There is a HiPPO in the room. It is big, loud, ugly and everybody is doing what it wants.
The HiPPO is the Highest Paid Persons Opinion.
You can spot HiPPO’s quite easily, they are expressed forcefully, everybody nods and agrees with them and they are always the last thing said.
A HiPPO is a dangerous thing
HiPPO’s can kill. But surprisingly it isn’t the big dumb bad-tempered HiPPO’s you need to watch (admit it, you have heard a couple) those are easily shrugged off.
The most dangerous HiPPO’s are the totally reasonable and sensible small ones, the ones you find yourself agreeing with without thinking about it:
- Incentives will make them work faster
- Off-shoring the low skilled tasks will save us money
- Punishment leads to better performance
The most dangerous HiPPO’s are so believable they treated as facts, not opinions at all.
Opinions and facts are not the same thing
An opinion is just a hunch, an idea or a theory but a fact is demonstrable, proven with experience and data.
The only way to turn an opinion into a fact is to try it out and see what happens, measuring the outcome and learning from it.
The way to prove an opinion is to test it
And the real beauty of a test is that it will teach you something new. It is only when you have learnt something new that you can step up and improve your performance.
Better still, once you have stepped up and improved you can move on to a new theory or opinion, based on what you now know. You can test that, learn again and improve again, ad infinitum.
But neither opinions, nor actions will take you very far unless you lock them together and learn from them. The trick is to test and learn.
Unfortunately facts and learning don’t last
Facts don’t remain facts for very long, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, that is a fact, unless you live up a mountain. So you can’t make a decent cup of tea up a mountain, that is a fact, unless you use a pressure cooker… And so it goes.
Testing and learning is hard work.
It is a lot easier to simply assert an opinion as a fact.
Is your highly paid person worth the money?
Your highly paid person will have opinions, we all have them, they are not hard to come by but opinions by themselves are pretty worthless.
If however your highly paid person will put his opinions to the test, to see if they are right or wrong and learns from the experience, then he is worth every last penny.
And that is not just an opinion, I have tested a couple of mine (they will agree).
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Hi James,
Great point about facts not always being facts. Once we thought the earth was flat. Once we thought that outsourcing and off-shoring was the best and most efficient and cost effective thing to do. Once the dinosaurs thought that the ice was not moving and it wasn’t getting colder.
Oh, how facts change.
Adrian
Funny how we hang on to our beliefs. We treat management as a religion not a science.
James