Before the ill-fated launch of the Challenger, a conference call was conducted between the engineers at Morton Thiokol, makers of the defective O-ring believed to have caused the crash, and NASA scientists. Following an exhaustive review of mission preparedness, the decision was made to go forward with the launch. It was a prelude to the unthinkable.

After the dreadful explosion, investigators reviewed transcripts of the call as part of their inquiry into what went wrong. What they discovered could and should have prevented the tragedy. They found that enough information was available to warrant scrapping the launch. The part was suspect. But no one explicitly said, “Stop.” Concerns were communicated with such vagary and equivocation that they were ignored.

In effect, no one stood up and told the truth. Telling the truth in the workplace, whether it’s NASA or IBM or Taco Bell, often provokes short-term discomfort, but the failure to speak it—essentially a failure of integrity—is the primary reason organizations fail, according to consultants Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. “When you dig through the rubble of most corporate disasters,” they note, “at the bottom, you’ll find an integrity breakdown.” In extreme instances, as we have witnessed in the Challenger catastrophe, “digging through the rubble” is more than metaphoric.

The Hendrickses are a husband and wife team, schooled in psychology, whose work has evolved to include teaching corporations what they call “conscious business practices.” To the public, they are perhaps best known for having authored or coauthored a number of widely read books, including At the Speed of Life and The Corporate Mystic.

Twenty years of observation have led them to conclude that most failures within an organization can be traced to one of three deficiencies: Failures of integrity, failures of vision, or failures to harness intuition and creativity. Each is worth examining in turn.

Failures of Integrity

Failures of integrity encompass three omissions. The first is not telling what the Hendrickses call the “unarguable” truth. A statement becomes “unarguable” when it is made without blame or judgment and therefore invites no argument.

“No, I will not complete this project by Friday.” “I have no interest in learning Java; I prefer programming in RPG.” “Yes, I’m having an affair with the vice president.”

A culture in which lying and withholding the truth are the norm will be marked by “inefficiency, lack of productivity, and massive ass covering.” It is also very likely that wherever there is a relationship strain or a complaint about a manager or coworker, one or both parties are not telling the other the truth. Over time “not speaking the truth and not hearing the truth cause more ill health in companies than all the microbes catalogued by the World Health Organization.”

So, why do we lie? Primarily to avoid the anticipated reaction of the listener. However, giving in to the fear of judgment or the desire to avoid consequences produces dubious short-term benefits at protracted costs. The organization suffers because both speaker and listener are operating on the basis of something that isn’t real. Lying is like spending money we don’t have; it provides momentary relief and long-term aggravation. Conversely, speaking the truth may cause momentary discomfort, but the result is long- term gratification.

Lying has become so pervasive that it is not only culturally accepted, but expected, particularly when applied to the cause of self-preservation. It seldom works. Recent events demonstrate that ethical lethargy has protracted costs. How much humiliation and expense would the president and the nation have been spared had he admitted to his peccadilloes when first confronted? One of the immediate payoffs for telling the truth is experiencing “a high level of aliveness,” the Hendrickses say. The remedy is simple: “Find any place where you haven’t spoken the truth and go speak it!”

The second integrity breakdown is the failure to honor all of your feelings. This is not about the inappropriate acting out of personal dramas. It is about individual awareness and access to all of our faculties. Suppressing your emotions, the Hendrickses warn, requires “sealing off from your awareness half of your brain and most of your body.” That dimming of consciousness restricts productivity. “Your feelings are on the same side of your brain that contains your creativity and intuition,” the Hendrickses write. “So to seal off your feelings is to separate yourself from many of your higher powers.” If ignored long enough, suppressed emotions “[will] communicate with you through less pleasant means, such as tension and pain.” Because suppressed feelings tend to leak out in disagreeable ways, in many cases the suppression is bolstered by addictions to alcohol or drugs, massive doses of numbing television, and other misguided attempts at self-medication.

The third breach of integrity is the failure to keep agreements. “Simply put, agreements are about things you said you would do and things you said you wouldn’t do.” Broken agreements erode personal and organizational credibility as well as self-respect. They are reflected in the epidemic of projects not delivered on time, often because people have not bought into them but were unwilling to say so. Occasionally, agreements need to be renegotiated, but the process of renegotiation is likely to go much smoother if it occurs before an agreement has been broken. Agreements presuppose accountability and logical consequences if they are not kept. “Truly huge problems ensue,” the Hendrickses say, “when people don’t keep their agreements and try to act as if nobody has noticed.”

Integrity is the foundation on which successful organizations are built, and even small breaches of integrity, the Hendrickses warn, can quickly escalate into full catastrophes: What if Nixon had admitted the break-in?

Failures of Vision

Vision is a delimiter and thus can be either expansive and inspiring or confining and restrictive. Paradoxically, it requires “the ability to be comfortable in an imagined future” while being fully accepting and aware of the organization’s current reality. A common “vision slayer,” say the Hendrickses, is the “tyranny of the possible.” The most fruitful visionary will ask, “How would I like it to be, regardless of what I think is possible?” As an example, at the time John F. Kennedy committed the nation to landing a man on the moon, we had a grand total of 16 minutes of space flight experience.

If vision is to serve as a guide to transforming current realities, then employees must not be punished for expressing “oddball ideas” or for “not being practical.” Today’s outrageous notion may indeed evolve to become tomorrow’s desktop wonder, but only if it is not dismissed out of hand. The consequences of being unduly devoted to the feasible, the Hendrickses assert, are best expressed by a Chinese proverb that forewarns: “Unless we change directions, we’ll end up where we’re heading.”

Information technology is littered with failures of vision. As late as 1977, Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, declared: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” which succinctly accounts for the conspicuous absence of the desktop DEC.

IBM was also slow to recognize the potential of the PC and has never fully recovered from its mainframe fixation. It was not alone, however. So unseen was the promise of the PC that it might well be considered the first stealth technology. Steven Jobs recounts: “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary; we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then, we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’”

Does vision matter? A whole generation of people never heard of Atari, and HP is not a player in the PC market. Perhaps Atari and HP can find solace in the visionary prowess of Decca Records, which rejected the Beatles, saying: “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”

Fortunately, vision can be successfully adjusted. Consider that IBM’s legendary Thomas J. Watson at one time believed “there’s a world market for about five computers.” And H.M. Warner of Warner Bros. fame once proclaimed, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Indeed.

Failures to Harness Intuition and Creativity

No less an intellect than Albert Einstein believed in the power of intuition. In interviewing some of the world’s leading CEOs, the Hendrickses have found that they, too, express “a high degree of reliance on intuition.” Some company heads frankly admitted that “logic and its subsidiary functions, such a planning, are highly overrated in business.” The trend away from exclusive reliance on linear thinking is the result of the speed at which market conditions change. “You can drive a Ferrari logically at 30 miles per hour,” the Hendrickses note, “but to drive successfully at 180 miles per hour, considerable intuition is required.”

To develop intuitive vitality, the Hendrickses recommend setting aside a few minutes of quiet time each day. “Sitting alone in your room for 10 minutes every day is among the most radical and potentially profitable things you can do for yourself and your company,” they assert. The frenetic wheel-spinning so common in today’s workplace gives credence to the observation of French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said that most of humankind’s problems come from the inability to sit quietly by ourselves in a room.

Silence has both healing and teaching properties. Oliver Wendell Holmes noted that “silence like a poultice comes to heal the blows of sound.” Being still also creates space so that information that is out of our conscious focus can enter our awareness. Learning to ask for and trusting the answers that fill the silence may at first feel awkward, but creative think-time will soon provide you with a competitive advantage, the Hendrickses vow, “because almost nobody is willing to do it!”

Excuse me while I close the door.

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