and the more synchronized the touches you can see and feel, the more likely you are to feel something very strange. About half the people who try this find that the table starts to feel like part of their body—as though the hand is transferred into the table.
Signature Move
What word, phrase, or image sums up your organization?
The hockey great Brett Hull was fielding questions at a youth hockey camp. One of the youngsters asked what quality was most important for making it to the National Hockey League. Hull answered:
You have to be good, of course, so master the basics. But you also have to get noticed. There are thousands and thousands of kids like you out there who want to become pros. Most of you will be lost in the crowd. The way to get the scouts to remember you is to develop a signature move—something you do so well that whenever your name is mentioned, everyone will have a picture of you in their mind.
Hull’s own signature move was a sizzling, hundred-plus-mile-per-hour slap shot that some experts have ranked among the best ever.48
With people and with companies as with aspiring hockey stars, a signature move affects how you are thought of, how you are remembered, and how others react to you. So, signature move is one lens through which we can look at what we’re doing, and perhaps think about how to do it differently.
We expect attentive service when we shop at Nordstrom, and we expect prompt delivery when we order a pizza from Domino’s or ship a package by Federal Express. It’s not accidental that we have those expectations: these companies spend a lot of money making sure that’s how we think of them, and even more money making sure that we get what we expect. Lousy service at your local dollar store? What did you expect? Lousy service at Nordstrom? You feel like you’ve been cheated, and you might not go back.
A signature move isn’t always a positive thing. Your internet service provider might provide generally excellent high-speed connections, but you might still view its signature move as something much slower, slothlike even: keeping you on hold forever when you call with a question; routing you through a voicemail maze before you can get any attention at all; making you wait too long for an installation or service appointment.
An advertising executive describes a client interaction:
I was looking to try to identify what makes them unique. Their website and collateral material basically said that they did everything. It was just a bunch of blah blah. I brought up the “Signature Move,” explaining to them that they needed a key differentiator. What makes them unique compared to other companies who do the same thing as they do? When I mention your company to your customers or prospects, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Those “Signature Move” questions moved us off dead center and really resonated.49
The signature moves